It’s house cleaning Saturday at our house. I was suggesting to my wife that we make the kids clean their own rooms (they are ages 4 and 5).
Walked into the older kid’s room and realized it was already tidy. To mess with him, I told him to clean his room anyway, so he laughed and ended up going into his sister’s room and picking up all her stuff too.
I realized maybe I just have one kid that likes to clean along the way and one that wants to “defer” her cleaning.
Tidy guy
Deferred cleaning
Was in the shower (where a lot of this great thinking occurs) and noticed the tan lines on my feet. Those would be slippah tan lines (or flip-flops for you continental types).
Reminisced a little about the weekend and going to the beach. Then I thought maybe slippah tan lines can proxy as a measure for how the weekend went. After a week’s worth of wearing shoes indoors and commuting, retaining some sort of tan line means the weekend was pretty good.
I’m not wondering how far Silly Bandz stretch literally, but how long the Silly Bandz fad will last into the future and whether or not we’ve missed the boat.
If you’re not familiar with Silly Bandz, just look at any elementary school kid’s wrist to find them. If you still don’t know what I’m talking about, here are links to pics that were sent to me on Twitter by:
Silly Bandz are so popular that some elementary schools have taken steps to ban the Bandz during school — does that make them Contra-Bandz? I’ve actually told my son, “When I was your age, we had Silly Bandz, but they only came in one shape and one color.”
You can get them in your favorite cartoon character or your favorite sport. It made me wonder if we should have been ordering some in the shape of healthy foods. Broccoli and cauliflower come to mind as easily recognizable shapes. Kids could wear them on their wrist to remind them about the cool, healthy vegetables at lunchtime (at least they could if their school didn’t ban them already).
What’s difficult to tell is whether the Silly Bandz craze is on the rise or if we’re at the end. The trouble with fads is knowing when one is over the what the next fad is. I’d hate to end up with 100,000 broccoli-shaped rubber bands that no one wants, especially as we try to cut down on paper use.
Maybe we’ve missed the Silly Bandz boat this time around. Anybody know what the next fad is going to be?
Although the “holiday season” has been better advertised as the time for reuniting with family, I find that summertime is actually more filled with more touch points. Our family attended three events over the weekend with the extended family. One graduation party on Friday night and two birthday parties on Saturday and Sunday.
Both we and our kids had a great time reconnecting with our extended family. We also made a point to explain to our kids how it is important to maintain good relationships with our family and to continue to get together regularly. The kids had a blast playing with cousins and interacting with grandparents and aunties and uncles.
More than just being on vacation from school, I remember summertime as a time to get together for family parties and traveling to visit family or traveling with family on a vacation. Perhaps our children will think of family when they look back on their summer memories as well. We hope that our children will also value staying close to each other and getting together as our family expands and extends.
Caught my 5-year-old son counting by twos — “Two, four, six,…”. And I’m positive that it had nothing to do with him singing a memorized, “Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate?”
He was counting the fourteen squares on a placemat at dinner. He used his index and middle fingers to pair them up as he counted and you could see him trying to skip the odd numbers as he got passed eight — mouthing the odd numbers and then saying the even ones out loud.
Although I believe there are number facts worth memorizing (like mutiplication tables through 12), we’ve emphasized patterns with our kids.
Ten is an even number, we tell them while holding up both hands, because everyone has a partner. Using our fingers we show them that 1+1 is 2, 2+2 is 4, 3+3 is 6, and 4+4 is 8. Each time we emphasize that 2, 4, 6, & 8 are even because everyone has a partner.
This is foundational because once kids learn they don’t have to count by ones all the time, they can learn to count in groups of twos, threes, fours, fives, etc. This is the beginning of understanding multiplication. In counting by twos, my son is reciting the multiples of two. As he continues doing this he will recognize and “memorize” a rule that all even numbers end in 0, 2, 4, 6, or 8.
It started with my 5-year old constantly asking where his favorite shirts were while I’m staring at a mountain of a week’s worth of laundry. So I showed him how to fold things in half and in half again. He made separate piles of shirts, shorts, pajamas, etc.
After all, I asked him, “Whose clothes are they?”
“My clothes!”
“Right, and you can take care of them.”
Three-year-old sis can roll socks, fold face towels and carry clothes to the bedrooms.
How about rewards for this? High fives work really well (“Higher, daddy, higher!”). We also have a magnet board to keep track of their accomplishments. Maybe a little extra dessert after a good day, but not just for folding clothes.
Oversight or foresight?
Scanned in a portion of this from an OfficeMax mailer I received.
At the bottom where they would normally put all of the contact information, there are clearly icons to direct you to find them on Facebook or Twitter as well as their physical address.
Did someone accidentally leave out the website?
Or is this marketing genius to direct more traffic to their Facebook fan page and their Twitter account?
What do you think? Oversight or foresight?
We recently had lunch on our patio adjacent to our back yard at a family gathering on a late summer day.
A handful of family members referenced an e-mail circulating about how to discourage flies from coming around by using ziploc bags filled with a few pennies and water (see Snopes article). A few said they had tried it and were convinced it had worked. We used three ziploc sandwich bags 1/3 filled with water with 3-5 pennies each and suspended them with tape.
The observed outcomes:
In summary…Was our food spared from the attack of the flies? Yes. Did it keep ALL the flies away? No. Does it work? Maybe. It’s always difficult to prove something didn’t happen — we weren’t able to test what it would’ve been like without the bags. Practically, it was a small investment to make in effort and materials and we were generally happy we didn’t have to stand guard over the food. The guests were convinced it worked.
If you try it, or if you’ve already try it, I’d love to hear your story.
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