simple.green.organic.happy.

Category: Family, Parenting

5 Ways to Support National Parks

Happy 100th birthday National Park Service! This year the National Park Service is celebrating a century as the caretaker of the national parks, and welcoming the next generation of visitors and supporters to play an active role in stewardship of America’s most treasured places. Community members are invited to join the Find Your Park movement by taking a hands-on role in park conservation and preservation. There are a lot of great ways to get involved, with activities suited to a range of interests.

5 ways to get involved with National Parks:

1. Join the VIPs.

The National Park Service’s Volunteers In Parks (VIP) program engages over 444,000 citizens who donate over 7.9 million hours, which is the equivalent to more than 3,700 additional employees. Thousands of Volunteers help maintain trails, provide visitor services, lead guided nature walks and historic tours, support preservation initiatives, and deliver education programs to youth and school groups. With more than 400 parks in all 50 U.S. states, the engagement opportunities available are as diverse as the parks themselves.

2. Become a Citizen Scientist

Ever dream of discovering a new species? Here is your chance! The parks’ Biodiversity Discovery program has revealed amazing things, and is not just scientists who make these discoveries. Volunteers and students have collected plants and animals that turn out to be rare, new to a park, and sometimes new to science. In 2016, you can join one of more than a 100 National Geographic Society BioBlitz events to help park staff and scientists catalog biodiversity in your local national park. The National Park Service reports that to date, more than 114 national parks and 30,000 people have engaged in this annual BioDiscovery effort, and more than 18,000 species new to parks have been identified.

3. Leave No Trace

Volunteers help maintain 18,000 miles of trails in national parks. If you’re planning to get out and find your park this year, help keep the parks as beautiful and litter free. Go the extra mile by bringing your own garbage bag to pick up any trash you might see along the way! And remember, there are at least 247 species of threatened or endangered plants and animals found in national parks, and you can help protect them by keeping food stores secure and not disturbing the plants, animals and historic artifacts that live there.

4. Be an Artist in Residence

Artists have created art in national parks since the late 19th century. Today, the sights and sounds in national parks continue to inspire artists in more than 50 residency programs across the country. There are programs for visual artists, writers, musicians, and other creative media. Programs vary, but residencies are typically 2 to 4 weeks in length and most include lodging. Often artists are invited to participate in park programs by sharing their art with the public.

5. Try Virtual Volunteering

In the new, free mobile iOS game – Save the Park – you can virtually experience the types of activities and impacts volunteers have in parks. Play all four volunteer characters – Environment Champion, Wildlife Lover, Citizen Scientist and Culture Concierge – across three park environments. And for each download of Save the Park occurring this year, American Express will donate $1 (up to $50,000) to support the National Park Foundation’s conservation and stewardship programs.

This post was contributed through American Express; I was not compensated in any way, just thought it was pretty cool and wanted to share for National Park Week!

Photo credit: Depositphoto

April 20, 2016
Ollies Blocks and the Building Blocks of Creativity
Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.
― Margaret Mead

There’s lots of jokes about how your parenting changes from your oldest child to your youngest, but I think for me the most dramatic change was in the stuff I chose for them to play with. Jake, being our first child and also the first grandchild, was admittedly pretty spoiled; his first Christmas (at six weeks old, he slept through the whole thing) was an embarrassment of excess, including not one, not two but three of that year’s coveted Tickle Me Elmo doll. He had tons of toys, all of which seemingly lit up or made noise or moved all around but certainly required batteries. Most of them carried some claim of having educational or developmental value.

Then Maverick came along, with an obsession for cars and trains and puzzles and Play-Doh and things like Lego and Bionicle that had a million parts and exacting instructions for how they were to be put together. We had bins upon bins of these things. It was an explosive plastic nightmare that we stealthily packed up and hid away while we were preparing to sell our house, never to be seen again.

With Cass, we took a far different approach, and it’s influenced the gifts I choose to give other kids now.
- I require toys to not be capable of vocalizing on their own power. This is non-negotiable after owning several Furbys.
- I need them to still be fun even if you lose a few pieces, and not to require buying bins upons bins worth of pieces to be able to make anything good.
- They have to be easy for little hands to clean up after and to store.
- I prefer they be aesthetically pleasing— something adults don’t mind seeing on a shelf when not in use.
- I want creativity— the act of creating— to be a vital part of the toy’s makeup.
- I gravitate towards toys that are eco-friendly, batteries not required.
- I invest in toys that can be handed down: durable, fixable and timeless.
What that means is that Cass had fewer toys than her brothers by a looooong shot, but they’re still around for her younger cousins to play with when they come over, and eventually we’ll give them a good cleaning or sanding down and hand them off. And it meant that most of those toys were of the building variety: high quality block, magnet, gear, circuit sets.

Construction sets are the building blocks of creative and critical thinking. They help teach kids how to think. Kids have to conceive of something to create, and then break down the steps that will take them there. Fine motor skills and hand to eye coordination are strengthened. Patience is practiced through ongoing, low pressure trial and error. Balance and gravity are tested. Relative sizes are eyeballed and confirmed. There’s a lot going on here, and at the end you have a finished product you can display or, satisfyingly, take apart knowing you can always do it again later.

Plus they are age and gender neutral! Building sets are simply a lot of bang for your buck.

Ollies Blocks are made with high quality oak wood— sourced from surplus direct from wood artisans whenever possible— combined with durable interlocking plastic pegs. To me they are reminiscent of Erector sets (the good ones from when I was a kid, not the plastic versions available now) but less painful underfoot and much more pleasing to the eye and touch.

Ollies Blocks are actually a reboot of another construction set from that time. (Like the music from the 90s, I’m convinced I lived through the golden years of toys. It’s not nostalgia, they were just the best eras for toys and music PERIOD.) “Yael’s Wooden Toys” were manufactured by Ollies’ founder Haran Yaffe’s father, and named after Haran’s sister. Now, Haran and his father are bringing the family blocks back for a new generation to enjoy, and they’ve been renamed for Haran’s daughter Olivia. Which is a detail that I find irresistibly adorable.

Original 80s packaging

Ollies Blocks are currently at the Kickstarter stage with a little over two days left to go. They’re reached their Kickstarter goal, so you know if you jump in to back now you’ll receive your blocks! The estimated delivery is set for September 2016— just a few months away, and well before Christmas. The prices are on par for a quality construction set, with a few awesome tiers (for instance, if you donate a 50 piece set to a hospital the company will kick in a bonus 25 pieces).

Not to tell you what to do or anything, but I think I’d personally spring for the 200 piece set for $149 and break it up between a couple of kids; like most things the prices get better the bigger the set you invest in.

Take a look at Ollies Blocks here!
March 31, 2016
Raising Adventurous Eaters ($25 Certificates for $3 from Restaurant.com)

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

-George Bernard Shaw

I received a Restaurant.com gift card for the purpose of this review. This post was made possible by Mom Spark Media. Thoughts are my own.

I did not grow up an adventurous eater. Pretty much the opposite, really.

People tend to think that curious, especially those who regularly caught the scent of tangy garlic pastes being reduced or pungent pigs’ feet having something being done to them (I’ve no idea what) wafting from my house. Yes, my mother occasionally cooked Vietnamese food, but only for herself; my brother and I grew up on a very limited menu of decidedly American fare. We had burgers and ribs and ham-and-cabbage and spaghetti; corn and peas and potato salad. Every so often we’d have pork eggrolls or a roasted chicken with all the trimmings.

My guess is that my mother did try to introduce some other foods when we were young, and gave up on them when we predictably didn’t love them. Food can be expensive, and we didn’t have the money to waste on meals she didn’t excel at preparing (since we couldn’t afford to eat out ever, she never got to see what a lot of foods were supposed to taste like) and that weren’t going to be eaten.

And so when I got to be an adult I discovered asparagus and brussel sprouts and sweet potatoes; gyros and empanadas and lobster bisque and kangaroo steaks and spicy chicken wings. One of my favorite things is going to a restaurant I’ve never tried, particularly in a town other than my own, and ordering a food I’ve never eaten, and I work really hard to make trying new foods a fun adventure for my kids.

They say it takes ten tries to develop a taste for foods that the palate doesn’t instinctively love (read: full of survival-ensuring fat or sugar), and I want to encourage my kids to get those ten tries in while they are still young: to embrace trying new things, to seek out new worlds, to immerse yourself in the traditions of new places, to give things a chance even when they didn’t work out before, to appreciate cultural history and philosophy and visual appeal even if it’s not your favorite thing you’ve ever eaten.

Food is a metaphor for life, really.

Food feeds more than your belly.

There’s the experience of being together, whether you’re preparing the food together or sitting down for a meal together in a restaurant. We’re making memories here, people. Memories that can be recaptured and savored later in life, evoked by the smells and tastes and textures of a meal.

Of course, making these kinds of memories can be expensive, especially now that I basically have three teenagers. In fact, I was just reading an article about how raising kids who eat healthy/have more sophisticated palates is a luxury of the relatively wealthy, because those parents can afford to “waste” food and money on potentially unsuccessful initial exposures. I don’t agree; I think anyone can eat healthily and adventurously, although it does take some planning.

It’s a question of priorities, budgeting and being on the lookout for great grocery and restaurant deals.

It doesn’t get much better than this one, which ends tonight so do not delay:

$3 SALE FROM RESTAURANT.COM

If you’re not familiar with Restaurant.com, the site offers up deals on more than 23,000 restaurants nationwide. And TODAY TODAY TODAY, Restaurant.com is serving up $25 Certificates for only $3 with Promo Code: SALE. All their other deals are on sale too! For example, you can get your hot little hands on a $10 Certificate for just $1.20.

To find a deal, search Restaurant.com by location, cuisine, price range and more. Use this opportunity to really stretch your culinary wings and try all manner of new things! Or gift someone else with a Certificate, because the gift of a good meal is something everybody loves.

There are worlds waiting to be explored, and they are tasty.

But seriously hurry— this $3 sale is for a limited time. You need to get your butt to Restaurant.com today: this offer ends tonight, Thursday March 31st, at 11:59 pm central time.

Let me know what you get! I think we’re going to try some Jamaican this weekend.

I received a Restaurant.com gift card for the purpose of this review. This post was made possible by Mom Spark Media. Thoughts are my own.

March 31, 2016