Cozi Blog

The Family That Eats Together...

Keeping with this week's question about families eating together, we'd like to highlight a site that has information about a national initiative that addresses exactly this topic. Family Day - A day to eat dinner with your children will be held this year on Monday, September 24th. Organized by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, and first held in 2001, Family Day is meant to reinforce the message that what kids want most at the dinner table (though they may say macaroni and cheese) is you, their parents. Research has shown that the more often kids eat dinner with their families, the less likely they are to smoke, drink, or use drugs.

The site has more information about this research, tips on other ways to help reduce the chances that kids will abuse substances later in life, and fact sheets and materials you can download.

So put it on your Cozi Calendar!

Summer days drifting away...

Tick... tick... tick...

As the end of August approaches, it's time to face the inevitable - summer is fading and the beginning of a new school year is just around the corner. In fact, for some kids, the magic first day has already come and gone, met with new backpacks, school supplies, excitement, and maybe even some apprehension.

Even if you've had the best summer ever, the transition into back-to-school routine can be tough. Bedtimes need to be re-set, good study habits re-established, and time carved out for extra-curricular activities. Add to that the adjustment to a new teacher and classroom, and kids settling back into their friend groups, and it's no surprise that the first few weeks of the new school year can be pretty stress-filled.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has put together a handy tip sheet on making the back-to-school transition a bit easier - and safer -  for kids and parents. From dealing with first day jitters to techniques for dealing with bullies or setting up homework routines, it can give you some ideas and help you start getting into that back-to-school mindset.

And while you're at it - check out the new poll in the right colum. Are you ready for summer to end? Are your kids? Sound off!

Site of the Week: Club Penguin

We hear a lot about teens and computers, about social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. But even though my 7- and 9- year olds are pretty savvy about computers and have e-mail accounts that they use to write to their grandparents, I was still taken a bit by surprise when my son asked if could go online and join Club Penguin.

Club Penguin is a virtual world aimed at the 8-14 year-old set where they can chat and play games together, all while decked out as very colorful penguins. A basic account is free, but it doesn't take long for kids to realize that as they play games and help other penguins out and accumulate coins, they can buy clothes and pets for their penguins, and decorate their igloos - but only if they have a paid account which runs $5.95/month.

After spending some time exploring the site with my son,  I found it to be a nice safe way that kids can have fun playing and chatting with friends. There's always a moderator available and kids are encouraged to report penguins with bad behavior. The site is currently ad-free, though it's recently entered a new partnership with Disney so hopefully it will remain so.

Site of the Week: Jumping Monkeys

Former TechTV host Megan Morrone has joined up with TWiT.TV's Leo Laporte to explore parenting in the digital age with the Jumping Monkeys podcast and accompanying web site.  Morrone, mother to three toddlers, and Laporte, father of two teens, bring quite different perspectives on issues such as online privacy, kids' e-mail and social networking sites, screen time, and many other issues that our parents never had to think about.

Each weekly episode starts with tips on how you can save money, spend money, and give back to the community, followed up by a book recommendation. Add in lots of fun banter, link recommendations, and an interview with a mover and shaker in the parent blogger/web/software community and an hour passes before you know it. Download the podcast directly from the site or subscribe via iTunes, then check out the site afterwards for links mentioned on the show and between-episode tidbits from Megan.

Site of the Week: Travel for Kids

Before we had children, my husband and I used to imagine the family vacations we'd take one day, introducing our offspring to  places we loved and discovering destinations that would be completely new to all of us. These were romantic visions, full of Kodak moments and non-stop fun, building memories that would last a lifetime. Now that we're parents, those rosy visions are tempered by the reality that anyone who has traveled with kids eventually encounters - traveling with children presents unique challenges that can sometimes feel so overwhelming that staying home starts to sound really good.

Luckily, the site Travel for Kids exists to rekindle that wanderlust with lots of great practical tips on how to make family trips easier and more fun for everyone. It offers planning advice (where to stay, what to take, getting passports, staying safe and much more), guides that highlight kid-friendly activities in several countries and major cities, and book lists - both fiction and non - to get the kids reading about their destination, whetting their appetites to learn and experience even more.

Site of the Week: Offsprung

Billed (by itself) as being "for parents who don't suck," Offsprung is a fairly new parenting magazine/community that navelgazes all-things-parenthood via a collection of blogs covering topics from gear ("Meconium") to television ("Huxtabled") to music ("Zooglobble") and beyond. You can even submit questions for Neal Pollack ("Ask Alternadad"), one of the site's founders and perhaps the most public faces of the "hipster parent" genre. Readers are invited who discuss parenting (and non-parenting) topics in "The Playground," where hosts start and moderate discussions based on the articles on the site.

The writing is witty and snarky, and the diversity of voices means that even if some of the blogs and topics leave you cold, there are plenty of others that hit the mark. If you're not a big surfer and prefer to have the "best of" delivered to your e-mail, sign up for the daily newsletter.

Site of the Week: MomsRising

MomsRising,org is a non-partisan grassroots organization that advocates for policies to help bring about a more family-friendly America. With over 120,000 members and growing at a rate of 500-4000/week, the core issues they address are:

M - Maternity/Paternity Leave
O - Open Flexible Work
T - TV We Choose and Other After-School Programs
H - Healthcare for All Kids
E - Excellent Childcare
R - Realistic and Fair Wages
S- Sick Days, Paid

The site is stuffed with information on current initiatives and relevant news, blogs, and links to help you get involved in local groups so you can take action both on- and offline. Not to leave Dads out, a companion site, FamiliesRising.org includes Dad blogs and discussions.

Site of the Week: Squibbles

It can be difficult to find good kid content on the net. Search engines are hit and miss, and even if you find sites that look good you can't necessarily tell if the content is age-appropriate for your child, or if there will be some things on it you'd prefer they don't access. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way for you to find content that other parents and teachers had recommended for kids, pre-vetted and approved?

Enter Squibbles, a site that allows parents and teachers to submit interesting kid sites, and then allows the community at large to vote for the links they like best; the more votes a link receives the higher in the list it goes, very much like the social news site Digg, but for the underage set. Links are broken down into four age groups, and after new links are approved, the most recent 25 remain on the home page before moving into the browsable and searchable archives.

As an extra incentive to submit good content, the top 25 users (based on total votes) submitters (based on number of squibbles submitted), voters, and talkers (based on number of comments) are displayed on the site.

Site of the Week: FutureMe

Featured recently on NPR's Weekend Edition, FutureMe is a simple site, with a simple idea - write an e-mail to yourself and have it delivered at some future time. If you have an amazing day and want to remind a future you of how truly wonderful it was in that moment, send yourself an e-mail. Conversely, if things are really bad right now, and you're hoping that in a year or two they will be better, and you want to see how far you've come - jot it down and send it. Version 2.0 of the site, released in early 2007, allows registered users to send e-mail to other people in the future as well.

One neat option that provides lots of entertainment, is that users have the option of making their e-mail public (though remaining anonymous), so that others can browse through them. A book of some of the best ones is going to be released in the fall.

Sites of the Week: Flickrvision & Twittervision

If you're not ready to kill a bit of your time this afternoon saying "Whoa!" and "Cool!" then you probably don't want to visit either of these sites of the week. Flickrvision and Twittervision are "mashups" (putting two separate technologies together to create something new) that combine photos (in the case of Flickrvision) and pithy commentary (in the case of Twittervision) with Google Maps, to create a real-time view of the images and words that people are posting within minutes of the time they post then.

The results are mesmerizing - bite-sized pieces of peoples lives, displayed where and when it's happening. It makes the world seem just that  much smaller and more connected.