10 Best Tips to Keep Your Child (And You Too) Safe

The best rule of thumb when it comes to safety, is "plan ahead, and be prepared, then plan some more". No one wants their Halloween turning into something really scary.
Halloween remains one of my most favorite nights. Coming from a large family, we had the safety part of our Halloween Evenings down. Here's a lifetime (all 32 years of it) of Halloween Safety Tips for you and your family to use. I'm using them this Halloween as I go as a plus size ######y Venus in my Halloween Costume. My daughter was thinking of going as a regal Hera!
The Costumes themselves seem to cause the most problems:
- Take a good look at the costume. Is it safe? Is it fire proof? Are the eye holes large enough to see through, and, allow peripheral vision?
- Are there long flowing robes tailling behind your little one that may get caught in the shoes...or entangled in the trick-or-treater behind him?
- Is the costume bright and reflective? Consider adding a bit of reflective tape or striping to costumes and trick-or-treat bags for greater visibility.
- If your child is carrying some type of prop, such as a scythe, butcher knife or a pitchfork, ensure that the tips are smooth and flexible enough to not cause injury if fallen on.
- Place emergency identification (name, address, phone number) discreetly within the costume or on a bracelet. This is a great time to teach your young ones your home phone number and how to dial 9-1-1 if they have an emergency or become lost. Remind them that 9-1-1 can be dialed free from any phone.
- Unless there's one built in, have your young one carry a flashlight. Make sure each child has a flashlight with fresh batteries. Bring along some chemical lightsticks just in case. Also, this would be a great time to buy fresh batteries for your home smoke alarms.
Safety around the house is also important:
- If you've put out jack-o-lanterns on your porch with candles in them, then get on your knees and see the perspective a youngster might have on Halloween. Ensure that those jack-o-lantern's are far enough out of the way to prevent kids costumes from accidentally being set on fire. This would be a great time to review with your children the principle of "Stop-Drop-Roll", should their clothes catch on fire.
- Since you're already on your knees, make that extra effort to eliminate tripping hazards on your porch and walkway. Check around your property for flower pots, low tree limbs, support wires or garden hoses that may prove hazardous to young children rushing from house to house.
- Kids always want to help with the pumpkin carving. Don't allow small children to use a sharp knife to cut the top or the face. There are many kits available that come with tiny saws that work better than knives and are even safer too, although you can be cut by them. It's best to let the kids clean out the pumpkin and draw a face on it, which you can carve for them.
- Look over the candy your children received tonight. Have them dump it out all in different parts of a large room so they won't complain about their sister or brother's candy getting mixed in with theirs.... Now, look at it closely, all of it. No fruits (razor blades), No torn packages, no "loose-fit" wrappers, nothing that's suspicious. You must do this as the little ones are simply too concerned about eating it than inspecting it for themselves,Nike Shox R4!
Now, although this is a great bit of advice, it technically has nothing to do with safety...but it could prevent your kids from getting sick on over ingesting all that collected booty: Jedi Mind Trick #1. Make Halloween really fun. Take the kids out to eat before the trick-or-treating kicks off. Let them get filled up at dinner, and they probably won't be tempted to burn through their booty of candy at the end of the night.
Happy Halloween!
Again, I would like to mention that the focus of this article is not how to be a creative artist and express yourself through your music, but solely about how to make music that will eventually lead you to SIGNING A RECORD DEAL.One thing you have to remember when following this method is that "popular" trends change quite often in the music industry. What is popular today might not be popular tomorrow. So, you have to be able to determine when a trend is growing and when a trend is on the verge of extinction, because you don't want to spend 6-12 months creating an album worth of material only to find out that no-one is listening to that sound anymore. For example, if you are creating music in the Rap genre, you don't want to use rap music beats from the 90's, but you want to be sure you are using rap music beats that sound like they were produced in the year 2009!
While there are no hard and fast rules to determine how long a trend will exist, use your better judgment. For example, I will use the Hip-Hop industry and one of its most popular trends of the 2000's. Approximately five years after T-pain exploded onto the scene with his unique use of Auto-tune and the Vocoder, nearly every popular song in the Hip-Hop Genre today in 2009 is incorporating those elements. It has gotten to the point where popular rapper Jay-Z recently released a song titled "Death to Auto-tune." Now this should be a clear indicator to anyone in the Hip-Hop genre that this trend is on the verge of extinction, but soon a new trend will grow in popularity to replace the old and YOU WILL BE READY!