Families

All it takes is one picky toddler to make parents pull their hair out at the dinner table. If there is one topic that worries us the most, it’s our children’s health and what they’re eating (or not!). As a result, there are countless books on the market touting the best way to get your kids to eat more foods. From The Sneaky Chef, which advocates putting veggie purees in brownies, to 201 Healthy Smoothies and Juices for Kids, to What Chefs Feed Their Kids where chefs share their gourmet secrets, there are more than 60 titles to choose from just in our library system. Parents who are at a loss as to how to get their littlest ones (and often, their big ones!) interested in a plate of carrots can easily become overwhelmed with the advice. With the additional goals of trying to feed families with increasingly less time and high grocery bills, it’s enough to make many of us revert to pasta every night of the week.

The newest addition to the collection, however, might just change not only how you feed your kids, but also yourself. French Kids Eat Everything by Karen Le Billon is the story of one Canadian mother who moved her young family back to her husband’s native Brittany, on the coast of France. As you can surmise by the title, she discovered why French kids associate chocolate cake with pleasure, not guilt, and why they have astonishing lower rates of childhood obesity (20% in America, just 3% in France (p. 140)). She discovered why nearly half of French children eat the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables each day, while barely ten percent of their American counterparts struggle to eat the same amount (p. 117). Even their daycare menus resemble gourmet menus. One day’s lunch at her daughter’s preschool was listed as: beet salad bolognaise, roast turkey with fine flageolet beans, goat cheese buchette, and organic pear compote (p. 36). “By the time they are two years old,” Le Billon discovered, “most French kids have tried (and eaten) more foods than many American adults” (p. 120).

Senior citizens, their families, and caregivers looking for accurate healthcare information on the Internet will probably tell you it’s a mess.  There are a tangle of sites for the various federal, state, and local government healthcare agencies, not to mention sites for hospitals, private care facilities, medical information sites like WebMD, and a quagmire of others floating around out there.  Each site has its own navigation scheme and design that  will make even the savviest of the web-savvy shake a fist skyward in frustration when trying to figure them out.  SeniorNavigator.org seeks to make the information gathering experience for senior citizens easy and anxiety-free. At the Central Rappahannock Regional Library, we want to help you use this tool to find the best information and advice to make your lives easier. 

A wave of wonderful new online tools, like the HeritageQuest database from ProQuest, makes doing your family history research much easier than it used to be! Here’s why:

The key to accessing your ancestors is accessing documents, the paper records they left behind as they went through life. You’ll need to look for your relatives in all kinds of documents, like birth, marriage, and death registers; cemetery rosters; and military service records. To locate all these records and get a complete picture of your heritage, you’ll have to visit lots of different libraries, archives, courthouses, and cemeteries.

This is where HeritageQuest becomes a real lifesaver for you because it provides easy at-home access to all kinds of documents, all in one place!

A few weeks ago a friend of mine told me about Awkward Family Photos. This is a collection of photos that I would probably have burned if I had some of these for my family.  However, these families bravely submitted them for the world to see.

Sometimes the reason for the awkward moment hits you in the face, but then there are others that you really have to look carefully at the picture and what is happening in the background to figure out what is funny about the photo. When I realized what is “special” about the photo I felt stupid for not noticing it right away.

Piper Reed, Navy Brat, by Kimberly Willis Holt, is a great beginning to a fun new series!   

I absolutely love Piper Reed! She is a spunky 10 year old with lots of personality.  Piper doesn’t let the fact that she doesn’t read as well as everyone else in her class (she is dyslexic) get her down.  And neither does moving--well, not for long, anyway.  Her Dad is in the Navy, and so they move a lot.  Sometimes it’s really exciting, like when they go someplace overseas, but now they are moving to Florida and Piper isn’t sure she really wants to.  She has a great group of friends in her “club,” but she decides she’ll just have to start a new club in Florida!