Has the time come to teach your children about the early years of rock? Elvis.com has an awesome section for kids, including a video tour of Graceland hosted by twelve-year-old boy named Curtis with highlights such as Lisa Marie’s favorite chair, Elvis’ preferred spot for watching Saturday morning cartoons, the Graceland stables, and the archives of personal items including boyhood photo-booth snapshots.
Don’t miss exploring the way-cool virtual tour of Elvis’ dressing room in 1969. Click on the guitar to hear it play, or on the scrapbook to see newspaper clippings from his legendary career. You can even rifle through his stage costumes.
Our favorite part is the free children’s activity book, with coloring pages, word puzzles, trivia and more! Download here.
In honor of Lullaby Renditions of Elvis Presley, out today, it’s Elvis week on the blog. Stop by each day for fun stuff including a free Rockabye Baby Elvis coloring page, and more!
Can’t get enough baby Elvis? Listen to an exclusive full-length sneak peek of “Love Me Tender” (lullaby style) here.
Oh, and by the way, we’re giving away five Lullaby Renditions of Black Sabbath CDs! Enter here!
Looking to get a smile on your grumpy kid’s face? Or maybe you’re just in cuteness withdrawal? Well don’t worry; Cute Overload has you covered. Kids love these insane pictures that the site creators somehow find all over the web each day.
I mean, check out this video they found:
Seriously adorable. It’s insane how popular this site is, but I guess there are a lot of people who need a little boost during the day. Every child loves to laugh, and every parent loves when his or her kid isn’t crying.
Getting ready to fly the friendly skies with your brood? Better to plan ahead before boarding and make sure you aren’t carrying anything that won’t pass muster—you know, bringing personal care items that are 3 oz. or less in your carry-on bag. Now, stocking up on the right-sized stuff is as simple as point and click. 3floz.com is chock-full of all your favorite beauty and grooming products, and now they also carry baby items such as bath products, oils, creams, sunscreens and towelettes. They even have high-end brands include Little Twig, MD Moms, Lather and Weleda Baby.
If you place your order by 2 pm EST, you’ll receive same-day service in Manhattan. Even if you’re not a New Yorker, we love that you can upgrade your order from ground shipping to overnight by including your flight itinerary that shows travel within three days. Cool perk! Now, if only they could do something about that pesky kid kicking the back of your seat…
Parenthood certainly has its ups and downs, and some days, it can sure feel like the minuses outweigh the pluses (how many diaper blowouts should you have to endure in one day?). In celebration of being a new mom or dad comes My First Baby, a new series of webisodes from Meredith Video Studios and Graco that chronicle the experience of caring for a baby and all the joy (and madness) that goes along with it. Now through February 2011, each of the 36 three-to-four-minute webisodes will feature clips from real-life moms, peppered with tips and advice from TV personality Jill Cordes.
A “dream team” of experts that includes designer Liz Lange, a personal trainer and a baby planner help guide newbie parents through an overwhelming sea of baby gear and more. Our favorite part is the homegrown videos submitted by viewers who share the good, the bad and the ugly of parenting, like traveling with a newborn and getting back into shape. If you upload your own video to the site, you’ll have a chance to be featured in one of the webisodes and win prizes from Graco. So, if a Babies ‘R Us shopping spree gets your blood pumping, go grab that camera and get started…
An eternal debate amongst parents rages on, and once again another writer has decided to try and make sense of the boys versus girls debate. Kids are not easy to raise regardless of their gender, and of course each child is different. But let’s just put this fact aside momentarily and ponder a bit, are girls easier to deal with than boys? Are boys just a bit too crazy for a tired parent or is a girl’s (sometime) silence and sadness too confusing for a dad or mom?
In a recent article on Parenting.com Paula Spencer, discusses the differences in raising a boy or a girl and the challenges each offer parents. While she starts off the article saying that she spends much more time on her boy than on any of her three girls, this fact is pushed to the side immediately when parents of girls claim the opposite. Which is harder to raise?
Here are some tidbits from the story that can be open to debate:
From birth, we talk softly to girls but throw boys in the air.
Girls’ hearing is more sensitive in the frequency range critical to speech discrimination, and the verbal centers in their brains develop more quickly. That means a girl is likely to respond better to discipline strategies such as praise or warnings like “Don’t do that” or “Use your words.”
Boys tend to be more tactile — they may need to be picked up and plunked in a time-out chair
Boys are more rambunctious and aggressive. Taking risks lights up the pleasure centers of their brains.
Letting kids explore — at the cost of a few scrapes and cuts — builds character, self-confidence, resilience, and self-reliance. Boys, being natural risk takers, may need encouragement to slow down a little, but maybe girls need to be encouraged to take more risks.
From birth, a girl baby tends to be more interested in looking at colors and textures, like those on the human face, while a boy baby is drawn more to movement, like a whirling mobile.
Because girls study faces so intently, they’re better at reading nonverbal signals, such as expression and tone of voice. Boys not only learn to talk later than girls and use more limited vocabularies, they also have more trouble connecting feelings with words.
As girls get to be 8 or so, things can get harder: The flip side of being so adept at communicating is that girls exert a lot of energy on it. There can be a great deal of drama around who’s mad at whom, who said what and why.
Girls tend to grow up less confident and more insecure than boys.
In their early years, most boys lag behind girls in developing attentiveness, self-control, and language and fine motor skills.
One area where girls do less well in school concerns spatial learning, such as geometry.
The general consensus seems to be that boys are more of a handful early on, and girls more challenging beginning in the preteen years.
So reading these facts, what do you think? Do you agree with Spencer that boys are harder to deal with early on and easier as they get older, or is the opposite true?
Smarter Babies and Kids is a website aimed at people looking to be the most informed parents on their cul-de-sac. Featuring posts on daily parenting topics, such as behavior, fun events, upcoming holidays, and more, this blog aims to give moms and dads all the information they need about anything related to raising a child. There is a lot of information on important product recalls that can affect your child, as well as a section to find rebates and coupons on baby and toddler gear to save you money.
Merchants who sell baby or child gear can register to list their products on the site, and the site is international, with branches in China, Japan, and Korea. A branch of the main “Smarter Blogs” family, which focuses on good buys for many different categories of products, the Baby Blog is dedicated to parenting and families.
The main blogger, Heidi, has great tips on topics like baby sunscreen, alleviating teething pains, flying with kids, paying for college, and even what to do in case of divorce. All that, plus fun facts on strange baby names like Shanda Lear, daughter of the Lear jet founders.
Funology.com is one of those sites that parents dream of. This site will hold your kid’s attention for hours with recipes, games, crafts, plus true science facts that will boost the IQ of anyone of any age.
There are enough cool arcade games to easily fill several rainy afternoons. Categories include action, logic, sports, and memory games. There are even some typing and puzzle games to help your kid learn how to type faster than you.
Check out the Jokes tab with countless belly busters, as well as the Boredom Buster section that includes ideas for crafts, an Art Gallery that shows your child how to create art with household items. Boredom Busters even includes a step-by-step guide to making your own hacky sack. Summer is approaching, after all.
My personal favorite is the array of magic tricks, which can turn your child into a regular David Blaine, though sans the creepy stare. With tons of card tricks, number tricks, and optical illusions, your kid is guaranteed to have a great time.
Kids love knowing everything; you probably know that by now, no matter how old your kids are. If it moves, or even if it doesn’t, they want to know why. Why is the sky blue? I still don’t really know the answer to that one. But hey, maybe it can be found on this great news site aimed at kids called DOGO News.
With all the articles split into categories like current events, science, social studies, sports, and entertainment, it’s easy to find relevant stories and a lot of fun random stuff as well. Also great is the ability for your kids to subscribe to the site so they can not only comment on the articles, but also get daily news sent to their email.
A tab on DOGO connects to a list of other cool kids’ sites, from Let’s Talk About Insects, to Funology. The web is full of great information for your kids, as well as plenty of games that will easily entertain for hours, or at least minutes.
DOGO News has a tab called Earth that functions like a map for news. The picture of the globe is fully movable and it rotates as news stories from around the world are announced, which users can click on and read at will. Geography was always my worst subject, so maybe I’ll spend some time checking out the globe myself.
Are your kids old enough that they know you’re probably spending a bit too much time on the computer while they’re stuck watching the same SpongeBob episodes again? Well, maybe it’s time to get your kids online. Yes, it’s scary, but that’s what that parental control panel on your computer is for. After restricting pretty much everything, head over to Hellokids.com to set up an account for your kids.
Right after creating an account for your child, you can select the age group for them to view other kids, from 0-10, and start uploading your child’s pictures or write about their favorite toys, anything that tells the world who your child is becoming. They’re able to completely customize their profile, with your help of course, and they can add elements like video and music to their page as well. There are even coloring pages to print, jokes, poems, games and more to keep their attention.
For the kid who loves music, there are tons of fan groups for acts like Justin Beiber, Hannah Montana, and Taylor Swift that any of the 15,000 members can join. There’s even a gardening game for the future green thumbs of the world. Head over to HelloKids.com today to get your kid started in the world of 0’s and 1’s today.
With the recent explosion of iPhone apps it seems there is one for every occasion or event. Why do I need to turn my cell phone into a mini lightsaber? Because it’s cool. But there are a few that would be extremely handy for parents with babies. Jindrich Sarson is selling the Baby Monitor and Alarm for $2.99, and it turns your iPhone into a monitor that will call another phone in the house when your baby wakes up. It can also replay all the noises made while your baby slept and it has a function called “Mum’s Voice” that can play back any recorded message when your baby starts to cry (the most common being a recording of the mother’s voice.)
Another app that can be used to entertain the toddlers while you’re trying to kill time is FooPets Tuxedo Kitten (they also make a FooPets Marley Puppy based on the film Marley and Me which I think is a little cuter). This app features virtual pets which you feed and play with. They respond according to your actions. This isn’t the latest supercomputer but the animals are cute and will keep your kid entertained.
Parenthood certainly has its ups and downs, and some days, it can sure feel like the minuses outweigh the pluses (how many diaper blowouts should you have to endure in one day?). In celebration of being a new mom or dad comes 
