Does the mask your child thought looked so great or even funny in the store a month ago when you bought it now scare her and make her cry?
Been there, done that.
Changing Halloween costume plans at the last minute is all too common — even if the child helped pick out the costume well in advance.
So if you don’t sew and if she or he isn’t interested in wearing the rest of the costume either, you may want to try one of these fun ideas we have accumulated in our sewing files. The best news is that not all of them require sewing.
One of our favorites was the yellow sweatshirt, yellow sweatpants and gray duct tape stripes at an angle across your clothes. You’re a speed bump.
Electrical tape stripes on a baby’s yellow outfit and you suddenly have a cute little bumblebee. Use some black T-shirts shaped over wire hangers to create your bee’s wings.
Another cute one is to take a towel and wrap your daughter’s hair up like mom does. Let her wear her fuzzy slippers and a robe over her coat and she can go to the relatives’ homes saying, “Don’t I look like Mom does all day Saturday?”
With my daughter, Zion, now nine months old, I’ve somewhat adjusted to the busyness that comes with parenting.
Zion is now starting to take her first steps, and thinks she’s ready for adult food. Just two weeks ago, while we were out at Old Country Buffet, she grabbed my plate of chicken from off the table when I looked ahead for a split-second.
Zion still barely wants to go to bed at night. It can be 10 p.m. or later. And once she starts whimpering and rubbing her eyes, we know that she’s getting sleepy. But like Cyndi Lauper sang in the 80’s — “the girl just wants to have fun.”
When I’m ready to hit the sack, nothing frustrates me more than seeing Zion standing up and peeking over the top of her crib. Especially right after I just laid her down and gave her a nighttime bottle of milk and rice cereal. That potion used to knock her out for the night. Now, she’s like the Energizer Bunny; she keeps going and going.
I now need my batteries recharged. But not just because of Zion. There’s a secret that I’ve kept from many of you all for months. My wife, Alicia, is five months pregnant. And this afternoon, we’ll find out if it will be a boy or girl.
They say the crazies come out when there’s a full moon. For a class full of toddlers, that means sweet-faced cherubs turn into rabid little wild things.
Grace is usually an angel at daycare (or at least I’d like to think so). I call every day around the lunchtime for a report.
Aside from an accident here or there (yes, we’re still potty training — more on that next week), Miss Eleanor always tells me that Grace is having a great day. But not Wednesday. When noon rolled around, I gave daycare a call, fully anticipating Grace was having another great day.
Turns out, Grace was having a very … bad … day. Apparently, she had been in time out several times. She was having problems sharing — to the point where if any of her classmates even got near the toys she was playing with she would start screaming. She threw her carrots on the floor at lunchtime. And she was even hitting her friends.
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“This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs.”
Yes, the “Fried Egg” public service announcement that was so popular when I was in high school is not only memorable, it is handy as us thirty-somethings try to figure out how to talk about the dangers of drugs with our own kids.
Drugs will mess up your life and your brain. Using them will “fry” your brain.
Our daughter came home from school the other day talking about SADD.
She asked me if I knew what it stood for?
I said “Students Against Drunk Driving.”
I was wrong. It stands for Students Against Destructive Decisions.
It is not just about alcohol, it is about drugs and other peer pressures young people face these days.
Around noon, this past Saturday, my wife Alicia and I made the 45-minute drive up to Orland Square mall in Orland Park. With Zion and Alicia’s younger sister, Tiffany, in tow, we met up with my mother-in-law, Alicia’s older sister, Angel, and baby brother, Stan.
Alicia’s relatives truly value spending time with one another, so the get-together was another one of their regular family gatherings. Well, sort of.
Besides grabbing a bite to eat in the mall’s food court and browsing — me and Stan ditched the women to check out some baseball caps, gym shoes and ultra-expensive men’s attire — we had REALLY gathered together for one reason. Or should I say one person — the smallest one of the bunch, Zion.
My little girl was going shoe-shopping. (It was the first of many such excursions, huh?)
When I first saw ABC’s hit show Supernanny, I was three months pregnant with our first child. Although we were years away from temper tantrums and back-talking (at that time my thoughts were more consumed about how I’d actually get the child out), watching the Supernanny was a great introduction to parenting.
You couldn’t help but become addicted to the dysfunctional families featured on the show. Moms and dads were at their wits end with little hellions wreaking havoc on their households.
There was the 5-year-old boy who dropped F-bombs and the 11-year-old girl who cursed at, hit and kicked her mother. There were the toddlers who wandered off into the neighborhood unsupervised, the cat fights that erupted among siblings. And who could forget the 6-year-old who pee’d on the floor just to spite his mother?
But the best part was always when Supernanny, aka Jo Frost, broke out her life-altering, ever-changing approach to discipline: The Naughty Corner. Never an advocate of spanking, ’Nanny uses this technique in some shape or form in nearly every episode. Just when you think it’s not going to work, she puts a twist on the technique and it magically turns the brattiest kids into well-behaved, obedient little angels.
The principal is simple: Kid does something wrong, kid gets a time out in a not-so-fun “corner” of the house.
Seems like school just started, but parent-teacher conferences that wrap up the first grading period are coming up next week.
Along with that ongoing need to stay on top of the normal household flow (or shall we say log jam) of paperwork, there are backpacks that tend to get thrown here and there and finished assignments that get rapidly reviewed and stacked into a bin.
In The Boy’s case, there are even unfinished assignments that get discovered in his possession from time to time. He is in fourth grade and I have always prayed that he would have figured this out by now. It isn’t like he hasn’t received any coaching on the subject.
So the conversation about the importance of being organized pops up again. I can hear those two kids groaning already.
Even our sixth-grader needs to be reminded to plan for future assignments, so The Girl can avoid the last-minute scramble to gather the information.
Students need to learn to take responsibility for these things and be independent about keeping it all in order on a daily basis. (more…)
My husband, Steve, told me the funniest story the other day about our 2-year-old, Grace, and her fascination with Band-Aids.
Grace loves Band-Aids. Especially the Sesame Street ones. The other day she got her little finger caught in the drawer. She howled bloody murder, but the second I taped an Elmo bandage around it she was better.
Why, she’s gotten to the point that every time she gets even the slightest knick she cries out for a Band-Aid. “Mommy, I gotta boo-boo,” she weeps if she so much as grazes her finger against the wall. The other day, she barely bumped her noggin, and insisted she get a Band-Aid “on my head.” So, despite negotiating, I stuck the thing in her hair, only to watch her screaming minutes later trying to pull the thing out.
Of course, the need for a Band-Aid in these minor incidents is usually because she wants to play with the sticky things — not because the bandage takes her mind off the pain. But whether it’s to soothe a bonafide bruise or placate a bored mood, Band-aids seem to fix just about everything.
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College money for getting organized enough to create a new meal? Hmmm. The two don’t seem to coincide until we think about how much money meal planning saves us. Money that would be great to put toward college savings.
The folks at www.mealstogether.com are so concerned about families not sitting down and eating a meal together that they are giving away $5,000 college scholarships to five families for coming up with a new recipe. Calling it the Kids’ Cook-Off Recipe Contest is misleading because you have to be 18 or older to enter. The contest ends Oct. 31.
Here is what you have to do: Come up with a kid-friendly, original recipe and submit it along with a complete list of ingredients, measurements and instructions. It could be really fun for you and the kids to come up with a neat combination of kid-friendly flavors. I already predict the kids will lean more toward something that has to do with an unusual combination of pizza toppings. The Boy loves to get carried away when it comes to shaping the pizza dough (let’s see how high we can toss it in the air) and even when it comes to throwing different spices in the bowl of pizza sauce. Sometimes they are sweet, sometimes they are spicy, but I had never given much thought to writing down the combinations.
My daughter Zion turned nine months old last Friday. Over the last couple of months, Alicia and I, started feeding our “little cute one” all kinds of Gerber foods. She eats well. Sweet potatoes. Corn. Green beans. Carrots. Is your mouth watering for Thanksgiving dinner, yet?
With almost every serving of those delicious “entrees,” and depending on the time of day, Zion also gets a 4-oz. bottle of milk. That’s two scoops of formula for every 4 ounces of nursery water. She takes Infamil’s Lipil Formula with Iron. So occasionally, Alicia and I will shell out $25 for a 25.7-oz. can of formula.
If we need to conserve money until our next paydays, we’ll buy the 12.9-oz. can for nearly $13. Oftentimes, we don’t mind paying the $13. But it’s the whopping $25 that hits us hard, especially when we also have to buy diapers, wipes, additional Gerber food and more.
So with all that said, I got to dreaming (yup, that’s what I have to do) about what I would much rather spend that $25 on.
