More Sneaking Nutrients Into Kids' Food

Here's a quick and easy way to get some wheat germ and flax into little tummies if they want toast, instead of a cereal type of breakfast (such as porridge).

I make cinnamon toast, which they find irresistible. I toast whole grain bread, then add butter. I sprinkle each slice with about 1/2 tsp of brown sugar (you don't need much, surprisingly), and before I add the wonderful, flavourful and fragrant cinnamon, I also sprinkle a bit of wheat germ and ground flax. I use a knife to spread it all together, cut into pieces and serve.

Mmmm... yummy!
____________________
Return to Blog Scene By Jeanne

Clean Up Time!!

How are such little people capable of making such big messes??? Yikes. I find it quite interesting, actually, how their little brains seem to just tune out the craziness. Or do they really? Maybe the mess is their secret revenge for all the times we say "no"!! Hmmm. Brats ;-)

Gina at Kids And Kiddos wrote a great post about getting her kids to clean up their toys. She has some tried and true strategies for motivating them to make order out of chaos. At the end of her post she asks readers to share what works for them, and her question is what inspired this post for me.

What I do is simple. I require that my kids clean up the activity that they're finished with before they can move on to the next.

This works in two ways:

1) The desire to move on to a new activity is their inspiration to clean up.
2) This strategy keeps the overall mess down to a "dull roar" - at the end of the day when everyone is tired, there are only a few things to pick up.

They're not always happy about it though: "Aw, Mommy!! Do I have to do ALL of this?"

(uh... yup. You dumped the puzzle pieces on the floor ALL by yourself, so you can put them back in the box too!)

Here's another strategy that a friend of mine uses with success:

1) Any toys that her kids leave out, get packed up and stored in the basement for awhile. Her kids know that if they want to play with the toys tomorrow, instead of in a month, they need to tidy up and put them away.

There's no perfect solution, and what works for some kids might not work for others. At least there's a variety of different things to try!
____________________
Return to Blog Scene By Jeanne

Sea Monkeys - A Slightly Better Pic

Hey!!! You can kinda see something now. They're about 1.5 mm in length, and some of them have long stringy tails. They also appear to have three eyes (three black dots on the front of their heads) although you can't see that in this pic.

They swim like mad, and they're still quite small, which makes them difficult to photograph, but I'll keep trying...

____________________
Return to Blog Scene By Jeanne

Sea Monkey Mystery

For the uninitiated, when you get a Sea Monkeys kit, you first purify the water for 24 hours before adding the eggs. Packet 1 is water purifier, Packet 2 is eggs, and Packet 3 is food.

Both kids got a kit for Christmas, and I dutifully followed the instructions and purified the water. Then I put the two little tanks up out of harm's reach, or so I thought.

Lil' J: "Mommy look!'
Me: "What is it, bud?"
Lil' J: "Mommy I washed my nut!" (he meant the kind that you crack open and then eat, before any of you start to wonder).
Me: "Where?"
Lil' J: "In dat. In da monkey tank"

He had washed his hazelnut in his still-being-purified Sea Monkey water, but thankfully hadn't spilled too much on the counter.

Now here's the mystery (hence the post title): I put his eggs in his water maybe an hour before Alyssa's, and yet today, almost two weeks later, his are double the size of hers. His are monster monkeys!!! Hers are wee little girlie things, still barely visible, but his are big enough that you can see their tails wiggling behind them as they swim.

Hmmm. Hazelnut shells for Sea Monkey food? Or little boy finger grime? We may never know ;-)

____________________
Return to Blog Scene By Jeanne

Kindergarten Readiness

Ok, Lil' J - you're up next!

Hmm. Is my giggly, silly, march to the beat of his own drummer son really ready for The Big K this fall? His father was expressing doubt last night, which started me thinking about the whole thing.

It's difficult for me to really tell, because at the age that he is now (4 1/2), his sister was reading and writing simple (4-6 word) sentences. I know that's a little ahead of the curve as far as early language skills (btw, to compensate she was behind socially - she had much anxiety and shyness, which thankfully she's outgrown). It leaves me with the inability to judge J's preparedness, because he's not quite as advanced as his sister, so acck! He must not be ready, right?

Wrong!! (yippee).

Here are a couple of handy checklists I found, to which I was able to answer "yes, yes, yes," repeatedly for J. I guess he won't have to repeat preschool after all ;-)

http://www.nvsd44.bc.ca/sites/pdf/12/12-160-1815.pdf

http://www.vbschools.com/kindergarten/checklist.pdf

Phew!!
____________________
Return to Blog Scene By Jeanne