Tips Guides

Gifts for dads are notoriously hard to buy and they generally get saturated with aftershave, electric razors and novelty USB gadgets. Although these have a place, there is another option which many overlook during their present buying. You cannot go wrong with dropping a classic DVD or DVD boxset into the present cache and this article offers the ultimate guide to buying DVD gifts for dads.

Many people misunderstand the filmic requirements of dads as blood, explosions and full frontal nudity are all good and well, however not just for their respective sakes. Films need to offer a bit more than that to really grasp our imagination and stop us from nodding off in front of a boxing day matinee. We will look at three directors who you can more or less guarantee will provide excellent gifts for Dads.

The first is any film by Martin Scorsese. Before Taxi Driver cemented the lifetime working relationship between himself and Robert De Niro, Scorsese had already done a number of films with Harvey Keitel. When De Niro was discovered during Mean Streets, a film that also starred Keitel, the gritty and dangerous style of Scorsese was epitomised by the unpredictably violent performance of the protean De Niro.

His better known later work such as Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino will probably be in many DVD collections already, however the chilling Cape Fear and witty King of Comedy are much less known and are great gifts for dads. More recently Gangs of New York and The Departed which might well have been seen but not owned could be good options, both cementing the Scorsese reputation as one of the top film makers working today.

The next recommendation by director would be the well known Francis Ford Coppola. His work really got hurled into the limelight when the studio gamble turned good, The Godfather. Previous to that he was a theatre director and had only done a couple of films making any credit, mainly The Rain People with James Caan, later to play Sonny in the first Godfather. After that the Godfather trilogy was produced and that has featured in many gifts for dads over the years.

Sandwiched between the second and third Godfather instalments was the Oscar winning Apocalypse Now, staring Martin Sheen and the legendary Marlon Brando. Those are his films of greatest merit as a director however he moved into a role of producing with credits such as Lost In Translation, The Good Shepherd which was the directorial debut of Robert De Niro and Youth Without Youth, featuring Brit actor Tim Roth. Any of these films would be great gifts for dads.

Stanley Kubrick is thought to be one of greatest directors of all time and he is best known for films that sparked massive controversies such as A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. His repertoire runs much deeper than mere controversy and his technical abilities as a cinematographer are unsurpassed by other directors. Films such as Fear and Desire, Paths of Glory and Lolita from his early career are some of the most visually beautiful films ever made with compelling thematic content and performances.

The better known films such as The Shinning and Full Metal Jacket are always great gifts for dads although many are popular and might be in an existing collection. If you choose a more obscure title such as Barry Lyndon, one of the greatest period films ever made then you can be sure it will not be in a collection and is a fantastic and original gift.

Dominic Donaldson is an expert on gifts for dads and a retailer of films providing expert advice.

Sometimes the best presents are those that will have Dads and Kids fighting for control of them. If you know a man that is really a big kid at heart, who perhaps spends more time on Guitar Hero then the kids do, then this article is for you. We look at neat gifts for Dads who have everything a grown up could wish for but like to indulge the child in them as well.

We are looking at the worlds smallest hydrogen car versus possibly the worlds smallest Tank. The H-Racer hydrogen car is the ultimate in executive toys however it palls relatively quickly and is more of a novelty item than something that will have a Dad and son clinched in a tug of war battle. It might be suited for gadget addicted Dads or kids who have a vested interest in mechanics or technology, as it is more a model of how hydrogen power works as opposed to a fun toy.

The car is sleek and boasts a snazzy blue and silver body however you have to assemble it yourself. This is possibly the most entertaining part of the whole process as you have to connect the hydrogen fuel cell system to the electric motor and after this is complete you can begin the speedy charge process. There is an accompanying power station, powered by a modest two AA batteries or a solar panel depending on whether and if you can be bothered.

As far as gifts for Dads go this is not fantastic but it looks great and is interesting watching the car fuel. The major draw back is that it is not too powerful and only goes in a straight line so it renders the toy more of a model than a functional source of entertainment. It could however be a good gift for a child with an aptitude for science who could reconstruct it. The price tag of 50GBP makes it an expensive model so you have to be sure that the recipient will be playing with the toy as opposed to the box, this includes Dads!

Facing off against the not so exciting but informative hydrogen car is the R-C Remote control tank. That is right, a remote control tank complete with toy soldier. The green soldier will take many Dads back to their childhoods however it is not as fantastic as it might seem. The tank actually costs 15 dollars which is the equivalent to about 8GBP and you get what you pay for. The shell is very un-tank like as it is flimsy and can be damaged by running into anything harder than a pillow and it eats batteries as the tank is charged from the controller.

It is the ultimate boys toy but as far as gifts for dads go they might need something with a bit more juice. It will not stand the test of time however it does turn in four directions unlike the hydrogen car. A combination of the two could be interesting, however they would both serve as novelty gifts for dads or children in two different price ranges.

Dominic Donaldson is an expert on gifts for dads and provides impartial advice on all present buying.

Halloween is a great time to host a kid’s party. After all, what child doesn’t like Halloween? One of the most enjoyable aspects of Halloween is the food. There are hundreds of recipes that have been specifically created for this spooky holiday. The following ideas will help you plan the yummiest menu possible.

Serve a minimum of sweet treats. You don’t want your guests suffering from ’sugar overload’ during the party. To celebrate the occasion, serve chicken fingers with a blood (any red dipping sauce.) If you prepare them from scratch, it’s not hard to make them resembling the more human variety. Add a sliced almond for the finger nail for a realistic approach.

Another dish to try is to add equal parts red, blue, and yellow food color to spaghetti after it’s been cooked so it turns an ugly brownish color. Serve with a green pesto sauce and call it snakes in the swamp.

Make goofy eyeball meatballs. Shape seasoned ground meat into an oval with a flat top and bottom, bake until done. Cut a round circle out of mozzarella cheese about the size of a half dollar or one inch in diameter. Cut grape tomatoes or cherry tomatoes into three slices. Cut black olives in half. Assemble the goofy eyeballs by placing a slice of cheese on the meatball, then a slice of tomato on the cheese and top with a black olive half. Vary the placement of the toppings so the eyeballs are looking in different directions.

If you will be serving punch, why not serve the ghoulish variety? Simply make your favorite punch and add a few ghoul hands. To make these hands, fill non-powdered rubber gloves with cranberry or other red juice. (Don’t overfill, the fingers of the glove should still move easily.)
Close gloves tightly with rubber bands and freeze flat on cookie sheets, which have been lined with paper towels. When ready to serve, open gloves with scissors and add to punch. You may want to break off one or two fingers and add them separately.

A fun punch can be with one quart of lime drink, one quart of lemon lime soda and one cup of lime sherbet. The sherbet should be added right before serving. Stir so the sherbet foams up a bit with the soda. Dust the foam lightly with cocoa powder to resemble dirt.

It’s not a good idea to use dry ice in your punch to make it smoke. Curious hands may try to touch the dry ice resulting in freezer burn. Instead place the dry ice in containers out of reach, such as the back of a table and you’ll still have the atmosphere of the smoky fog without the worry of accidents.

Keep the food simple and familiar but with a twist. Rename favorites in the Halloween theme. Use food coloring in blues, greens, and browns to alter the way a dish looks. Or use familiar food in unfamiliar ways. For example blanch a cauliflower head, break apart and then reassemble (this makes the cauliflower easier to serve) cover the cauliflower with ranch dressing then using ketchup in a squeeze bottle outline each floret with the ketchup so it looks like a brain.

Have fun with your food at Halloween.

Dee Power is the author of several nonfiction books and the novel, Over Time Get your free booklet Party Ideas for Kids Dee’s hobbies include gardening, and jewelry.

You can create a genius baby if you understand how the human brain is structured. In most adults, the left hemisphere of the brain is dominant. Left-brained people think in a logical, linear manner, while right-brained people think in a non-linear, intuitive fashion. The left-brained learn best through hearing, while the right-brained learn best through seeing and feeling.

Our school system, geared to logical, linear thinking, favors the left-brained. Right-brained children often do only averagely well in school because they are not able to show how they arrived at their answers, having reached them by unusual methods or through sheer intuition.

You should therefore not lose heart if your child gets low grades in school. It may be a sign of a genius in the making! A great example of a right-brained person is the scientist Albert Einstein. An acknowledged genius, he suffered from speech difficulties in early childhood.

So, is there a genius baby in your house? There may well be. As Glenn Doman and Makoto Shichida, two right-brain educators, put it: accessing the right brain enables a child to learn better and could unlock genius-like abilities.

These include speed-reading skills, a photographic memory, the ability to accurately sketch something seen only once, a facility for performing instant math equations, and rare musical talent. The right brain is also responsible for visual and spatial processing, and the ability to see problems in multiple dimensions, as great physicists do. Einstein possessed this ability.

If the right brain is so much more intuitive and creative, why is our left brain more dominant? For a very good reason. It does the important job of filtering out a lot of the information bombarding our senses. This helps us to avoid “sensory overload”.

If the right brain was dominant, we would constantly be reacting to a host of information being thrown at us. Think of the autism sufferer who, being hypersensitive to sensory stimuli, finds ordinary social interactions overwhelming, and you get the idea.

Our left brain helps us hold a conversation while ignoring background noises. It ensures that a great deal of the sensory input we receive remains beneath the radar of conscious awareness.

Right-brain teaching helps us to reclaim some of the benefits of right-brain dominance by changing the way we absorb and recall information. Most people memorize data by storing it in their short-term memory in the left brain. Only repetitive use leads to its transfer it to the long-term memory of the right brain.

Right-brain teaching helps us bypass the left brain and directly access our long-term memory, helping us learn faster. It allows us to recall information received on a subconscious level - for instance, through speed reading.

Unlike left-brain learning, right-brain learning does not require conscious effort. In small children, the right brain is already activated, making learning especially rapid. This is because the right brain develops before the left and is dominant until the age of three and a half.

So, if you want your child to be a genius baby, stimulate her right brain.

Madeleine Fitzpatrick is the editor for BrillBaby.
Go to http://www.brillbaby.com to learn more on how to make a genius baby.

The continuation of life is a fundamental part of our purpose on earth. At some point or another we will be obsessed with the thought of passing on our genes to another generation. Without this inbuilt force of nature, there would have been no continuation of the human race after the first set of parents discovered the joys of teenagers.

Of course, with life as complicated as it is, the news of an impending birth is not always welcomed with open arms as it can bring difficulties that we are ill prepared for. However, for the majority of people, the gift of a new life is something that brings on an unexplainable joy. From the moment a woman realises she is pregnant, she feels an affinity with that baby that breaches the realms of normal bonding.

From the second trimester onwards that new life that is growing inside at an unprecedented rate will become known as the bump. The bump will govern many things before it even draws its first breath. It will decide what mum eats and drinks and whether or not those things stay down. It will decide how much sleep is had by mum and dad, it will govern how many times mum has to spend in the loo and it will give mum this inexhaustible urge to go out and buy cool baby clothes.

By month five, the realisation is that nothing will ever again be quite the same. The cool baby clothes are held up to the burgeoning stomach to see if they fit (don’t ask, it makes sense to us) and the house is taken over by a whole host of baby paraphernalia that warrants an extension being built. You will find yourself buying not just a cot and pram but a whole assortment of bedroom furniture to house the cool baby clothes, soft toys and rattles.

By months eight and nine, the only conversations possible are every aspect of what the childbirth itself will entail and all your hopes and dreams as parents as to what the delivery of your child will bring.

A month after the birth of your darling bambino, parents are divided into two groups. Those that divulge every gross bit of birth detail to any passing stranger to hold up as a true miracle and those parents who are still so shell shocked by the whole gory experience that they prefer to wander around in a daze, pretending it didn’t happen. This is ok until one day they leave the baby somewhere forgetting they even had it. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Hormones do funny things to women and at no other point in her life will she experience such peaks and troughs of hormones as now. This means that all sensible reason will go out of the window for a period of time until that gorgeous bambino turns into ‘the baby’.

‘The baby’ then turns into a machine that eats, pukes and poops and as fast as you can shuffle sustenance into one end, ‘the baby’ turns it into something unrecognisably disgusting to churn out the other end. Still cute?

At this point, any lovey dovey gooey nonsense from dad over his cute little bundle of joy dissolves into looks of dismay as the now promoted ’sprog’ feeds rusk into the dvd player and hides his keys. This stage of baby rearing is soon moved on to the rugrat stage. This is not so bad. The rugrat is on the move and although he can get up to so much more mischief, this is balanced out by the fact that he finds everything funny dissolving everybody to giggles and his incessant laughter and the fact that he know sleeps all night.

From rugrat we promote our babies onto ankle biters. Ankle biters are at that stage just before and bordering on the terrible twos. Nothing is discovered unless it’s through the power of their new teeth and this also covers other peoples fingers, noses or shoulders. Never mind, just a few short years and they’ll be off to school.

So, whatever stage your bundle of joy is at, make the most of it because the work may be rewarding but it will only get harder.

Parenting expert Catherine Harvey looks at what drives a mother to be to buy cool baby clothes as well as lose control of her own body.

Despite the merriment we all experience at the beginning of the back to school season, there seems to be a rapid decline in our moods the moment the dreaded paperwork begins to appear in our houses. The countertops, dresser tops, table tops, and back seat of the car all seem to grow their very own pile of papers. All of those school supplies that were purchased at the beginning of the year have now made their way back into our homes in the form of school projects, art projects, mobiles, and dioramas. Not to mention that fact that all the teacher supplies we so generously donated to the school have also returned to our homes in the form of field trip slips, progress reports, graded homework, and report cards. Where does all this stuff go? How do we get back our houses?

Everything in its Place

In every home there seems to be a “junk hot spot” where everything not nailed down ends up. Backpacks, flip-flops, keys, hats, coats, and leftover lunches all seem to end up in the same spot in your kitchen. Why not make that “hot spot” the dump spot? Actually designating a place in your home where you and you kids throw their everyday things will actually help cut down on clutter elsewhere in your universe. Make sure that you have set up specific bins for things to go into. Have a special hanging hook where you and your kids put your keys. Have a shoe rack where you and your kids can put your shoes. Have a coat rack where you can all put your coats. This doesn’t just sound simple, it is simple.

School Supply Storage

With all the money you spent at the beginning of the school year, you aren’t just going to let all your children’s school supplies get lost in the mess that is your house? If your kids don’t need them at school, you should set aside a place in your house where you can store school supplies when they are not in use. Buying baskets or storage bins and labeling them with the appropriate item, will help you sort and store all those special items for their special projects.

Inbox and Outbox

With all the paperwork going through your house it is probably very hard to keep track of important time sensitive documents. There is nothing as horrible as your child getting to go to his class swim party because you never got around to signing his permission slip. Designating a specific box or basket in the house as the “inbox” for all school related papers can drastically cut back on life shattering “mommy mistakes”. Every night before you snuggle into your bed, go through the inbox and file, sign, toss, or display whatever needs it. If something needs to be signed and returned, sign it and put it right back into their backpacks to be returned the next day. If an important date needs to be remembered, write the date down on your family calendar and toss the paper. You can de-clutter your living space and still be on the ball with your kid’s important school stuff.

Home Art Museum

All those school supplies and classroom supplies you purchased at the beginning of the year have made a triumphant return as a beautiful piece of art. Paper Mache snowmen, multi-colored paper chains, painstakingly drawn pictures of the family standing around a large pumpkin. When all those amazing pieces of imagination come flowing through your door, you will want to display them proudly for all to see. The fridge might not be big enough to hold so many wonderful works of art, so set aside a wall in the family room or kitchen where you can display with much pomp, your child’s newest achievement. Let the artwork hang there until the next great masterpiece graces your abode, and switch them, leaving the new artwork hanging and putting the old away in a storage container for later.

With your schedule already super crammed, your shopping list already overflowing with school supply needs, and your brain exploding with important dates, being able to find space, peace, and order in your own home may just save your life.

Seomul Evans is a SEO Service consultant for leading Classroom Supply retailer (American Classroom Supply).