Useful ideas for traveling families, gathered for your information:
What are you working towards? What’s your goal? Immediate gratification is for sissies. Our family road trip has been three years in the making (explicitly) and is the culmination of at least ten years of conscious, difficult, parenting. I know that everything won’t be roses and sunshine when we do it, but the important thing to me is that we’re trying at all. What are you working towards?
Nine Essential Skills Kids Should Learn: Leo Babauta hits a home run on this article, addressing something a lot of full-time (homeschooling) families. In a nutshell, don’t count on the schools to teach your kids how to be relevant in tomorrow’s world. Everything in the world is changing, at an unprecedented pace, and schools continue to update curriculum, attempting to teach kids what they need to know to be prepared for the world. They’re failing, and they will continue to fail, with that philosophy – it’s impossible to teach kids what they need to know, because nobody knows what this is. Instead, schools should be teaching kids how to more effectively learn, adapt, and grow. In other words, school should no longer be focused on preparing kids for any specific task, but instead teaching them how to learn. Leo says, "We can’t give our children a set of data to learn, a career to prepare for, when we don’t know what the future will bring. But we can prepare them to adapt to anything, to learn anything, to solve anything, and in about 20 years, to thank us for it."
United Airlines piles more inconvenience on travelers: A new United Airlines fee set to take effect next month would dramatically increase the cost of shipping a pet — to as much as $3,900 for large animals — and may especially affect members of the military transferred under orders. Pets are now classified as cargo, and subject to the higher cargo rates. Pets zero to ten pounds will cost $259, with rates going up from there for larger pets.
