I am in a TIZZ about Elizabeth going to Girl Scouts camp this summer. I’m GLAD she’s going, and I’m glad she WANTS to go, but it’s a week and this is the first time and ack.

I HAVE been having fun buying things, though. She’s supposed to bring old grubby clothes, but she went up a size this year so all her clothes are new. So I went to Goodwill and bought a bunch of things for $1-2 each: shorts, long pants, t-shirts, a sweatshirt. And Target had a bunch of t-shirts and leggings at 70% off, so I bought some of those, too.

Other fun purchases:

Each girl needs her own mess kit. The Girl Scouts shop has a mess kit with a logo on it (photo from GirlScoutShop.com) for $25, but that felt a little high. I found the SAME mess kit without the logo (same brand, same color, same items even though the dunk bag isn’t in the picture) on Amazon for $15.84 (photo from Amazon.com).

When I was little, my grandmother gave me a pad of fold-and-mail stationery (photo from Amazon.com), and I remember thinking it was a mind-blowing concept. This sort of thing rarely has the same impact for the next generation (”I remember when we got COLOR TELEVISION!!”), but I found a pad of it at Marshalls and got it for her for writing letters home. She does like it, though the wow factor is, as expected, not quite as wowish.
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This week a little virus sped through our household: sore throats and 103-degree fevers for everyone except me. If I ever wondered if I might have been a good and kind and angelic nurse in, say, an army tent with rows of patients, the answer is “Probably not.” Six people asking for more juice, more water, a blanket, the remote, maybe another piece of toast, was pretty much all I could handle pleasantly, and probably the adverb “pleasantly” is pushing it a bit, even in much nicer conditions and with much less upsetting illness/injuries than would be in an army tent.

There are certain things I keep in the house always, so I have them on hand when illness visits us and don’t have to add “running to the store” to my toast-fetching list:
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One reason I love “saved items” area of online shopping carts is that it takes me a long time to decide to spring for something. Well, or else it doesn’t, like when someone mentions something and I have it on its way within 2 minutes. But MOSTLY I have to think for awhile. Here are the things I’m currently thinking about:

I am on a bit of a break with Postcrossing, but I suspect I’ll be going back to it. I already have way more postcards than I can possibly send—but Pantone color-chip postcards (photo from Amazon.com) are making me very tempted.

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I was pretty grossed out to learn that only about 12% of plastic water bottles are recycled.  This is particularly awful when it’s so easy and inexpensive to get good-quality reusable water bottles that will last for years or even DECADES before they join their non-recycled disposable brethren in the ground—or even join the 12% of the disposable ones that get recycled. Well, or some would have to be in a different kind of recycling bin because they are metal instead of plastic BUT YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.

My son is supposed to have two water bottles for school:  one for his desk, and one with his lunch.  He is also going to need two to take along on a camping trip in a few months. And I’d like to have two for myself, one for the diaper bag and one for the car.  But my experience with water bottles so far has been PITIFUL, mostly because they LEAK.  We’ve drenched lunches, backpacks, clothes.  I asked my Twitter peeps if they had a water bottle they were happy with.

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The recent events in Haiti are never far from my mind these days. I watch the news and I cannot believe the things have have happened over there—that are happening. Everything in our lives seems impossibly luxurious now, and I feel both grateful for our situation and helpless in the face of such an enormous tragedy.

We watch the news at night and if things aren’t too graphic, we let our preschooler watch it too. I’ve tried talking about the earthquake with him, but I don’t think he quite understands. He does want to know if earthquakes happen here, too, and he’s super focused on whether or not there are firefighters in Haiti because I think in his mind firefighters make everything okay.

It’s hard to know how to talk about subjects like Haiti with kids. I don’t want to scare him, but I do want to teach him a bit about what happened and what people are doing to help. I want him to understand how Mommy and Daddy are trying to help by sending money, so he knows that’s what our family does when we can.

For those of you with similar confusion and questions, here’s a list of resources I found when researching ideas for talking about Haiti and other difficult news events with children.
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So I made some New Year’s resolutions this year. Some are lofty goals (”Start writing a book”, “Finish at least 16 credits of college classes”), some are less so (”Ped Egg my feet more often so my scratchy heels don’t snag on the bedsheets”).

A bunch of my resolutions are health/fitness related, which I am sure is totally blowing your mind because that is such an unusual nonstandard sort of resolution category and clearly I am a special creative person with many—okay fine. Baaaaaaaaaaa. ANYWAY, I’ve got 3 main goals, dietwise, that I want to achieve in 2010:

• Eat more whole foods from local sources
• Keep a food journal for more than a week at a time
• Make more of our staple foods from scratch

These are mostly about personal choices and, you know, seeing things through, but since this is a blog that mainly talks about fun stuff to buy, here are some of the tools I think will help me:
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The ongoing news with the H1N1 virus has me thinking a lot about vaccinations lately, and I thought it might make a good topic for this blog. Not anything controversial, mind you, just some ideas for making shots hurt less. Most of us know about trying a children’s pain reliever before the injection and rubbing the site afterwards, but here are a few more tips for easing the Woe and Angst:
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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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My oldest two kids are technically old enough to brush their own teeth now, but they do a crappy job. Our compromise is this: they brush their own teeth in the morning before school (with me calling out from the other room, “Are you getting the BACKS? Get EVERY surface of EVERY tooth please!”), and I brush their teeth for them before bed. And then there are three more kids, so the Toothbrushing Line is a significant chunk of our bedtime routine.

One thing that’s made things easier for me is having the kids LIE DOWN while I brush their teeth. I got this idea from the dentist—not in that he suggested it, but in that I noticed that’s how HE did it. And indeed, it is way superior: the toothpaste doesn’t drizzle down their chins, it’s easier to see the top and back teeth and to get at them, it’s easier for the kids to open their mouths wide, it’s easier to keep their heads still.
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My firstborn, Rob, asked about the facts of life pretty early. He is sort of child we describe as “having an inquiring mind” (we save “OMG, he just BEATS ME DOWN with questions until I can’t stand it another SECOND and have to pretend I need to pee so I can hide in the bathroom for a few minutes!” for later, when he’s asleep) and so I did have to decide what he was ready to hear, but I didn’t have to decide when to bring it up.

My secondborn, Will, is less inquisitive. He is going into second grade next year, and it occurs to me that we haven’t had any kind of Talk yet. Rob knew the basic scoop by now, because of the asking and asking and ASKING, but I suspect Will would just as soon not discuss it.  That makes two of us.

I’m working from scratch here:  I need to decide when to tell Will, and I need to decide HOW.  For Rob, as I said, I started by answering his questions, a method which can be tricky:  it involves trying to figure out what they’re REALLY asking.  Is “the baby starts to grow in a special kind of tummy” a sufficient answer, or is he really asking HOW-how?  Is “in a special kind of tummy” sufficient, or is it time to bring out the word uterus?  And so on.  It’s a topic that doesn’t have one single correct answer for every family, or even necessarily for every child within a family.

When I felt Rob was ready for what I think of as The Basics (bringing out the real words and explaining some mechanics), I used
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