Taekwondo teaches kids respect, instills pride
I didn’t know much about taekwondo, but I kept hearing the same rave review from other parents: “It’s so good for teaching them respect.”
Sold! I mean, who doesn’t want respectful kids?
We signed up our son last year, when he started Grade 1, and we all liked it so much that our daughter joined him this fall. We aren’t a sporty family, so taekwondo has been the perfect combination of physical activity and teamwork.
From the power of coloured duct tape to synchronized bowing in the middle of a basketball game, there are a few things you may not have known about taekwondo …
1. It really is all about respect.
Whenever an instructor enters the gymnasium (dojang), every student needs to stop whatever they’re doing and bow in unison. Now, this might not sound that impressive if you think about them already being fairly quiet and working on their moves. But the instructors are entering the dojang before class starts, during the “free time” when the kids are running around playing basketball and scooting on PlasmaCars. It’s pretty neat to see dozens of kids look up suddenly, bow and then get back to their game of tag.
Continue reading in my weekly parenting column, The Mom Scene …
Trimming furniture to make it fit perfectly
Sometimes the perfect piece for a room is already lurking somewhere in your house, but you look right past it.
That’s what I discovered recently when I was helping a client convert an office into a guest bedroom. She wanted a small desk where she could plug in her laptop when she wasn’t using it, so we’d talked about building a slim floating desk near the door. (Similar to this floating makeup desk I’d built for our daughter’s room.)
Then, 10 minutes later, when we were traipsing through her basement, I said, “Wait, what about that desk?” It was home to a few kitty food bowls and the top was in rough shape.
She explained it was an old partner’s desk — designed to be shared by two lawyers. While she liked it a lot, she’d checked numerous antique shops and had never been able to find a chair narrow enough to slide underneath it.
“We can totally trim a chair to fit!” I insisted. I was already committed to making the old desk work.
In fact, she already had a great wooden chair to use — the front of the seat was just slightly too wide, but I knew it could be lopped off.
I loaded everything in my truck and took it home. I used my quilting ruler to square off the edges of the chair seat — basically just removing the curve where it became wider at the front. I used my jigsaw and took off less than an inch from the widest section, but it was enough to make the chair fit smoothly under the desk.
Now, I also had plans (and permission) to trim the desk. Since it would be going in a fairly small room, we wanted to eliminate any extra bulk. I was able to saw off about an inch and a half from each side and along the back, but I left the front intact. I also unscrewed a small interior board that would prevent the chair from pushing in all of the way.
Since the top of the desk was in rough shape, I gave it a good sand to remove the dings, scratches and discolourations. I brushed on a coat of wood conditioner, and then stained it to match the rest of the desk — Minxwax’s “Dark Walnut” was just about perfect. I did the same to the chair, which took care of its newly-trimmed edges and helped it blend with the desk.
It was exciting to bring the refinished desk and chair back to my client’s house and set it up. The poor desk that could never find a chair to fit is finally living out its destiny — not a cat food holder — and it’s perfect for the corner of this vintage-inspired bedroom.
All it took was a little furniture haircut!
DIY pallet headboards
I recently made a housecall — yes, I do those — to visit a client who wanted help turning a former home office into a cosy guest room.
She had two twin bed frames and I knew immediately I wanted to try building pallet-style headboards — envisioning a mix of deep wood tones to go with the fluffy white comforters we planned to use.
I measured the beds and decided the headboards should be 38 inches wide and 24 inches tall, so they’d fit nicely over the beds without hitting the window trim (or being completely hidden by pillows).
I got started by cutting pieces for a frame and screwing them together. Each headboard got a long 38-inch piece of 2×2 for the top of the frame, two 20-inch pieces of 2×2 for the sides, and a 35-inch piece for the bottom.
Once I had two sturdy rectangles built out of 2x2s, it was time for the fun part: adding the planks!
My chop-saw got a workout as I cut 12 24” pieces of 1×4 (six for each headboard) and 8 24” pieces of 1×2 (four for each headboard).
This meant each headboard would have a combination of 1×2 and 1×4 vertical planks — 12 boards total per headboard — with a nice gap between each.
Then I played around with the order, laying the planks on the frame to see which pattern looked best. In the end, I decided on “a thin, four wides, two thins, four wides, and a thin.”
The part that took the longest was pre-drilling holes in the end of each plank to prevent the wood from splitting. Then I started on each end — screwing the first 1x2s in place — and worked my way toward the middle of each headboard, using two flat construction pencils as spacers to keep the boards even.
When I got to the middle of each headboard, I just eyeballed the placement of the two centre 1x2s — screwing them evenly between the 1x4s on either side. There’s a slightly larger gap around them, but — as Pa Ingalls would say — it’ll never be noticed on a trotting horse!
After using my electric sander to get them silky-smooth, I spread out my trusty drop cloths and propped up each headboard on my little plastic painter’s pyramids (and some leftover subway tile). Then I brought in a bunch of different pots of stain and started playing around.
I kept the pattern the same on each headboard, and alternated between dark, medium, and light wood tones — doubling up and using two different shades on some of the boards. That was fun, but then I realized I’d have to use a tiny brush to stain between each plank.
Should I have stained the planks before assembling the headboards? Sure, probably. But that just doesn’t seem to be the way I operate, so I didn’t let it bother me. I was binging old DVRed episodes of Four Weddings as I worked, so it wasn’t that bad.
After the stain was dry, I used a foam brush to apply a couple of coats of poly — sanding lightly in between. I love, love, love the silky feel of wood that’s beautifully stained and sealed. It just gleams with a healthy sheen that makes it look like it’s perfectly content.
A couple of screws later — into studs, since these suckers are HEAVY — the new twin headboards were hanging above their beds. I love how the wood looks against the pale grey walls and fluffy white bedding. The headboards also go perfectly with some other elements in the room, which I’ll show you another day …
March Break? March Broken.
Happy March Break! This is a truly magical time of year when absolutely nothing lives up to anyone’s expectations for nine whole days.
You think you know how you’d like to spend it, and somewhere around Wednesday — possibly as early as Tuesday — you wonder if it’s possible to switch to a different school district that’s already had its March Break.
For example …
“March Break is the perfect time for a family vacation!”
No one has to miss any school. You could spend six days and seven nights on a beautiful resort where no one has to wash dishes or cook meals. You could take frame-worthy family photos where everyone’s laughing on the beach, or whirling around in the spinning teacup ride. It’s perfect!
Oh, wait. Except for the fact that it’s exponentially more expensive to travel anywhere on March Break, since that’s when hotels and airlines all jack the prices. You will bleed money from your pores every time someone dares to whine they are hungry. You will come home far more exhausted than you were when you left.
Hmm, scratch that …
Continue reading in my weekly parenting column, The Mom Scene …
Our family’s lice scare
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
Is it all in my head? Am I just being paranoid or is my head really itchy? (Just try to read this column to the end without scratching your own head. Shudder.)
I may not have to worry about pregnancy scares anymore (thanks to an early hysterectomy), but nobody — especially a parent — is immune to the dreaded lice scare.
I’m knocking on all the wood while typing this, but we’re in our third year of life in elementary school — currently we have a Grade 2 and a Primary — and we have yet to get lice. Hold on, I want to go knock on some more wood.
That doesn’t mean that we haven’t had near-lice experiences, of course. Our classrooms regularly send home a standard photocopied note to the effect of: “Someone in your child’s class had/has lice. Please check your child.” I see the note, I shudder a little and then I check the kids’ heads.
I wrote an article on lice about a year and a half ago and it made me feel a little calmer because I’d know what to do if it struck our household. I immediately ordered the exact comb the expert in my interview recommended — a $15 stainless steel comb called The Nit-Free Terminator* (affiliate link) — and started following her advice.
Well, some of it.
I comb through the kids’ hair once a week with a steel lice comb to check for nits (eggs) and lice (moving bugs). I frequently remind them to NEVER share a hat or scarf with another kid.
But there are two things I’m not great about doing, honestly. I TRY to style our daughter’s hair in a bun, ponytail, braids, etc. to limit the contact it has with another student’s hair. But I also really like pigtails and the “half-up, half-down” style, so I’m not as vigilant as I could be.
The expert had also suggested doing the kids’ hair with something scented, like gel, mousse or hairspray, since lice hate strong scents. I often forget that part, or choose to skip it because I feel guilty about them violating the school’s scent-free policy. Which is worse, I often wonder? The kids catching lice because their hair isn’t “smelly” enough, or someone at school getting a headache because the Clarke kids smell like the inside of a hair salon?
Our kids are five and seven, and they understand all about “lice buggies,” as we call them in our house. They come home and tell me which kids have them — at least, according to their classroom rumors — and which kids were checked at school because they couldn’t stop scratching their head.
I understand that lice is “common” and “no big deal,” and I know my children are probably going to get it at some point. They love hugging their friends and sitting close together and snuggling on the couch with them.
(True story: I once watched our son wrestle playfully on the ground — heads touching and everything — with a child that had had lice just two days before! Noooooooooooo!)
But even though I know it’s probably inevitable, I think it’s a parent’s responsibility to try to keep their child from spreading lice to other children. And, frankly, not all parents do a good job of that.
- I don’t send my child to school with the stomach flu, and I wouldn’t send them to school with lice. Please don’t send yours!
- I don’t let my kids go on playdates when they’re sick, so please don’t send your kid to my house — or invite mine to your house — without disclosing that your child has lice. I like to make decisions based on all of the facts, not just the ones you decide to tell me.
- If my child has been sick and is now getting over something, I’ll tell you and let YOU make the decision as to whether or not you want to be around someone who’s “probably fine now.”
We had quite the scare last week, but thankfully the itching feeling was all in my head — er, but not in my hair.
If and when the day comes that someone in our house does get lice, I will do my best to stay calm. (Can’t promise anything, though.) I will rush to the drugstore and buy what the expert recommended — she loves Nyda, not the old-school Nix — and follow the instructions very, very carefully. I will do the million loads of laundry (bedding, towels, pillows, etc.) and probably scrub my head until my scalp bleeds.
When I make it through to the other side, I’ll probably turn into one of the cool, composed post-lice moms who insists it’s “no big deal.”
Until then, however, I’ll be on Lice Alert … nervously waiting.
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Heather's Handmade Life 