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!)

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.

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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!

I am a commentator for BamRadio Network, the largest education radio network in the world. I recently participated in an interesting discussion on children and conflict.

Conflict occurs because we are all different. It’s true for both children and adults. Think about it. I think we should leave on our road trip at 8:00am, and my husband Karl says we should leave at 6:00am. My experience tells me the kids will be cranky (me, too!) if we have to wake them up to go. Karl’s point of view says that not getting caught in rush hour traffic is vital. We have different perspectives, and that creates conflict.

The same thing is true for children. Their outlook on the world is even smaller, and more ego-centric than grownups, which make them more likely to outright fight.

It is NOT your job to keep everything peaceful, and everybody happy. You can’t. However, it is your job to allow those episodes of conflict to become skill-building moments in the area of problem solving.

Here’s how:
There are phrases we all use (they often come from our own childhood) that are ineffective with children, and don’t help them solve the problem. Be nice. You need to say you are sorry. Let’s all share. You should play with Kimmy. (Sound familiar?) As much as you want to make your child say they are sorry (and yes, apologizing is important), you can’t force them to do so, anymore than you can compel them to play with a particular child. So, recognize your phrases and where they came from!

Children are concrete and specific, so we need to be, too. Don’t ask the why questions like “Why did you hit him?” That is abstract, and not how children think. You aren’t going to get an answer. Instead, ask what questions: “What is the problem?” Mark will tell you, “I want the boat”. Mark doesn’t know how to get the boat, so he uses what he knows will work – he’ll just reach over and grab it.

Now that you know what the problem is, you’ll need to validate and help them name feelings. Sometimes the very little ones (toddlers) don’t have the words, so you can help. But only if they need it! “Maddy, are you mad at Mark for taking your boat?” “I see that you are sad.” Sometimes your children’s feelings may not seem logical to you, but they are very real and logical to them! Allow them space to be mad, frustrated or to cry.

Once the children are calm (And this is important, because problem solving cannot happen when emotions are running wild. Think about it – do you find good solutions when you are hopping mad? I don’t.), then you can ask more “what” questions. What are your ideas to solve this problem? Children are remarkably brilliant at coming up with solutions. It may take a few minutes, so give them the space and time they need to figure it out.

Don’t solve the problem for them. Encourage them to devise their own solutions. Don’t offer suggestions to preschoolers. Their solution may not be the same as one you would have come up with, but that’s okay.

Toddlers may need some more questions to help them explain their behavior. Did you want the boat because it is red? (Remember not to ask why!) What if Maddy and you and I went and looked for another red boat you can play with? The toddlers Mark and Maddy may not like your first idea, but you are modeling the process of conflict resolution. So try again.

Once they’ve come up with an idea, they are much more likely to own it and stick to the solution.

On a side note, I will tell you that as my children get older, I don’t step into the middle of their conflicts very often. Many times they will resolve the problem better without my help. And I don’t have to be stuck in the middle.

In the end, conflict resolution is a foundational skill that enables our children to become confident, successful at school and work, and competent at negotiation and cooperation.

You can listen to this podcast in its entirety here.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who reports that we ended up leaving on our road trip somewhere around 9:30am, and encountered neither traffic nor cranky children.

Every evening with good weather creates a predictable scene in our neighborhood.  About 5pm, the kids start pouring out of their homes with balls, bats, light sabers and Pokémon cards in tow.  They all gather in front of my place for 1-1.5 hours of fun before being called in for dinner.

My boys are finally old enough to run out and join the kids without constant adult supervision.  Although I can see them and hear them, I still struggled with letting them go. I soon found that I know exactly what is happening, as they and many of the other kids have pulled me into the not-so-pleasant side of childhood playtime.

As I am the closest adult, I soon realized that I was somehow involuntarily nominated as the playground monitor.  While all the other parents were happily making dinner without interruption, I was making dinner while mediating all the squabbles.  I began seriously resenting 5pm. As soon as I resolved one problem, another would appear on my porch.

One day, after attempting to make a simple dinner for 1.5 hours (no joke) I finally gave up the idea and gathered the neighborhood kids around me.  I asked when they thought tattling was ok.  They said, “when someone hurts you, isn’t playing fairly, not letting me have a turn”.  Sound familiar?  I agreed with each of them that those are indeed difficult situations, and it is easier to talk to someone else than to the person who hurts us.

In my home I have a no tattling policy. My kids, of course, still tattle, but I continue to turn them toward each other to talk.  They need to learn to work it out.  They eventually will grow up, have their own lives, their own jobs and hopefully their own families.  Conflict management is a huge part of what we do each and every day.

When one of my children declares that their brother hurt their feelings I always respond, “I’m sorry your feelings are hurt.  Did you talk to your brother about it?”  The answer is usually, “no”.  I then remind them that they can “tell on their brother” only if he refuses to listen to you and you are unable to work out a solution.

I try not to intervene, as I know they need to learn this important life skill.  Believe me, I have my “I can’t take it anymore moments” and become the peace keeper, but I too am learning the benefits of allowing them to figure out a solution for themselves. If only Jedi mind tricks really worked!  I could slowly wave my hand in front of them and say “you will get along, you will always play nicely, you will always share, you will….”

While the neighborhood kids were still all gathered I told them that I was honored that they trust me to help them work their fights out, but since they are all old enough to know what is right, appropriate and expected behavior that they are also old enough to work out their problems with each other.  I then laid out my “no tattling policy”:

• You may come and tell if someone is purposefully harming you. Accidents hurt, but are not tattle-worthy.
• You may come and tell if someone is purposefully harming themselves…like waiting too long on purpose to move out of the way when a car approaches (yes, some of the neighborhood kids have tried to see if they can use The Force to stop a moving vehicle).
• You may come and tell if someone is doing something or talking about something completely inappropriate. Such as, it is completely rude (and inappropriate) to knock on people’s doors and hide as a trick.
• You may come and tell if you tried to work out a solution but are still disagreeing and need a little extra help. Even grown-ups need arbitrators at times.
• “Tattling” is to protect and preserve, not to harm or to try and get another in trouble as payback.

-posted by Miss Jesikah, who is finally winning the war on 5pm, although she still thinks being able to use Jedi mind tricks would speed up the process.

Welcome back!  If you’ve missed parts 1 and 2 of this ongoing blog, we’ve been talking about ideas for managing your mornings.  We’ve looked at how to get out of the house easier and some breakfast tips.  Today we’ll take a look at schedules, routines and letting go (also called delegating).

Have a routine but not a schedule.
I learned this important difference from a website called Homemaking with TEACH.   Lorrie Flem, the founder of the site, has numerous books and audios on managing your home and family.  One of her ebooks talks about the difference between a schedule and a routine.  Learning this lightened my load tremendously.  A schedule is time-driven, like this:

8:00 – eat breakfast
8:20 – do breakfast dishes
8:30 – get dressed and brush teeth
8:45 – read a book
9:00 -  etc, etc.

A routine looks like this: we get up in the morning, eat breakfast. Then we do the dishes.  Next we get dressed and brush our teeth.  Then we sit and read a book…you get the idea. It’s not clock-driven.  Lorrie, the mother of eight, shares that until kids are approximately seven years old, they really  need routine more than schedule.   When I realized that my schedule was what was causing me stress, I was able to relax a little more. Most days having a “routine” instead of a schedule works.

Of course, there are still days (like Kindermusik mornings) that you have to be somewhere by a particular time, so you need to have a rough idea of how much time you need each morning to do certain tasks.  When you have a time you need to leave the house, that’s when you can implement some of the other tips I’ve listed in written about in this blog series (keep things in one spot, have a breakfast plan, etc).  Make protein breakfast bars or on-the-go granola for a simple grab-and-go breakfast.  Don’t plan pancakes for the days you need to leave the house at a particular time and so forth.

When selecting things to do (when creating your schedule), keep your stage of life in mind.  If you have a toddler who still naps, don’t make plans for 10:30 when your toddler usually naps at 11:00.  But do try to keep your routine as consistent as possible.  It’s only for a short time and your child will be happier for it.

Here's Adrienne; I think you don't need further explanation!

Teach kids to handle what they can; let things go.
Allow your kids to participate in your morning routine to the best of their ability. My daughter was dressing herself at 18 months (sounds unbelievable but it’s true). She could do her own tights before she was two.  Her clothes never matched, but it was one less thing I had to do in the morning, so I let it go.

I’m not saying not to make your kids clothes match: if matching clothes is important to you, then that’s not the task to “let go.” But weigh the options: if you can let it go, go for it.  After all, three year olds in mismatched clothes are seen as cute and adorable!

Other examples of tasks you could delegate would be: have an older child be responsible for putting a younger sibling’s coat and/or shoes on.  Teach your children how to make their beds when the get up in the morning.  Kids, especially toddlers and preschoolers, love to be involved in Mommy Work.  Take advantage of this.

Have your four year old set the table for breakfast.  Have a six year old make the toast.  Teach a three year old (even some two year olds) how to unload the dishwasher.  You get the idea. Remember that your kids are far more capable than you realize they are.  They want responsibility and will be eager to join with you.

Take the time to train them (training implies that you show them repeatedly and have them practice repeatedly until they are competent).  One thing I do with my kids when teaching a new skill is a seven-day training program.  When they are old enough for a task, I work with them for an entire week on the chore.  For example, around 3-1/2 they are old enough to wipe the bathroom sink after brushing their teeth.  Take a few days to do it for them, having them watch.  Then have them do it for a few days while you watch. Coach and encourage and praise them while they do it.  After a week of doing this together, you will probably be able to walk away from this task!

Your child might not do the task as well as you would (remember Adrienne’s mismatched clothes), but the freedom of having a task delegated out can make your mornings so much less chaotic!

-posted by Donna Venning, who wishes mismatched clothes at any age could be seen as cute and adorable, but sadly, knows that’s not the case.