Spring and Summer have arrived, so it’s time to break out the outdoor games! Gamewright has been our favorite source for games for the past year and a half, and with its new releases, it looks like that trend will continue. (and not just because they send us games for review!) We spend the winter (and evenings) playing games from Gamewright, so it is only fitting that we are playing one of their new games, Boochie, outside!

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We live in a world filled with creepy-crawlies. We’ve also become more and more aware of them each year. From dust mites to mosquitoes, seemingly nuisance pests are wreacking more and more havoc. Then, each spring moms are starting to cut their boys’ hair to make it easier to do tick checks (all our friends are nervous about ticks after our Lyme Disease issues). Other than ticks, our biggest tiny bug anxiety is about lice.

Do you remember that feeling of squickiness and shame when the school nurse found out you had lice? ick But now parents are not only worried about eliminating the lice and nits, but also worried about using pesticides on their children’s heads in order to kill off the lice. Everyone needs to comb every strand of hair, but coating the head in olive oil or mayonnaise and then a hair thingie for 3 hours seems to work, but not everyone can do that. The kind folks at MomCentral have teamed up with Lice MD to show parents that there’s an alternative to pesticides sitting on their pharmacy shelf.
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This week is Food Allergy Awareness week, and this month is Celiac Disease Awareness month. To honor both of these, we are participating on the bi-weekly Food Allergy carnival and talking about summer camp despite food restrictions

Our family has Celiac Disease, an intolerance to dairy, and LG has a severe berry allergy. We bring our own food to birthday parties, parks, and playdates, but I never wanted the dietary restrictions to restrict the girls’ access to activities. Occasionally an event is so food-centered that we can’t participate, but as food restrictions become more well-known, we can go to more and more events without risking a reaction.

Some days, it feels like our food allergies are a complete non-issue. Kids play here or in the neighborhood and they eat popcorn, we go to the park and have some chips, we hang out at the beach with some trail mix, etcetera. Some days it is an issue - my girls take some treats when they go over to a friend’s house, or they can’t stay for dinner with a friend, or there’s an activity that looks great except that it includes cooking with flour or using play-doh, or when a friend’s been eating a sandwich then puts their hand in your chips, which means you can’t eat the chips any more. Those are the hard days, and the days that keep me on my toes, keep me from becoming complacent.

Last year BG and MG went to camp for 2 weeks (check out BG in the above photo from the camp brochure!). It’s a day camp, and they had a week off at home to rest in between the two camp sessions. Thanks to their grandparents, they were able to go to a wonderful camp on an island, taking a boat to and from the island each day. To make it even more special, it’s a camp I attended for 10 years. Is it tricky to attend camp when you can’t eat a regular sandwich and need to have kids wash up after they eat a sandwich? Yes, but it’s totally worth it. Their heads are filled with memories from those weeks, and we are happy to do the prep work so they can attend.

My mother talked to the camp and counselors about the girls’ dietary needs, and so did I. We discussed lunch and snack times, papier maché (no flour/water paste), play-doh, and the need for hand-washing. While I am saddened by the number of children with peanut allergies, their existence has really helped raise awareness about food allergies and restrictions. Everyone at the camp was comfortable with the girls dietary needs and happy to help out. This was key for me - if you find what looks like a great camp, but they seem clueless about food allergies, back away! You don’t want to risk your child’s health for summer camp - find another camp.

This year they’re attending camp for 2 consecutive weeks and it will also include a sleep-over on the island. We will continue to work in advance to help keep camp safe for the girls, and I’m sure the counselors will continue to be as helpful this summer as they were last summer! First, we asked that our girls wash hands before they eat, and have their friends wash hands after they eat. This reduces the chances of cross-contamination, and is generally a healthy idea anyhow. Food sharing is a no-no at most camps now, but a reminder about that printed on lunch bags is a great idea, too.

In advance we bought a variety of favorite snacks, and plenty of snack-size and sandwich size ziplocs. This is much more economical than buying everything in single size bags, and it gives you a greater range of snacks - not everything is sold in little bags! We also froze bottles of water so they would keep the food cold and give the girls cold water later in the day. We don’t usually do a lot of juice, so it was special to have juice boxes or pouches for their lunch!

One trick for us was to include a fair amount of protein, as camp requires a lot of energy, and low amounts of protein tend to make my kids grumpy! Peanuts and nuts are safe for us, and great for a protein kick (we all love Larabar Bars Variety Pack and KIND Bar Almond & Apricot), but they aren’t allowed in most schools or camps. Instead, we added meat sticks (such as Jack Links Super Size Beef Sticks), beef jerky (such as World Kitchens Brown Sugar Beef Jerky), and nut-free trail mix (such as Enjoy Life Trail Mix Not Nuts! Beach Bash). If you’re looking to stock up, you can get great prices on allergy-safe and gluten-free treats at Amazon.

LG has an epi-pen and is the one with the severe berry allergy. She’s still too young for the day camp on the island, and I’m grateful. I wouldn’t be comfortable with having her on an island with a potentially anaphylactic allergy. We can hope she outgrows it in the next two years! I’m still working out my comfort level with having her go on field trips with people who aren’t me, her dad, or her grandparents.

What accommodations have your kids needed for camp? Check back tomorrow for a link to the Food Allergy Carnival!

I hope all of you had a wonderful mother’s day!

On Friday afternoon Jack was giving Ra a hard time, so I was separating them. Stupidly, I did so with my hands. Ra accidentally nipped me, and even though it’s a tiny cut, it whacked a nerve. So until now my thumb on my left hand was basically useless. It’s a bit better, but not a ton, so I’m going to the doctor tomorrow. wheee! I think it’s been a couple months since I was last there!

I had a lovely mother’s day with sleeping in, a great bbq linner made by my step-dad, visits with my mom & step-mom, and general rest & chatting. My brother was visiting, which was a lot of fun for everyone. He grew a mustache, and now suddenly looks so much like my dad. It’s surprising.

It’s great to feel special, isn’t it? Of course, sleeping in and having meals cooked for you is a day in the life of many of the people in this house, but ah well. No pictures from Mother’s day - no new camera yet.

I spend a lot of my time with my girls and pups taking pictures, which we post in blogs and on flickr. The joy of digital cameras is that you can delete the bad pictures, and crop the images so that the pics you select are exactly what you want to share with your friends and family. There are a lot of programs and websites where you can share pictures online, but there aren’t many where you can choose who can see the pictures of your kids OR sites that easily mail your digital images to someone who might not have a camputer. Kinzin is a program that allows you to limit who can view your pictures, and will mail 10 pictures to any address once a month. With out of state family and great-grandparents without computers, (and far too many unfulfilled promises about mailing prints) we were eager to review the service for PBN.
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MG and I have become very lucky. Last week the lovely jimiyo asked if he could sketch one of the girls from the innumerable pictures on flickr. I agreed and if you look here, you can see the sketch of MG in progress.

If you want to pick up some of jimiyo’s designs, you can buy:

Lovely women’s shirts at etsy
• Life, ’tis Precious, which has some wonderful detailing
• Revelations, which has a gorgeous lion

Meanwhile, I was chatting with some of the designers last night, and one of the designers, cho, made a quick sketch of me based on this picture! I was a bit embarrassed at the attention, but it’s really cool!

If you, like me, are impressed with his designs, you can pick up 3 shirts by cho this weekend:

• My favorite, as I’m partial to water/beachy designs, Treacherous Waters

• Reminder of childhood, Duck Hunt
• Fun with video games and the alphabet, Alpha Battle

They’ve both got entries in this week’s shirt.woot Derby, where the theme is “Revolution”.

We have always tried to make our birthday party invitations stand out a bit. We’ve made collages out of construction paper, and customized invitations made using theme-appropriate clip art on the computer. However, since BG was turning 10 this year, we were thrilled to team up with PBN to review birthday party invitations by tiny prints.
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I was listening to npr on my way to the therapist last night, and I heard a story about gender identity, and treating children who self-identify as the opposite gender early in life. I missed part of the story as I picked up meds & had to go into the building, so I was happy to be able to read the story online. My heart aches for families in this situation, but my heart especially breaks for the boy who had his toys taken away.

For something completely different, I found this cool comic strip while haunting the halls of shirt.woot. Today’s comic about genes and whips reminds me of Tom Lehrer’s “Masochism Tango”, but with genes. Geeky is cool, who’da thunk it?

I’ve mentioned the cool t-shirts over at Threadless before. Well, another shirt.woot designer has an intense Threadless submission up titled Apocalypse, be sure to vote for it! jimiyo creates work with such an incredible level of detail. Very cool.

Rachel’s tip for the day: if you work in a checkout lane and ask someone for ID, don’t say “oh, my mom is your age”. Gah. I was feeling old enough when BG turned 10, knowing someone younger than me has a child working in the grocery store completely freaked me out.

While reading the Maximum Ride series, my girls are committed to saving the environment. (When they remember, of course!) We were all thrilled when our local grocery store switched to printing on both sides of the receipt! They aren’t printing goofy ads on the back, either - it’s the regular receipt of purchases, but put on both sides of the paper.

B’s company has also put more green ideas into practice - they gave each employee 3 reusable grocery bags (the nice ones that fold up), and took away the styrofoam and plastic cups for water and coffee, replacing them with a ton of mugs, a rack for the mugs, and special pens so folks can put their names on them. They also have special parking for hybrids, so they’re on the “good” end of businesses!

It’s been gorgeous here lately! The sun is too bright for me to work on the laptop outside, even!

And why are we outside all day? Well, BG got an incredible bike for her birthday, so BG and MG are riding all around the neighborhood, and exploring with some friends. The bike has gears and shocks, and is just a wonderful bike for her to ride on roads, grass, or trails.

The older girls have also started to take their bikes down to the playground, and play with the other kids in the area. I follow on my scooter with LG and at least one dog, and we hang out. It’s great!

I have to be careful about sunburns, though - the first day on the beach I got burned.

Sadly, my camera isn’t working, but my mom was nice enough to take a few pictures, including two of MG scaling the rock wall and BG climbing the rock wall. They both climbed to the top the first time! We’ll have to go back soon, they loved it. I’m hoping LG is tall enough to join them soon!

So, what’s been up with you while I’ve been distracted by the nice weather?

edited: because I mis-typed a link, making it all go wonky

BG turned 10 today! I can’t believe that she has been here for a decade! It feels like only yesterday she was a baby that needed to be held, nursed, and cuddled all the time. Babies are cute for a reason - they make you sooooo tired! Here’s a pic from when she was 7 months old:

Now she’s just as cute, but so much her own person, with a very strong personality. She is very verbal, very social, and feels everything very strongly. She is an incredibly loyal friend, and she loves to play any number of imaginative, board, or other games. I am so proud to be her mom! BG’s a great kid.

Now it’s time for visiting the grandparents and picking up her new bike!