Imbee, a new social networking service for kids, launched earlier this week. Like other services, Imbee provides blogging, photo sharing, and messaging. What makes Imbee unique is the amount of protection in place to help keep kids safe. For example, kids can't sign up without a parent's help. A parent or guardian must register for the child using a valid credit card for authentication. And the service provides tools for parents that allow them to easily monitor their child's blog posts, photos, shared music and files, and messages. Another interesting difference between Imbee and other services is that everything is private by default and isn't indexed by search engines. Only people who are invited may view a member's blog postings or photos. It all adds up to a safer, more controlled environment. Imbee offers limited free accounts and paid accounts with a 90 day free trial. [via TechCrunch]

I remember setting up a lemonade stand in front of my house one Summer. I think I charged people a dime seeing as how I had no costs. My parents paid for and made the lemonade, provided the table and cups, the whole deal. Of course, I drank most of my own inventory. Tuesday afternoon I saw our and the neighbor's kids setting up a stand across the street, so I dipped into our spare change jar and moseyed on over. Boy was I lucky I was feeling generous and grabbed a handful of coins. A cup of water (no ice!) and a pack of Smarties cost me $2.00. And, sucker that I am, I tipped them each $0.25 for a total charge of $2.75. And the cups were mine! Oh, the Moms had a good chuckle as I walked back to the house.

Do you have a toy collector in the house? Barbies or Pez or Hot Wheels in mint condition in the original packaging? Or maybe you have a growing collection of pacifiers you'd like to share with the world. If you do, Kaboodle's new MyCollectibles service may be the perfect place to showcase and share your collection with others. At the site you can create your own collections, browse and rate collections, and meet other collectors online. The free service also integrates with eBay allowing you to easily add items purchased from the auction site to your showcase. The site was just announced Monday but already features dozens of collections from stamps to paperweights to toys.

I honestly cannot understand how someone a) can leave their child in a car long enough for them to die (accidentally or intentionally) and b) why we (government, the public) think that a slap on the wrist warning is punishment enough for parents who do it. I've written about this every Summer when I see the stories start rolling in about kids dying from hyperthermia in their parents' car. In many cases the perpetrator is young and stupid and does some jail time (the young woman who left her kids in the car while she stopped to buy drugs comes to mind). But in many others, the parent should have known better, the child dies, and the parent gets off with a warning because the whole thing was a tragic accident. An accident! Why is it an accident when a parent leaves a child to die in a car while he goes into a store to buy groceries?

Amit at Photojojo.com (the best photo DIY projects, tips, and gear) wrote in to us about some neat toys that you can personalize with your own photos. I love my digital camera and I take a lot of photos with it but I hardly print any. Not only are these toys fun, they're a way to preserve your precious photo memories in a physical form. Projects include jigsaw photo frames (pictured right), a custom photo Rubik's cube, photo building blocks, and a lot more.

TLC's new reality show Bringing Home Baby takes us along for a peek at how rookie parents handle their first few days with their newborn. Each episode showcases a different family as they experience the first 36 hours at home. Some of the upcoming episodes are 20 Year Old Mom about single mom Nataly, Preemie Goes Home about a baby born seven weeks early, and Hipster Baby about Cheyenne who won't stop crying. The wife and I recently decided that we're stopping at two so this show comes at a perfect time for us. Now we can catch two episodes of video birth control every weekday this month on TLC.

The so-called Mosquito alarm is a high-frequency sound that can't be heard by most people over 20. It was invented to repel teenagers from places where they're not wanted or allowed to congregate. But some resourceful teens have recorded the sound and are now using it as a ring tone that their teachers can't hear. A teacher in Cardiff, UK, discovered the ring tone being used in his class when one of his pupils told him about it. "All the kids were laughing about something, but I didn't know what." It shows you how resourceful and how silly teens can be at the same time. I mean, why not just put the phones on vibrate? Read the full story at 24dash.com.

In 1983, Ronald Reagan proclaimed May 25 as National Missing Children's day as a way to raise awareness for this issue. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a 1999 study found:

• 797,500 children were reported missing
• 203,900 children were the victims of family abductions
• 58,200 children were abducted by non-family members
• 115 children were the victims of long-term kidnappings
• 2,000 children are reported missing every day
  

Visit missingkids.com to find out how you can help.

Why? Why? Why? Kids have an insatiable hunger for knowledge--not unlike Jaws' hunger for girls in bikinis. I do my best to answer the never ending torrent of questions, but one of them stumped me recently. They wanted to know how plastic drinking straws are made. And not just any straws but the bendable kind. I'm a dork, so here's what I found out. Modern plastic drinking straws are made by extruding melted plastic through a machine. I explained it by comparing it to the noodle extruder on a Play-Doh set. They're cut to length and then a crimping machine adds the grooves that allow them to bend ("then, kids, a machine bites the straw to make it bendy"). The spiral winding process used for making the first paper drinking straws was patented in 1888 by Marvin Stone but Ancient Sumerians, the party civilization of the Stone age, may have been the original inventors of the straw, using them for drinking beer. How Products Are Made is a great resource if you've got inquisitive kids in the house with manufacturing details on everything from acrylic fingernails to juice boxes to zippers.

Of course, the inevitable next question was "why did they drink beer?" Are you kidding me? Can you imagine raising kids in the Stone age? I'd need all the beer I could get my hands on.

Some days you just can't win, but I have a secret weapon. To children, a little water and some plastic can equal happiness. And since their happiness is my happiness, on Saturday, despite not having a working air pump, the Slip 'n Slide came out of storage. A Slip 'n Slide is a magical device that works like this: you put water and children in one end and ecstatic, slippery children come shooting out of the other end at high speed. A distant cousin to the Slip 'n Slide of my forefathers, this beast has no fewer than six inflation valves and a splash down pool at the end. But I'm nothing if not a giant gas bag, so a bit of minor dizziness and ten minutes later, the slide was ready for action. Putting lips to valves that have been in storage on the garage floor for nine months is disgusting, in case you were wondering, but it was worth it. On Saturday I was king of the world. I'm so grateful that sometimes it's this easy to make them happy.