The Girl Scouts of America have created a cool new team (female teenagers) to help teach young people how to stay safe on the Internet. “Good Morning America,” ran a segment about this new initiative:

Girl Scouts of America and Microsoft Corporation teamed up to create a new Web site that empowers girls to take control of their own online safety and help them educate their parents.”

Diane Sawyer relayed some staggering statistics at the beginning of the piece:

Forty percent of teens hide what they do online.”

Wow. That means your teenager might not be telling you everything. Even more staggering is this:

Twenty percent of kids 13 and under say they have met face to face with people they only met online.”

Parents: This is Your WAKE-UP CALL

Kids are meeting people they don’t know. They are talking to people they don’t know. These kids are young. Very, very young. And starting on computers at younger and younger ages. Communicating with a medium their parents don’t understand. This is where the Girl Scout initiative is going to come in handy. These girls are going to speak to other girls, on their terms. In their language.

The girls will be talking to parents too, teaching things like how to set up a Facebook page. They are also offering a free monthly Online Safety Newsletter, written by the teens for parents. Each month, the all-girl editorial board explores a different Internet safety topic online and then shares what it learned in the newsletter, which is distributed to adults the following month.

Being online is a part of every teenage girl’s life,” says Shannon, a member of the LMK editorial team. “Now we have a chance to teach our parents a thing or two about the real issues we face every day.”

This is a win-win folks.

Related:

• Visit the Girl Scout/Microsoft Web site for girls: LMK: Life Online (LMK means, let me know)
• Visit the Girl Scout/Microsoft Web site for parents: http://letmeknow.girlscouts.org/Home.aspx
• Sign up for the girl’s monthly Online Safety Newsletter for parents.
• Watch the GMA segment.
• 5 Tips for Keeping Your Kids Safe Online from ABCNews.com.

A representative for Parents.com emailed me about a Toy and Recall finder that I think is pretty interesting for parents to learn about. The Web site put together a database and slide show detailing all the recent toy recalls — with pictures.

Searchable Database

The site uses an easy searchable database which allows you to search by a variety of ways:

• Enter Product Name, Brand or Model Number
• Choose a category (such as clothing, cribs and strollers)
• Choose a date range (last month, last 6 months, last year or all of the above)

I decided to try out the databaseI’m looking for new booster seats for my son so I did a search on car seat recalls within the last year. The search results display a list of 9 car seats which have been recalled. Pretty cool for just a couple clicks. It’s a great resource for busy parents like me. Be sure to visit the site to find out about products you’re interested in.

• Toy and Product Recall Finder
• Get the CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission) recall alerts

Photo courtesy Parents.com

At the Halloween store this weekend and got our pre-schooler a Fireman’s outfit. Didn’t plan on him being a fireman. We weren’t sure what he’d be interested in. You see, earlier in the day we went with a friend to the area park. There just so happened to be a festival going on and a firetruck was there. BINGO! That’s a pre-school jackpot. Not only did my son get to go in a real-deal fire truck, but the fireman gave him a Fire Chiefs hat.

Ironically today, all this talk of firefighters brought me to the Mom blog, Stop, Drop and Blog where I learned that it’s Fire Prevention Week 2008. Although the week is half over, it’s never too late to share insights on how to prepare your home for a possible fire.

From the National Fire Protection Agency Web site:

Your home should be a safe haven. But do you regularly check for home fire hazards? If not, there is the potential for danger. Fire departments responded to nearly 400,000 home fires in 2006. That’s why the theme of Fire Prevention Week 2008 is “It’s Fire Prevention Week: Prevent Home Fires!”

Do your family a favor this week and read over how to prepare for a fire. You neve rknow when one could strike.

Related:

• Read Stop, Drop and Blog’s post about Fire Prevention Week.
• Quick online safety quiz. See how much you know.
• Printable home inspection checklist. Download it now.

Yesterday’s “Oprah Winfrey Show” had a mother on who is responsible for the death of her two-year old daughter. She left her daughter in a hot car for 8 hours in the middle of summer. She’s not unlike you or me though.

She was an Assistant Principal of a school and was headed to the first day of school. Her husband usually took their two children to two different schools. She did the pick up. On this day, her husband had a morning dentist appointment and asked his wife to do the drop offs. She agreed. Headed to the home where her daughter stays during the day, she realized it was too early to drop her daughter off so she stopped to picked up donuts for the teachers at school. Then, as normal, headed to school.

She continued with her day, not realizing until 4:00 p.m. that she had left her precious little girl strapped in her car seat, locked in the hot car in August.

Every mother’s nightmare. The child died of heat stroke.

33 children died in cars from heat stroke this year.”
– Oprah

How many times you have you been so busy, thoughts racing through your head that you end up home and don’t know how it happened? You drive down a road, headed one way, ending up somewhere else because that’s where you typically go. We drive around like zombies sometimes. Autopilot directs us, instead of active thoughts.

The message that Oprah shared is to “slow down. You are doing too much.”

When you think of the mother from this story, Brenda is her name, think:

• Stop rushing.
• Slow down.

Personally, this issue has always bothered me. It’s so hard to hear. I wonder how on earth anyone can do this? How is it possible? But, then I realize how easy it is to happen. We are doing everything. When my son started going to daycare my husband and I agreed to a system, a layer of oversight of sorts, that makes me feel better about the drop off/pick up routines. Every day whoever drops our son off has to either call or text message the other saying that we actually did drop off our child at school. We usually share a tid-bit from the event in addition to the message. “Dropped boy off. Kids were lined up to go to the playground.” Or, “picked boy up. Had good day. Headed home.”

If I don’t get a message, (which happens to both of us) I call my husband and ask what’s up? This helps us live in the moment. It’s part of our routine to notify someone of what we did, and to check up on the other that it got done. I have a trigger every day that by a certain time I should have notification that my son was successfully dropped off and is safe.

Of course, this isn’t fool proof and the best measure is to slow down and live in the moment, not in the rush-rush lifestyle that so many of us are living today.

• Read the story on Oprah.com.
• Brenda also told her story on “Good Morning America.” Watch the segment here.

Tropical Storm Fay is approaching Florida and meteorologists predict she is coming my way, Central Florida. At the beginning of the season I wrote about my experiences during the 2004 season (tree falls, hunkering down in bathroom, not fun, but all ends up safe.) It was from those experiences that I developed the family hurricane checklist. I’m reposting it here today because I had to pull it out to start getting ready. Hopefully some of you can find it helpful in the next few days, but I’ll be happier if, because we are all prepared, we are spared any damage or losses.

Family Hurricane Preparedness List It breaks down everything that we need to have on hand and to prepare (like taking porch furniture inside), and is color-coded based on when each task needs to be done. For example: You don’t need to fill your bathtub up with water until 24 hours prior to the storm’s arrival, but you should get cash from your bank at least 48-hours in advance to avoid ATMs running out of money.

Related:

• Balancing Motherhood’s Official Hurricane Checklist — Download now
• National Hurricane Center Official Web site