Welcome back to Gear Daddy I am your host Daddy Troy. You know when I was a kid, I did some pretty crazy things with fireworks. When I am a Dad, I’m a little more concerned with safety. So in today’s episode, I am going to share with you some of the most common injuries surrounding fireworks, as well as provide you with some safe and fun alternatives.

In United States each year, over 9600 people go to the emergency room for firework related injuries. Interestingly enough, over three quarters of those are male, which I think is a clear indicator that the fireworks industry has it out for men. Joking aside, if you have a boy in the house or men in the house who likes to play with fireworks, you might want to warn them that guys tend to get injured a lot from fireworks.

On a more important point I think for us as parents that over a third of those 9600 injuries are the kids under the age of 15. What is the most common injury? Well, it is the standard all black cat, the standard all fireworks. They are the most ubiquitous.

The second most common injury, what do you think? You think it is the Roman candle? You think it is the bottle rocket, maybe the smoke bomb—none of the above. The second most common injury is the seemingly benign sparkler. I think this is really important for parents to know because the second most common injury causing firework is one that we tend to give to younger kids thinking that is the safe one to give to them, so be careful as you give these out.

And the third most common injury comes from bottle rockets. So what are you going to do as a family if you decide that you are going to be a fireworks-free-family for this holiday season?

I think the easiest thing for you to do is to get a bunch of glow in the dark toys. This light up, kids really, really love them and provide hours of fun. There are two types of glow in the dark toys. They are kind that you click chemicals mix and they start to put off light for the next 6 to 12 hours. The second type are kinds that absorb light and once they have absorbed light, they will re-emit it for a little while and you have to recharge them.

There are tons of types of glow toys now and the most common ones are these bracelets that you can put on right here on to your son or daughter’s wrist. These things come with a lanyard that the kid can then put on and put it around his or her neck, which inevitably does not get use that way. Instead, it is get used as a thing that spins round and round, pop until it hits some kid in the eye and then becomes equally unsafe as fireworks.

When it comes to colors for these, you can get bluish colors, kind of an indigo color and a red color so you can stick with the holiday colored theme. You do not have to go just with nuclear green.

There are tons of glow in the dark toys of the kind that absorb and then reemit light. You got some snakes here. You have got this bouncy ball. You even have glow in the dark chalk which provides for a great afternoon. You can plan out a whole little thing. You can also have glow in the dark paint and make t-shirts for the whole family days in advance. Glow in the dark gel, and if you get really adventurous, you can get a science kit—a glow in the dark fun lab from Scientific Explorer.

And where can you get all of this? You can get it at a party superstore. You can get it at a dollar store. They tend to have a lot of glow in the dark toys. You could also get them online. A place I shop sometimes for party favors is called the Oriental Trading Company and they can give you like a huge giant batch of this so you can buy them in bulk. You keep them for the whole year for other family parties.

So if you have opinion about fireworks or just want to tell us some crazy stories, something you did when you were a kid, go to dadlabs.com, upper right hand corner and click on the DadLabs script. It is where we discuss things that are related to dads. We will see you next week on Gear Daddy and all week long at dadlabs.com