Posts made in June, 2010

Activity – Bottle + Pasta

Posted by Michelle on Jun 28, 2010 in Activities, Parenting, Therapy | 4 comments

Playing with Pasta

I’m always on the lookout for fun activities for The Little Empress to do after school and during the weekends. She does well in school but is very prone to meltdowns once we’re home. We’ve discovered that the key to preventing her epic meltdowns is to keep her busy with activities that appeal to her nearly insatiable drive for sensory input. As I am sure you can imagine, it is always better to provide a safe and fun activity rather than leave her to her own devices. (When left to her own devices shortly after she’d finished with this, she was upstairs climbing onto counters. Oi.)

This is a simple and fun activity that I copied from her school involving an empty parmesan bottle.

MATERIALS

• Empty parmesan bottle (with two different openings)
• Pasta (long & short)

NOTE: You don’t have to use pasta for this activity; it is just what I had on hand. Other fun objects that you could use include coffee stirrers, pompoms, chenille stems, whatever you have handy.

WHAT IT TEACHES KIDS

This activity helps teach kids about size (what fits, what doesn’t), fine motor skills (placing objects through small openings with precision) as well as provides tactile (handling the pasta) and visual stimulation (the shapes of the pasta and colors.)

HOW TO PLAY

Gather the materials and set them in front of the child. If they’ve never seen the activity before, demonstrate how the objects can be put into the container through the different sized openings. Have the child experiment with what will fit and what won’t fit. Another fun thing to do is figure out how to get all the objects out of the container once they are in.

The Little Empress showing off her handiwork

She’s seen it before at school so she was delighted to play at home. She happily dove into the activity which kept her busy for about a half hour as she stuck pieces of pasta into the parmesan bottle and then shook them out. It is pretty rare for something to hold her attention for so long so I was more than delighted with the results.

Shaking it out

And here’s another adorable photo of The Little Empress as she shakes the pasta out of the bottle. I just love the expression on her face.

Marshmallow Girl

Posted by Michelle on Jun 26, 2010 in Family, food, Parenting | 4 comments

Marshmallow lover

Since The Little EmpressNinja has soundly defeated just about every gate we have in the house, we took them down as they were far more a hindrance to us than they were to her. The last few days have been somewhat stressful as a result, as neither The Hubs ™ nor I fully trust The Little EmpressNinja not to do something crazy like climb up onto the counters and/or hang from oven knobs. (Both of which she has been caught doing, by the way.)

Still, I’ve stubbornly decided to keep the gates down and packed away because, well, she has to learn sometime, right? I just keep telling myself that.

Since there is no longer a gate protecting the kitchen, I’ve found myself having to be extra careful about what I leave out on the counter, so as not to tempt The Little EmpressNinja to climb. Though I have learned my lesson about keeping sharp knives in the sink where she can’t reach them, things like bags of chips and foodstuffs are somewhat harder to remember.

TLE is quite self-sufficient when it comes to feeding herself and happily does so. To her, anything left on the counter is fair game. This is how she ended up with a bag of marshmallows for dinner* last night. She had triumphantly plucked the marshmallows from the counter and walked into the office, marshmallow in hand, bag clutched to her, munching away happily.

“Mama?” she asked, holding the bag of marshmallows out to me with a smile.

“Mama doesn’t want marshmallows. But thank you,” I replied.

She nodded, smiled and went along her merry way, still clutching the bag of marshmallows.

* For the record she didn’t eat the entire bag of marshmallows, only about three of them. Which, when you think about the size of a toddler’s stomach, is plenty. I’m sure there are some parents that will roll their eyes at the thought of someone allowing their toddler to eat marshmallows for dinner. Hey, live a little, okay? Of course, there are other parents that I’m sure will understand exactly where I’m coming from when a few marshmallows can buy you some sanity minutes.

Rethinking my love of McD’s

Posted by Michelle on Jun 22, 2010 in food, health | 0 comments

I not-so-secretly adore McDonald’s hamburgers. I mean, logically, I know that they are junk food and it is healthier/cheaper for me to make my own burgers at home for a fraction of the cost at home. Taste better too. But McD’s burgers must have some sort of crack in them because I still adore them. I associate the burgers with happy, childhood memories, a treat for having behaved in the pews at Mass.

A friend of mine just linked an article about a McD’s hamburger: 1996 McDonalds Hamburger

The post was originally published in 2008 but honestly, the message speaks for itself. That just ain’t natural.

Did you ask what I think you asked for?

Posted by Michelle on Jun 17, 2010 in Family, Observations, Parenting | 2 comments

Since The Hubs ™ work hours are sort of crazy, TLN and I eat dinner together on weekdays without The Hubs ™. Last night, The Little Ninja and I sat at the dinner table, eating our dinners while The Hubs ™ played his latest game in the family room. (He’s currently playing Red Dead Redemeption on the XBox 360, if you’re curious. Not family friendly but a lot of fun if you like Westerns and lots of shooting.)

The Little Ninja was happily slurping up her macaroni and cheese, in between sips of milk, looking thoughtful. Conversations with TLN can be hard to understand since her words really aren’t there yet but the fact that she does her best to converse is always a thrill.

“Mama?” she asked between mouthfuls, pointing to me.

“Yes, I’m Mama,” I answered.

“Dadee?” Now she pointed to The Hubs ™ who was likely in the middle of killing some poor schmuck on RDR.

“Yes, that’s Daddy,” I replied.

She looked thoughtful for another second and pointed to herself.

“The Little Ninja!” I said triumphantly, hoping she’d mimic what I said. (Well, okay, I used her name not The Little Ninja but you get my drift.)

She shook her head, her brow furrowed. She pointed to me and her Daddy and herself again. And then she added another sign.

“More?” I asked. She indicated yes. (She doesn’t actually say the word “yes” but she does laugh or clap or something else that indicates yes.) Now I was confused. “You want more… Mama?”

“Nooooo….” she laughed.

“You want more… Daddy?”

“Noooo…..” she shook her head and laughed again. Then she pointed to herself and signed “more” again.

“More TLN?” I asked. She indicated yes and laughed before returning to her meal.

Meanwhile, I sat there a bit shellshocked. Did she just ask for a sibling?!

While recounting this to The Hubs ™…

(09:38:48 AM) Me: I think The Little Ninja asked for a sibling last night.
(09:38:55 AM) The Hubs ™: ?
(09:39:10 AM) Me: She pointed to me. She pointed to you. And then she pointed to herself.
(09:39:43 AM) Me: When I didn’t get it at first, she did it again, pointing to herself and kept on signing “more”
(09:39:51 AM) The Hubs ™: That just gave me a flash of an army of TLNs….
(09:40:00 AM) Me: YEAH SERIOUSLY

I’m not sure what scares me more. The notion of a sibling for The Little Ninja…. or an army of The Little Ninjas… which is likely what I’d end up with if I ever gave in to baby fever and/or TLN’s want of a sibling. *shudder*

Presenting… The Little Ninja

Posted by Michelle on Jun 16, 2010 in Parenting | 0 comments

Life with The Little Empress Ninja has been… interesting… as of late. I have turned my back for literally less than a minute to discover that The Little Empress has taken advantage of my inattentiveness to defeat yet another safety device. All gates, from our pressure gate at the bottom of the stairs, to the wraparound gate that protects the kitchen, have been effortlessly and silently scaled. One particularly memorable late afternoon, I discovered that The Little Empress had used a chair to climb up onto the counter, where she stood, balanced perfectly, to raid the snack cabinet to find her precious potato chips. The next afternoon’s explorations yielded her using another chair to climb over the kitchen gate, where she then proceeded to pluck an apple from the counter. This was particularly scary since there had been a knife just inches from where the apple was. Thank God she was so focused on getting the apple and didn’t get curious about the knife!

Yesterday, however, was a complete and total coup de grace to any sense of child safety. I had left the sliding door to the outside open, with the screen door in place, to let some much needed air flow through the family room. Since she had never attempted to open the door before, I wasn’t particularly worried when I left the room for a minute to send out an email while she was enthralled by an On-Demand episode of Blue’s Clues. A minute later, I decided that things were too quiet so I peeked outside. A quick glance of the room showed that the screen door was closed but as I looked, I realized that The Little Empress Ninja was nowhere to be found!! Panic started to set in when I noticed movement outside. That little stinker was happily playing in her sandbox (with my BBQ tools… -_-;;), smiling to herself, so happy to have made it outside ALL ON HER OWN. The dog sort of gave me this guilty look like, “Sorry, she just sort of surprised me,” as if that was an excuse for not barking to let me know that The Little Ninja had escaped.

My nerves are so shot. The Little Ninja’s teachers told me that her gross motor and fine motor skills are more advanced than they actually should be. They weren’t kidding!! On one hand, I’m happy that she’s developing so well in this area but on the other hand… how am I ever going to survive this??