Pedigreed Housewife World

By now my kids are well accustomed to me chasing them around with a camera.   They also like to turn the camera around and take pictures of me by themselves.   Since the camera is a mainstay in our house, I figured I should teach the kids how it works. We start by making a pinhole camera.   This is super easy to do.        Take a cylindrical cardboard oatmeal box (any empty cardboard box should work).      Poke a hole in the center of the bottom of the box with a pencil.      Put wax paper on the other end (the open side) of the box Done.   We sit in Briana’s slightly darkened room (rainy day about 5pm) and turn on her princess lamp.   We pull a blanket over our heads and stick the side of the camera with a hole in it outside of the blanket.   I tell Briana that if she points the camera at the lamp then we can see a picture of the lamp on the wax paper. As an aside,...

While I was hanging out with some of my friends, one of my friends mentioned that her nanny taught her girls the following song.   “Stop! Don't touch me there. This is my private square.” While singing the song she made a square from her shoulders to her knees.   The song is intended to teach the kids about personal space boundaries.   Just typing this much is making me squeamish already and my first thought was that there was no way I wanted to touch this topic with my kids this early.    It’s not just that I don’t want to talk about private parts with my kids; I more worry about them asking me why because I hate to give the children answers like “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”   At the same time, I don’t have a good answer as to why someone can’t “touch me there” for my 2- and 3- year olds.   Ug!   I reflected on it for a couple of days and late Sunday night I decided that it is part of my job as a parent to teach my kids everyt...

 Briana is getting pretty good at “reading”, And this is a skill that I want to keep feeding. By “reading” I mean that she can tell you the first letter of phonetic words- each day better and better.   She can use that to find words in her books, and then grins at me with the proudest of looks. Ok, no way I can keep that up for the whole blog.   We’d all go nuts. Briana has a book series, by Nora Gaydos, where every sentence is the same except for one word, like “I have one scoop on the cone.   I have two scoops on the cone.”   She can count the scoops and then say “Three begins with T.   There’s the word three!” while pointing to a word that begins with T.   Of course sometimes she ends up pointing to the wrong T word and we’ll correct her and say “No, that’s the word the” and sound it out for her and tell her to look again for three.   She is incredibly proud of herself for learning to read and is ready to “read the whole w...

This week we were inundated with back-to-school activities – picnics, ice cream socials, drop-in days, etc.   Watching my girls play at the picnics it became glaringly obvious that we live in a very girly world.   My kids don’t even have bats and gloves and when we play with balls it tends to be to line them up in a row and make a wall for our castle.   I do exercise with the kids pretty much daily but we tend to run or bike, and right now Abby is in gymnastics and Bree takes ballet (and swimming at school).   My husband sees sports knowledge as his domain so he decided that on Labor Day weekend he wanted to have some Daddy time to teach the girls some sports. In addition to learning sports so the kids can make Daddy look good at the picnics, sports are important for the physical, mental, and psychological development of toddlers.   Physically, learning sports will help improve their reflexes, keep them fit, help develop their bones and muscles.   M...