In a day of quick fixes, fast food, instant information and trophies earned by merely  showing up, perseverance seems an old-fashioned virtue.   And, indeed, who can value perseverance when time in its most abbreviated form is often the best loved commodity of the two?!  

Few have so dramatically demonstrated the worthy quality of perseverance as Derek Redmond in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.   Enduring at least 13 operations on his Achilles tendon, Derek overcame much to appear in the 250 meter race that day, and many believe the world never saw his full potential on the track.   But what they did see that day was the love, the commitment and the perseverance of a parent/child team as Derek and his father hobbled across the finish line following a serious mid race hamstring injury.    Subsequently, Derek turned his skills and energies to coaching and motivational leadership, preparing a new British team to bring home the medals in the 2012 Olympics.

 “Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after the other”, noted the 19^th century American priest, Walter Elliott.   Parenthood, however, IS a long race full of many short races with ever changing scenarios and roles.   Just when our newborn falls into a regular napping or feeding pattern, it changes.   Potty training a toddler seems eternal.   Will our child ever use silverware or master the times table?   Suddenly it’s the periodic table…and, oh no, they’re driving!   

As it is with most character development, our role as parents is usually best accomplished through modeling.  Our children need to see US persevering to accomplish a goal, persevering through a difficulty, a loss or a fear.   When we have developed or ARE developing a particular character quality ourselves, we are best able to pass it along to our children.

We have limitless opportunities to strengthen our personal perseverance, as well as our child’s, to hang in there rather than throw in the towel, to demonstrate the value of encouraging, committed relationships, to choose to go on after defeat or failure, to go one mile more.   And with every small step forward comes the opportunity to celebrate.   Cheer the victories by the moment, the hour, the day, the week!  Exercised with a generous amount of patience, supplemented by healthy and encouraging friendships, honest feedback, and wrapped in unconditional love, the quality of perseverance can become a core strength of every family.   

So, eyes open!   The opportunities are all around you.   Watch for ways to stretch personally, and for that place where your child is learning something new, adding to a previous accomplishment, refining a behavior, overcoming a difficulty.   The character quality of perseverance will not only aid both of you in maximizing your unique gifts, becoming all you were designed to  be, but it will also carry you successfully through most of life’s rough waters.

-posted by Miss Colleen, who is grateful for both a father and a husband who modeled perseverance in spades!  “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”  -Winston Churchill  

I was making two dinners at once, plus preparing lunch for the next day (ultra-multi-tasking).  One recipe called for lemon juice, which I keep in a large jar in the back left of my fridge.  So I opened the fridge and pushed aside a bottle of something that was in the front of the shelf, keeping my hand on whatever it was to peer behind it. I saw yogurt, olives, feta cheese, salad dressing, vitamins and jam.  No lemon juice. 

So I pushed the bottle that was in my hand to the other side of the shelf and looked on the right side of the fridge; just cartons of milk.  Where was the lemon juice?  I always keep it on the top shelf toward the back left.  I pushed the “random bottle” in my hand back in front of the milk and peered in, getting frustrated.  The lemon juice jar would only fit on the top shelf so I knew it couldn’t be anywhere but on that shelf and I needed it now.  I could hear the garlic sizzling on the stove top, waiting for the lemon juice to be added.

I stared to stand up and call out an accusation of “Who took the lemon juice?” when I looked at the bottle that I’d pushed back and forth and was “holding” in my hand while I looked for the lemon juice. Yep, you guessed it…it was the jar of lemon juice itself.  I was so focused on it being in the “back left” of the fridge that I hadn’t even noticed that the very thing I needed was in my hand.

After rolling my eyes and saying a silent “thank you” that I hadn’t yelled at some innocent person (my husband) about the missing juice, I thought about how often something is right before my eyes but I become so focused on the long view that I loose sight of what’s right in hand.

Parenting can be this way. We can become so focused on our long range goals for our kids that we forget about the here and now.  Don’t get me wrong– I think we have to have long-range goals for our children.  Perhaps they’re academic (already eyeing a particular college), moral (instilling a particular religious belief), financial (wanting to raise a child who will be self-sufficient) or physical (training them in a particular sport).  For others, the goal of parenting may simply be “getting them out of the house in one piece at age 18” or getting them through the teen years “without strangling them.” 

Sometimes our focus is on the “end” of a season or time in our lives.  “When they’re finally potty-trained I’ll be able to…” or “When the turn five, things will be better…” is a common mom-thought and can become a goal that we’re focused on.

Serious or silly, years away or just a season of life away, where is your focus?  I encourage you not to become so focused on the long range or “someday” that you forget what you have in hand now.  You have a precious, unique opportunity today – to spend time being silly with your child, rolling on the floor, playing their favorite game for the tenth night in a row, answering their endless slew of questions, talking about what’s important to them (even if it’s about toy trucks, the names of the Transformers, or the large collection of stuffed kitties), fixing their veggies, cutting their food, wiping their noses and singing Farmer Jason.  These are precious times and will be over before you know it.  And you can’t get them back.

 Your child’s future – the long range – might be what you’re focused on, but take time to realize that the goal of parenting—enjoying each day with your child– is already in your hand.  Don’t push it aside looking for something in the back of the fridge.

-posted by Donna Venning, who knows that the cleaning, cooking and chores will always be there, but her five year old won’t be.

These ideas in the Games for Babies Series can be played with babies 9 months and up, but my children play these well into their preschool years.

Croquet

What you’ll need:
Ping pong balls
Wooden spoons

In its simplest form, you use the wooden spoons to play a “free-form” version of croquet all around the living room. With little ones, it takes a lot of hand-eye coordination just to hit the ball!

You can also sit facing your child (with legs spread to contain runaway balls), and hit the ping pong ball back and forth between you.

As your child gets older, create a little “wicket” course with blocks or books or boxes. Have fun with it!

Chicken Ball

What you’ll need:
Feather dusters
Balloons

I have to give credit for the invention of this game to my nephew, Jared. Blow up a balloon (or two), and hit the balloon with the feather duster. Sound silly? It is. But unbelievably fun.

For older ones, place a making tape line on the floor and play with the classic rule, “Don’t let the balloon touch down on your own side”.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, whose own children and their cousins launched rocket balloons over the loft balcony attempting to land them in the growup’s coffee cups this weekend at Grandma and Poppa’s beach house. (Another fun game, but not for babies!)

I recently blogged about the benefits of parenting in community.  So, I thought I’d share some of the great ideas that my friends have come up with.  I think it’s fun to hear what ideas have worked well for others. I hope you find something helpful for your current parenting stage and needs! Of course I’ll have to add a few of my own ideas too.

Melani—“One thing that I remember doing was taking my daughter out frequently for an hour or two.  We often went to the mall to walk around — it kept both of us from getting bored, but the outings were short enough that they didn’t take a lot of preparation.”

Selena—“I loved getting my exercise before the kids woke up and before my husband left for work. I had a gym membership and I loved the feeling I was doing something to get my body back, not to mention that it gave me more energy.  Also, taking naps when they took naps gave me renewed energy.

Find a playgroup!  Get connected with other moms and give kids chance to have friends; it helps with combating depression and isolation.”

Veronica—“When my kids reached toddler age, we put them to bed at a certain time, i.e. 7:30pm, but I didn’t require that they go to sleep.  As long as they were in their beds, they could listen to stories on tape or look at books or play quietly in their beds, with a small lamp or lights dimmed in their room.  It gave me some time to myself, and they fell asleep when they were ready.  I’d check on them later and turn off the lights.

Now I have to tell my two older kids to turn out their lights and go to sleep because they can stay up really late!  Most of the time, my youngest still falls asleep when she’s ready.

Donna—“After my second was born, I always took a shower in the morning—even if it had to be a quickie because one of the kids was fussy.  I learned that the benefit to my attitude was worth letting a baby cry for 5 minutes while I did my splash and dash routine.  When I stayed in my pj’s until the baby napped, as I did with the first, I often felt less than my best.  But I must add that I’ve never been a pajama lounger.  So just be yourself!

I’ll add onto this list of “best ideas” throughout the coming months. If you have a “best idea” you’d like to share, email me at donna.detweiler@comcast.net.

-posted by Donna Detweiler, who loves to collaborate on just about anything in life—the more the merrier, as they say.

The word “discrimination” tends to get a bad rap. It’s actually a very important skill. Especially when it comes to your sense of hearing. For instance, I don’t want to open my front door, call my children by name in to dinner, and have all the neighborhood kids appear. (Well, that might be a compliment to my culinary skills, but that’s not the point.)

Here are some fun and easy activities for you do with your child to help develop auditory discrimination:

Infants (newborn to around 18 months):
You’ll do most of the work at this age. Point out the noises around you. Sounds have to be alone, rather than layered or mixed in with others. When more than one sound occurs simultaneously, infants cannot discriminate between them, even if they are very different noises.

• Say, “Listen. That is a dog barking.” Then, you imitate the dog. “Woof. Woof. A dog says, ‘woof, woof’”. Eventually, your baby will hear a dog barking and say, “Dog.”
• Ask and answer your own question. “What sound does a truck make? A truck goes ‘vroom, vroom.’” One day in the future when your little one is playing with a truck, you’ll hear “vroom, vroom”, emanating from her mouth.

In this stage, your baby is learning to associate a particular sound with a particular object. Later, he’ll use this skill to match a sound to a letter symbol.

Note: When you speak in full sentences to your baby, you’ll be demonstrating vocabulary, good grammar, and correct sentence structure. What you put in her mind will, at some point, come out naturally!

Toddlers (18 months to 3 years):
As toddlers, children continue to discriminate single sounds best. You’ll still need to name new sounds, but now they will readily imitate them back to you. Toddlers are also likely to ask what an unidentified sound is.

• You can ask questions like, “What is making that sound?” (a cow) “Can you moo like a cow?” “What does a ­­­­­­­­­­­­_______ say?”
• Toddlers can now associate sound with a process or event. “What’s that sound? … Yes, someone is knocking on the door. What does that mean?”… You are right. Grandma is here!” Also, think microwave beeping, clothes drying timer sounding, keys rattling in the lock, phone ringing.

Save the learning of letter sounds for later. And letter names have nothing to do with reading. Auditory discrimination is the best first step towards reading readiness.

Preschoolers (3 to 6 years):
At 3 and 4, preschoolers are now ready for simple layered sounds. That is, identifying a sound (like a lawnmower, and then hearing a bus drive past), and being able to recognize the sound of the bus while the lawnmower is still making noise.

• Focus now on picking out sounds. Make a game of it. Let’s say you are taking a trip to the beach. What are the things that you, the grownup can hear? Birds, waves, people talking, laughing, a ferry boat… Have your child identify a sound. He picks laughing. You listen for it, too. Now you say, “Can you also hear the waves?” He has to use his filters – turn off his ears to laughing, and listen for the waves. That is auditory discrimination.
• For 4 ½ and up, I love the Kindermusik CD called Ned Redd, World Traveler. Every song on the CD is from a different country, and the narrator at the beginning of each track will give you a choice of three different sounds to listen for, and how many times each sound occurs. There are three different “levels”, so younger and older kids (and their grownups!) can play together.

Here’s a track from Ned Redd so you can play this game right now.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

If you’d like to download the whole album (great for a car trip!), you can right here on play.kindermusik.com.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who developed her auditory discrimination skills by practicing band music on her euphonium in the woods at music camp right next to her violin-playing friend Gwen, while blocking out Gwen rehearsing orchestra music. I am told that it sounded rather horrible to the non-discriminating!

Welcome back to the final installment of Managing Morning Madness!  Today’s tips are somewhat subjective, so I’ll give a couple examples but you’ll want to target your own trouble spot and come up with a solution that works!

Target Your Trouble Spot

Chances are, your mornings are not chaotic all over the board, but the problem can be traced down to one or two key trouble spots. Think about what it is that you never seem to get to do or the area that always pushes you behind schedule and work on it.  Don’t try to apply all of my tips at once; work on one at a time.  You’ll be more successful this way and less likely to be overwhelmed with a bunch of changes all at once.  I also suggest starting with something that can be easily fixed.  By starting “small” you’ll have success sooner, which will motivate you to tackle the next problem.

I’ve mentioned in a previous blog that shoes were a trouble spot for us and I explained how I handled it.  Another example comes from a friend of mine.  Her nemesis was her daughter’s hair.  She couldn’t seem to make it out of the house with her daughter’s hair fixed.  Her daughter has one of those heads of hair that needs to be brushed or fixed, she’s got so much of it!

My friend finally learned that unless she fixed her daughter’s hair before they came downstairs for breakfast, it didn’t get done. So she developed the habit of fixing her daughter’s hair first thing in the morning. By getting it in braids, a pony tail, or a barrette, she had it done and out of the way. Then, later in the morning, when her daughter got herself dressed, my friend didn’t have to remember to go do her daughter’s hair and when they left the house, she didn’t take a “wild child” with her.

There’s another simple solution to this same problem: keep a brush in the car.  Then you can always brush it when you get where you’re going.

So you see from these two examples (the shoes and the hair), there are multiple ways to address your trouble spot.  Think “outside the box” about solutions to your trouble spot and an idea will come to you. Try something for a few weeks and see if it makes a difference. Either you’ll have your problem solved or you’ll know that you need to try a new approach.

When the Trouble Isn’t a Task

As I talked to a few other parents, I discovered two common trouble spots that weren’t “tasks” to be completed, but much bigger issues:

• Motivating a Child to Get Ready (also known as the dawdling child)
• Abnormal Days/Change of Daily Routine (that one or two days a week when your schedule isn’t normal and you’re required to be out of the house earlier than normal)

Motivating a dawdling child is a HUGE topic and one I won’t cover here in Morning Madness. I’ll post a blog with some ideas for dawdling children in a few weeks, so check back.  But as for the problem of needing to be out of the house earlier than normal, if you slowly start to apply the steps I’ve written about in these four blogs on “Managing Morning Madness,” hopefully those “abnormal days” won’t set you back.  If you plan ahead, pack the night before, have a nutritional breakfast ready for in the car and  get your kids trained to be involved in the morning routines, you should haven’t any trouble being out the door earlier than normal…with the exception of possibly having to set the alarm a little earlier and get out of bed sooner.  But you’re on your own for that discipline!

-posted by Donna Venning, who  felt that her stress to get out the door was starting to come out in erratic driving, so she developed her morning habits so that she can leave her house in a calm, peaceful, pleasant manner, making her a safer, nicer driver!