When I first found out my Wife was pregnant with our son, I was over-the-moon excited. I had always wanted to be a parent for as long as I can remember and while we were actively trying to get pregnant I couldn’t help but be excited as if it were a complete surprise to me. I had always had these grand ideas of how I was going to be a great parent, mostly because my parents were such poor examples. I would simply do everything opposite of them. How could I fail?
I’ll never forget traveling from Rome to Toronto in executive class with a one year-old who didn’t sleep a wink. (I’m quite certain the airline had to appease many of our fellow travelers!) Every parent has a ‘bag of tricks’ and we’d love for you to add your own ideas to our 15 ways to entertain kids on an airplane. Having their full attention for so long is a great way to bond and can reveal amazing teaching moments. Even looking at the maps in the airline magazine is an opportunity!
Cabin Girl and Mr. Monkey have birthdays 4 days apart. Awesome planning on my end. We decided that this year, to make things simpler (HA!), we would do a combined birthday party for them. But, how to combine a birthday for a 7 year old girly-girl and a 2 year old rough and tumble toddler boy?
The answer, my friends, is in Never Neverland.
The birds are chirping and the sun is warming your face. Green grass is peeking through. The smell of spring is in the air. You step back into your lovely home and suddenly notice all the winter dust and disorder peeking from multiple rooms around the house. As you walk from room to room there are house cleaning needs to be addressed in each room. You can no longer ignore what the winter clouds hid from your view.
As mothers, as we have more children, the likelihood of needing emergency medical care increases. Despite all of our work to keep them safe, toddlers fall, they get sick, and they eat things they’re not supposed to. Getting to the hospital can be a trial on its own – but when you’re there, you want to be sure that you have everything you need to make it easier. Even though medical care has advanced, you need to be prepared for a long wait in a harsh, sterile environment. Considering how difficult it is to take a toddler to the corner store, some advance preparation will be required.
April Fools’ Day is quickly approaching and my family is plotting. Alliances are being formed (and broken), plans made, and supplies collected. In this family, we definitely like to pull April Fools’ Days pranks on one another. We fully support the children joking around as long as pranks are done in kindness, not at someone’s expense, and don’t leave complete destruction in the wake of the prank. And as always, I find the family friendly benefit to joking with each other.
To cope with toddler behavior it helps to remember the basic principle of developmental discipline: the drive that babies have to develop is the same one that creates discipline challenges. That’s why sometimes toddlers are hard to discipline.
Do you want to go to frontier camp this year? I texted my son. My son, who has a cell phone and rides the bus and comes home to an empty house. Who towers over his twelve-year old buddies and can look me straight in the eye.
No! Frontier camp is for little kids and it’s stupid. I want to go to engineering camp, he texts back and I have to sit down for a minute. Engineering Camp? Who wants to go Engineering Camp?
How far is too far for an April Fool’s Day joke? It’s all supposed to be a day filled with practical jokes and hoaxes and silliness. Until, it’s not.
Years ago, on April Fool’s Day, I told my mom I was getting engaged to someone I had recently started dating. My acting must have been pretty good because she actually bought it and, worse yet, I let the prank go on ALL day. Boy was she furious when I told her it was a joke at the end of the night.
Funny, right? Wrong! I’ve vowed never to go that far again.
Spring break. The time parents plan for and children dream about. A trip to the beach, amusement park, or in our case, the mountains. We chose to drive to our destination. It forced family fun and was simply easier than flying with our gear.