This morning I was working away in my office when I heard Adam’s voice. It sounded sort of small and distant, as though it were coming across a string and into a tin can held up to my ear.

Strange, since I didn’t have a tin can telephone on my ear. Even stranger, it sounded like he said there had been an explosion in the basement.

Lucy and Alice were in the midst of a giggle fest in their bedroom, so I had to holler at them to pipe down for a second.

Then came Adam’s voice again—through the laundry chute.

 “I must have misheard you,” I called down. “It sounded like you said ‘explosion.’”

“Yep,” he said. “In the dryer. It’s really bad.”

I don’t know about you, but when I hear explosion, basement, dryer and really bad all together in one sentence, I have but one thought:

“Oh no. A rat crawled into our dryer and died and somehow through the process of decomposition accelerated by heat, its guts burst from its belly and are now sliding slowly, cruelly down the sides of the dryer, weaving awful new patterns into our clothing.”

But maybe that’s just me. In my own personal dictionary of life’s little traumas, “bad” by means rats, dead or alive, along with innards of any sort.

So it was good news, then, that the basement explosion involved neither rats nor their juicy bits.

It was a crayon, hot pink, that made it through the wash and into the dryer before it succumbed to the heat and exploded all over every single long-sleeved uniform shirt the kids own, as well as our bath mat and Adam’s pillowcase, which he tossed into the wash yesterday after it got covered in lavender bubble bath.

(This bubble bath business is a long story unto itself, as is the reason the bath mat was being washed in the first place. Let’s just say that the bubble bath meant Alice had to take a second bath right after the first, only this time without bubble bath because the last of the bottle was on Adam’s pillow. And I am pleased to report that it was chocolate on the bath mat, and not what I’d originally suspected.)

In any case, the good news is at least there were no rats involved, unless by “rat” you mean the kid who put the crayon in her shirt pocket. (And I know which kid it was. The shirt looks like her heart burst. It’s sort of gruesome.)

Oh, but I joke, I joke. Who hasn’t put a crayon through the wash? Any kid who hasn’t probably doesn’t color enough. Or that’s what I say to make myself feel better for not checking pockets thoroughly before I toss stuff down the laundry chute.

The hard part, though, is getting the crayon out of the clothes and off the drum of the dryer. But even that isn’t as hard as I’d feared. 

A friend sent along a recipe for removing crayon wax from clothing. The list looked long at first. But then when I went down and compared it to the list of things I’ve accumulated as a parent—Shout, OxiClean and the leftover Borax from the slime we made at Lucy’s “gross and disgusting”-themed birthday party—I realized that I already have it all.

And that is true, in an even bigger way. Stuff goes wrong in life. But when you have the wisdom and support of friends, a well-stocked cleaning supplies cupboard, and acceptance of the fact that small calamities will happen even when we are busy with other things, you feel better, almost instantly.

But I’ve still made it good and clear to the kids that crayons don’t go in pockets. Judging from the looks on their faces when they saw their school shirts, this time they’re going to remember.

--Martha Brockenbrough

Happy Birthday, Sesame Street!

Sesame Street celebrated its 40th birthday this week. Do your kids love the show as much as you did when you were a kid? If so, you may want to have your own Sesame Street birthday celebration. And who better to inspire you than Elmo?

Small children love Elmo, so this is sure to be a wonderful theme for children between 1 and 3 years old. If Elmo is your kid's favorite friend, have a look at the ideas below for birthday party ideas with this sweet, lovable character!

Decorations:

• Use primary colors of red, yellow, and blue: they work very well with the Elmo theme, and they may be more budget-friendly than themed party supplies. Splurge on a few Elmo Mylar balloons to attach to the birthday kid's special chair.

• For a table centerpiece, have Dorothy the Goldfish swimming around in her bowl. You could also have other small fishbowls filled with fish-shaped crackers for the kids to enjoy. Before they start eating the crackers, ask them guess how many are in the bowl. Whoever is closest wins a prize.

Food and beverages:

• Elmo's favorite food is pizza, so this is a perfect (and easy) food for this party. For an activity, serve mini pizzas with sauce and cheese, and let the kids decorate them with fun toppings. Pop them into the oven, and have the kids do some party activities while the pizzas bake.

• For the beverages, make a primary-color frozen drink in a punch bowl. Orange or red flavors will match Elmo, and using club soda instead of water makes a really easy and tasty punch. For extra fun, find Elmo gummies to freeze into ice cubes and add to the punch.

Elmo activities:

• Fill a wading pool with little foam fish bath toys that have magnets attached. Rig up a small fishing pole with a paperclip on the end, and let the kids go fishing for a bath toy.

• Have a "Fill the Fish Bowl" relay race. Divide the kids into two teams. Give each child a small cup of water, have them run to a fish bowl, pour the water in, and run back to their team; each team member does the same.

Additional activity ideas include:

• Coloring or drawing pictures of Elmo

• Making things with red clay

• Playing musical chairs to Sesame Street music

• Blowing bubbles

• Goody bags can be primary colored bags, sand pails, or cups filled with Elmo stuff, including notepads, pencils, stickers, bubbles, coloring books, crayons, Elmo gummies, etc.

Happy Birthday, Sesame Street!

--Lisa Kothari, Peppers and Pollywogs

Now is the time to gather holiday card ideas. Whether you have your own holiday card tradition or are looking for new card ideas, you have many options for sending a greeting this holiday season. However you choose to communicate, sending a holiday greeting is a great way to stay in touch with those whom you’ve shared a meaningful connection with this year.

Here is a list of holiday card options to consider. Pick one, or a few, and get started!

• Pre-packaged holiday cards from the store. There is no shame in these. Try to make them a little more personal by adding a note to the recipient.
• Holiday letter on themed stationery. With the letter, you can add as much or as little information as you would like. It is common to use the letter to sum up the year for a family, or make announcements. Although, please remember, not everyone will be as thrilled to hear the details about each tooth that Jimmy lost.
• Homemade holiday cards. With today's plethora of pretty papers and card-making supplies, you can let your creativity run free here. Start thinking of ideas.
• Have holiday cards personalized and printed. There are many places that will do this for you now. They usually will include a printed message inside that you have written.  Many services will even supply postage and mail the cards out for you.
• Photo holiday card. I am always a little disappointed when a Christmas card comes in the mail from people I don't see often and there is no picture. A photo card is an attractive way to go, but don't forget to include a personal note or letter!
• Purchase your holiday cards through a charitable organization. Visit Cards that Give for an impressive selection of cards that will benefit quite an array of organizations, and ultimately, people.
• Holiday eCards. While eCards may not be a traditional method for sending holiday cards, they make both a good time-saving and money-saving option. There is a growing variety of eCards available. Electronic communication beats no communication.
• Send a family moment as a holiday card using the Cozi Family Journal. Create a special family journal entry just for the occasion, including a festive greeting and a special picture. From there, send the email card to as many on your list as you'd like. Find out more about sending a holiday card in Cozi.

Jennifer Tankersley is founder of ListPlanIt.com, with over 400 printable lists and planning pages, including everything you need to prepare for the holidays, manage a family, and organize your life. Jennifer is also the creator of 100 Days to Christmas: a daily dose of inspiration and motivation to help you through the busy holiday season.

The holiday cards that arrive throughout the month of December are like little gifts in themselves—a fun way to reconnect with friends and family and see how families have grown over the year.

After the holidays, though, it’s hard to know what to do with those special cards. Adding them unceremoniously to the recycling bin seems like sacrilege, knowing how much effort, time, and money went into creating them.

Here are a few ideas for what to do with those cards when the holidays are over:

SCAN THEM: Scanning your cards onto your computer won’t take long, but it will allow you to enjoy them over the course of the year.

COZI COLLAGE SCREENSAVER: Once you’ve scanned the cards, you can include them in your Cozi Collage screensaver. With card photos in your collages, fun holiday memories will pop up unexpectedly all year long.

WALL COLLAGE: After you’ve saved your cards by scanning them, you can have fun with your kids by creating a poster-board collage. Try giving your kids free reign with cropping and arranging the cards on a winter evening by the fire, and see what they come up with. You can then put the collage up on your fridge, or on a bulletin board in the family room. Once you think it’s run its course, you can tuck the collage away—and pull it out next year to see how much everyone has grown.

SPECIAL GIFTS: The photos included in most family holiday cards portray families at their best: a freeze frame that represents the family for the year. Some families might keep a copy for themselves, but most send out every last card, thinking they have plenty of their own pictures. Even those who keep a copy probably don’t have copies of each year’s cards together in one place. Imagine how special it would be to quietly keep a file of the cards from your closest friends through the years, and use them to create a special gift down the road. What better surprise could you give your childhood best friend than a 15-year compilation of her children’s holiday photos for her 50th birthday?

These are just a few ideas for ways to enjoy these special cards after the holidays. What do you do with your holiday cards?

Let Cozi help you manage your family's holiday calendar, organize your holiday lists, and capture the chaos of the holidays with family journal entries.

Old people get a bum rap for two things: the early-bird special, and the amount of time they spend discussing their physical ailments.

But you know who does this to an even greater extent?

Nine-year-olds.

Let’s start with the early-bird special. At our house, dinner is usually around six p.m. Adam arrives home then and I do my best to have something tasty on the table, even if the kids and I tend to disagree over the definition of “tasty.” (Their definition: anything from a box.)

It’s not exactly a late dinner we’re having, but Lucy simply cannot wait for the meal to start. Never mind that she devours a lunch that weighs several pounds because she eats like a fruit bat. Never mind that I give her a huge after-school snack; she is forever sneaking into the cupboards and gorging on nuts, fruit leather, raw oats and other assorted items.

No matter where I am in the house, I can hear those cupboards slam, slam, slam, so I know exactly what she’s up to, even if I’ve told her to hold off on stoking her engines because dinner is on its way. (Oddly, Lucy slams the cupboards open; they’re always gaping when I go into the kitchen. We usually look like we’ve just been robbed.)

In short, the child would be happy to have dinner start at 4:30 p.m., and whenever possible, I feed her then. For a while, I worried that she was going to eat her way onto the obesity charts. Wrong. Lucy is made of solid muscle and she can lift her 180-pound father off the ground. She’s a spray tan and a body of baby oil away from being Little Miss Ironpants. Honestly, I am starting to worry that she’ll rip the kitchen cabinet doors right off their hinges.

So perhaps her early-bird special isn’t exactly like the senior citizen one, which is more about chicken soup, soda crackers and fiber supplements. But the way she and her friends discuss their ailments? Now that is like a little corner of Florida has parked itself in my family room.

“Look at this bruise!” “Once, when I was coughing, yellow stuff came out!” “Did you hear that David’s toenail fell right off?”

The worst part, though, is hearing them talk about their orthodontia, largely because it has a show-and-tell aspect. In the weeks before she got her retainer, I heard repeatedly about how a friend of hers had one.

“It hurts,” Lucy said. “Her teeth ache. Her jaw barely works. And she can’t talk right when it’s in.”

“Lucy,” I said. “I had a retainer. They’re not that bad.”

“Oh, but they are,” she said. “They’re terrible. They KILL.”

“Are you worried about your retainer?” I said.

“No!” she replied. “I can’t wait!”

She even brought her friend over to me for a little retainer demonstration the day I volunteered in class. Her friend clicked her retainer out of her mouth and offered it to me for inspection. Unlike my retainer, which was dyed to match the roof of my mouth, this child’s retainer was blue with stars. And lots and lots of saliva.

“Want to hold it?” she asked.

“No thanks,” I said. “Maybe put that back in your mouth, OK?”

“Ish kind of hard to talk when ish in,” she said.

“See?” Lucy said. “She can’t say her Ss.”

When Lucy finally got her retainer on Monday, she was in her night-before-Christmas mood—vibrating with energy. I picked her up in the waiting room of the orthodontist and was practically blinded by her wire-enhanced smile.

“Ish hash a kishen on tah!”

“What?” I said.

“KISHEN!”

She unhinged her jaw and showed me the roof of her mouth. Apparently stars are not the only decorative orthodontia option. You can also get kittens on your retainer.

“But you can talk normally, Lucy,” I said. “Please talk normally. I talked normally when I had a retainer.”

Didn’t we all talk normally when we had retainers? Wasn’t a speech impediment something you wanted to avoid? Like visible underwear and/or head lice?

Not so to kids these days. They celebrate their infirmities.

Because our appointment at the orthodontist’s office was sandwiched between school and Lucy’s back-to-back dance classes, I stopped at a teriyaki joint to feed the kids an early-bird special dinner. While we waited for our food to arrive, Lucy alternated between popping her retainer out of her mouth and snapping it back in so she could mispronounce words for Alice’s entertainment.

“Shee?” Lucy said, “I can’t shay tup.”

“Lucy, you can say cup perfectly well. You are faking it. FAKING IT!” I said.

To no avail. Alice was highly amused and rattled off a long string of words for Lucy to mangle until dinner arrived. And Alice can’t wait for her turn to be crippled by her own teeth.

For my part, I shake my head and hobble behind them, trying not to let anyone know that my Achilles tendons hurt because I played with a jump rope on Saturday. Somehow, I don’t think anyone would be interested.

--Martha Brockenbrough

Simplify your Thanksgiving preparations with Cozi!

Thanksgiving already? If you’re feeling overwhelmed by everything you’ll need to accomplish to put a fabulous feast on the table, let Cozi help. Here are a few ways that Cozi can help you simplify the pre-feast preparations and capture the fun moments of the event. 

TO DO LISTS: To plan your Thanksgiving celebration, you’ll definitely need lots of lists. With the new To Do list feature, Cozi’s got you covered. From “order the turkey” to “plan the seating arrangements” to “rent family movies,” you can use the new To Do list feature to organize your planning. You can even write a list of tasks and chores for each of your family members to delegate some of the workload.

SHOPPING LISTS: With all the ingredients that will go into your special Thanksgiving dishes, you’ll undoubtedly need several grocery lists. With Cozi Shopping Lists, you can keep a list for each store. You can then send your lists to your phone via text, or call Cozi to have your lists read aloud or sent by text. The Cozi number is 1-888-808-COZI, and our Cozi concierge will help you anytime, 24/7.

CALENDAR APPOINTMENTS: To make sure you have enough time to get through your To Do lists, consider adding appointments for key tasks directly to your family calendar. You could add appointments for shopping, cooking, and cleaning. You could even add appointments for all these chores for each of your family members to ensure that they have time set aside to accomplish all that you have in store for them. Don’t forget to set reminders for all these appointments to ensure that no one “forgets” their chores.

FAMILY JOURNAL: With all the work you’re putting into your Thanksgiving event, it would be a shame not to capture the fun, and to share these memories with your family. With the family journal, you can easily add a picture of your family’s annual Thanksgiving football game, or of Uncle Fred carving the turkey. Once you’ve added your picture, just jot down a few words and send the journal entry by email to any or all family members who joined in your celebration. Or, share all of your November journal entries automatically by signing up for the family journal newsletters.

Whatever you have planned for Thanksgiving, enjoy your time with friends and family. From the prep work to preserving the antics of the event, let Cozi help you simplify your Thanksgiving holiday.

To Do lists are now available in Cozi!

By popular demand, Cozi has launched a To Do list feature just in time for the busiest To Do list season of the year!

With all the lists you’ll need to write to prepare for your Thanksgiving feast, or to organize your holiday celebration, Cozi’s To Do lists could help you keep your sanity in these busy next few months. With To Do lists in Cozi, you can delegate a list of chores or tasks to each family member, and the list will automatically be assigned the Cozi color dot associated with that person in your family calendar.

If you’re winterizing your house this weekend, and want to assign “rake leaves” to your daughter, and “clean gutters” to your husband, it’s now easy to delegate these tasks with Cozi To Do lists. If your daughter gets sick, and you need to reassign her list to your son, you can do so with the click of a mouse.  As soon as you reassign the list, the color dot will change automatically.

With the new To Do list feature, you can keep even keep shared lists for tasks that your family needs to tackle together. For example, if the whole family needs to help clean up the garage to make room for the car now that snow’s on the way, you can add that to the Shared To Do list, represented by the All color dot in your family organizer.

It’s even possible to add categories within a list. For example, if you would like your Shared List to include categories, such as “THIS WEEK” or “IN THE FUTURE,” just enter these words in capital letters, and the To Do list will take care of the rest. If only the To Do list feature could take care of the tasks as magically as it creates the lists of the tasks!

Now that the To Do list feature is available, we need your help to give it a test drive and tell us what you think. So, take Cozi’s To Do lists for a spin today, and share your real-world feedback with us by sending comments to us here.

Dear Makers of Fun Size Candy Bars,

I am old. Middle aged, as one of my high school students told me two years ago, when I had significantly less gray hair and fewer wrinkles than I do today. A sign of how bad things have gotten: I now have bangs because my forehead looks like an elephant’s ankle. Every day is a bad forehead day, and I’m soon going to have to grow a beard to hide what’s happening with my neck.

Despite my age, however, I do remember the glory days of Halloween, when a child had to trick-or-treat carefully because of the razor blades in the apples and the LSD in the Mickey Mouse temporary tattoos. Both were urban legends, but hey! It was Halloween. The scariest day of the year (after school picture day). This sort of thing only helped the holiday live up to its terrifying potential. 

Back then, fun size candy bars actually were sort of fun. They were heavy enough to make the trick-or-treat bag/pillowcase bruise your ankles, and they were just long enough to seem like they could conceal something deadly.

Fun size candy bars today should be called dollhouse size candy bars. It’s not just my failing eyesight, here. These things are tiny. Lilliputian. My children are suffering because I have to steal two and three candy bars at a time to feel satisfied/protect their teeth/do my part in staving off the childhood obesity epidemic. By tomorrow, their trick-or-treat bags will be empty black holes collapsing in on themselves.

Meanwhile, so many other things in my life and the lives of other parents are now full size.

I’m talking about the size of the car insurance bill, which will now go up because of the minor fender-bender a certain beloved member of my household had last week.

I am also talking about the laundry pile, which, if it were a volcano, would be large enough to be classified as a federal emergency management administration hazard area.

And I’m talking about the parent’s to-do list, which keeps growing like a giant pumpkin. Just this week, I’ve had to track down flu shots and fill out legal waivers for multiple activities, one of which was a birthday party. We’re living in the fun size times of legal liability, flu pandemics and other horrors. Doesn’t it make you miss a good, old-fashioned epidemic, or even the simple elegance of a hidden razor blade?

So this is my request to you, oh makers of Fun Size candy bars. Instead of using your educations and talents to shrink one of life’s sweet pleasures, please direct your attention elsewhere. Make poverty fun size. Make wars fun size. Or, if you want to start really big, make my waistline fun size.

But please stop shrinking the size of the candy. My midlife crisis depends on it.

--Martha Brockenbrough