Browsing all posts in "Children".
Saturday Night Rules
Saturday night is date night. Not just for hubby and I, but for a large percentage of the world. Date night is a habit we got into long ago, when our lives were hectic and the kids were small. It was often just mom-isn’t-going-to-cook night, if we couldn’t get a sitter. We would put the [...]
You Can Take the Girl out of the City
One of the things we parents do to our kids is attempt to force down their throats foster a sense of appreciation for nature. To that end, then, we took Stretch out into the vast wilderness (sorta) with a two day trip to a local park. He was working on some scout stuff, and we [...]
Two Hours Later–I Get It–So Why Didn’t You?
Getting rid of a kid for a week during the holidays? Priceless. Actually, $60 and a two-hour orientation. The $60 was worth every penny. The two hours I can never get back. Normally, I avoid command performances more carefully than the plague. The plague I can cure. But there has never been a two hour [...]
Happy Birthday!
Today isn’t just Christmas. Today marks the birthdate of the greatest intellect in history. On December 25, 1642, Isaac Newton was born. When Newton was 25, he published the Principia, which laid out the laws of force and motion, gravity, and planetary motion. Newton invented calculus, proved that light is made up of a spectrum [...]
My Children’s Education Has Been Sadly Neglected (By ME)
I can’t blame anyone else, since I homeschool. And since it’s Christmas, I guess I’m doubly guilty. Here’s the story: Last week, I talked about working memory and a little cognitive theory. You all now know as much about it as I do, since I’m neither a psychologist or a neurobiologist. However, some time ago [...]
I’ll Be Home for Christmas (When I Wander In…)
My eldest drives home from college for the winter (Christmas? Hanukkah? Solstice? Mithra’s Birthday?) break. It’s a fifteen hour drive, as long as he avoids rush hours in any of the big cities he must drive through, and as long as they haven’t prepared in advance for all that holiday traffic by taking the ship [...]
The Mother’s Holiday Gift Guide for All Ages
Everybody and their dog is writing holiday gift guides. Not to be outdone, I have come up with my own (which my dog did not help write. But she did complain about dinner while I was writing it, which sorta counts). Ages 0-1: There’s a fire sale on Baby Einstein videos right now. So what [...]
The Mother’s Holiday Survival Guide
It’s that time of year again, when we engage in the ancient pagan ritual of stuffing ourselves until we vomit, followed by watching sweaty men engage in physical combat in an arena in the name of sport. [What? You think the Pilgrims invented overeating?] So, as we traipse across the country (or the city) to [...]
The Engineer Syndrome
The nice elderly gentleman bagging my groceries this evening spent a great deal of time stacking them just so. Then he rearranged them. Then stacked. Then rearranged. I must have been staring. Or maybe I had that impatient expression of someone who realizes that it’s 4:30 and she’s not getting any younger. He explained that [...]
Food Wars, Part 5,349
I have expounded, in the past, about the utility of a scorecard when dealing with a child’s food choices. I have since decided that the scorecard is irrelevant. Scorecards only work when the rules stay the same from one game to the next; if the rules of the game change, calculating the stats is virtually [...]
