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...

While we were on a Look and See Adventure this week (for some reason these never seem to get old to any of us), we came across a big open field with trees lining the back of the field.   It was breathtaking and there was no traffic on the road so we pulled over to admire nature’s beauty for a few minutes.   Briana asked me why there are no trees on the field part and I told her that someone most likely chopped them down.   She wanted to know why someone would cut down a tree so I told her that we make paper and lots of things out of trees.   She followed up by asking why didn’t they cut down all the trees then and make more paper.   I told her that we didn’t want to cut down all of the trees because they give us air to breathe and they give all the little squirrels, that Abby was cooing are “so cute”, some place to live.   As we drove along, Briana kept asking about how and why we breathe trees and I explained to her that we breathe out carbon dioxide an...

This week I want to teach the kids a more advanced version of cause and effect, primarily to help me when I say, “if you do X again, you will go to time out”, but also to further develop their thinking skills in general.  They understand simple things like if they push a button on one of their toys, a lion will pop up and I want to take that a step further. In this case, the thing that I wanted to teach the kids was the feedback loop.  In other words, it’s one thing to think through the steps to get something done.  What I find interesting is the ability to foresee how those steps will make the final result turn out and then, ahead of time or after a trial run, revise the steps to optimize the final result.  Did I lose you?  In the lion toy example for instance, I want the kids to be able to think “I want the lion to pop up and throw me a piece of paper.” and then realize that they need to wad a piece of paper up of the correct size (experimenting to find that...

We met with Briana’s Montessori teacher this week to get ready for the new school year, and Briana sat down to write her name on a piece of paper for fun.  It wasn’t that bad, nor was it as good as she used to be able to write.  Everyone slides back a little during the summer, but I think we could use a back to school crash course this week to get back into the mindset of the school year. The priorities (ie the stuff that we let slide this summer) –             Letters and numbers            Shapes and color         Table manners 1. Letters and Numbers Refreshing our letters and numbers was the easiest of the three because letters and numbers are everywhere (all of their tv shows deal with letters or numbers, and of course books) so the kids are constantly seeing and talking about them.  I have been working on not doing everything for the kids that they can do for themselves...