Ghost Stories

Halloween weekend is upon us!  Some good, old fashioned, scary story telling never ages.  I asked around friends and family for their favorite ghost stories from their childhood.  The nice thing about most of these stories, we have all heard them enough that we can put our own spin on it!  You can creep it up or creep it down.  Just remember, you reap what you sew with scary stories and kids.  You creep the story up, you will have a bunk mate for the evening.  Happy Halloween! 

La Llorona

  Once there was a beautiful woman named Xochitl.  She fell in love with a wealthy rancher.  They were married and had two children together.  One day Xochitl saw her husband kissing another woman.  In a fit of rage, she drowned her two children in the river by their house.  Realizing what she had done, Xochitl flung herself into the river drowning.  When Xochitl went up to heaven, they would not let her in until she finds her children.  So now she spends her days by the river, forever weeping and forever looking for her lost children.

Bloody Mary

There once was a little girl named Mary who lived in a cemetery with her family.  Her father was a gravedigger.  When he buried a body, he would always leave a string leading into the grave with a bell on the other end.  That way if anyone was buried alive, they could ring the bell and the gravedigger would be able to dig them up.

One day a terrible disease swept through the village.  It would cause people to fall into a deep sleep before dying.  They would check to see if the person was alive by placing a mirror under their nose.  If the mirror fogged up, then they were still alive.  Mary came home sick one day and fell into a deep sleep.  Her parents were devastated when they place the mirror under her nose and no breath fogged up the mirror.

They buried Mary behind their house in a grave with a string attached to a bell.  Shockingly, Mary wasn’t dead.  She awoke inside her coffin.  She pulled the string on the bell, but she pulled too hard and the string yanked the bell off its hook.  Days later her mother went to visit her grave, and saw the bell on the ground.  Realizing what happened they dug up Mary’s grave and found she died with a petrified look on her face and scratch marks on the ceiling of her coffin. 

To this day if you light a candle in your bathroom with the lights off and call Bloody Mary three times, Mary appears and scratches your eyes out!

Hook for a Hand

Once there was a teenage couple who went out on a date.  At the end of the night, they decided to go drive into the woods and gaze up at the stars.  As they are parked, they heard a radio story about an escaped inmate from the nearby insane asylum.  This inmate had previously killed several teenagers with his hook he had instead of a hand.  The girl got scared and decides she wants to go home.  The guy starts his car and pulls out of the woods when he hears a long scratching noise down the side of his car.  They continue home and when he gets out of his car to check the damage, he sees a hook stuck in the car door handle.

Babysitter ghost story

A young woman decided to take a babysitting job on Halloween night.  When she gets to the house the parents let her know the kids are already asleep.  She is welcome to watch TV until they get home.  The parents leave and the babysitter goes to check on the kids who are sound asleep in their beds. 

She comes downstairs and turns on the TV.  The house has a lot of odd collectibles all over the shelves.  The oddest being a statue next to the TV.  It appears to be a large gnome dressed in overalls and a small red hat.  Even though the gnome is just a statue, it makes her feel really uncomfortable.  She feels like it’s watching her.  She decides to take a blanket and place it over the gnome.  Then she plops on the couch and turns on a scary movie. 

After the movie is over, she gets a call from the parents checking in on their kids.  The babysitter goes upstairs, and the kids are still sounds asleep.  She tells the mom the kids are asleep and that everything is okay.  She asks if she can move the gnome statue because it is kind of creeping her out.  The mom pauses on the phone and says “we don’t have a gnome statue.”  The babysitter rushes down stairs to where the gnome statue was sitting next to the TV all night.  But all that is there is the white sheet on the floor.

A Trip to Mesa Rosa

I put out a post on Facebook asking for parents’ favorite place to take their kids for dinner.  This particular TexMex restaurant popped up several times.  I grabbed the six-year-old and the four-year-old and gave Mesa Rosa a try! 

I am a big weirdo because I love taking the kids out to dinner!  But I have very specific qualifications for restaurants I go to with the kids.  It must be a noisy restaurant.  Nobody wants to be that person with the loud, obnoxious kid in a restaurant.  But in noisy restaurants, if your toddler decides to hate the world, you only feel vaguely like you want to crawl under the table and hide. 

Having an outdoor section is also a big plus.  Sitting outside with kids, even when there isn’t a world ending pandemic, can help save a life!  Outside there are more things for kids to look at and enjoy.  They can be super noisy and you won’t be disturbing an entire restaurant.  I don’t think you need a playground to have a kid friendly restaurant, but I really appreciate how many Austin area restaurants do.  It’s nice to have a restaurant experience, that isn’t fast food related, where you can sit and enjoy your meal while the kids play on the playground.

It can’t be a breakable restaurant.  There are some great kid friendly restaurants that have good food, and a great atmosphere for kids.  But any place that brings us glass cups for our drinking water, is just asking for trouble.  We need plastic cups, cups with lids, and if you have some plastic plates wrapped in bubble wrap, we can probably get through a meal without breaking anything! 

I took the kids during the week to Mesa Rosa.  We went right around five, so it was pretty dead in the restaurant.  The inside is your standard TexMex style.  Fun pictures and bright colors cover the walls.  We heard there was great playground so we asked to sit on the patio.  The patio is fabulous!  This is the type of patio that Covid conscious people wish all restaurants had.  It is a huge patio with tons of room!  It opens up into a truly awesome playground.  It can be tough to see your kids from certain areas of the patio.  But there is still enough space for them to easily run back and forth from your table to play.

The playground itself is pretty awesome.  Lots of room for the kids to run.  They even have a water cooler to the side, with little paper, cone cups for kids.  Do the kids just end up pulling out all the cups to play with them?  Yes, they do.  But it is still a nice gesture from the restaurant.  The kids were on the playground the whole time.  When the food came, they’d run back to get a small bite, and chug some water.  Then it was back to the playground.  You’ll definitely be able to enjoy your meal and a few drinks without having to worry if the kids are having a good time. 

If I’m being honest the food is only so-so.  It is your average TexMex cuisine.  The kids ordered burgers and fries and only ate a few bites because the portions are HUGE!  You can certainly find better TexMex food in this area.  But overall, it’s an enjoyable outing with your kids.  You can sit back and enjoy some chips and queso, let your kids run around on the playground, and then wonder how they got a giant bruise on their head in under five minutes.

The Great Snack War!

The great Snack War has been waging in American kitchens for years!  Kids and adults need snacks throughout the day.  But while we all know we need the healthy snacks, the bad snacks are just……so good!  How do we help not only ourselves to be better eaters, but our kids too?  I have several strategies below to help you win your next Snack Battle!

Don’t Buy It

There is a reason why people are very disappointed when they raid my pantry for snacks.  I have not bought cookies or chips in years.  Why?  Because they last about five minutes once they enter my house.  Self-control is difficult for most adults.  It is next to impossible for kids!  If you don’t want your child to eat the unhealthy snacks, do not buy them. 

Look Out For “Healthy”

The food industry is really good at making bright colorful packaging, slapping some buzz words like “real fruit juice”, and convincing you it is healthy.  But we all know the truth.  Veggies Straw are just skinny potato chips.  Fruit Snacks are just gummy bears shaped like fruit.  It can be hard to market healthy food, because actual healthy food is boring to advertise.  A banana is just a banana.  I suppose they could put some more fun stickers on bananas!  Brand bananas for boys called “The Ultimate Banana” and for girls like “Princess Banana”.  But at the end of the day, there is only so many ways to make healthy food look “cool”.

Snacks For Home

Snacks at home are a lot easier to plan.  You have good storage and are able to prep snacks for the week!  Fruits and vegetables should always be your number one choice for snacks.  Always have a fruit bowl filled with easily accessible apples, bananas, etc.  If your kids don’t like certain fruits, don’t give up!  There are a lot of fruits out there to try.  Great vegetables to have on hand are pickles, carrots or celery.  Dips like hummus or guacamole are filling and perfect to have with your vegetables.  Great items to have stocked in the refrigerator are things like yogurt and string cheese.  Healthy pantry snacks for kids, who need something to crunch, are items like nuts, trail mix, or plantain chips.

Snacks For School

Snacks for school can be a little bit trickier.  It can be tough to plan ahead and schools often restrict certain snacks kids are allowed.  Here in Texas the heat can also play a big factor in what snacks are best for kids to take to school.  While yogurt and cheese are great snacks, school lunch-box ice packs only do so well for a long school day.  Fruits and vegetables should once again be your top choice.  Dried fruits and vegetables are a great option if your kids don’t keep their lunch boxes indoors during a school day.  If nuts are allowed in your school, trail mix is your new best friend!  If not try some popcorn for your kids who need that crunch! 

Controlling The Snacking

While in a perfect world, you’d have a house full of healthy snacks and your child would skip merrily home from school and say “dear mother, might I please have an apple before supper?”  But life happens and we all just do the best we can to keep our household happy and running.  There are other ways to keep the unhealthy snacking at bay.  Having snacks be a part of your normal routine is a good way to start.  If children have expectations of one morning snack and one afternoon snack, the angry demands for more snacks goes down.  Also keep in mind, kids get ravenous when they go through growth spurts.  This is when begging for snacks is at an all-time high!  Best way to see if your kid is going through a growth spurt, offer your kids a healthy snack, if they take it, vacuum it down and immediately ask for more, then it’s a growth spurt.

Another good trick to control snacking is a snack box.  Make a nice box for each one of your children.  Every day fill the box with the number of snacks your children are allowed to eat.  Tell them they can eat these snacks whenever they want.  But once the box is empty, that is all the snacks they get for day.  It helps give some control to the kids.  They pick what snacks are in the box and when they can eat them.  Also take the blame off of you when they eat everything in their box! 

The Snack War is one we all battle.  Best we can do is try and give our kids the tools to fight that battle as well.     

Volunteering with Your Kids

Volunteering may seem like an activity for older children and adults.  Many volunteer projects involve large scale clean ups, or manual labor that are next to impossible for the younger crowd.  But while it is easier to get your middle school and high school kids into volunteering, it is not impossible to get your elementary and even preschool kids into the practice of helping their community.

Knowing where to start can be one of the hardest parts.  If you are members of a church or any other religious organization, you are already ahead of the game.  Even if there aren’t programs specifically for younger kids to be a part of, plenty of people within your community can do with some help.  Helping an individual can be just as rewarding as helping a large group.  Your neighbors are also a great source of volunteer opportunities.  Reaching out to elderly neighbors or people who need a helping hand are great ways kids can help people around them.  Below are some other ideas that even your toddlers can do!  It can be a struggle to teach toddlers independence let alone helping out other people.  But simple things can imprint those lessons early. 

Donating Items

You know that thought you have every year?  The thought that your kids have way too many things they never play with?  Here is your solution.  Before every Christmas or birthday give your child a box and ask them to fill it with toys they don’t play with anymore.  Even little kids have items they don’t really like.  It can get kids in the habit of giving away things they don’t need, as well as clear out space for new toys! Send your gently used toys to your local daycare, hospital, or children’s center.  It is a great opportunity to talk to your kids about children who are less fortunate.  It also teaches children to treat their toys with better care and respect.

Helping the Homeless

Here is Austin we have a large homeless population that is very visible.  It naturally brings up questions from kids.  There are great ways kids can help the homeless community.  One of those ways is making small kits to pass out to homeless neighbors.  Head to your local store and get several large Ziploc bags.  Then go pick up some travel sized items for the homeless.  Some of the best items for the homeless are chap stick, deodorant, sunscreen, socks, tooth paste, tooth brush or any other small toiletries.  Have your children fill up the bags and then pass them out!

Cleaning up Your Local Park

When taking kids to the park, I’ve gotten in the habit of picking up random trash I see on the playground.  It has always been a pet peeve of mine when people throw trash on the ground when there are trash cans close by.  After doing this for a while, my little one came up behind me with an empty juice box she’d found on the playground.  People think of park clean-ups as a big weekend project.  And while those projects are great things to do, park clean ups can be made way simpler for little kids.  Simply acknowledging that we should pick up trash will encourage kids to keep an eye out for litter in the park. 

Fun Run

We live in a great city for runners.  There are so many great races to enter with your kids.  Look for races that specifically host fun runs.  Also look for races that allow strollers.  Your little ones can dress up and relax in the stroller while enjoying the spectacle of a race!  If there are charity runs that are too long for kids in a stroller, make your own water or snack station.  Kids get a big kick out of passing out water and treats to runners zooming by. 

These are just a few ideas for getting your littlest family members in the habit of volunteering.  It is such a rewarding thing to do as a family.  There is no shortage of volunteer opportunities especially around the Austin area.  Our kids are a part of our community and it’s important to teach them to make it better too!