10 uses of headlamp indoors

What do you use when you need extra, focused lighting: Flashlight? Lantern light? Smartphone light? Before smartphones, all we knew were flashlights. They are handy but hey always occupy one hand, leaving you only one hand to work with.

I always knew people used headlamps outdoors in the dark but until a friend of ours got one for my son for his birthday, I’ve never realized that headlamp is a household essential. For a while, it was just my son’s toy. Then it became an indispensable appendage. Besides its common use in dark conditions during outdoor adventures such as camping, biking, and caving, here are our favorite uses of headlamp at home by kids and parents.

1. Bedtime reading: Especially after parents tell kids to turn off the lights. In our household, reading is the most used weapon to drag the bedtime. After finding them reading with headlamps after the “lights off” order, I prefer to do a headlamp count at bedtime. But when they get ready for bed early enough, I’ll let them read in bed with the headlights for a while.
2. Indoor camping or sheet forts: One of our favorite indoor activities is camping indoors in an actual tent or a bedsheet fort with Fort Magic. The whole camping experience becomes more real and magical with headlamps.
3. Hide and seek in the dark: Only to be played at home. When you have kids for a slumber party, why not let them play hide and seek in the dark and have them try to find each other with headlamps?
4. Romantic dinners: Candles are out, headlamps are in. As much fun it is for the kids to eat with headlamps in the dark, it’s really uncomfortable when a glaring flashlight is directed into your eye in the dark. But you can see your food in fine detail.
5. Sneaking into your kid’s bedroom when they’re a sleep: If you have a low light setting on your headlamp, this is the time to use it. You can check on your kid, get something you need from the room or just spook them out in revenge for all the times you woke up to find them by your bedside staring at you in the middle of the night.
6. Cutting nails: Cutting children’s nails is tricky. I always get to the skin no matter how hard I try. Headlamp really helps to see better, if not, at least make you look like you are trying your best.
7. Minor check-ups: Removing splinters or thorns from little fingers or feet require superior visibility and I can’t do them without headlamps. You can also check up hurting throats or bleeding noses for quick diagnosis.
8. Cleaning up under the beds, nooks, and crannies: How about a game of finding lost toys and socks under the bed? The kid who finds the longest sought after item wins a trophy.
9. Repairing electronic or mechanic toys: Among my various hats as a parent, toy repair person is one of the highest regarded ones. The toys seem to get more and more complicated with smaller components and intricate mechanisms.  Headlamp lets you see better while you use both hands to figure out which cable to cut to stop the darn toy stop making annoying sounds, ahem, I meant to repair.
10. Sewing: Why do kids come and tell that they need to have a special costume for the next day right at bedtime? Or why do I procrastinate to do the sewing project the night before the deadline. But at least I have my headlamp to relieve the strain from my eyes because my sewing machine’s light is never enough at night.