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This past weekend my daughter went to a birthday party where the activity was to make a mask out of clay. My daughter is almost four, while the party was for a bunch of seven year-olds (we’re friends with the family so she was invited), and she couldn’t do this on her own, so I had to help out. (It turned out that many of the seven year-olds also couldn’t soften the clay/shape it/cut it/attached parts to it on their own, but that’s not the point.)
After I helped my daughter get her huge chunk of clay into a mask that did actually look like a cat, it was time to paint it. My daughter jumped to it and as you can imagine, the colors were all over the place, the red from the mouth was running into the face, the brown from the nose was running into the mouth, and when she took a huge brush of yellow (to do the eyes, mommy!) it splattered all over the blue background color.
As I was watching her do this, I was having an internal debate. I can summarize it like this: Read the rest of this entry »
I’ll just come out and say it:
We rarely eat dinner together as a family.
Our daughter is three and a half and she goes to sleep at 7pm. She eats dinner around 5:30-6 — either with me or the sitter, depending on the day. If I eat with her, I’ll snack on something — but it’s too early for me to eat a full dinner and my husband isn’t home yet at that point.
My husband and I eat dinner together, but it’s often in front of the TV. We both work hard and this is our only time to unwind. I know we should be sitting at the nice dinner table, savoring our food, and discussing our day, but 70% of the time we’re too wound up for that. Read the rest of this entry »
I know that most of you know exactly what I mean when I say that when I picked up my daughter from school today I had an immediate sense that we had some sick days coming our way.
First of all, she took a nap there, which almost never happens. This means she was exhausted to the point of not feeling well enough to keep herself awake. She was also less cheerful than usual and refused her favorite snack in the car, which immediately struck me as odd. But mostly it was her eyes — they seemed glassy, you know, the kind of glassy a kid gets as they are getting sick?
We came home, my daughter went to read books with our babysitter, and I literally skipped steps to rush upstairs to my computer. First order of business was to email the ever-helpful husband to see if he could go in late tomorrow. (Answer is yes, which is great.) Second order of business was to create a quick list of things I MUST get done by end of day today given that my workday tomorrow will be a few hours long, if my gut feeling is right. Read the rest of this entry »
Today’s guest post is by Ashley O’Neill, who is an editor for The Savvy Source for Parents, an early childhood education website, and blogs there as “Coffee Queen.”
Yesterday, I took my daughter to the museum. She fancies herself quite the artist and asked if we could go. Being an art buff myself, I was thrilled to oblige. I’m always happy when she wants to do something that doesn’t involve buying new toys, and she actually is a pretty good artist. Who knows whether she’ll become the next Georgia O’Keeffe or Cindy Sherman, but it’s nice to see her find “her thing” in this world. Some kids love to dance, some love to play sports — she loves to draw. It’s her passion. Not only does she love to do it, but she’s proud of her abilities. Finding something that she’s good at has done wonders for her confidence and it makes her feel special.
As the summer approaches, like many parents, we’re faced with the question of how to spend our time — a question made even more significant by my working at home and needing to keep up with my work during those months when school is out. Should we spend our money on a really great vacation? Should we spend our money on a membership to a pool? Those are both things that all of us would enjoy (and enjoy a lot!), but they don’t help me with my work. Maybe we should spend our budget on summer camps for the kids? My daughter thinks those a lot of fun — and they will give me time at home alone to work — but my son is painfully shy and has terrible separation anxiety. I don’t see him enjoying going to bunch of new places. Maybe we should focus our summer on nurturing our daughter’s love for art? She would be thrilled to spend the summer in art classes and camps. But that begs the question: At what point do we, as parents, know when to focus on something like my daughter’s love for drawing?
This morning after I dropped my daughter off at her preschool, I was walking back to the car through the parking lot and realized that I was smiling. She is so happy when we get there in the morning, I love all the fun projects they have planned for the day, and I leave to start my work-day feeling pretty awesome about where she will spend the next six hours. That’s cause for a smile, don’t you think?
And then I remembered how anxious I was about her transition to preschool last summer. We’d had a full-time nanny before that and we loved her. She was really part of the family, my (slightly) older sister, as I’d call her. But we moved and our daughter turned three so it was time for her to be with a group of kids and in a structured environment. Since I tend to overthink things to begin with, you can imagine how far I took this: Read the rest of this entry »
My daughter is sick — for what seems like the hundredth time this winter — and her cough is keeping her up most of the night. Needless to say, all of us are suffering. We give her some Triaminic to help keep the cough down (as well as the fever when it spikes) and it seems to help just a bit. But I came across this article last night — as I was zombing around the Internet in the middle of the night, unable to fall asleep after another bout of her cough — about FDA’s recent warnings against giving cold medication to kids under the age of 2. According to the FDA:
Over-the-counter (OTC) cough and cold products should not be used to treat infants and children less than 2 years of age because serious and potentially life-threatening side effects can occur from such use.
As I read this I feverishly tried to remember whether we gave our daughter cold medicine when she was less than 2 and realized that yes, we did. She seems fine, but should we now worry about long-term side effects? Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday we had another in the series of oh-there-is-rarely-so-much-snow storms. When my daughter saw the snow falling outside she could hardy contain herself from running out in her pajamas. I convinced her that getting dressed first was a good idea and went looking for her snow pants.
They weren’t there.
They were hanging in her cubby back at preschool, from where I forgot to bring them home on Friday. Even though there was a chance of snow for the weekend. Even thought we always bring the 27 different things in her cubby home at the end of the week to sort through. I forgot them because while I was gathering up her stuff, talking to her teacher and listening to one of her friends tell me about his new Spiderman backpack I was also trying to find a number on my cell phone. (The reason I need the number was because I’d mis-scheduled a call and needed to cancel it. Another in the series of working mom missteps.) Read the rest of this entry »
We’re in luck: Asha, the publisher of Parent Hacks, offers this guest blog with some great holiday hacks for busy and tired parents. Wait, did I say busy and tired? I meant energized and thrilled for the holiday season….
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With the holiday season comes that curious double-edged feeling of joy and stress. All around us are images of pink-faced children and comforting food and lovingly-decorated homes and cherished traditions — it’s all so beautiful. What we don’t tend to see represented in these warm fuzzy scenes: the frazzled parents planning the parties and cooking the food and buying the gifts and fussing with the decor. Pulling off the holidays can be a full-time job in and of itself.
This month, Parent Hacks readers are sharing their best holiday hacks; tips for simplifying life and saving time, money, and mental health during this busy time of year. I’d like to share a few of my favorites with you:
Scaling down holiday gift-giving
Giving is a pleasure. And yet, the frenzied shopping and shipping circus bring down even the jolliest and most generous. Here are some ideas for keeping the focus on giving rather than gifts.
How to encourage family conversation around the table
Often, holiday gatherings are the only time extended family comes together. Keep the dinner conversation lively with these simple icebreakers. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday at the gym I overheard the following conversation between two men, probably in their mid to late 30s:
Very muscular guy #1: “So did you hear, Jack’s wife decided to turn down that job offer?”
Less muscular guy #2: “The one her old company gave her?”
Guy #1: “Yes, the promotion she got while being on maternity leave. It sounded like a sweet gig, but Jack told me that she likes being a stay-at-home mom and turned it down.”
Guy #2: ” So she is just going to stay home now with the kid?”
Guy #1: “I guess so, she said she likes it that way. I think Jack was disappointed.”
Guy #2: “Well, I see that. It’s kind of unfair - all the pressure is on him now. I mean, I think they are OK financially as long as he keeps his job, but he was talking before about looking around. Not sure he can do that now, right?”
Guy #1: “Yeah, I am not sure he is going to risk it without a second income as a security cushion. Tough for him.”
I have to admit that this was the first time that I’d been able to eavesdrop on a conversation two men were having about moms–usually it’s the women talking about each other’s or friends’ choices to work or stay home. I tried to not appear like I was listening, but I was struck by it. With all the issues and questions and personal quandaries that surround making the choice to stay at home or return to work after having kids, I have to admit that I’ve never seen the issue of whether this is fair to your husband or not come up. Read the rest of this entry »
Prelude: If you live in one of those enviable climates where the weather is perfect all the time, there is plenty of warmth and sunshine, and you don’t know what it feels like to break your ice scraper while trying to remove an inch of ice from your windshield, this is not a blog post for you.
It’s snowing.
Yep, the first year that we have a driveway to shovel, a car to clean off from snow (no garage here), and our daughter in daycare (which has snow days as opposed to our nanny, who didn’t), the first snow has come earlier than in many previous years. Most likely it will just be an inch or so, and might turn to rain by morning, so it’s not technically anything to worry about. (Funny enough, my daughter and I had completely different reactions to this not really being a storm. Me: “Oh, good, just a little snow.” Her: “Oh, no, mommy! There isn’t enough snow for a snowman and you promised that when I wore my warm winter coat there would be!” I miss being a kid.)
The potential–extremely unlikely in this case–of having a snow day on Monday got me thinking:
Why can’t we schedule snow days? Read the rest of this entry »