A Safety Sort of Day

This morning, Big Bro selected a vocabulary reader, a rather silly book put out by Scholastic about fairy tale characters and safety called Safely Ever After.  It was not even something that I had out as work on the shelves...the book was just something that piqued his interest when we went to our local consignment store and was not really anything that I thought he would do much with, other than to maybe read it for pleasure.
He had selected a whole stack of Scholastic Vocabulary Tales and at 50 cents a book, I figured "Why not"?
(...especially if he likes reading them)

Lo and behold, it was what he felt like working on today, and it actually ended up being a very worthwhile sort of day...first, he read the book.

Then, he decided to make his own book about safety by writing out the safety vocabulary and then, by drawing and writing about being safe on his bike.

As we were wrapping up the morning, it just so happened that while I was checking my email, I happened to see an article on the Yahoo main page by Consumer Reports called 7 Things  You Should Stop Doing Now on Facebook.

I read through the list and realized that I needed to go into my Facebook account and change some things, namely removing references to my children's names and our exact locations, as well as our full birthdays and who can actually see our photos.

The timing of this article was amazing, as just this week, when I got ready to post about Big Bro's presentation for his co-op class, I realized that nearly all of the photos contained his full name, our address and other key information on his project.
When you clicked on the photos, you could read it as clear as day.
So, Dear Hubby went in just last night and edited the photos for me. I am still trying to learn how to do this, but basically, you can take your photo, go into MS Paint, and click on the photo and select a background color (white works best). Then, you can go in and airbrush out the details you don't want in the photos.
You can do this in MS Paint and also in Photoshop.
We have been spending time lately working on airbrushing details through Photoshop and the procedure is pretty much the same.
Things to airbrush out include:
Your child's full name
Your home address
Your phone number
Your name of your subdivision
You child's co-op,  school, camp,  sports team
Any upcoming plans about travel that would let folks know when you will be out of town.

You may wish to share with folks who regularly comment on your photos not to use your child's name in the photos, as well as not to mention when they will see you in their town soon...

You can also go and block anyone who leaves a creepy message or if necessary, you can switch your blog to be private, either for good or just temporarily.

We opted to switch our blog to private for a while when I worked at making these airbrush changes in Photoshop and when I worked at beginning to watermark photos.

Some people do not want their photos of their pink tower or knobless cylinders to be lifted, but to me, my focus is more on the photos of my children.

So, just a few safety tips on a safety day that just kind of came to be today...