#family-centered activities

[beingjellybeans]

Fostering Family Unity: Camella Homes' Celebrates National Family Week

In the Philippines, family isn’t just a unit; it’s a cornerstone of life. In a nation deeply rooted in Catholic faith, family values are not just cherished; they’re celebrated with fervor and commitment. National Family Week, held annually during the last week of September, is a testament to the enduring importance of family in the hearts of every Filipino. The Heartbeat of National Family…

[starry-bi-sky]

mmm throwaway conversation between Dan and Danny that popped into my head that I had to write out:

"You spent ten years being a one-man mass extinction event, then went back in time and fought me, and lost." Danny snarls, arms crossed and throat tight. His mouth pulls back to bare dagger-sharp teeth, and his eyes burn with the familiar thrum of ectoplasm heating up behind his eyes. "If I didn't believe you were half of Vlad before, I do now."

His other self -- and really, can he even call him that? He's half of Vlad too. Two halves severed from each other and welded together to make a new whole, -- snaps his head over to him. Wild-eyed and furious, he looks unlike the man Danny fought before, the one unruffled and untouched, unbothered by the world around him. It's familiar, but not like the way a reflection is.

"What's that supposed to mean." The Other hisses, matching Danny's scowl one-for-one with fangs much bigger and sharper than his.

But there's a reason lions fear hyenas. Danny matches the rumble in The Other's chest with one of his own, and shoves his face close to his. "I don't lose."

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Peter Montgomery at RWW:

The American Family Association’s Center for Judicial Renewal has been urging Republican presidential candidates and senators to adopt its explicit religious test for future Supreme Court justices;  the group is attempting to blackball conservative judges who fail to meet its “biblical worldview” standard. In a fundraising email sent Tuesday, AFA Action CEO Walker Wildmon revealed that the group is also seeking to apply its religious worldview test to judges for the lower courts, which he calls “a crucial, much-needed expansion of CJR’s scope.”

[...] Wildmon’s email also brags about the group’s involvement in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led project to engineer a far-right takeover of the executive branch if Donald Trump or another Republican is elected president this fall.

In spite of promoting an explicit religious test for federal judges—a clear betrayal of the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution—and supporting Project 2025’s authoritarian plan to undermine checks and balances, Wildmon’s email portrays AFA as a defender of the Constitution against “radical progressives” who he claims are “bent on destroying the rule of law altogether.”

Project 2025 partner and far-right hate group American Family Association’s sister organization Center For Judicial Renewal expands their religious litmus test (conservative evangelical Christians preferred) to lower court nominees.

[andromedasummer]

fun fact once youve worked at a daycare/preschool the instincts it gives you never leave. i hear a baby crying and my brain muscle memories me into standing up until i can stop and remind myself that most people understandably do not want a stranger to walk over and pick up and soothe their infant. not my job anymore.

[orangerosebush]

Tim overhears Angeline and Butler talking animatedly in the other room about something in Russian and he proceeds to discretely text Artemis to go "my son... I am summoning you to see if they are talking trash about us both" to which Artemis simply sends a "👍" before promptly appearing in the study to join Tim (despite Artemis having fully been in the other wing of the house last time Tim checked?)

[jvzebel-x]

🦋

[somethingnubian]

Harnessing Harmony: A Day in Our Afro-Boho Homeschooling Life

Introduction: Greetings, beautiful community! It’s your homegirl, Reiki Ra-ess, here to bring a sprinkle of sunshine and wisdom into your day. As a steadfast advocate for education that resonates with our roots and rhythm, I’m thrilled to unveil a daily tool that’s been a labor of love and learning in our household for over a decade– our Afro-Boho inspired Daily Worksheet. Harmony in…

[424playfactory]

For the physical, emotional, and cognitive development of kids, pleasant indoor activities are crucial. It's crucial to have a variety of indoor activities Pittsburgh that keep youngsters active, interested, and entertained in Pittsburgh because the city's severe winters and unpredictable weather may make outdoor play difficult.

Children who participate in regular physical activity have stronger bones, muscles, and cardiovascular systems. They also have better coordination and motor skills. Additionally, it can improve their mood and energy levels, lessen anxiety and stress, and encourage sounder sleep.

[dionysus-complex]

.

[littlestickfish]

Pope Francis removed him for being ridiculously and virulently hateful toward the LGBT and other minority communities, going so far as to say they don't belong in the Church--the Church Pope Francis is currently endeavoring to make safer and more welcoming to these folks.

The misleading part has nothing to do with whether or not it's legal by secular standards. The misleading part is the implication that this was some sort of arbitrary and unreasonable move instead of a rogue bishop who preached hate facing consequences for his actions.

The man was a menace, and this level of disciplinary action is the least he deserves.

im fucking sobbing why did they kill him twice in a row in the community notes

[carpetcleaningecopower]

Experience Family Fun at the Brandon Sports and Aquatic Center in Brandon FL

The Brandon Sports and Aquatic Center in Brandon FL is the perfect destination for families looking to combine fun with fitness. Whether you want to swim, play sports, or simply enjoy a day outside, this community hotspot has something for everyone. Designed to inspire active lifestyles, it offers a welcoming space where families can bond and spend quality time together.

Dive Into Aquatic Fun for All Ages

The aquatic offerings at the Brandon Sports and Aquatic Center are a highlight for many families. With multiple pools catering to swimmers of all skill levels, everyone from toddlers to adults can dive in and enjoy the water. Young children love the splash zones and playful water areas, while older kids and adults can focus on swim lessons, lap swimming, or honing competitive skills. Whether you're cooling off on a warm day or working on your swimming techniques, the aquatic options here ensure a fun and refreshing experience for every member of the family.

Sports Facilities for Endless Play

Beyond the pools, the center boasts a wide variety of sports facilities to keep everyone engaged. Tennis courts, basketball courts, and expansive fields for soccer or other games offer plenty of ways to stay active. Whether your family enjoys a friendly tennis match or wants to join a group fitness class, the center has options to suit all interests. With its diverse range of activities, it’s the ideal spot for a day of energetic play and fitness-focused fun.

Prioritize Health and Wellness

Supporting both physical and mental well-being, the center also offers numerous health and wellness programs. Families can participate in yoga, strength training, or even personal fitness coaching. Parents can focus on their own fitness goals while teaching their kids the importance of staying active and healthy. These wellness opportunities create a balanced approach to family health, encouraging an active lifestyle in a fun, supportive setting.

A Community Hub for Families

More than just a place to exercise, the Brandon Sports and Aquatic Center serves as a community hub, bringing families and neighbors together. Throughout the year, the center hosts seasonal events, sports leagues, and swimming competitions that foster a strong sense of community. It’s a place where families not only stay active but also create lasting memories and friendships. With its blend of fitness, fun, and family connection, the center plays a vital role in the vibrant community life of Brandon FL.

[toymakerinchina]

Thrilling Adventure Playland: Ultimate Indoor Playground for Kids

The images showcase a vibrant and comprehensive indoor playground facility designed to cater to a broad range of play activities, offering a dynamic environment for children of all ages. With an emphasis on safety, creativity, and engagement, this state-of-the-art play center is outfitted with a diverse selection of equipment. Starting with the multi-level adventure zones, they are equipped with…

[beggars-opera]

On the road leading into the center of Concord, Massachusetts, there sits a house.

It is a plain, colonial-style house, of which there are many along this road. It has sea green and buff paint, a historical plaque, and one of the most multi-layered stories I have ever encountered to showcase that history is continuous, complicated, and most importantly, fragmentary, unless you know where to look.

So, where to start? The plaque.

There's some usual information here: Benjamin Barron built the house in 1716, and years later it was a "witness house" to the start of the American Revolution. And then, something unusual: a note about an enslaved man named John Jack whose epitaph is "world famous."

Where is this epitaph? Right around the corner in the town center.

It reads:

God wills us free; man wills us slaves. I will as God wills; God’s will be done. Here lies the body of JOHN JACK a native of Africa who died March 1773 aged about 60 years Tho’ born in a land of slavery, He was born free. Tho’ he lived in a land of liberty, He lived a slave. Till by his honest, tho’ stolen labors, He acquired the source of slavery, Which gave him his freedom; Tho’ not long before Death, the grand tyrant Gave him his final emancipation, And set him on a footing with kings. Tho’ a slave to vice, He practised those virtues Without which kings are but slaves.

We don't know precisely when the man first known only as Jack was purchased by Benjamin Barron. We do know that he, along with an enslaved woman named Violet, were listed in Barron's estate upon his death in 1754. Assuming his gravestone is accurate, at that time Jack would have been about 40 and had apparently learned the shoemaking trade from his enslaver. With his "honest, though stolen labors" he was then able to earn enough money to eventually purchase his freedom from the remaining Barron family and change his name to John, keeping Jack as a last name rather than using his enslaver's.

John Jack died, poor but free, in 1773, just two years before the Revolutionary War started. Presumably as part of setting up his own estate, he became a client of local lawyer Daniel Bliss, brother-in-law to the minister, William Emerson. Bliss and Emerson were in a massive family feud that spilled into the rest of the town, as Bliss was notoriously loyal to the crown, eventually letting British soldiers stay in his home and giving them information about Patriot activities.

Daniel Bliss also had abolitionist leanings. And after hearing John's story, he was angry.

Here was a man who had been kidnapped from his home country, dragged across the ocean, and treated as an animal for decades. Countless others were being brutalized in the same way, in the same town that claimed to love liberty and freedom. Reverend Emerson railed against the British government from the pulpit, and he himself was an enslaver.

It wouldn't do. John Jack deserved so much more. So, when he died, Bliss personally paid for a large gravestone and wrote its epitaph to blast the town's hypocrisy from the top of Burial Hill. When the British soldiers trudged through the cemetery on April 19th, 1775, they were so struck that they wrote the words down and published them in the British newspapers, and that hypocrisy passed around Europe as well. And the stone is still there today.

You know whose stone doesn't survive in the burial ground?

Benjamin Barron's.

Or any of his family that I know of. Which is absolutely astonishing, because this story is about to get even more complicated.

Benjamin Barron was a middle-class shoemaker in a suburb that wouldn't become famous until decades after his death. He lived a simple life only made possible by chattel slavery, and he will never show up in a U.S. history textbook.

But he had a wife, and a family. His widow, Betty Barron, from whom John purchased his freedom, whose name does not appear on her home's plaque or anywhere else in town, does appear either by name or in passing in every single one of those textbooks.

Terrible colonial spelling of all names in their marriage record aside, you may have heard her maiden name before:

Betty Parris was born into a slaveholding family in 1683, in a time when it was fairly common for not only Black, but also Indigenous people to be enslaved. It was also a time of war, religious extremism, and severe paranoia in a pre-scientific frontier. And so it was that at the age of nine, Betty pointed a finger at the Arawak woman enslaved in her Salem home, named Titibe, and accused her of witchcraft.

Yes, that Betty Parris.

Her accusations may have started the Salem Witch trials, but unlike her peers, she did not stay in the action for long. As a minor, she was not allowed to testify at court, and as the minister's daughter, she was too high-profile to be allowed near the courtroom circus. Betty's parents sent her to live with relatives during the proceedings, at which point her "bewitchment" was cured, though we're still unsure if she had psychosomatic problems solved by being away from stress, if she stopped because the public stopped listening, or if she stopped because she no longer had adults prompting her.

Following the witch hysteria, the Parrises moved several times as her infamous father struggled to hold down a job and deal with his family's reputation. Eventually they landed in Concord, where Betty met Benjamin and married him at the age of 26, presumably having had no more encounters with Satan in the preceding seventeen years. She lived an undocumented life and died, obscure and forgotten, in 1760, just five years before the Stamp Act crisis plunged America into a revolution, a living bridge between the old world and the new.

I often wonder how much Betty's story followed her throughout her life. People must have talked. Did they whisper in the town square, "Do you know what she did when she was a girl?" Did John Jack hear the stories of how she had previously treated the enslaved people in her life? Did that hasten his desperation to get out? And what of Daniel Bliss; did he know this history as well, seeing the double indignity of it all? Did he stop and think about how much in the world had changed in less than a century since his neighbor was born?

We'll never know.

All that's left is a gravestone, and a house with an insufficient plaque.

[jen-with-a-pen]

driving at a safe distance (per what I remember being taught in driver's ed circa 2017) is considered putting one car length's worth of space between you and the person in front of you. if it's a larger vehicle or semi/dump truck, it's two car's worth or 200ft, give or take.

It also takes roughly 150-170 feet to come to a full stop from 40mph with a 1.5 second reaction time and a modern vehicle. That is quite literally the entire length of a fucking football field.

And that doesn't include weather conditions like rain (which makes roads oily and slippery!!! hydroplaning is real!!!)

Allowing for safe distance between you and the person in front of you is so, so, SO important. It can not only save your life, but the lives of those in front of and behind you.

source: was in a fender-bender back in October where the girl behind me hit me after I had to brake suddenly when a semi-truck in front of the car in front of me braked suddenly. I had enough space between the car in front of me and my front bumper that when I was hit, I didn't lurch and hit the car in front of me whatsoever.

Girl and I were both fine, and it sounded way worse than it actually was, but it was an extremely lucky scenario that would've ended poorly and would've resulted in a domino effect (been in one of those before... not fun.)

Also don't fucking text and drive. Don't. You're a piece of shit if you're more focused on your addictive lightbox than manning a 1.5 ton death machine.

I'm being so serious rn if you tailgate people I don't think you should have a driver's license

[determinate-negation]

important edit!

UPDATE 9/4/2024: we will be closing down the old campaign because mohamed was having issues with the guy hosting it. i'm hosting a new campaign which i am linking below. THIS IS THE UPDATED LINK.

(this is a verified campaign and is 192 on the vetted fundraiser sheet)

mohammed @save-mohamed-family has been trying to raise money to save his family for a while on tumblr, and he raised a significant amount of money but the bank his beneficiary was using abruptly shut his account down and he lost all his progress. a lot of banks and money services have been arbitrarily freezing or shutting down the money palestinians are raising to survive this genocide, which is just an additional injustice for people already suffering so much. mohammed has since opened a new gofundme but its made very little progress.

please donate to this campaign– especially if youve donated in the past because gofundme will have refunded you

mohammed already lost his mother, father, and four sisters in the war who were killed in a bombing, and is now living in tents with his remaining family members. he was seriously injured in his foot and it may need to be amputated, but he told me that hes doesn't care if he loses his foot, he just doesn't want to lose his wife and children. his wife has uterine cancer but hasn't been able to get treatment because the genocidal israeli army has destroyed health centers. his children are suffering from infectious diseases spreading throughout gaza. there is practically no medical treatment or medicine available in gaza and the massacres continue everyday. food and water is scarce and priced exorbitantly. mohammed has made posts on his blog about their situation and i do encourage you to read his own words too.

please dont be desensitized to this just because it's been going on for so long. put yourself in his shoes and think about how you would feel– after nearly a year of the most destructive bombing campaign in history, living in hunger and pain every second with no home, no running water, no sanitation, not having a moment of security, subject to arbitrary decisions from an occupying force. no one should have to live like this.

the pain of losing so many family members, your home, your job, and everything you have is already unimaginable. please dont let him lose any more of his family. donate to this campaign and if you cant, share it with someone who can.

especially if you have a degree of disposable income i implore you to think about what you can reasonably give. it could be relatively small adjustment for you but make a significant difference for someone else.

[sayruq]

Police in the Turkish city of Adana detained 11 suspects, five Israeli and two Syrian, on allegations of organ trafficking, the Daily Sabah reported on 5 May. The Provincial Directorate of Security's Anti-Smuggling and Border Gates Branch began investigating after examining the passports of seven individuals who arrived in Adana from Israel about a month ago by plane for the purpose of health tourism. The two Syrian nationals, ages 20 and 21, were found to have fake passports. Further investigation revealed that Syrian nationals had each agreed to sell one of their own kidneys to two of the Israeli nationals, ages 68 and 28, for kidney transplants in Adana. During searches at the suspects' residences, $65,000 and numerous fake passports were seized. Israel has long been at the center of what Bloomberg described in 2011 as a “sprawling global black market in organs where brokers use deception, violence, and coercion to buy kidneys from impoverished people, mainly in underdeveloped countries, and then sell them to critically ill patients in more-affluent nations.” The financial newspaper added, “Many of the black-market kidneys harvested by these gangs are destined for people who live in Israel.” The organ-trafficking network extends from former Soviet Republics such as Azerbaijan, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova to Brazil, the Philippines, South Africa, and beyond, the Bloomberg investigation showed. Accusations of Israeli involvement in organ trafficking also apply to the occupied Palestinian territories. In 2009, Sweden's largest daily newspaper, Aftonbladet, reported testimony that the Israeli army was kidnapping and murdering Palestinians to harvest their organs. The report quotes Palestinian claims that young men from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip had been seized by the Israeli army, and their bodies returned to the families with missing organs. "'Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,' relatives of Khaled from Nablus said to me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin as well as the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who all had disappeared for a few days and returned by night, dead and autopsied," wrote Donald Bostrom, the author of the report.Bostrom also cites an incident of alleged organ theft during the the first Palestinian intifada in 1992. He says that the Israeli army abducted a young man known for throwing stones at Israeli troops in the Nablus area. The young man was shot in the chest, both legs, and the stomach before being taken to a military helicopter, which transported him to an unknown location. Five nights later, Bostrom said, the young man's body was returned, wrapped in green hospital sheets. Israel’s Channel 2 TV reported that in the 1990s, specialists at Abu Kabir Forensic Medicine Institute harvested skin, corneas, heart valves, and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians, and foreign workers without permission from relatives. The Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place, but claimed, "This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer." Israel’s assault on Gaza since 7 October has provided further opportunities for the theft and harvesting of Palestinians’ organs. On 30 January, WAFA news agency reported that the Israeli army returned the bodies of 100 Palestinian civilians it had stolen from hospitals and cemeteries in various areas in Gaza. According to medical sources, inspection of some of the bodies showed that organs were missing from some of them. On 18 January, the Times of Israel reported that the Israeli army confirmed reports that its soldiers dug up graves in a Gaza cemetery, claiming its soldiers were trying to “confirm that the bodies of hostages were not buried there.”