Entertaining Travel Reads

          As I plan several flights this summer I've been thinking about how to occupy the mind of a 20 month old on a plane full of people. At home, when she's bored I just pop on the TV, turn on the music or throw the bag of blocks all over the living room floor...these are not viable options on plane, as she doesn't use headphones yet, and for those of you who think these options are ideal (and, you know who you are...) shame on you as I'm not really in the market for annoying others on the plane, nor do I like the idea of treating the whole plane as my personal living room, as I am not so far removed from being on the other end of that experience. I remember quite clearly a mother and companion and three little people who sat in that space at the front of the plane (where there's leg room) and had crayons, markers, blocks, noisy toys et cetera all over the floor even as the plane landed and people wanted to get off the plane...not cool.
          To me, the easiest way to entertain a tiny tot is to give them books, one at a time. 1] Books are quiet, even if the tiny tot in question wants you to read the book you can read it to them at conversation level or a whisper (much quieter than a noisy toy). 2] Books are not messy, your tiny person cannot write with the book, sure, they can write on the book, but that's only if you give them a writing utensil. 3] Books are small and can be easily packed into your childs carry-on.

Here are some books that I recommend as ideal travel reads:

• Baby Einstein Cats by Julie Aigner-Clark It's a tiny board book that fits easily into any compartment of a carry-on, or in a pocket. You're kid can eat it or bend it and if he/she wants you to read it, it's short and easy. This is a cat. Cats are warm and soft to hold.
• I'll Teach My Dog A Lot of Words by Michael Frith Again, it's a board book, not as small Cats (but, I'm guessing you'll be hard-pressed to find many other books as small as Cats) and I can attest to the fact that it's really easy to read on the plane and can be acted out with little to no interruptions to other passengers (it's all in the voice and the eyes). My kidlet likes to read this to herself and that's...well, it's nice. The first words I will teach my pup are dig a hole and fill it up.
• Duck and Goose Find a Pumpkin by Tad Hills This is a lovely interactive book where Duck and Goose ask questions about where to find a pumpkin, most of the answers are "No" and your kiddo can catch on pretty quickly and answer. Trust me it's fun. I hear there are other books in the series, but this is the only one we know by heart! "Is the pumpkin in the leaf pile, Duck?" "No."
• Baby Einstein My First Book of Numbers by Julie Aigner-Clark The tiny person can be entertained for hours by this book. Seriously...there's counting, there's colors, there's rubber ducks and marbles and flowers and bees, there's pictures of little people. This book is really big though, so big that when I've taken it on trips, it's been one of two books I take (and the other is usually a squishy bathbook like Seahorse or, a small board book like, um, Cats--can you tell what book my kiddo really likes?!) If you start with three and add one more, did you know you have the number four? Just draw a triangle and add a little line for a number four that looks just fine.
• Seaside Bath Books-Seahorse by Julie Clough We bought this book at Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and then spent the 8 hr. train ride home being entertained by it. It has a squeaker, but so far Lila can't squeak it, which is fine by me! Sally the Seahorse love to dance.

And, finally...

• Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin Jr. An oldie, but goodie it seems that everyone knows this story. Lila likes to guess what's coming up next, she likes to label the colors and label the animals. This takes a book that might take 5 minutes to read about 15 minutes of entertaining reading and communication. Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see? I see a red bird looking at me.

Whatever books you choose, reading with your tiny tot while traveling can be loads of fun! What kinds of books do you like to read while traveling?

Mars Needs Moms -- The Top 10 Things My Daughter Would Miss Most If I Were Abducted by Aliens

Ok, I saw this post at Inspired By Savannah on Monday and thought that it seemed close enough to a questionnaire that I could post it here today! Yippie!

I, frankly, have never heard of the movie or book, which just tells me that my kidlet isn't old enough yet to totally be influencing what I read and watch (as I type this we're watching Blues' Clues, a show I know from when Little Miss Aidan was a little missie--which tells me that I may be not telling the truth on that last bit, darnnit), however it sounds cute and fun!

From Inspired By Savannah:

In honor of the March 11th release of "Mars Needs Moms," SocialMoms has asked bloggers to write up a post about what are the top ten things you think your kids would miss most about you if you were abducted by aliens/Martians?

TOP TEN THINGS LILA JANE WOULD MISS MOST ABOUT ME IF I WERE ABDUCTED BY ALIENS

1] All the times I wait patiently for her to answer, "No" to the questions as I read to her Duck and Goose Find A Pumpkin again and again and again. "Is the pumpkin in the log, Goose?"..."Nooo...".

2] Our nightly concert of The Rainbow Connection, Give Him the Ooh-la-la and Original of the Species.

3] The fact I don't mind watching PBSKids and its need to repeat cartoons over and over and over all. day. long. I also enjoy singing along to all the theme songs...yes, I do. *Big Grin*

4] Music on the computer for music time, including but not limited to From Where I'm Standing and Rhythm of Love...thanks Aunt Nellie for creating this little ritual!

5] Traveling. She's gone with me to visit my friends in St. Louis, on the train to Chicago for vacation, on the plane to DC to visit family...next stop? Who knows!

6] Saturday morning peanut butter toast and bananas.

7] "Naked baby!"This funny thing that started when she was tiny and using an infant tub...she did not like baths or being cold so, I'd take her out of the tub and squeal the phrase while I wrapped her up in a towel. She now says it on her own without prompting as I take her out of the big girl tub and wrap her up in a towel. Cuteness.

8] Going to used books stores and playing around with the books and such until we find the perfect ones to take home.

9] "Walk" time...after I pick her up from daycare, we spend some quality time walking to check the mail and walking up and down the sidewalk and walking to pet the "cat, cat, meow, meow" and walking up and down the steps.

10] Our "KissKiss" "HugHug" times.

30 Day Song Challenge: Day Three

Day Three: A song that makes you happy

          I've been telling everyone I know about kindie rock. Kindie rock is kid friendly indie rock and encompasses such bands as The Scribble Monsters, They Might Be Giants, The Not-Its and, my favorite, The Jimmies. 

         I found The Jimmies quite by accident at B&N, I was looking for something to entertain the tiny tot. I'd been playing kiddie music and Fisher Price lullabies when I took her to school when I have to do work on the weekends and was actually looking for the lullabies when I stumbled upon their cd and recognized them from some of the videos we'd been watching on youtube. The cover kind of grabs you (their stuff is sold exclusively at Barnes and Noble and on their website) and I bought their cd instead. At Christmas I bought the dvd and introduced my whole family to Ashley and the guys in ties. We especially like Taddy, Spanimals and Bedhead. The latter is the song that makes me happy.

          I loved the song when it was just Lila and I dancing around at school or bopping around in the car on the way home. I love the song even more now that I have Christmas memories of the kidlets bopping around to the song as their older cousin rolls her eyes and laughs and we're entertained by watching kindie videos...sigh...good times!

Side note: One way to make Lila excited or distracted is to pop in the 'ole video of this song, her head starts bopping up and down, she shakes and shimmies about, she raises the roof (still not sure where she learned that one) and she sings.



"It's Cool to be Uncool"

Feel free to join in by commenting below (I really do love comments, on fb or here), or doing this challenge on your own blog.

The 30 Day Song Challenge

Day 01 – Your favorite song
Day 02 -- Your least favorite song
Day 03 – A song that makes you happy
Day 04 – A song that makes you sad
Day 05 – A song that reminds you of someone
Day 06 – A song that reminds of you of somewhere
Day 07 – A song that reminds you of a certain event
Day 08 – A song that you know all the words to
Day 09 – A song that you can dance to
Day 10 – A song that makes you fall asleep
Day 11 – A song from your favorite band
Day 12 – A song from a band you hate
Day 13 – A song that is a guilty pleasure
Day 14 – A song that no one would expect you to love
Day 15 – A song that describes you
Day 16 – A song that you used to love but now hate
Day 17 – A song that you hear often on the radio
Day 18 – A song that you wish you heard on the radio
Day 19 – A song from your favorite album
Day 20 – A song that you listen to when you’re angry
Day 21 – A song that you listen to when you’re happy
Day 22 – A song that you listen to when you’re sad
Day 23 – A song that you want to play at your wedding
Day 24 – A song that you want to play at your funeral
Day 25 – A song that makes you laugh
Day 26 – A song that you can play on an instrument
Day 27 – A song that you wish you could play
Day 28 – A song that makes you feel guilty
Day 29 – A song from your childhood
Day 30 – Your favorite song at this time last year

Twist Your Noodle...

"In our new knowledge economy, if you haven't learned how to learn, you'll have a hard time."
---Peter Drucker

         So far my kid loves to read...no seriously, she does. If there are toys on the floor and a pile of books, she picks the books. She'll grab one of the books and hand it to me, nodding her head, while quietly and passionately saying, "Yes, yes". We read to her at night and well, frankly anytime she wants. She loves books that have animals, and Seussian sentence structures and princesses...I can't wait until she starts reading the Serendipity books. We watch "Super Why" where you learn that if you have a problem you 'look in a book'. This genius cartoon teaches theme, rhyming patterns, spelling, phonetics and has caused my kidlet to sing, "ABCDEFG" over and over...I know she doesn't know that these are letters, but isn't it a start?
          I don't know how to keep this passion for books going, I don't remember not loving books, nor do I remember ever being told to read, so I don't know how to fan the flames. My mother read to us at night, something from the Bible and then something that we wanted like a chapter from the Laura books, "The Purple Pussycat" (Kim's favorite), "Popcorn" "Sheldon's Lunch" et cetera. On the rare occassion that I got in trouble and was told to go to my room, my mother would say, "No radio, and no reading". For as long as I can remember I have had a book in hand, in brain and/or in head. There was one night, just a couple of weeks ago, that the my whole tiny family was reading. Lila with her books on the floor, Chris with his Nook and me with my book. No television, just books and the occasional grunt of happiness...over books. We do this often.
            The men we have married are readers, sure it's non-fiction, sports books, man magazines or, in the case of my husband, "The Grumpus Under the Stairs"...a book he still wishes he had, by the way...a book that I can't find for sale under $100, but it's still reading. In our different ways, all three of us girls have become avid readers...sure Kim reads boring books like the manual to my car and Marissa reads scary books or VC Andrews, but we are ALL readers.
            Of course, my sisters and I had the same upbringing and, because we grew up in the world's smallest town, we had the same wonderful teachers, all of which did their very best to instill in us a love for reading. One teacher I remember especially, her name is Mrs. Coday, because she had a reading bathtub. It was one of those claw toed tubs that she painted some sort of obnoxious lime green and she had this tub sitting off to the side by the bookshelves. It wasn't attached to water or anything, there was no swimming involved, it was just an empty tub. But, during reading time (if you had been good) you and 2 or perhaps 3, I don't remember exactly, of your classmates got to sit in the tub and read. These times were the best times ever. In 5th grade, I got to be in the 8th grade-level reading class. Even then I understood that splitting kids up by their reading level and challenging them to read, at no matter what level, made them better readers. I understood this because my sister was in her grade-level class and she learned as much and had as much fun with reading as I did.
          We had Book-It goals (free pizza was way cool, Book-It was not tied to our passing our respective grade-level) and SSR, we did not have AR.
          In our own different ways, my sisters and I have figured out that reading is essential to life and understanding. We understand that the power to read and process information is stronger than monetary assets and we do not take this for granted.
          Being a high school teacher has also shown me the pitfalls of people who don't have a love for reading and I have also seen to what lengths students--smarts students--will go to NOT read (I can't even get all of my honors kids to read books in the summer--something I still assume every honors kid should just do by nature)...I do not want my kiddo to be one of these kids.
          How will I be able to make sure that my kiddo has teachers who instill in her a love of reading and how will I make sure that these teachers are more concerned with her learning than they are test scores and AR scores and MAP scores?
          How will I make sure that I teach my tiny person a love of reading without killing, in her, the joy of reading?



Happy Sparkly Halloween



Grandma (Nona) reading to Lila Jane



    

Work-Life Balance at Its Best...

While I was on maternity leave I became the woman I secretly desired to be..."A Stay At Home Mom". I took 10 whole weeks of slow it down ‘bliss’. It was only when I started going back to school to teach the beginning of a unit, grade and import grades, give test or explain a concept that I realized that I didn’t really want to be a SAHM, I just wanted to make my own hours. J

I had a lovely routine going during this time, however, and it was this theme that afforded me the privilege of watching some day time television. It was during one of these days of getting up early, breast feeding, grading, breast feeding, “Today” show, feeding myself, 4^th hour or “Ellen” that I stumbled upon this delicious read, Just Let Me Lie Down: Necessary Terms for the Half-Insane Working Mom.

Kristin van Ogtrop was on the “Today” show talking about her book and about how to simplify some aspect of your life if you have a busy life with kids and a husband and they’re always hungry and wanting something from you while your job is also hungry and wanting something from you…I don’t know what it was she wanted us to do… I just remember liking the title of her book, the way she laughed at herself and the feeling I had; the feeling that I was listening to a woman who could teach me a thing or two about work-life balance.

I bought, in hard cover, and read her book. She talked about being tired in a way that I was only beginning to understand, and about husbands who try, but just can’t sometimes (for all those clichéd reasons, and more reasons you realize are unique only to you and your family situation) and about families who help and hinder and for the first time I was beginning to relate to a woman who just years, heck months before, I perceived I would have had nothing in common.

Now, I’ve tried to read books about achieving a life balance,  Eat, Pray, Love comes to mind, that just didn’t cut it because they were too religious, or not religious enough, or too wishy washy or too exacting. It wasn’t that this book was teaching me how to have a life. It was and still is showing me how my life will be.

I’ve been sitting here trying to think about my favorite word she defined and I can’t come up with one (trying not to look at the book to search for a word), but I can tell you that I read it in a week, between ‘sleep[ing] when the baby sleeps’ and learned that, while my life is not unique and while the over the top gush I feel for this woman, van Ogtrop, is not original in any way, I am and will succeed at being a mother without turning into Chopin's dreadful 'mother-woman'.  I can tell you that I have taken many deep breathes, yelled at my husband when he doesn’t help and am unforgiving about the fact that sometimes he has to watch the kidlet while I grade, or go to a conference for a weekend or go to a meeting that last past 7pm. On the other hand, I feel no guilt about leaving a meeting early to pick up my kiddo at 4.30p, or about spending a whole weekend outside on the swing set not looking at a single essay that needs to be graded or lesson that needs to be written, or about being too tired to cook and vegging out, tiny tot in my lap as we watch Brian Williams and the husband cooks (after all he is faster at it and gets hungry first).

From the 1,691 word count introduction, she had me hooked. This book, silly as it is, has become one of the many books that are my foundation, without it, I’m not sure that I would have survived being a mother, a wife and a member of working society. I find it interesting that I have become that woman, I have become a ‘working mom’ and I'm not worried about being perfect at anything. I'll just work my best at all the facets of me.

The word I came up with after reading the book:

Tiny Person the person who has your ears, hair and toes, but your husbands’ eyes and nose. She makes you laugh just by being and your world…well it’s no longer your world, but hers, everything is hers…is aglow because of her laughter, her smile and her ability to mimic you in the most personal of ways. The person you’d quit your job for, the person who has taught you to breath and slow down. And, although this person is less than half your height and just now walking without looking like a drunk orangutan, she towers over you and commands you to the task at hand, the task of being ‘mommie’.

What’s your word and definition? It can be something totally made-up or a word that you’ve commandeered and made your own…