Adults. Like, WHAT?

 Most of our offspring are adults now.

Just putting it out there 😆

Useful school/educational websites and stuff

There are a lot of resources out there and educational games etc. As you have probably already noticed, some are great and some are dire... Here's what we've found (but every kid is different so, as always, what one loves another will hate):

Games:
Most games are repetitive exercises disguised in various formats - which is not a bad thing, certainly helps practice & reinforce what they are learning. The ones I would recommend for K-2 based on our experiences are:
Reader Rabbit - spelling, reading
The Jumpstart series - a lot of different areas - maths, english, music...
Boost Maths from the Learning Ladder (they also have the start stile which is fabulous as well, and I notice there is now also Boost English - we haven't tried that one) - Maths practice with rewards as games (or you can add parent rewards as well)
Zoo Tycoon - is a strategy game, can be played in sandbox mode for the littlies and can help promote reading (as they need to read the messages) and maths (to work out how many animals they have etc)
Clifford Phonics - english/spelling

Websites:
Spelling city - warning - it is American, so you need to be careful, teachers can use it to set up spelling lists & practice games
Mathletics - often schools have this as part of their program - it is very good for practising maths

There are more which I'll try & remember to put up here as I go... Also ask your teachers if they use The Learning Federation resources through Scootle - all DET schools and most NG schools have access to this.

the sun may not always be your enemy

interesting:

Sun may be a factor in food allergies

don't you think it's interesting that so far (touch wood) none of our lot have allergies, and we all have a relatively similar attitude to things like sun and germ exposure? there may be something, or of course nothing at all, in that.

hehe

Natural Parenting (I heart xkcd)

Some days

Some days you just want to sell them. Other days you hear things like this:

G! There's a rainbow.
(sound of screen door opening and closing)
C! C! Can you see the wainboww?
(they don't listen to each other either)

And you think, why can't they be like this all the time?
Five minutes later they were pulling everything out of the toybox and making a huge mess. Situation normal.

Cats getting their own way...

By crying like babies...

Foxing

Miss 3 was put to bed at 6.30pm last night because she was being vile. Her tantrum at being put to bed was rudely interrupted by falling asleep. That's what happens when you don't have an afternoon snooze. Shortly thereafter followed the first of three nightmares that made it difficult for me and her father to watch TV uninterrupted. Finally, the last one during Miss Marple saw her insist on sleeping on Mummy on the lounge. For the sake of my TV viewing I gave in. She fell asleep half an hour from the end, so it was all good. Then things wrapped up on Miss Marple, we turned off the TV and a little voice from my lap said "I want to sleep in Mummy bed". She didn't even open her eyes. I wasn't sure whether to be annoyed by her foxing, or awed at her awesome ninja pretending to be asleep skills. She slept in Mummy bed until 8am the little sod. Mummy got sick of being kicked and vacated at 6am.

This never gets old...

mineral oil can be a little freaky.

be warned, I do mention mortality and children in the same sentence.

a while back I found an article on the net (which I helpfully can't find now, but will keep searching) describing a child having a fatal case of pneumonia after inhaling a well-known brand of baby oil (which is made from mineral oil). I wondered at the time if this was trash journalism at it's best, because it just seemed so far-fetched. but when I ran it past TDN(tm), she nodded and said it was entirely possible. so I thought I'd better look further.

there's lots of information regarding mineral oil as used to treat constipation, and there's a number of articles about resultant pneumonia, with the recommendation that it be used with caution. nothing easily found about children not actually recovering from it, though.

then I remembered Snopes, and if you've never taken a poke around there, well... you can lose hours, except it can get well freaky in there, so be careful. they're independant urban-myth busters, and I don't use them as much as Coz, but I like to run all those stupid chain-mail emails thorugh the Snopes wringer.

so, Snopes says it's true, and I believe them. their information suggests that these sorts of cases has led to child-resistant packaging in the US.

the main reason I actually found that information is because I've gone off mineral oil in recent years. I'm annoyed it's just a by-product of making petroleum. it's cheaper to make than to dispose of. is it a complete co-incidence that mineral oil became more widespread after WWII and the increasing number of cars driven? on one hand it's meant to be inert, and on the other hand, it's a by-product of distilling crude oil. what do we do with all this stuff? market it, that's what.

anyway, I've found after a bit of trial and error (and irritation) that I can use some soaps. most commercial soap is just detergent in solid form (and therefore irritating), whereas properly made and aged soap is so much more gentle. I stress *properly made and aged*, because there's a whole lot of bad soap making and selling out there on the net. I have a milk soap and liquid wash which is creamy and foamy and has a nice smell... god, what a change. the end result is approximately the same - still need help from topical steroids, but I think that's better than having to use petroleum by-products over the entire body.

Tip #2

...and apparently, hairspray works really well for getting pen/texta off walls. I was about to give paint stripper Baijiu a shot...

Looking forward to 2020?

This little gem from one of our lecturers with a great sense of humour...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_veIGGP1Uh4

Laugh now, while we can....

Quote for the day...

"I won't be shy about my special horn again."

I have 'Thomas' on in the background and somehow managed to zone in just at that point...

Is it always like this?

I have just learned...

...that good ol' bum wipes are excellent for removing crayon, pencil & pen from off the walls.

Good tip, that!

Inside slide

We purchased a slide on the weekend from Sportsman warehouse, marked down from $200 to $50. Gem discovered it and was having a lovely time whizzing down it and wanted to take it home. I was about to grab her at the bottom and haul her back up the stairs, but stopped and picked up the price tag first, which was lying face down on the floor. $50 seemed to good to pass up, it will take kids up to 35kg (roughly 9 year olds) and so we decided to grab one.

On the way home, a crafty little voice from the backseat, belonging to Cha suggested that we could have it inside. This coincided neatly with me wondering where we could put it so it wouldn't get too hot to slide on. I was about to say 'oh don't be silly' when it occurred to me that keeping it inside would in fact be a great way of ensuring that it didn't get too hot. Slide builder, aka Dad also thought that putting slide together in the air con was a brilliant idea. So now we have an inside slide, which is really cool, except when the kids drag it into the kitchen when I'm trying to cook dinner.

The goodness of felt

Really as a PS to the cabin fever... Anyhow - felt is also a brilliant boredom buster, we made pincushions today, but for other ideas...

• homemade fuzzy felt
• felt clothes/spots/ears etc bits to toilet roll people/animals
• felt accessories for the dolls house/zoo animals/farmyard creatures
• for first sewing attempts
• for gluing together to make more permanent pictures/sculptures (think butterflies, flowers, beetles etc or whatever takes your kids fancy...). With the littlies probably best to do a bit of the cutting out pre-work
• homemade Barbie/dolls/teddies clothes to the child's specs
• for the older ones - needle holders (sandwich lighter fabric in a symmetrical shape with felt on top & bottom. Glue one half down solid - add needles to the other side so you can find them again, & yes I still use the one I was given when I was 5)

the list is endless - libraries always have a few kids craft books you can dig ideas out of.

Another one for odds and ends of wool besides the french knitting is those woven crossed sticks - remember doing them for fetes when we were kids?

Making the "chatterbox" out of different coloured squares of paper - can be used as just something to play with and get the fingers moving, add eyes/ears/tongue etc for animals, add messages or things to do for the "I'm bored" and go through the whole pick the colour & number routine to see what they get to do next

I'm sure there are also stacks of websites...

Cabin Fever

Crossposted from my blog

We have had some very cold days, where the wind chill has taken the temp down as low as -18. I wouldn't rug us up to go outside even if Pers & I weren't afflicted with the flu. So as you can imagine, cabin fever is kicking in and I'm about to commit toddlercide.

I just need some ideas, what do you guys all like to do with the wee-ones when you're hovelled up inside your 23rd floor appartment?

Well, you asked.

Noodle was told yesterday afternoon that if he had a sleep he could go to Billy Lids (indoor playground) in the afternoon. He happily trots off to be and then emerges some ten minutes later theatrically rubbing his eyes and yawning.
N: Can we go to Billy Lids now?
D: I said we could go after you had a sleep
N: I had a sleep
D: A proper sleep, not just ten minutes
N: I did have a proper sleep, I was asleep for hours and hours.
D: You were in there for ten minutes, that is not a proper sleep. What kind of idiot do I look like?
Noodle looks perplexed
N: What kind of idiots are there?

What’s with the Whiney voice?

And God, how do you stop it?
Age had one of ‘those days’ on Friday. Everything was answered with a contradiction, a whine or nagging.
By the time Mummy went to the grog shop for a much needed bottle of mother’s little helper I actually had to seriously ask myself if clubbing a four year old with a 2004 NZ Sauv Blanc would be so very wrong.
I can take pooh and wee and watching the same bloody episode of Ben 10 eleventy billion times. I don’t really mind being dragged to the park when I’d much rather be sitting on my fat ass watching Oprah. It doesn’t bother me that we read the same book 8 times in a row or soothing the ear ringing screams of agony that accompany a stubbed toe.
But the whiney voice, the oh-my-God-how-do-I-stop-from-killing-you whiney voice.
Fingers down a blackboard would be music to my ears compared to the whiney voice.
I don’t know what it is. Possibly the pitch of voice that can penetrate gums and vibrate teeth inside the jaw. Maybe the unreasonable nature of the request (but I must have chocolate for breakfast) or else it’s the sheer repartition. That you know in your heart it does not matter how you construct the answer the whine will just go on and on and on and on until you give in, your brain pops or you club the child. Possibly all three simultaneously.
I figure the whiney voice is somehow hard wired into the neo-cortex, thereby making it impossible to ignore.
Maybe cave children only used the whiney voice to inform mummy that there was indeed a slathering sabre tooth tiger at the cave door. Or the location of a rare yet nutritionally rich tree fungus.
I have no idea why it works, but please God, does anyone know how to make it stop?

dolls that don't make girls look like bimbos or whores

I can't remember how I found out about either of these, except that I stumbled across them on the net a while ago without actually searching - although I'd long wanted to know if dollies like this even existed. been meaning to post about them here, and now it's not long before Xmas, I guess a bit of potential-pressie-talk is pretty apt ;-)

Australian Girl Doll




they're the big dolly size, and a bit on the expensive side, but they look like they're a lovely quality doll. would be nice to see one in a shop to have a proper look. I think they've mostly managed to do it without being too stereotyped, except for the Almost-Bindi.


Only Hearts Club


these are from the US, and have such a wholesomeness to them that I scoured the website for religious content. hard-hearted cynical old me! couldn't find any, though... have seen these in a couple of shops now and think they are quite lovely.


of course, neither of them do boy dolls. crap. you stumble across the occasional boy baby, but the next step seems to be overly-muscled action heroes, or violent junk. where are the nice boy dolls? girls want to play with them too.

edit: forgot about the canny marketing exercise that is Diego, Dora's boy sidekick. he's okay, I guess. not offensive, at any rate. I used to think Dora was fine until I found Dora Xmas/Princess sparkly crown/tiara-type-affairs in Coles the other day. how do you keep that on in the jungle?

Big kid.

Diamond head turns four

Party time

No to put to fine a point on it, being a parent is the best thing in my life. In all of my life, like forever and ever.Being with AJ is a joy. I loves everything about him.As a four year old he:

Has a squirmy warm body that is delicious to snuggle against

He laughs like a drain

He says stuff like ‘ I can’t walk, mum. My legs are broken’

His skin is gloriously soft and unblemished

Except for the bits that are bruised, scratched and lumpy

He’s incredibly empathic

He hides his embarrassment by putting his hands on his hips and sticking his tummy out

His language skills are a work in progress. Slow, slow progress.

He has a dreadful singing voice

He now knows the value of sucking up

He loves Ben and Toby best

He likes Darcy, but I fear he’s just not biddable enough to be a best mate

He loves Alfie

The new pigeon wants a puppy books makes him squeal with delight

He is Ben 10 mad

He’s quite fastidious about hand washing

Happy birthday Whizz Fizz. This mummy couldn’t be any happier than when you are snuggled in my arms.