The Marble Jar Channel

  Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll tell you about the tool that I use for allowance and money management for my teenagers — FamZoo prepaid cards.   I'm a big believer in giving your kids an allowance.   Not as a reward for good behavior or even for getting their chores done, but apart from that as a way to promote early money management and financial responsibility.   When my kids were younger, I used a whole host of different tools to pay them an allowance, from actual cash, to an allowance ledger, to ultimately the iAllowance app.   You can watch the series I did on kids allowance featuring iAllowance, if you are interested. As my kids got older and became more independent, they needed to be able to access their money more easily.   For a while, we were on a cash-based system where I took money out in $5 increments and would allow them to “withdraw” cash from their iAllowance accounts.   But, I got tired of be

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share how I get my kid's attention when they aren't answering their iPhone. We have all been there, right?  Sitting outside of school or outside their friend's house, calling and calling and calling.  One time I was supposed to pick my son up from sledding.  I started calling when I arrived, I had no idea where he was was, so I sat there for over 30 minutes steaming because he wasn't paying attention to his phone.  It's aggravating since 80% of why parents give their kids a phone in the first place is so that we can get in touch with them!   So, what do I do when my kids don't pick up their phone after many, many tries?  I play a n alarm on their phone that is impossible to ignore.  Here's how I do it.  I have a different Apple ID than both of my kids at this point.  However, they are both required to give me their log-in credentials to their accoun

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share some tips to ensure that your body doesn't ache after a full day of working or studying.  First I'll talk about proper posture, then switching between standing and sitting, and finally some great exercises. Over the past year, I've gotten really into exercises that promote proper posture.  I'm convinced that collectively our nation's terrible posture is the problem behind most of our over-use injuries and back pain.  I started doing Egoscue exercises -- you can see my video on that if you are interested -- and have made an effort to change my posture and as a result I have eradicated my frequent headaches, gotten back almost full mobility in my arthritic right knee, AND eliminated much of the back pain that I would get from standing for too long.   Sitting Properly Here's the bad news -- we are all almost   universally sitting at our desks wrong.

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share my secret for quickly formatting APA, MLA, or Chicago style references -- Citefast.com. I'm back in graduate school after a gap of almost 20 years.  I'm getting a masters in social work and all of my writing assignments are required to be in APA style.  The first semester almost did me in trying to remember all of the arcane and totally arbitrary style rules -- you know, do you spell out first names or use initials?  what part gets italicized?  when do I use an ampersand and when do I spell out the word "and"?  To be frank, I'm almost 50, I have a limited amount of space in my brain -- I sincerely do not need to clutter it up with this kind of pointless information.  But unless I wanted to continue to refer back to the handbook EVERY time I did a citation, I WAS forced to remember some of this nonsense.   Okay -- just a quick disclaimer.  I totally g