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

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.

Social media has come a long way, baby. A long way indeed. Cybersleuthing is what moms do instead of reading our kids’ diaries, when we fear they are in trouble.

“Good Morning America” had a great segment on today about why parents should have accounts on these networks — to check up on our kids.

It’s important to know and understand how they are communicating, and to whom they are communicating.

The segment is entitled, “Five Tips for Keeping Your Kids Safe Online.” ABC.com won’t let me embed it (bah!) but here’s the link.

Read the full ABCNews story here.

Want more help? Contact WiredSafety, “the world’s largest Internet safety and help group.”

Tonight is bath night. A big, luxurious Elmo Bubble Bath night. Soaking in a nice, warm tub full to the brim with bubbles. It will be the first bath (or shower) for my son in over a month. Yeah, I’m a bad mom.

NOT. (Well, maybe sometimes.)

No, today my son got his cast off so we going to celebrate with the world’s biggest bubble bath.

I wrote about the adventure that lead to my two-year-old’s broken leg, but little did I know that was the easy part. The tears from the break, the tears from having an x-ray to actually having the cast set. The lifting a 36 lb. boy everywhere for a month to all the sponge baths and trying to wash a toddler’s hair without getting in a bath or shower. That was the easy stuff. For a month, I’ve looked forward to getting the cast off. Having never broken a bone before, I had no idea.

Now I know.

And I don’t want to repeat this process again. EVER.

Let’s just say that having a loud saw come at your leg can’t be comforting, no matter how much your Mommy is whispering in your ear, “It’s OK. It doesn’t hurt. It’s OK. Just a few more minutes. It’s OK. It doesn’t hurt.”

Thank God it’s over. The leg is healed. This adventure is over and it’s time for a relaxing bubble bath. I think I need one now too.