Pedigreed Housewife World

The most common thing you hear about summer as it relates to kiddies it that they forget a huge portion (usually said to be half, but that can’t be true, can it?) of what they learn all year over the summer. So every so often we do something to spark what we learned all year. We do lots of little things, integrated into our fun time like:    ü   When we’re in the pool we talk about whether our toys or ourselves are more or less dense than  the water.    ü   When we’re on a roadtrip we talk about how far we are from where we are going (whether I plan to or not) and what state we are in and which states touch it, or start with the same letter, or are bigger or smaller than the one we are in.    ü   When we have snacks we try to count how many we have or do the math problems of we started with x and we ate y so how many should we have left?    ü   We always read. Stuff like that. As my planning turns from ...

So this isn't exactly instruction on a specific topic, like I usually do in my blogs. This week is mostly a creativity exercise with math and reading add-ons and summer survival tips. Anyway, without further adieu... I have been watching my girls at their gymnastics classes this summer.   Every week has a new theme – the Olympics week, horse riding week, etc.   What is interesting is that the activities they do don’t really change. On Olympics day they were vaulting for the Gold medal and got Olympics rings stamps and coloring pages. On horse riding day they were vaulting onto a horse, etc. Regardless, each week my girls were excited anew about their unique experience that day. The reason that I was reflecting on what made these same activities seem new is a situation that I think many parents (if not every parent) of preschoolers can relate to.   We have a Toys R Us’s worth of toys in our house, but “nothing to do”.   Usually my girls are in school for h...

School is out for the summer and to kick off the fun, I decide spend time encouraging the kids to use their imaginations a bit.   The kids, however, have their own plans for the first day of summer.   Abby dons her new dress (for the second day in a row) and Briana decides that she wants to spend the whole day in pajamas (a huge surprise for a morning outfit from my little fashionista).   Regardless of outfit choice, both agree that they want to spend the first day of summer vacation “doing science experiments”. Not to worry.   We’re not at an impasse.   I have been saving our crystal making supplies for just such a merger between imagination and science (or for a rainy day, whichever came first). The kids are ecstatic and can’t wait to start! I tell them that we are going to make magic crystals.   I even say “magic” with a mystical sounding, wavy voice to emphasize how cool it was.   My practical kids were not fooled, but just wa...

Our family loves to roadtrip.   As we get ready for the end of school, we have started talking to the kids about where we are headed this summer and Briana has become fascinated with tracing out the many possible paths we could take on her US states coloring placemat.   Pretty much regardless of where we are mapping, she likes to see if she can make us go north through Michigan so that she and Abigail can laugh uproariously about us having to turn our car into a boat to get across Lake Michigan.   Hey, if Rocket can do it, why can’t we (Little Einstein’s tv show reference for anyone reading without little ones who watch that show)? While the kids trace out possible routes with their fingers, we talk about whether we are going north, south, east, or west to reinforce that vocabulary.   In addition to reinforcing the names of the directions, I want to take this time to teach the kids more about the states’ names and location within the US, so we start wit...

With Memorial Day is coming up this weekend, I remind the kids of what we are celebrating.   Rather than tell them that we are commemorating those who have fallen in war, which is the true intent of the holiday, I opt for a less macabre explanation for my 3- and 4-year olds.  We are celebrating all of the soldiers who save us.   Briana asks me how the soldiers find out that we are celebrating them and I tell her that they get letters in the mail.   The kids want to send letters in the mail to a soldier, but I don’t actually know anyone overseas right now.   I tell them that they can send mail to a friend of mine who is being deployed at the end of the summer, but they want to do it today.   Of course.   So, we pretend.   First we need a mailbox.   Luckily I got a shipment of coffees from Keurig today and have the perfect size box.    I also got a mug as a gift from the kids’ school so I can use that smaller box for extra...

One of my wonderful readers asked to share her story with us.  It is such an amazing story of cancer survival and I am happy to be able to post it for you all.  While outside of the blog I do not personally know Heather, her story touched me and inspired our activity today, which you will see posted after Heather’s story. Without further adieu – ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ It Takes a Village, or a few O nce I had a baby, I understood the truth behind the saying “it takes a village.” After being diagnosed with cancer, I know it takes not one but many villages. Following a normal pregnancy, my daughter was born healthy on August 4, 2005. Our village of parents, friends and relatives immediately enveloped my husband and me. Everyone visited to see Lily, and life was filled with so many good things; little did we know what lied ahead. I went back to work ...

Abby got some Elmo bath fizzies from one of her friends for her birthday and it has been a huge hit at our house.   I figure, what better time to sneak in some chemistry learning. Today we are making our own bath fizzies and working on some new scientific vocabulary (pipette, test tube, dissolve, and dilute). MAKING BATH FIZZIES First we make bath fizzies.   As a back-up, I make sure that we have some extra bath fizzies around so that I can switch them as we wait 24 hours for ours to set up if it looks like they won’t set up. I explain to the kids that bath fizzies are made up of a weak acid like citric acid in lemons and sodium bicarbonate like in baking soda.   Yes, I did tell the kids that.   I get asked all of the time if I really tell the kids the background info.   I do.   You never know what they’ll remember.   Then I simplify, usually with something that they can visualize – today I told them that if they took some lemon jui...