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Parenting Press®Welcome to the October 2011
“News for Parents”
Dear Friends of Parenting Press:
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Looking for a conference speaker? Check our list of authors available for speeches and interviews, and the online media kits. Books, info sheets, teaching plans, kids’ activities: we’re always in a whirl at Parenting Press with dozens of ideas that we hope you’ll enjoy and find helpful. Many are described in this issue; others will be published in later issues (see Coming Attractions).
IN THIS ISSUE
- WHAT’S NEW?
- FEATURES
- POTPOURRI
- COMING ATTRACTIONS
- What’s Named for You? Fun with Maps
- Head Start on Holidays
- Temperament’s Physical Cause
I. WHAT’S NEW?
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Costumes! Quick, Easy and Even No-Sew!
Ready, set, sew! Or glue. Or staple. The costume crew at Parenting Press has come up with zillions of homemade ways to get your family ready for Halloween festivities. Here’s a few of the resources we use.
First, take a trip to your local library or bookstore for helpful ideas. You’ll find dozens of patterns with step-by-step instructions for October festivities in Homemade Halloween: Quick and Easy Costumes, Decorations and Not-So-Frightening Family Fun (Fox Chapel Publishing). Besides how-to’s for capes, tunics, hats, tails, and wings, this book explains how to
- paint faces
- create a hook hand for your pirate
- make a quiver full of arrows for Robin Hood (or Maid Marian).
Color photos show kids in costumes put together with old clothes, wire, paper, boxes, pipe cleaners and other odds and ends.
Other easy ideas:
- Glue plastic spiders here and there on a couple of yards of white cheesecloth and wrap it around your ghost or mummy as a shawl
- Cover a tight-fitting knit hat with paper curls cut from one-inch-wide strips of newspaper or construction paper
- Saddle up a stick horse and dress your little cowpoke in jeans, a cowboy hat and kerchief
Eileen Kennedy-Moore, the mother of four children who are always well-costumed, and the author of our What About Me? 12 Ways to Get Your Parents’ Attention (Without Hitting Your Sister), is full of suggestions for turning inexpensive oversized sweatshirts into critter disguises. (If you’re feeling all thumbs, she also has a confession: “Because I have more imagination than skill, I have relied heavily on glue and staples!”)
She almost always starts by turning the shirts inside out. Black, brown and white are good options: you can turn them into bears, dogs, rats, rabbits, cats and even a Sasquatch. Duct tape or safety pin newspaper, a small pillow or a roll of quilt batting to the inside of the sweatshirt if you need a chubby critter. Cut the sleeves to an appropriate length for your child and use the extra fabric for a tail and ears. Use wire or a wire hanger for shape if you don’t want the tail and ears to droop. The tail can be attached to the back of the sweatshirt and the ears to a plastic or stretchy headband. Use felt for a contrasting color (the inside of the ears or a dog’s spots). Underneath, kids can wear matching sweatpants (right or fuzzy side) in their correct size and a turtleneck. If it’s cold, add a pair of “stretch-to-fit” gloves in the appropriate color. Get out face paints or an eyeliner pencil to draw the whiskers on your child’s face.
More tips from Dr. Kennedy-Moore:
- Use angel wings from the dollar store and yellow felt to turn a black sweatshirt and tights into a bumblebee costume
- Make red felt wings with black dots to transform another black sweatshirt into a ladybug
- Make a snowball with a white sweatshirt decorated with large white pompons and snowflakes drawn with silver glitter glue
- Use the existing sleeves plus six more strips and green and blue glitter glue to turn a royal blue sweatshirt into an octopus
Your girl would rather be a princess or a fairy? It doesn’t take many stitches to turn yards of tulle into a glamorous skirt that she can slip over a long-sleeved leotard and tights. Triple her waist measurement and buy at least that much in tulle of at least two colors—pink and gold, maybe, or green and turquoise. Use elastic to gather the material together for a bright poufy skirt. (If she’s short, double the tulle before you gather it.) Add a glittery cape or shawl and a tiara and then all she’ll need is a magic wand. For that, she can glue a cardboard star to each side of a foot-long dowel and cover it all with glitter before tying on ribbons or tulle scraps.
Capes work well if you have a witch or Dracula. Take a yard of fabric, fold over the top for a casing (and hem the other sides if you have time), and gather it with one-inch wide elastic. Sew a giant snap or Velcro at the neck (so the cape will release more easily if caught on anything).
Shari Steelsmith, author of Go to Your Room!: Consequences That Teach, recommends that every home with children have a dress-up box. Even when your children outgrow dress-up play, she says, “Mine regularly raid the box for costumes for various school projects or movies they make for fun.”
Besides the usual capes, hats, scarves, and masks in a dress-up box, Steelsmith had another brainstorm: “I kept a bunch of old bridesmaid dresses from years ago---hey, what else are you going to do with them?”
At the home of the “News for Parents” editor, the dress-up box was a favorite with visitors, who headed straight for the wigs, beaded shawls, cowboy boots, and grass skirt brought home from Hawaii as a souvenir.
“If you have one good prop like a hat or mask, it’s fairly simple to create a costume,” Steelsmith continues. For example, the year her son wanted to be a werewolf, she started with a mask and added a grey sweatsuit. Fake black fingernails were trimmed to look like claws and then glued to the fingertips of old grey gloves.
The author turned her daughter into a rock star one Halloween with a “diva” costume that was appropriate for the Seattle area’s chilly Octobers: a fuzzy pink sweater, black bell bottom pants (with pieces of feather boa from the dress-up box basted to the hems), an inexpensive pink wig, strings of beads and a toy microphone. After the holiday, the wig and beads went into the dress-up box and the sweater and (boa-less) pants went into the girl’s school wardrobe.
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Pumpkin-Flavored
Once the costumes are done, let’s talk pumpkins. Or, more accurately, let’s taste pumpkin! It’s easy to put together a pumpkin pie (with your help, even little kids can use a premade crust and canned pumpkin pie filling to turn out a fabulous seasonal dessert). Surprise your family with all the other ways to celebrate National Pumpkin Month. Most supermarkets have two kinds, pumpkins for jack o’ lanterns and pumpkins for pie and other recipes (usually called “sweet” or “sugar pie”). Farmers’ markets may have more variety, and the farmers will be able to tell you what’s best for carving and what you’ll want for cooking.
You can serve pumpkin just as you do squash: cut into pieces, seeded and baked in the oven or microwave, either peeled or (easier) eaten out of the peel. Or you can peel baked or steamed pumpkin and then puree it for pumpkin soup, cake or bread. For more information and recipes, check the Internet for extension service and cooking web sites such as the University of Illinois’s “Watch Your Garden Grow,” and “Baking with Fresh Pumpkin.”
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Scary Scams
There’s nothing fun about the criminals who target grandparents and other elderly relatives, by impersonating teenage and 20-something family members. The 80-ish mother of one of our friends was recently telephoned by someone who sounded just like her out-of-state grandson, claiming he was in trouble in a foreign country and needed cash ASAP. “Don’t call Mom and Dad,” she was told. “I don’t want to upset them now. Just wire the money to. . .”
She’s no fool, so she did try to reach the young man’s parents, but neither was available, and every half hour or so, she continued to be phoned, with the caller sounding increasingly distraught. By the time she was told, “They’re going to jail me if I don’t post bond,” she headed into town from her rural home, determined to withdraw the thousands of dollars demanded and wire it to the supposed grandson’s local attorney. Fortunately, by the time she reached the bank, her son had picked up his phone messages and called the bank manager with assurances that the grandson was safe on his graduate school campus.
This is a story we’re sharing with our older friends and relatives, and we hope you will, too. As Security News Daily recently reported, “The grandparent scam comes with an air of authenticity that adds a frightening element of reality to an otherwise phony phone call.”
This publication points out, “Social networking sites offer a wealth of family information — often including the grandparents and grandchild’s name, address and date of birth — that a scammer can use to effectively pose as the victim’s grandchild. Armed with those details, a frantic ‘Grandma, I need help’ call creates an extremely vulnerable victim.
“To steer clear of the grandparent scam, the Consumer Federation of America urges people to ask detailed questions of the caller, questions no impostor could know — ‘the name of the person’s pet, for example, or the date of their mother’s birthday.’
“It’s important also to report the scam to the money-wiring service the grandchild wants the victim to use.”
Bankrate reports a variation on this, when “someone purporting to be Sgt. Smith gets on the phone and confirms the dilemma.”
Besides warning relatives about this recurring fraud, what can you do to protect your family? Check every family member’s social networking sites, especially Facebook, and make sure that privacy settings are at a high level. Be aware that if your list of friends and family is visible to strangers (those you haven’t “friended”), it can be easy to find contact information for family members. Once a scammer has a name, it takes little effort to check online telephone directories for phone numbers. Because our publications include books on child sexual abuse and Internet safety, we at Parenting Press are cautious, and we’d prefer that even our “friends” can’t see information on each other. (Because who knows who has access to posts by our “friends”?)
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Places That Inspire Stories
New York, Los Angeles, London and Singapore are the settings for thousands of stories, and we’ve been delighted to learn how many other real places have inspired authors. Some even use actual streets that we can go to!
Last summer, the web site Flavorwire reported that Moat Brae, a Georgian townhouse in Scotland, inspired J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. Other sites that show up, in one form or another, in stories include:
the Hannibal MO cave that Mark Twain immortalized in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Narni, an Italian hill town that in Latin is known as Narnia, and supposedly inspired C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia
Ashdown Forest, Sussex, England, the setting of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories, and pictured in the original 1920s illustrations by E. H. Shepard.
As your family shares stories and watches films, consider talking about whether the places depicted are real or imaginary, and whether you’d like to visit them. You can also watch for stories that are set in your community. . .and maybe even make up your own tales about your neighborhood!
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Advice on Autism Resources
Helen F. Neville, author of several recent Parenting Press titles including the new ADHD/ADD Medications (written with Peter Levine, M.D.), suggested we compile a list of autism resources for those whose children have recently been diagnosed. If you’re a parent, educator or professional who has experience with autism, we’d appreciate your recommendations of recently published books and articles that you have found valuable. Our preference is for materials that have been peer-reviewed. To ensure that your suggestions stay out of spam filters, please use “Autism Resources” as your subject line, and address your message to media@parentingpress.com.
II. FEATURES
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Tips for the month
Each Saturday, Parenting Press posts a new parenting tip and the previous week’s tip is moved to the archive.
“You did it!” “I did not!” “Mom, he. . .” “Mo-ther! She. . .” Tired of the tattling and whining when your children argue? Take a look at our parenting tips this month, and you may find exactly the help you need to squelch your kids’ squabbling.
October 1 — Reduce Quarrels by Teaching Boundaries
October 8 — Reducing Sibling Battles
October 15 — Three Techniques to Prevent Sibling Quarrels
October 22 — Using Natural Consequences
October 29 — Defusing Sibling Squabbles With Problem Solving Skills
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Family Fun Ideas — Zombies for Dessert
“From the grave to the table with 16 cupcake corpses,” claims author Zilly Rosen on the cover of crafty cookbook Zombie Cookbooks, perfect for refreshments at adult or children’s Halloween parties.
What these recipes are also perfect for are family or youth group projects. Although some decorations require careful cutting with sharp craft knives, kids can handle many of the tasks—and have fun doing them! Turning clear piping gel into “blood,” for example, simply involves stirring in red paste food coloring. Another easy kid project is mixing up and then rolling out a fondant-gum paste combination for decorating. They’ll also enjoy pinching balls of black-tinted fondant into rat shapes, crushing cookies into “dirt” and experimenting with piping “blood.”
Although the recipes look tasty, you could simplify these projects by using cake mixes and prepared frosting, and by decorating with shapes cut with cooky cutters and with purchased gummy worms and “eyeballs.” Or make this an extended family festivity with supplies from the cake decorating aisles of your supermarket and specialty stores and lots of adult hands to do the detailed cutting. (Remember the cameras. You’ll want a photo of the blood spurting out of the pastry bag!)
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Community Service — Trick or Treat for Your Food Bank
Our goal with this column is to suggest ways that you can model the concept of sharing and giving back to your community. There are practical advantages to community service, too. Kids can use these projects to meet school or youth group requirements for community service and to start building resumes that they’ll use when applying for first jobs or college.
Click for full-size templateThis month, especially if your children are a little old for trick-or-treating, suggest they collect for your local food bank, which is probably experiencing greater demand and a reduction in donations. Food drives are common during the holidays, but right now the food bank’s shelves may be especially bare. Your kids might want to publicize the food drive a few days before Halloween with posters around the neighborhood and door hangers on your street. Consider contacting the food bank to see what it needs most and listing those groceries in the publicity. We’ve provided a template for a door hanger; print it out and either hand-write or imprint the information before duplicating.
III. POTPOURRI
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Special of the month — Celebrate with Homer Henderson!
This special has expired.
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