To be fair, it can be tough to maintain a healthy diet for ourselves, let alone our finicky little people — we’re surrounded by sodium, sugar, and preservatives, and any thirtysomething parent who still feels the residual tingle of childhood when walking past those brightly colored boxes of Trix and Cap’n Crunch in the cereal aisle should be able to sympathize with the junior set’s hunger for junk food.

The Lunch Love Community Project is here to help.

Will they make it so Pop Tarts aren’t so sinfully delicious, and beets taste like something besides dirt? No. But they are offering support and guidance to parents who want to help their kids eat healthy food, starting with — you guessed it — school lunches. Observe:

To learn more about the project — and see more videos — visit their site here.

Disney took some heat for the way Earth was assembled, and perhaps rightly so; it’s basically a boiled-down version of the BBC’s mammoth Planet Earth series, and though it uses some footage that wasn’t aired on the show, it’s still mostly reheated goods. But nobody wants to watch seven and a half hours of anything in a theater, and this is Disney — they’re aiming Earth at kids, whose attention spans are built for the film’s 90-minute length. This is actually one of the first projects from the studio’s new Disneynature banner, intended to expose the Disney demographic to the sights and sounds of the world around us, which is awfully hard to complain about. Even if you were enthralled by Planet Earth during its TV run, in other words, don’t be so quick to write off Earth as its shrimpier cousin; in any house with kids, it’s got a charm all its own.

As you might expect, the movie’s narrative structure is also condensed. Led by some typically stentorian narration from James Earl Jones, Earth follows the travels (and travails) of three animal families — polar bears, elephants, and humpback whales — as they migrate in search of food, water, and shelter. Given the film’s target audience, it should not surprise you that it’s been carefully edited to omit most of Mother Nature’s darker side; although we do see some heartbreaking stuff, and there is a fair amount of animal-on-animal violence, there isn’t much in the way of blood and guts, and a precocious four-year-old should be able to take all of it in stride — with parental supervision and discussion, of course.

For adults, Earth might prove to be a bit of a snoozer, but if you’ve invested in a 1080p screen, you’ll get a kick out of how unbelievably lovely these scenes are, and how they jump off the screen. It’s a film the whole family can enjoy — for different reasons, of course, but so what?

Like other recent Disney releases, the Earth Blu-ray comes bundled with a DVD version, but the extras don’t end there. You also get a series of picture-in-picture “filmmaker annotations,” in which the folks behind the scenes talk about how different scenes were shot, which footage was left behind, and more. There’s also a 45-minute behind-the-scenes documentary, as well as a nifty little wrinkle called “Living Menus,” which lets you use the menu (updated using your Blu-ray player’s wi-fi connection) to access additional text and video information about various hotspots around the globe. On the short list of Blu-ray discs that are worth your $25, Earth ranks near the top.

Purchase Earth at Amazon on Blu-ray or standard DVD.

Brady Rymer – Here Comes Brady Rymer and the Little Band That Could (2008, Bumblin’ Bee)
purchase this album (Amazon)

Kids’ music has come a long way from the says when its creators were expected to treat their listeners like tiny little mental patients, but even in this golden age of non-nauseating listening choices for parents, some of the old rules still apply. For instance, most kids’ album artwork is still done in bright colors, and filled with pictures of performers proudly displaying open-mouthed grins — and the songs themselves often tend to be overly sweet or self-consciously wacky. As adults, we often count ourselves lucky if we can remember our younger, sillier selves, but what we forget is that kids don’t always feel like acting goofy, and even though they think fart jokes are funnier than the average adult, they’re also capable of serious thought and occasionally startling insight.

Brady Rymer‘s latest release, Here Comes Brady Rymer and the Little Band That Could, shouldn’t exactly be your first stop for serious thought or insight, startling or otherwise — but it doesn’t pander to its audience, either. This is relatively smart pop music that just happens to be aimed at kids, and although it lacks the sort of crossover non-breeder appeal enjoyed by, say, They Might Be Giants, it’s still a deeper, more relaxed, more thoughtful collection than you might think after looking at the cover.

This is no accident; as a member of From Good Homes, Rymer released a handful of rock records in the ’90s, and toured with big names like Davids Byrne, Crosby, and Matthews. He calls his songs “music for kids with a rock ‘n’ roll heart,” and even if that overestimates the material’s actual rock quotient, it’s close enough to the truth to explain how he’s managed to make five kids’ albums (and counting). He’s a likable frontman with an honest voice, and the songs have some wonderfully positive energy; Rymer even has the good taste to end the disc with a cover of Pete Seeger’s “Well May the World Go.” Your kids probably won’t care about that last item — at least, not unless they’re like my three-year-old Seeger groupie of a daughter — but they’ll still enjoy Here Comes Brady Rymer and the Little Band That Could, and so will you.

Tired of listening to your kids’ same old CDs over and over again? Jitterbug is here to help! The site seems to be in something like beta right now, with just a handful of artists available, but the premise is awfully cool. In the site’s words: “Discover great independent music for kids. we hand pick the good stuff…you won’t find Barney here.”

It’s a sentiment I can’t argue with, certainly, and I can personally vouch for Jitterbug’s appeal to one particular three-year-old who told me, after watching one video, “I love this site.”

What would be nice is the ability to stream a Jitterbug radio station, or download a Jitterbug podcast — hand-picked content aside, the site is essentially just acting as a portal for embedded content that seems to be mainly hosted elsewhere. Once Jitterbug gets its legs, hopefully they’ll add some of the extra functionality that will help turn them from a video gateway into a must-visit site for the “hip kids” they’re targeting in their manifesto.