This blog post is a combination of one I wrote in 2007 and I finished in 2013. It’s kind of awesome to have 6 years between starting and finishing… My three-year-old daughter just took a parasol out of her baby brother’s hand. I say, “Miss Annabelle, you can not take toys from Henry.” She glares at me, stomping one bare foot and growling. She’s standing in her Curious George underwear, so small and delicate, her hair in wild toddler curls…
Today there was a mystery in my house, and we love a good mystery around here. If we can’t find one, we create one. For example: The Case of the Missing Car Keys, The Case of Mama’s Missing Cell Phone, The Case of the Little Lizard in the Paintbrush Drawer… On this particular day, I was busy making lunch and when I turned around and saw a trail of footprints across the kitchen floor. I gasped. “Where did these footprints…
We love taking the kids to swim in the ocean. We knew it was the best “school” for their early years, where everything they learn is through their senses. What better place to explore science, nature, environment, and get exercise too? But here are even more reasons to take a dip in the sea! This Is Your Brain on the Ocean
I loved this article: Can Emotional Intelligence Be Taught? I’m always fascinated by methods of teaching children empathy, kindness, and emotional intelligence. I have loved experimenting with how to teach my own children how to look around at the world to see how they can help others–those smaller, more vulnerable, or just people in general. It is important to me that they feel free to openly communicate their feelings to me. and I tell them how I feel so they…
Ahh, getting dressed. That age-old ritual. I wonder how it was in caveman times: “Honey? Do you want to wear the fig leaf or the buffalo skin loin cloth today?” Did two-year-old cavebabies shout “No!” at their mothers and throw their bamboo leaf underwear across the cave? Or were they better behaved and wear whatever their mother put on them before smacking their sibling across the head with a club and writing on the cave walls with a stick covered…
When my daughter was two, she came to me crying. “I want to go home,” she hiccuped out of the blue. “We are home,” I said, getting on my knees so I could give her a proper hug. “No,” she wailed, “Our other home.” Ah, the home we left after the storm. I held my daughter in my arms and thought about how I could make her feel stable and secure in new environments. We had recently evacuated from New…
It’s no secret that I love a party. My sister always teases me about the fact that I use any excuse to create one: “Oh, it’s a full moon! Let’s have a party!; Oh my lily is blooming, let’s have a party!!; Oh my roses need ladybugs, let’s have a ‘releasing of the ladybugs party.’” I even had a bar mitzvah for my cat, Coco Bojangles. When he turned one-year-old and was graduating form kitten food to cat food, I…
I was fascinated by the review of this book in the New York Times Book Review a couple of weeks ago. The book is called The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way, and was written by Amanda Ripley. In the field of early education, we often hear about education in Finland, how they have the highest literacy rate in the world, how they don’t start teaching their kids to read until the age of 7,…
When I was a child, I walked home from school through Mr. Farley’s lush green apple orchards. A fresh crisp apple was the perfect tonic after a long day at school. I made mud pies and tried to get my little sister to eat them. I walked through fields of wildflowers, caught polliwogs in the creek, and hiked up mountain trails under the moonlight. I laid on the grass in my back yard with my father, eating peas and raspberries…