Parent Hacks Weekend Catchup: highlights from the week of 2/28/11

A look back at the last week at Parent Hacks:

Reduce hair combing drama with distraction: Strategies for keeping your kid's mind busy during the daily brushing.

Reading is fun (and crunchy!) with letter-shaped cookies: How Amy turned snack time into learning time.

Review and giveaway: Curly Girl: The Handbook: I loved this care-for-your-curls handbook and was excited to give three copies away on Friday. 175 people (!) left their #1 curly haircare tips in the comments; I'll round them up so they're easier to read.

Safely trim your toddler's bangs with nose hair scissors: Home haircuts without fear of bloodshed.

Stop fighting long hair battles with your kids: cut it: Long live the bob...as long as it works for the haircut-ee. Appreciate the comments recalling childhood hair trauma at the hands of well-meaning parents.

Contain hair styling supplies in a tackle box: This hack started as a comment but was so good I had to "promote" to the front page.

Homemade "sock keeper" holds stray socks while they wait for their mates: Cute, quick, problem-solving DIY project. Lots more ideas in the comments including "who cares if their socks don't match?"

Review and giveaway: Let's Panic About Babies!: Another fantastic giveaway, and this one's still going on! You have till Monday to enter for a chance at a copy of Let's Panic or a most-excellent gift basket. But you still might run out and buy the book this weekend (it's that funny).

Simple budgeting: tips and tools: The suggestion to dramatically pare down spending categories struck a chord with me, making the whole project feel so much more doable.

How do you teach helpfulness while promoting responsibility? Talk amongst yourselves: In which I highjack Parent Hacks to get a conversation going about my own parenting dilemma. (From the sounds of it, I'm not alone on this one.) I'd LOVE to hear your comments!

Plus: A great one-day Amazon deal on Earth's Best organic infant formula. (Did you miss it? Subscribe to the feed, or follow on Twitter or Facebook for up-to-the-minute updates.)

Twitter and Facebook highlights:

Interesting thread on Facebook, kicked off by the nose hair trimmer hack, suggesting letting little kids cut their own hair. Really? Hm.

I pointed to Love That Max's campaign to engage Twitterers about their casual but hurtful use of the word "retard."

Fun social media moment in which a reply to a tweet led me to a blog which led me to another blog which inspired me to rethink our family budget process (see Simple budgeting: tips and tools).

Thanks for another lively week at Parent Hacks. Have a great weekend!

Are you finding the Weekend Catchup posts helpful? One reader likes them so much he asked to subscribe to a feed of only the catchup posts. Would anyone else be interested in that feature? It's not available now but if enough people want it I will look into whether it's possible. Leave a comment here to let me know.

Comments

[bad mummy]

I'd be interested in a catchup post feed. I'm pretty sure that all it would require is tagging the posts with something like Catchup Posts and being able to subscribe to posts with a specific tag.

[Asha Dornfest]

TypePad doesn't do feed by tag, but it does do feed by category. I'm in the process of doing a complete content overhaul, so I'm rethinking my categories very carefully.

[Amy]

I'm really enjoying the catchup posts. I don't need a feed, though, as long as you tweet it.