Pedigreed Housewife World

The kids are still excited about learning about the world so we do it for one more week. Moviendo a Mexico Briana got up from her siesta on Thursday and asked me, “Mommy, where does Dora live?”  I told her, “Mexico”.  “Can we go there this week?” she asked.  Happy to oblige. While Abigail continued to sleep, Briana and I went to nickjr.com to print out some pictures of Dora to color while we waited.  While we colored I asked Briana if she remembered how to count to 10 in Spanish.  “Uno, dos, tres….” She counted while we colored.  Briana and Abigail can both count to ten in Spanish already thanks to Dora and Diego.  On occasion they can get to 15 correctly.  Abby sometimes gets confused and will count to 10 in English and then continue on saying “once…doce…”.  It cracks me up every time and then I correct her as to what was “English that we speak” and “Spanish that Dora speaks”.  This confusion, however, is exactly why we haven’t pursued learning another language yet, although I kno

The next few weeks, the kids and I are going to explore the world…in our imaginations.   Our “travels” will be the next few blogs.   I’ll probably do one or two more depending on how much the kids and I are enjoying it. One of the things that I’ve always dreamed of doing with my kids was to pick a country and have everyone in the family research that country and bring one interesting factoid about it to dinner.   My factoid would always be the food.   That way we could eat some version of authentic food (or as close as I could come to cooking it) and talk about a new country and their culture.    Maybe I’d have everyone pick a category each time, like music or famous people or current events or whatever so everyone didn’t bring the same piece of info.   Before my husband and I had kids, we used to love learning new languages together (Italian, Japanese, etc.) and then travelling to that country to try out our newfound language and experience the culture of that location.   By the w

Both of my kids know their basic shapes (square, triangle, circle) very well.    Briana even knows all of the basic extended shapes (pentagon, octagon, star, oval, rectangle, heart, and diamond).   Abigail gets the extended shapes correct some of the time but not always yet.   I credit the kids’ love of puzzles, specifically the Melissa and Doug puzzle that shouts out each shape’s name in a weird monotone if you put it in the correct space. At this point I think that there is a diminishing return in adding dodecahedron to their vocabulary or splitting the triangle into isosceles and equilateral and the rectangle into a parallelogram and a trapezoid.   That being said I do want to expand on their knowledge of shapes (and spending the day on shapes will reinforce what they already know too).   So this week I will literally expand the shapes for the kids- Squares into cubes Rectangles into boxes or cuboids Circles into cylinders and spheres Triangles into pyramids and cones First we

As the school year starts to come to a close, and we prepare for next year, I’ve been going to many preparatory meetings at the kids’ school about next year.   Of all of the information I was inundated with, one alarming fact, which was actually said offhand in response to a question, stuck out.   Many kids nowadays don’t have the coordination and hand strength to tie their shoes or even to write.   Apparently when we substitute things like climbing trees for video games and written letters for emails, our kids are losing the muscles in their hands.   It was said that most kids by what I think was 3 rd grade don’t have the muscles in their hands to write a multiple page paper at one sitting.   It was also said that most Kindergarteners not only can’t tie their shoes, but have never even been presented with the opportunity to try to tie their shoes in today’s world of slip-ons and Velcro.   That’s really alarming (and sociologically interesting) to me! So today I want to work on de