Chasing Shadows

I was recently walking with my two year old daughter, as we were walking she began to follow her shadow. After a few minutes of this she began chasing her shadow. It was just out of reach, no matter how fast she ran she couldn’t catch it. That futility did not diminish her fun or her determination. She was having a blast!

Later, at work I was thinking about this and it dawned on me that I was doing a similar exercise at work. I am chasing the shadow of  libraries and how they can make lives better. I know I will never be able to fully comprehend everything related to libraries. I won’t be able to catch that shadow. But that won’t stop me from trying.

It’s an exciting time and I have every intention of enjoying my work. While I’m busy chasing my shadow I get the opportunity to learn new things and help other people learn at the same time. I do love my job.

Common Sense Media

My wife brought this site to my attention today and I’m so happy she did!

I can see me using this site a lot as my children grow up.  It is similar to kids-in-mind that I wrote about a few months ago but it does more than movies.  They have books, TV, websites, games and music rated with children in mind.  I’ve been fiddling with it for a few minutes and I really like it!  Check it out!

http://www.commonsensemedia.org/

Kids-In-Mind

My 4 year old daughter loves movies!  What kid doesn’t?  Up until now she’s been content to watch movies at home on the TV but she’s getting to the age where she wants to go to the theater.  That’s to be expected and I’m excited about taking her to the movies.  It will be great  for us to have a daddy-daughter date night!

My delima is: what movies do I take her to and how do I decide?  I have recently discovered a site called kids-in-mind that helps parents with these questions.

The site gives pretty detailed summaries of movies and rates them on scale of 1-10 for profanity, sex/nudity, and violence/gore.  If a movie has a high score in any of these categories it means there is a lot of it in the movie.  For a more detailed explination of how their rating system works click here.

It is good for older movies too!

I hope this can help anyone.  I know it will help me.

Kidzui

Downloading Kidzui to see if my 4 year old will enjoy it. So far we have her set up on a firefox browser with the speed dial addon with two choices (nickjr and pbskids) and she likes it. But…she’s growing and may want to explore more. From what I’ve read about kidzui from lifehacker it seems like a pretty good introduction to the internet for young kids. 

We will see.