Pedigreed Housewife World

CHRISTMAS PRESENT SPOILER ALERT!!!   GRANDPARENTS DO NOT READ THIS!!!!! As I’m sure everyone has noticed by the appearance of trees, lights, and holiday music, it’s that time of year again.   I, for one, LOVE Christmas time!   As soon as Halloween I open up the Amazon wishlists that I have for all of my family members and start buying Christmas presents.   By the way, the Amazon wishlist is amazing if you haven’t tried it.   All year long people mention things or you see things and think “I have to remember to get so-and-so that movie/book/keepsake for Christmas (or whatever holiday you celebrate).”   But when the pressure of Christmas time rolls around, you’ve long since forgotten what you wanted to get everyone and start to panic.   I just go onto Amazon year round and add things to a hidden wishlist (I have the kids’ wishlists listed publicly mostly so my parents and in-laws can see what the kids want for birthdays, Christmas, Valentines Day, Grandparents were thinking about you

I have it on good authority that by the end of next year Briana will need to recognize all of her numbers up to 10, which made me realize that I haven’t done much math with the kids yet.  I can’t believe it!  I LOVE math!  No really.  I LOVE math!  It’s like a puzzle with a definitive answer and you just have to move the pieces around to find it.  I’ll even share a little secret with those of you who don’t know this.  I was a mathlete growing up.  Yes, an “athlete” that competed in math competitions.  Hey, I was a real athlete/ volleyball, gymnastics, softball, basketball, and soccer player too, though in all honesty I was probably a better mathlete as a kid.  Until I had kids, I still judged the local MathCounts competition to pick the kids for regionals.  No teasing me!  Well, it’s time to right my wrong.  We’re going to spend the week looking at numbers in three separate ways: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For the last few weeks it has been raining off and on here and my ever-curious daughter, Briana asked me while driving home from school one day what makes rain.  I tell her that rain comes from when water on the ground like in lakes gets hot and floats up into the sky.  That’s called evaporation.  The floating water is called water vapor.  Then if the water vapor gets really cold, it will stick together and turn into a cloud.   That’s called condensation. If the cloud gets warm then it will evaporate again and the cloud will go away and there will be a nice clear sky.  If the cloud gets cold with all of that water in it, it will get heavy and turn back into water and fall back onto the ground as rain.   That’s called precipitation.  If it gets really, really cold then the rain turns into snow.  Then all of the rain on the ground forms lakes and oceans and that’s called collection.  So a cloud is really just a lot of tiny drops of water waiting to get hot and go away or get cold and tur

I was planning on doing experiments this week on the water cycle because Briana has been asking a lot about why it rains.   It has been a very rainy Fall here.   Of course, it doesn’t rain at all this week.   The one time I was counting on rain!   I check the weather forecast and see that it’s going to rain most of next week, so I decide to postpone rain experiments until next week. So what to do this week? Last week my cousin-in-law, Jessica, whose PhD work was on teaching kids to read with the help of media, commented on my Beginning the Basics blog that, among other things, I should encourage story telling to help my girls with reading comprehension.   Briana likes to make up stories, usually so that she can talk when she doesn’t want anyone else to talk.   She interrupts my husband and I’s conversations all the time and tells us that we interrupted the story she was telling.   When we ask her what her story was, she tells us some variation on a princess story or a story about L

I usually don’t blog about the everyday learning things we do.   It would be pretty boring to read that we sat around the playroom floor counting how many times we could jump or reading a lot of books everyday.   But in this one case, I’m making an exception because I have found a lot of interesting info on teaching the kids to read and I thought I’d share the wealth. First of all, Briana has become very interested in reading since her 3 rd birthday.   She wants to know how to spell everything and she wants us to point out the words in the books we read her, and I want to help her out, of course.   I googled ‘teaching toddlers to read’ and the resultant volume of contrasting information made me want to continue on our slow, random path of learning letters.   But I diligently poured through the info anyway and stumbled upon a couple of homeschooling sites that say all of the “Your baby can read” style teaching methods are flawed because they force your baby to memorize thousands of

My wonderful friend and blog reader, Tina, emailed me a suggestion for something to do with the kids this week based on an article that she read on MSNBC.   The article is titled ‘Moms, teach your daughters about money too’ and is about a recently widowed woman who realizes that she, and hence her kids, don’t have the understanding that they need to manage the family finances when her husband passes away. http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/39689446/ns/today-money/ Now, I am probably the last person you should ask about financial matters.   When I first graduated from undergrad and was starting my first real job, I got some advice from a coworker with who was close to retirement that has been my investment strategy ever since: “If you don’t know what you’re doing with your money, every time an opportunity comes by that doesn’t seem too risky, if you can afford it, put any extra money you have in it.   That way, when you figure out how to invest well, you’ll have some things to start wi

My Briana has become obsessed with watching Mommy get ready in the morning. The whole 5 minutes of it. She scrutinizes my face washing, deodorizing, and quick, sloppy make-up application like she's a cosmetology student and her future career depends on perfecting her craft.   Of course she also wants to join in and every now and then I let her use a chapstick to make her lips "all shiny like Mommy's".   As a kid I could wear some makeup, but I was never allowed to wear “rouge” (ie. blush) which my Dad for some reason believed to be a catalyst to becoming a “lady of the night”, so I have a probably unhealthy fear of letting my kids wear make-up too early, but I try to let go of that this morning and get ready for some fun with chemistry. Time To Talk- But first, I stress to the kids that before you can put things on your face, it’s important to know how to take care of your face.   You have to wash it to keep it clean.   I also share my mother’s skin care secrets-