Pedigreed Housewife World

 This week our neighborhood had ‘Touch a Truck Day’, which is a time when all city vehicles (police, army, fire, ambulances, ice cream trucks, etc.) are on display for the kids to climb in and pretend to drive.   The kids love going and sitting in the ambulances and the police cars.   This year there was a real fireman hose and the kids got to put out a pretend fire with the real hose – clearly the highlight this year for them.   For me the best part was the mobile police headquarter van, which was straight out of any heist movie you’ve ever seen.   Super cool.   Anyway, at the event the girls were given, among other things, rulers and they were dying to use them. So after they got up from their naps on touch a truck day I set out to teach them how to use a ruler.   This is a great and fun way to practice visual number recognition (versus rote counting) and addition.   I point out each number from 1 to 12 along the ruler to the kids.   Then I tell them that those numbers tell you h

Since the predicted neverending rain will spoil my plan to teach the kids about sunblock – stay tuned for next week assuming we finally get sun – I stayed up thinking about what else I should teach the kids this week.  The biggest thing that’s going on in our house right now is that my sweet little Abigail is now well into her terrible twos and gets very frustrated when she cannot express herself.  Abigail has developed a hilarious behavior along those lines.  If she doesn’t know the word for something, rather than restructure her sentence, she puts the word “tompomp” in for whatever word she lacks.  Tompomp can be any part of any sentence.  Although that satisfies her need to complete her sentence as intended, it does not satisfy her need to have others understand that sentence and leads to a high level of frustration for poor Abby.  So we’re going to work on building our vocabulary this week. I chose 3 games to play throughout the week to this end. 1.      Cranium Cadoo 2.      Pict

Last week we spent the week down at the shore house.   The kids are crazy about the water so we spent as much time as we could at the beach.   One day we were sitting in the sand just far enough in that when the waves came in we’d get soaked and pushed around a bit, but not so far that we’d have to test out the Coast Guard approved life vests that my kids seemed to be the only kids on the beach wearing.   Better to be safe than sorry!   Briana looked at me and said, “Mommy, what makes the waves keep on coming?”   I told her that I didn’t know and thought maybe it had something to do with the rotation of the Earth.   She thought that someone must be pushing them that’s so far away we can’t see them pushing the waves.   I promised that I would look it up and let her know.   So that night I did; however, in the morning the in-laws/ grandparents arrived and, as it should be, the kids would much rather have fun running their grandparents ragged than finding out what caused the waves.  

My kids are pretty good at greeting people.  If you put your hand out, they both know how to shake your hand and say, “Hi, I’m The Briana.  Nice to meet you.”  Or “Nice a meet you a Abigail.”  Hey, they’re not perfect just yet, but they get the basic gist.  In fact, I have never been prouder than at Briana’s 3 rd birthday party when she walked around and greeted every single one of her guests with an equally enthusiastic, but tailored to the person greeting.  Some kids got squeals and jumping up and down greetings with big hugs, others got a polite but genuine, “I’m So happy that you came to my party!”, and still others who seemed shy or overwhelmed when they arrived got a big smile, a “You came to my party!”, and a quick hug.  And for the record, she wasn’t coached at all – it was her party and she could have done whatever she wanted to.  So many people commented on how she greeted every single child that showed up for her party.  As much as I’d love to take credit…ok as much as I di