Archive for the ‘kids’ Category

What do you mean when you say “Write it down?”

July 2nd, 2012 in kids

I had this misunderstanding with my 5 year old about taking notes and looking them up.

“Mom, how old was I when I said my first word?”

“I don’t remember, but I wrote it down, so I can look it up.”

“Why?”

“Why did I write it down? Because I knew you might want to know some day.”

A few seconds later. “How old was I?”

“I don’t know. I’ll look it up.”

A pause. A pointed look at my phone. “How old was I when I said my first word?”

“I don’t know! I wrote it down. I’ll look it up for you when we get home.”

Another pause. Another look at the phone. “Is it stuck in the computer?”

Ah! “No, I wrote it down with a pen. On a piece of paper in a notebook. I have to find the notebook. I’ll find it when we get home.”

So what do you mean when you say you “wrote it down?” Five years ago, I meant I wrote it in a notebook with a pen. Today it means I noted it down some where in the cloud. Or perhaps I put just on my computer and it’s “stuck” there.

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Firefox to the rescue!

October 13th, 2011 in kids, mozilla

My son broke his arm this week and had 2.5 hours of surgery this morning. Firefox kept him company throughout. (When the nurse asked him where Firefox came from, he told her “Mommy’s work.”)

Firefox even keeps watch over the elevated arm.

Firefox the web browser has also been a life saver. Watching movies over the internet with Firefox is a good way to stay still …

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Did you have to fight?

June 5th, 2011 in Business, Career, kids, mozilla, PlanetGNOME

Yesterday it was implied that I might not know everything about raising boys because I wasn’t in physical fights as a child. While I am sure I do not know everything about raising boys, I was startled to think that not engaging in physical fights would be a parenting gap.

I was even more taken aback to be told my career path was easier because I never had to engage physical fights. While I’m not afraid of controversy, I avoid physical fights. I consider that a wise decision that has advanced my career.

So I promised to get more data about people in “successful careers” like mine and whether they thought fighting was important or not.

I was able to find data on fighting in kids: fighting among school aged children is declining in the US. Whereas 43% of 9-12 graders had been in a fight in the past year in 1991, only 32% had in 2009. There is also a gender and race difference. 39% of boys had been in a fight and only 23% of girls.

But I did not find any data that broke down those that fought and what careers they ended up in.

So here’s a short survey for you. I will share all the data on my blog. (This survey is anonymous. I am not saving IP addresses or any other identifying information.)

Please take a minute to fill it out.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world’s leading questionnaire tool.

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Mother’s Day Tradition

May 13th, 2011 in kids

My stepson’s mom has one of the most awesome traditions. She throws a Mother’s Day party every year. Every year I feel extremely grateful and honored to be included. Raising a kid across two households is not an easy thing but she makes it possible because she’s an awesome mom.

(And I think we need a few more relationship words in our language these days. How should I refer to my stepson’s mom? My boyfriend’s ex? We need a few more words …)

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Actually, a good book on fish

March 14th, 2011 in Books, kids

Did you know that not only are there entire books on fish, but there are entire books on single types of fish?

Much to my delight, my four year old sees the library as a treasure house of information. He’s not interested in the stories (although I push them every time), he just wants to head to the nonfiction section. Sometimes he has a topic in mind, but if not, we always end up looking at fish books.

This weekend, a book about sharks caught his eye, Sharks and Other Creatures of the Deep. As we read through it, I was really impressed at how much information they taught in a fun way. For example, they taught about ocean currents (and pollution) by talking about 29,000 rubber duckies that fell of a container ship in the Pacific and how they’ve been found from Hawaii to Greenland over time.

I think the best part of the book is the layout. It varies from page to page but really keeps little guys interested when they might not be able to follow whole pages of prose. (And even though I’d said I wasn’t going to read it right then, I found myself peering over his shoulder pointing things out.) And it’s not just about sharks … that was just the teaser.

(Last week the topic he was interested in was space, and with the librarians’ help, I managed to get my hands on a book I read over 25 years ago, The First Travel Guide to the Moon. That was fun.)

 

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Too skinny and too fat: what happened to normal?

December 28th, 2010 in Health, kids, losing weight, tv, women

Photo by Camera baba' aka Udit Kulshrestha

You hear a lot about how the media potrays super-skinny models and they make poor role models for young women.

Today I turned on the TV and there was a cartoon with an obese girl in it. Interesting, I thought, they’re trying to portray reality. Then I noticed that every other character had a waist the size of their arm. (Literally, I paused and checked. The male characters had muscular arms and so had slightly bigger waists. The girls all had thin arms and ridiculously thin waists.) So there were a whole bunch of super skinny characters plus one obese girl and one obese boy.

What kind of body image message is that sending?

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Learning division in school these days

December 28th, 2010 in kids, learning

One of the things that has frustrated us with our 10 year old’s current school is that he has no text books. This makes it hard for us to look up how he’s learning things. It’s especially frustrating in math as they now learn different methods we did.

Recently, I was struggling to show him how to divide. (Well, I wasn’t struggling to show him how to divide but my way seemed to be completely foreign to him, as if he’d never learned it before. So I was struggling to build on what he already knew.)

So I asked his teacher how he had taught the class to divide, and he sent me back this work sheet with the “4 methods he had taught them”.

Nevermind that those are 3 methods and one explanation on how to write problems – I will admit that at times I’m a bit too pedantic about saying exactly what you mean. (But really, it’s math, you have to say 3 when you mean 3!)

While it seems like a good way to understand what division is all about, it seems to be lacking in ways to easily come up with the exact answer. But it does work to teach them how multiplication and division are related.

I also really liked that it was immediately followed up with word problems, i.e. “Mike has 32 cookies. He wants to share them equally with his 6 friends. How many cookies does each friend get?”

I hope there’s a next step where they learn how to divide the “good old-fashioned way”.  Whether or not they do, I’ve already taught my 10 year old that way, although I had to teach him decimals as well. (I’m sure that when I first learned to divide, they very conveniently left out all problems with remainders and then added them in later.)

Which way do you think is the best way to teach kids about division?

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Is it bad to argue in front of your kids? (Was: apologize to someone you’ve wronged.)

December 15th, 2010 in kids, PlanetGNOME

Is it bad to argue in front of your kids?

Benjamin Zander, the author of The Art of Possibility (My review: The book that changed my life the day I read it), has started a meme promoted by Miguel and Jeffrey Stedfast, to apologize to someone you’ve wronged.

My first instinct was to apologize to my kids for arguing in front of them. When we do that it really bothers me and I wonder how it affects them. However, according to NurtureShock by Po Bronson (recommended by Cathy Malmrose), while hearing parents argue stresses kids out, if they hear the end of the argument (and hopefully two happy parents) they go back to feeling normal stress levels. And they learn about conflict resolution. But if you “take the argument upstairs” and they don’t hear the resolution, they remain stressed.

So perhaps I should now have a discussion with Frank about how we argue in front of the kids. I sent them to their rooms and when that didn’t work Frank sent them to watch tv (which was a better distraction but still not enough.)

But if I let the kids watch an argument I have to answer all sorts of very difficult questions. I regularly get asked about why our old car couldn’t be fixed, why owls eat rabbits, why cars need gas, why we can’t have cookies for breakfast, why I wear contacts, why we have to wear clean clothes, why our dog will die one day … and explaining why we were arguing about whatever we were arguing about … well I just want to say “go to your room”! So perhaps the real apology I owe to my kids is for lazily not wanting to explain the argument to them.

But really, there are some subjects you’d rather not get asked why about too much …

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The terrorists have accomplished their mission

December 6th, 2010 in kids, PlanetGNOME, Travel

Terrorism is the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion. … Common definitions of terrorism refer only to those violent acts which are intended to create fear (terror) (Wikipedia)

Right after 9/11, I flew to Australia for a vacation I had been planning for almost a year. Many people asked me if I was afraid to fly and implied that I should have stayed home, close to family and friends. I replied that if I had stayed home, the terrorists would have won.

Unfortunately, my government does not agree with my definition of winning. They think that living in fear and trying desperately to keep us all 100% safe while flying is the most effective way to fight terrorism. It reminds me of a boss that told me he liked it when people lived in fear of being fired, they worked harder. I told him being fired held no fear for me. When you live in fear, you do irrational things – like sending millions of people’s shoes through an xray scanner every day.

The terrorists that used planes as bombs on September 11, 2001 have changed our lives forever. Now I spend hours each month standing in line waiting to be closely inspected and treated as a potential terrorist myself. I buy shampoo in small bottles. I buy special bags to get though security faster. My life and our economy has been fundamentally changed by those terrorists. Not because it needed to change in response to their actions but because we choose to let them create irrational fear in us. We allowed them to terrorize us.

I had to watch my older son fight back tears at the airport as his bags were taken, all his toys were examined by a stranger and his bag was searched for explosive residue. And I had to answer his questions about why they were doing this and why I was letting them.

Today I read that the TSA will now tell children that groping them is a game. Terrorists, through a series of acts in one day 9 years ago, are now causing our children to be sexually molested when we travel. Having a stranger touch your genitals is not a game unless you are both consenting adults.

We need to grow up, crawl out from underneath the bed, trust each other and fight back. We need to carry our fingernail clippers and our knives on the airplane again. We need to give up the charade that we can be stripped of everything that can be a weapon. We need to fight back with intelligence, not fear. Invest all the money that is going into scanners and use it to fight terrorists not travelers.

Remove TSA from the airport process. Let airlines decide how to run security for their flights and let travelers vote with their money for the type of security they want.

Take the money you were using to fund TSA and fight terrorists. Fight terrorists in a much smarter, more targeted fashion. And while you are at it, think beyond weapons as planes. I certainly think the terrorists are thinking beyond planes at this point. But that tactic sure worked well for them!

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Scary parenting moments: When should you see the doctor?

September 2nd, 2010 in kids, Personal, PlanetGNOME

Photo by Rußen http://www.flickr.com/photos/rubenperez/452108745/

My son had RSV when he was 4 months old and the doctors warned us that he was at increased risk of asthma and other respiratory problems. Fortunately, he didn’t develop asthma, but he did develop a mom who’s terrified of breathing problems.

Since then, I’ve had trouble figuring out when we should go to the doctor.

See, the day he was diagnosed with RSV, our day care provider told us she thought he was pretty sick and should go to the doctor. Of course it was Friday at 5:00 and we had dinner plans. And the two previous times she’d thought he should see a doctor, he’d been fine. But we took him. And on the way over, I commented to Frank that this was it. Third strike and she was out. If he wasn’t sick, I wasn’t listening to her advice again. I now take her advice very seriously. When we got to urgent care they immediately attached a device to him to test his blood oxygen levels. One look at the readings, some xrays to eliminate pneumonia and they told us to go immediately across the street to the hospital. There would be a room waiting for us. (Instead we had to go and sit in an office and show proof of insurance, but that’s a different story.)

Since that day, I’ve called the doctor’s office numerous times and held the phone up to my son so they could hear what he sounded like. Several times they have sent us in to the doctor or urgent care. One memorable morning his breathing was so loud it actually woke Frank and I up – and we were in a different room. When I called the doctor at home and held the phone up to my son’s mouth, he told me to go the emergency room immediately. We decided that I should go alone so we didn’t have to wake up our older son. While going 75 mph down the interstate, the terrible breathing noise stopped. My heart stopped too as I put on my hazard lights, pulled over to the edge of the freeway and leaned over the backseat to see if he was still breathing. He was. The terrible noise had started again by the time we got to the hospital and the hospital staff was so sure he had swallowed something, they took xrays. Nope, just a throat infection that was closing his throat up.

But I also took him to the doctor for a number of common colds that didn’t really merit a doctor’s visit – except to calm my nerves. So I no longer trust my judgement.

This morning he sounded terrible. And Frank told me he should go to the doctor. (And usually Frank thinks I’m too quick to go to the doctor.) And when I called the doctor’s office and described what he sounded like, they didn’t think I should wait until 2:45 to see his regular doctor. They told me to come right in. So I was scared. And imagined all the worse.

Luckily, he only has croup and the medicine they gave him to reduce swelling in his throat kicked in within a few hours.

But I continue to be regularly terrified because I simply don’t trust myself to know if it’s serious or not. I mean I would have brought him home with RSV and he might have died that night.

At the doctor’s office today, I anxiously waited the reading of the oximeter (it was a nice 98) and decided I should have bought one of those a long time ago. Turns out you can get one for less than $100 on Amazon. (For the record, I spent 4 days in the hospital staring at an oximeter reading, willing it to stay above 80.) So maybe with an oximeter of my own I’ll know when it’s really serious … but probably not. I’ll probably keep calling the doctor’s office.

(For the record, you are supposed to take kids into the doctor – urgently – if they have stridor breathing sounds, wheezing, stomach breathing, blue lips or gums, … or any number of other terrifying symptoms.)

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