The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll give you my main take-aways from the horror of middle school.   Both of my kids will be in high school next year, which means that I can safely say that we survived middle school.  It was honestly touch and go there for a while.  My son's experience was easy and uncomplicated.  He had a good group of friends going into middle school, he wasn't too high up in the status hierarchy, nor was he too far down, and he was a boy.  He had some friends who floated up in status, but the majority of his elementary school friends actually stayed together and there wasn't much drama.  My daughter was a totally different story.  I'm not authorized to give too much info -- and it's not my story to tell, but it was a tough two years.  Like something you'd see on an after-school special.  She came out the other end with more solid friendships and with he...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'll share my rationale for giving my kids Snapchat rather than Instagram.  My kids both got phones when they were in 7th grade. I would say soical media was a way bigger deal when my daughter got her phone last year than even 3 years ago when my son got his, so her experience is probably more relevant than his.  At the time, both of these platforms were more straightforward. Instagram was and is a highly visual social media platform where you post artsy photos and selfies for your friends and followers to view, like, and comment on. Snapchat was a silly point to point communication tool where you sent photos to friends that disappeared after a few seconds.  Since that time, Snapchat has added lots of features that make it more like other "feed" centric platforms, but I was basing my decisions off of the Snapchat of "then".  I really think these decisions differ f...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'll tell cover what you need to say to your suburban kid about the n-word.  I really feel like no parent is going to watch this video. Mainly because nice, respectful, aware parents don't think their kids would EVER use the n-word. Sure, you've never had a conversation specifically about it, but your kid has never heard YOU use that kind of language.  There is really no way they would think that was acceptable.   Here's the reality -- and I know this because I have witnessed multiple incidents just within the last year of kids using the n-word in the "rap" sense.  This is in my upscale, majority white, suburban town of pretty privileged kids. And the perpetrators ran the gamut from lily white 13 year old girls to high school boys, some of whom may have been people of color, but definitely not black.  Here's why I think this conversation really needs to be...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and this is the third video in a 4 part series about organizing and accessing your digital photos. In the first 2 videos, I covered storing my photos centrally and physically organizing them simply.  In this video, I'll talk about how I manage and virtually group my photos using Picasa.  I've been using Picasa for photo management for years now. To give a brief history, Google acquired this desktop software in 2004 and then started phasing it out in favor of Google Photos.  By early 2016 Google had completely stopped providing support for it and its online component -- Picasaweb. So, why do I still use it?  Simple -- even though Google stopped updating this software, they haven't built all of its features into Google Photos yet -- so I will continue using Picasa until they do. I also use Google Photos, but more about that in a later video.  What does Picasa do?   Photo Viewer ...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and today's video is the 2nd of a four part series where I share my tools and processes for organizing and accessing photos.  In the first video, I covered pruning and centralizing quarterly onto my PC.  In this video, I'll talk about how I organize simply.  I know myself well enough to know that whatever organization system I adopted better be simple or I would have a hard time sticking with it for the long term. What that means to me is, I can't have a bunch of nesting folders with designations that won't make sense in the future. I'll throw my mom under the bus and give her complicated organizational schema as an example.  She came up with (what I consider to be) somewhat arbitrary top level groupings (family, friends, grandkids, church).  Then under these files, she has folders for events that are sometimes labeled by date, but sometimes just thrown in willy nilly. Some have subfolde...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in this video, I'll talk about my system for dealing with all of the paper that comes into my house. This is part of a series on my ADHD brain and all of the systems that I use to compensate for a lack of internal structure and organization.   In the overview video of this series, I mentioned that information comes into my life in one of two ways: electronically and by paper. I spent the last six videos talking though my apps and systems for dealing with digital or electronic information, which is by far the bulk of what I receive. This video will be a shorter and a little more obvious and will deal with how I handle paper information. It eventually feeds back into the same systems.  Single Stream How does paper come into your house?  Probably the same way it comes into mine:  Snail Mail Stuff from the kids' schools Paper detritus from everything else (flyers, business cards, chec...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and today I'm going to talk about why I quit Facebook.  I joined Facebook back in the early days and was immediately delighted by the ability to instantly contact people from different eras of my life.  I never posted much, but I was a promiscuous friend acceptor -- accepting requests even from people I couldn't place immediately. My rationale was that my memory is terrible, so I probably knew them, right?  I soon amassed hundreds of friends -- each from different eras of my life. Which brought me to my first problem: Diversified Audience  - I believe strongly in tailoring my message to my audience. This might sound inauthentic, but I believe that it is easier to build understanding by first establishing common ground.  For me, there were too many disparate groups among my Facebook friends. I grew up in a rural, conservative area -- and as a result many of my high school friends hold v...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and today I'll discuss using Blue Apron as a Culinary school in a box for your kids.  I would like my kids to be competent cooks.  They are 13 and 15.  I'm not looking for next contestant on MasterChef Junior, but I want them to be able to find their way around a kitchen and make some reasonable meals. To this end, I have tried a bunch of systems with varying degrees of success starting when they were in early elementary school.  Let's see if I can remember some of the highlights: I joined a monthly mail away cooking club that sent these adorable cookbooks and little kid-sized kitchen implements, I created a summer cookbook for the kids to work through with easy recipes for lunch, I've signed them up for pricey classes at our local culinary school, I assigned them weekly nights to sous chef for me, and most recently, I implemented a Kids in the Kitchen Night once a month where they took ove...

Hi, everyone!  It's Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'm going to tell you about my military style solution to bowls and towels everywhere courtesy of my kids.  Two years ago, I basically lost it. I do laundry once a week on Thursdays and this time I washed and folded -- I kid you not -- 21 TOWELS.  18 bath towels and 3 beach towels. For a family of four -- this was beyond ridiculous.  Particularly when I noted that my husband, my daughter and I only had one towel a piece. That means my son managed to use 15 bath towels in one week.  Again, this strains credulity since this is the kid who requires incessant nagging just to get in the shower once a day.  Maybe he was using a different towel for each body part? His problem is a combination of forgetfulness and laziness. After showering, he leaves his towel in his room -- generally on the floor although we DO have hooks to hang them in each kid's room.  But he the nex...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in this video I'll discuss why you should talk to your kid about the fuzzy line between cheating and not.  First off -- I don't think your kid is cheating. I don't think my kid is cheating. That is -- I don't think they KNOW that they are cheating.  The reason I think this deserves a conversation is because life is so different now than when we grew up. Technology makes everything faster and easier and there IS an impact on our kids' perception of some basic schoolwork dos and don'ts.  We assume our kids know not to lie, cheat or steal, right?  But these are not the absolutes we would like them to be -- with each tere is a range that goes from okay in some circumstances to totally unacceptable.  Let's take stealing for example. We can pretty much all agree that stealing is objectively bad. If there was a dollar bill laying on the counter in an office kitchen, most people would not ...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and today we are going to discuss the dreaded "sex talk" with your kids.  I am by no means the perfect "sex talk" parent model -- and certainly not from the beginning. I knew that I wanted to have an open dialog with my kids about sex eventually, but I was squeamish just like everyone else.  For the longest time, I let my kids think that babies came out of an incision in the mom's belly.  I had had 2 c-sections and, to be fair, they only asked specifically about their own births. When they were in early elementary school, I got shamed into doing a better job because our local Anglican priest, who's kids were around the same age, had already had this very specific and detailed conversation with his kids. And I refused to be bested by an Anglican priest! Now -- I'm a sex education teacher at my church. The church that I belong to is very liberal and takes the view that sexual educatio...