Caitlin and Tessie and I were talking on Twitter awhile back about iPhone cases, and Tessie said that the choice of iPhone case tells you everything you need to know about a person. Which made me want to send her photos of iPhone cases I like and have her read them like a palm.

Modern Green Pearl Lace (photo from Amazon.com). I feel I SHOULD want this one, and I do. But I want it as one of a large wardrobe of them, so don’t form a conclusion too quickly.

Speck Products Love Birds (photo from Amazon.com). I like this one, too. But I don’t like how from a distance the birds look like holes in the pattern instead of like birds.
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Nothing. There isn’t anything. Gift card, maybe.

As we enter the Land of Teens, I’m finding it more and more difficult to choose good gifts. It’s partly that the things teenagers would like to receive are usually out of our price range now. And it’s partly that teenagers seem less delighted in holidays and gifts in general.

Well, we muddle though as best we can, relying heavily on these ideas:

1. Stuff from Zazzle (screenshot from Zazzle.com). I started messing around making custom things on Zazzle, and the children were RIVETED. You could make your OWN STUFF?? And then HAVE IT?? And then they started browsing, and of course they were cracking up at every lame joke the rest of us have heard a hundred times, because the world is all fresh and new to a child, and that world includes rude homework/gassiness jokes. Zazzle stuff is pretty expensive, but they have sales all the time for 50% off in a particular category, such as mugs or t-shirts. I have the kids send me links to things they like or things they custom-designed, and then those make good gifts.

2. Game/movie/book tie-in stuff. This is where we generally find the greatest riches. Is the teenager a fan of Minecraft? Portal? Harry Potter? The Hunger Games? Then it is your good fortune to live in a capitalistic society, because if there is any product that can be tied in, it will exist.
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We have an atomic clock at our house that has been the cause of a certain level of DISPUTE. The problem is that about once per month, it checks in with its radar thingie and comes back with an utterly wrong time/date. I consider that a reasonable frequency for errors. I glance at the clock in the morning, I immediately grasp that 11:27 PM FEB 2004 is not correct, and I change it to the right time. I go on with life, unscarred by the experience.

Paul, though. Paul feels this clock is in violation of the sacred oath of time-keepers. A clock that is EVER WRONG must be THROWN AWAY. An atomic clock, because it has access to the correct information but chooses not to use it, must be publicly shamed and THEN thrown out.

I have fished the clock out of the trash twice. Perhaps it is time to research a replacement.

Before I get to the severely limited options, here’s a picture of almost exactly the clock we have: it’s a Sharp atomic clock (photo from Amazon.com) that shows time, day, date, and temperature. The one I’m linking to shows indoor and outdoor temperature; ours only shows indoor. I don’t need the outdoor temperature (in fact, I’d prefer NOT to have it; we’ve gone through a dozen such devices, so I don’t want a notoriously glitchy feature on a clock), but I do like having day and date and indoor temperature.

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We are in the market for a new telephone. It’s a purchase that COULD be fun, but is GOING to be boring. Perhaps it is ridiculous to be buying a new telephone at all, and we should get rid of our landline like most people we know. But when I tell you our current telephone has a cord, perhaps you will see that I need a decade or two to catch up.

Crosley Candlestick Phone (photo from Amazon.com). We had a Crosley vintage-style phone once! It was the corded wall phone style.

I am sorely, sorely tempted by the pink pay phone style (photo from Amazon.com). But no: we want a cordless phone this time.
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Can we talk a little about what we did for Father’s Day THIS year, so that we can refer to it NEXT year? I’d wanted to do a post on Father’s Day gift ideas last week, but I felt too discouraged, and also Paul reads here sometimes and I didn’t want to give away his gift idea. And of course all the store gift ideas are like “Barbecue! Golf! Beer! Sports! Tools! Here’s the perfect idea but it’s $250!”

I was lucky this year, because I thought of an idea for something I wanted to get ANYWAY for Paul, and Father’s Day was only a month or so away so I bought it and put it aside.

Wireless Remote Locator (photo from Amazon.com). Paul is continually getting frustrated at not being able to find the remote, and I am continually getting frustrated about the frustrated searching, so this is really a gift for BOTH of us. There is a risk, of course, of losing the remote finder—but I plan to NAIL IT TO HIS HAND THE WALL.
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My friend Heather is moving across the entire country with children aged almost-3 and almost-5. If I were her I would say that as “ages 2 and 4,” to maximize the Pity Factor.

She is looking for ideas to keep the children entertained on the trip. If your first suggestion is “OMG don’t do it at all! Fly instead!! With the children in animal crates!!” you can save your breath because I already tried it. They will be in the car at least six days, and that is final.

I suggest we see if we can make this easier for her in any way. Donations of prescription medications would be excellent too, but I was thinking more along the lines of travel tips and toy ideas.

My tip, based on taking two much-shorter trips (1.5-days in the car each trip) with a 2-year-old and a newborn, is to plan to stop at places that have a play area or a grassy run-around area, and include in estimated trip time the amount of time it would take for the kids to run/play/climb for 15 minutes or so at each stop. Plus assume triple the number of stops needed with adults. This makes the entire trip take much, much longer.

My second tip is to save some stuff aside and not bring out everything on the first day of travel, or else the children will play frantically with all the toys on the first day and be bored for the rest of the trip. (This is a pointless tip, because if it were me, I’d be desperate enough on the first day to bring out anything, ANYTHING I had.)

Now for things to buy:

1. Fresh TV/movies. Heather tells me that they already have a DVD player for the car, so I suggest buying several new DVDs. …This doesn’t seem like it’s brilliant enough to suggest, but that didn’t stop me from suggesting the kids could run around at rest stops. Blue’s Clues (photo from Amazon.com) is one of the ones I got for the just-turned-2-year-old on my own trip, so it may be too young for the 2- and 4-year-olds—but anything, ANYTHING they would like that wouldn’t be intolerable for the adults.

2. Water-drawing thingie. The H-2 Whoa is the one we had. It’s two-sided, so by the time you finish drawing on the second side, the first side is mostly dry and ready to use again. But if I were buying now, I’d buy the travel-sized Aqua Doodle (photo from Amazon.com). (In fact, I DID buy it, and we still keep it in our car. I like it less because it has pre-printed rainbows/grass on it, which can kind of ruin an outer space drawing. But it IS more sensibly compact.)
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Part of me feels so extremely sick of writing/reading “What camera should I buy?” posts (or vacuum cleaner posts—those two topics are tied for extreme sickness of), I never want to write/read another one.

Another part of me is in the market for a new digital camera.

The trouble, I think, is that digital cameras keep CHANGING: a post written/read a year ago is about cameras that aren’t even being sold anymore. And the thing is, the search for happiness with a camera (or vacuum cleaner) is a search most of us are going to be working on repeatedly throughout our lives: THIS camera took the picture the instant I clicked the button, but had trouble with focus; THIS camera had excellent multi-spot auto-focus, but paused briefly so I never got the picture I had in mind. THIS camera has everything I want, but is too expensive and too large.

I’ve read several places that if you’re not making poster-size prints (or frequently cropping down to a tiny fraction of the original photo), you don’t need anything larger than 10 megapixels. But it’s hard to even FIND a camera 10 megapixels or smaller.

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I have always been scared of having to take my kids on a plane. We’ve never done it, because our family is close enough to visit by car, and every time I fly on my own I surreptitiously stare at other parents trying to manage small kids and strollers and bags and think to myself, oh thank GOD that’s not me.

The time has come, however, for me to nut up and face my fears, because I have the opportunity to take my 3.5-year-old on a trip to Washington DC at the end of this month. It will be just the two of us, and I am both thrilled about the adventure and, um, COMPLETELY FREAKED OUT.

We’ve been talking a lot about the trip and watching YouTube videos of planes taking off and so on; I feel like I’m doing an okay job on preparing him as best I can. He’s super excited about everything, but I know the fickle nature of a preschooler: it’s inevitable there will be some challenges along the way. So, what sorts of gear can help make it all a little easier? I’m hoping you guys can help me out, especially those of you with experience traveling with children. Here are some items I’m looking at:
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If you like pink, October is a good time to shop:  a lot of pink stuff is available for National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.  If you’re like me, you like supporting that cause and also really like the way it justifies a purchase.

Coffee-Mate is offering a pink mug for $12.95; $5.00 is donated.
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Last summer I went on a car trip with a toddler and a newborn. Um, that was really fun! As you might imagine!

One thing that made a world of difference was the DVD player. Sweet, peaceful Steve bought us several happy hours during the day in the car, particularly toward the end of the day when traffic got bad and no one was in the mood for another car game or car song. I really, REALLY recommend an in-car DVD player of some sort (and a few fresh DVDs) if you are driving a long distance.

Toys for long trips are tricky. Ideally they should be hand-held, one-piece, non-messy, non-noisemaking, and long-entertaining. It’s hard to hit all those bases, but here are a few that came close.
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