Goede dag, Nederlands!

Goede dag, Nederlands! Hallo.

Hoe gaat het ermee? Glad to have you here!

Goede morgen!

Laura

5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do

What do you think of this? Do kids need to do dangerous things? Does it help them feel a stronger sense of themselves? Does it ultimately make them safer and more capable?

Both of my kids use power tools with their Dad. I wouldn't do that for them, but I make custard with them and my husband doesn't do that. It takes two, baby.

My son has a pocket knife. He can not wait to show his friends, and we've explained that it's not a toy, it's a tool and you have to be especially careful with it and treat it with respect. He is proud to have it, proud to be trusted by his parents about this and has a special place where he keeps the knife. He has used the tiny scissors around the house and has felt proud to be so helpful.

As an industrial designer, my husband is fully aware of the lengths that companies go to to warn people off of their own stupidity. If you take off a safety feature for a product, you might get hurt by it. If you use a product for something it was not intended for, you might get hurt by it. If you use a baby saucer/play chair/console thing as a flotation device, your child may not be safe. If a kid uses a knife correctly, will they automatically get hurt? If they get a greater facility at using the knife, will there be even less of a chance of them getting hurt?

I've posted a poll about what dangerous things you think are OK for a kid to do. Please vote, and we'll see the results next Sunday.

Be careful out there! If it's cold, be sure to put on a coat! Look both ways before you cross the street! Chew your food slowly! Measure twice cut once (I actually like that one)!

Oh. I'm sorry. You guys are adults, right? Oh. OK then. Right. You can figure out for yourselves how to negotiate your own way through the world.

Never mind...

Grandmother's Broken Sewing Box

Depending on what the item is, I can be sentimental about it.

I had an old, cloth covered sewing box. It was broken and had been repaired with black stretchy tape. I got the box when my Grandmother died and we were packing up all of her stuff.

15 years later, I have children of my own, and I needed a bigger sewing box, and I was sick of this old broken inefficient sewing box. But... I had a hard time throwing out this box. It felt like I was throwing out one of the last connections to my Grandmother. And then, I had an epiphany.

My Grandmother wouldn't have wanted me to be beholden to a broken box. She wouldn't have wanted me to order my life and my surroundings and my space according to things--especially things that don't serve me. SHE would have thrown out the box at this point! And even if her thinking would have been different, I'm an adult and can decide what things are good for me and useful and needed, and what things are useless and in the way.

A couple of years ago, I transferred all of Grandmother's spools of thread and sewing shears and needles to a new box, and I threw out the old sewing box and didn't think twice about it. My grandmother's not in that box. She's in my father and me and my siblings and my children. She's in paintings and politics and crusty loaves of bread.

What should you throw out or give away? What are you needlessly holding onto? Do you have any broken sewing boxes?

Waffle Iron

I had just come downstairs from the kitchen for a moment. Yes, a waffle was currently in the waffle iron. Yes, well of course it was hot. But, I was going right back up and I know how long a waffle takes. I noticed a funny burning melting plastic smell. I didn't know that melted butter was flammable in a small household appliance--did you? Well it is!

Here is the waffle iron on the back porch moments after being ablaze in the kitchen.

See the scorch mark? Do you know how much batter I had left?...

This waffle iron caught on fire after ONE WAFFLE!

Stupid stuff...