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Parenting Tips: Fear of the Automatic Flush Toilet

Laugh all you want until your child/niece/nephew or friend takes a leap off the toilet when the automatic flush goes off. The tears and clean-up that ensue can be easily handled by just placing your hand over the sensor until business is taken care of. Another tip, unless you have really long arms, pull off the paper first so you don't have to become a contortionist.

Adirondack Museum: Alice T Miner Museum

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Assistant to the Curator Stephanie Pfaff leads us on a whirlwind tour of the Miner family in Chazy. It is astounding how one family could shape a community. She touches on some of the basics like Heart’s Delight Farm as an experiment in modern farming, starting a K-12 school that became the 1st centralized school, building a hospital, church and the Alice T Miner Museum. The unusual part of the museum is that Alice Miner had the museum specifically built to replicate a house to highlight how people lived in the mid 1800s. Her directive was to showcase American history. This isn’t a renovated building altered to fit the museum’s vision but a specific example to allow visitors a glimpse into the Colonial Revival time period. We are shown the downstairs sitting and formal rooms. The children are asked to identify various articles from the collection and play three guesses. For the first item my son guesses a spoon warmer correctly. His recent fondness for soup has him rethinking our tab

Seagle Music Colony 2009 Schedule

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Since 1915, Seagle Music Colony has been training talented singers in opera and musical performances in Schroon Lake. Located on the web at www.seaglecolony.com.

Paddle on Osgood Pond

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My husband and I are alone. My daughter is worried as she goes off to a play date that we will be lonely. We are soon in the middle of a pond, completely alone. There are no young voices yelling to see a cobweb, bug, rock, or floating stick. There are never long moments of silence. The dynamic children bring to any activity can fill the air and allow one to see things differently. The enthusiasm for the simplest of things is refreshing. That said, they also have the ability to vacuum the positive energy right out of a given situation with life altering decisions like they no longer like bread while dramatically claiming starvation at the same time they wave a sandwich overhead. Another way is when is when they have to go to the bathroom only after being life-jacketed and paddling in the middle of a lake no matter how many times they are asked before to take care of business. It happens and we survive but during all that I am not always tuned into the hermit thrush’s call. I

Parenting Tips: School Projects and Clutter

Items needed: photo album, color printer, photo paper, digital camera In our household children and clutter go hand in hand. I do my best to keep ahead of the paperwork coming home but it can become overwhelming. On the same thought, children put a lot of work (and sometimes glitter) into their school projects. In the house it can create a mess and a build up of projects. I want to create an environment that acknowledges their creativity but also doesn't overrun the rest of us with egg cartons and shoe box dioramas. At the beginning of each school year I give my children an empty photo album just for school projects. We set a time limit that each project will be "on display" in our house. Our time limit is one week after the school presentation takes place. Of course if family is coming to visit then we will postpone so our children can demonstrate for the grandparents. We make a big deal when it is time to take the photos. Take as many angles as necessary and let the chi