Can your family bear a weekend without cable? Camping is a great way to spend time together, swapping memorable stories and creating new ones. Maryland has scores of parks and campgrounds to offer your family an outdoor experience. Whether you like to sleep under the stars or have shelter above, blaze a trail or sing [...]
Archive for May, 2005
Camping close to home
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005Classy families
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005When Jason Ortega became a fifth-grade teacher at Cradlerock School, it came as a surprise to no one. Ortega’s mother is a kindergarten teacher at another Columbia school, Clemens Crossing Elementary, and his father teaches fifth grade at nearby Jeffers Hill Elementary. Both his grandfathers were educators too. Ortega, now in his second year teaching [...]
Mother Knows Best
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005Whether you’ve been a parent for days or decades, you’ve accumulated plenty of wisdom to share. We asked our readers to pass along the one piece of advice they thought no new parent should be without, and ended up with enough knowledge to fill a small textbook. Here are some of the best pieces of [...]
Card in the Yard trumpets your good news to all
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005Fourteen years ago, Dawn Coolihan of Ellicott City found the ideal job for a stay-at-home mom. She took the idea of the big stork in the yard announcing the birth of a baby, expanded it and started her own business: Card in the Yard of Maryland. For just about any occasion, her business will cover [...]
Make time to help on Mitzvah Day
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005Now’s the time to volunteer the whole family. Community Mitzvah Day is planned for Sunday, May 15, beginning at 9:30 a.m. and volunteers of all ages are needed for community service projects at eight locations throughout the Baltimore area. The word mitzvah means “a worthy deed.” The event is sponsored by the Jewish Volunteer Connection, [...]
Art and fun at the twist of a crank
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005Kids love things that move, so the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre exhibit of automata at the American Visionary Arts Museum is right up their alley. Automata is a mechanical sculpture that moves when a crank is turned. The feet of little sculpture men start peddling a bike, a fish wriggles with feet hanging out of its [...]
Keeping families connected online
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005Does your son or daughter spend plenty of time on the computer e-mailing friends, but little of it talking to you? Maybe it’s time to commandeer a little of that keyboard time for something that could ultimately benefit all members of your home with FamilyeJournal The brainchild of Columbia resident Kevin Strauss, FamilyeJournal is an [...]
Losing total control but gaining complete happiness
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005I’ll never forget the feeling that sat on my chest the first few months after Maggie was born. Sure, I was thrilled to be a mom and I loved her to pieces. But there was this awful feeling – something hard to describe that weighed me down. I brought it up to a friend one [...]
Circle of friends
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005After her father died of cancer, Ashley Williams, who was 11 at the time, refused to talk about it — she pretended her father was at work. This concerned her mother, Shirley Williams, who began to worry about Ashley and her 9-year-old sister Lauren. When her husband was ill, she had contacted some organizations for [...]
What’s up doc?
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005As with every other child, my two young sons are scared to get shots when they go to the pediatrician. Are there any recent advances or techniques you know of that make it easier? There have been some new developments that claim to make shots less painful, but they do little to reduce the anxiety [...]