The other day, I thought we’d make some memories. The weather forecast promised heavy rains, so on Friday we geared up and got ready to frolic and play in the rain. It was great fun! She splashed and ran in the huge puddle/lake we found, and laughed and screamed and spun around. She even sat in it.
Yes. She sat in the great big lake puddle. Oh dear.
I thought I had planned out the morning so well, packing snacks, a towel, a change of clothes, using the baby carrier, and waterproofing her as well as I could.
Did you know that Napa cabbage (aka Chinese cabbage) is better for you than KALE?! On this list of 10 Superfoods Healthier than Kale, it comes in at #2, second only to watercress! (Okay so WebMD puts kale as #1 and cabbage as #9, but still. It makes the top 10 either way!). This was a surprise to me because kale is a well-known veggie all-star, while Napa cabbage always seemed so plain… and pale… and not dark leafy greenish.
Right when I decided I had to learn how to cook it, someone asked for Napa cabbage recipes on one of my Facebook groups! One of the supermoms there (who blogs at L@WS) shared a bunch of recipes with us, including one called “Chinese Cabbage in Clear Sauce.” It looked simple enough: make sauce, then pour over boiled cabbage.
So I made some sauce. Then I poured it over boiled cabbage. And it was delicious! More importantly, my toddler loved it. Simple, healthy, and toddler-approved? DONE. Since then, I’ve made it so many times that my recipe printout is covered in sauce stains, which I take as a sign that it deserves a spot on my blog. Enjoy!
Hello Readers! Hilary Smith is a writer and parent who specializes in spreading positive parenting techniques, focusing on the use of social media and new technologies by tweens and teenagers. These are hard topics that I hardly know how to talk about, but I’m glad someone is! I think you will find this information very useful if you have a child with access to technology!
Like what you read? Follow her twitter @HilaryS33, or read her column on HMHB.
Did Your Child Receive a Smartphone Recently? What You Need to Know
Guest post by Hilary Smith
Digital citizenship comes with a price many of us don’t realize until after we hand our kids a Smartphone. Lurking behind the glow of their screens and friendly social media apps hides an underbelly of cyberbullying, sexting, oversharing, and predator grooming occurring right under our noses. If your son or daughter has recently acquired a Smartphone, there are a few things you need to know to help protect your child.
Last week, I went to a worship gathering, and someone spoke about how our Creator must feel about His creation. The closest I’ve ever come to creating anyone was carrying and giving birth to my children. I mean, I guess all I really did was let my body be the vessel that God used to create a human life, but still, I got to take part in that awesome miracle. It’s the closest understanding I’ll ever have to being a creator of life, and it breathed new life into common Christian ideas I’ve gotten used to.
People often ask me how parenting has changed my understanding of God. Here are some things that came to mind tonight as I reflected on God and how He relates to us, His creation.
Find rest in God
There is no feeling in the world like your child resting her head on your chest. They lay their small head right there and everything else in the world just melts away. You delight in being a source of comfort, love, and rest for that child, and treasure every second of it because you know that in about 20 seconds, they’ll be up and bouncing around the house again. Sweet cuddles.
Can you believe that God feels the same way toward us? He loves to be our place of comfort, for us to find our rest in him, for us to relax and flomp our weary heads on his chest. He desires to hold us tight and listen to us breathe and I imagine he likes when we try to listen for His heartbeat.
A couple weeks ago, I shared about how I tried to teach kids to communicate effectively. We talked about the importance of body language, eye contact, and showing understanding. I didn’t want to leave it at that. In this post, I’ll share how I brought their conversational skills to the next level.
Once my students seemed to understand how to listen well, we moved onto the next step: learn how to have a discussion. It’s basically expanding on the “showing understanding” step from before, and then adding a fourth step: Add your own thought. This can also be thought of as a lesson on “How to Agree and Disagree Politely.”
I think this is an essential life skill that every person should work on! Myself included :P. I eventually found a way to do it that was really fun for everyone. Here’s how it went:
Me: So you know how we’ve been working on improving our communication skills?
(Suddenly they all straighten up give me penetrating eye contact :))
Me: Ah yes, I see you remember! Well, today we’re going to take it a step further. It’s good and all to learn to listen well, but you also need to learn how to share your own thoughts well. Now, this doesn’t mean just blabbing on and on and always talking. It also doesn’t mean sitting there just waiting for your chance to say what you want to say and only concentrating on your own thought. I’m going to teach you a polite and courteous way to do it. It’s two steps. First, you SHOW that you were listening, and then you ADD your own thoughts. Again, SHOW your listening, then ADD your own thoughts.
I think my friend Rachel needs to start a blog. Until that happens, I get to pick her brain and ask her to write guest posts for us here! I say that like I’m going to keep asking. Because I probably will :D. (Rachel, you’ve been warned ;)). A couple months ago, she shared her awesome tips on How Teaching Has Influenced My Parenting. Today, I am sharing her equally thoughtful and practical ideas on How Parenting Will Affect My Teaching. It’s everything I had hoped it would be, and more! I am super excited for you to read it. Teachers, I’d love to hear how parenting has affected you as an educator as well! Please feel free to share in the comments below.
How Parenting Will Affect My Teaching
A guest post by Rachel K.
Being a stay-at-home mom is a gift in many ways: It has allowed me to watch my kids grow up, shape the way they see and interact with the world, take an active role in their education and in helping them develop life skills. All of which, I would consider, standard fare (things you could reasonably expect to experience when you are at home with your children). As an educator on hiatus, however, I have been gifted in unexpected ways too. I have gotten to experience life from the outside of the classroom looking in. I have helped with homework I haven’t assigned, quizzed for tests I wasn’t giving, and attended parent conferences and IEP’s where I got to listen instead of lead. It has been, and continues to be, quite the learning experience. What follows are my top 3 take-aways that I will be implementing when I return to education.
Take Away #1: Less homework. More meaningful homework.
It wasn’t until my son became a kindergartner that my view on homework changed. And I am so glad it did! I used to see real value in homework. I still do, to a degree. But nowhere near what I did before I had school-aged kids.
A Lamp Unto Bible reading app: now available for iOS devices!
I think it is good and important to read the Bible. After all, I actually believe these are words that God had written for us. I believe it shows us true things about God. I believe it gives me instructions for living a meaningful, love-filled life that will glorify Him.
But I am also human. And I have a newborn. And a toddler. And golly, I LOVE to sleep. Reallyreallyreally. Like, at this very moment, I’m fighting the urge to go take a nap instead of write this post. #thestruggleisreal (I’ve always wanted to use that hashtag haha)
I’ve decided to write this post, even though both children are in bed for a nap at the same time, because that’s how badly I think word needs to get out about this awesome app. Full discloser: my husband wrote the app. If you know my husband, though, you know that he is a man of excellence. Seriously. Not only is he brilliant, but anything he does, he does well. He drives well. He dresses well. He puts together amazing material to teach at Sunday school. He does our finances excellently. His smile is excellent.
You get the idea.
So of course, when he set his mind to create a Bible app, it was just that: excellent. This app is so thoughtful in all the right ways. It’s the kind of app that has solutions to problems you didn’t even realize you had. Tired of feeling defeated on December 31 when you’re only halfway through the Bible? Then pick the “3 chapters per day” plan instead. Sick of starting in Genesis and giving up by Deuteronomy? Try the chronological or “Genre rotation” plan instead. Only have time to read on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Then check those boxes and make it so!
Sorry. Couldn’t stop myself. Clearly, I need a nap.
This app makes it possible for you to create a reading plan that suits your lifestyle and personality to make Bible-reading more realistic and doable. It’s so super handy!
It started as a lesson to prepare my students for book club discussions. In my early years of teaching, I noticed that kids always seemed so preoccupied with saying what they wanted to say during a discussion that they hardly seemed to pay attention to what others were saying. If I’m honest with myself, I know some adults who are like this. (If I’m really honest with myself, sometimes I’m like this! Hah.)
So I prepared a lesson to teach my fourth graders to be better at these discussions. While my original purpose was to improve book club conversations, our class conversation soon morphed to focusing on the importance of showing courtesy and respect when conversing with anyone, anywhere! In the years following, I made sure to teach conversational skills early on so we could practice all year long. The kids always loved this lesson, because it was real and it was a social skill they could tell was applicable to all of life.
I usually started it off like this:
“Today, we’re going to talk about how to communicate effectively. Usually, we think of communicating as talking, but there are lots of ways to communicate with others. For example, you are always communicating with your body. Think about what your mom looks like when she’s talking with another mom. When she’s listening, she’s usually nodding her head, looking the person in the eye, and says, ‘Uh huh… yeah! Oh, totally…’ and other things to show she is listening, right?”
I can see, as I’m imitating mothers, that my students are envisioning their own moms showing these excellent listening skills.
“It’s not just what she’s saying, but it’s the way she is furrowing her brow, looking intently, nodding, and holding her arms still that shows she is interested and engaged. What if, instead of all those things, she did this?”
I repeat the same words- “Uh huh… yeah… Oh, totally…” but this time while rolling my eyes, sighing in the middle, tilting my head away from the speaker, and using bored inflections in my voice.
The kids laugh.
“It’s funny, right? I mean, I said the same things, but it was clear from my body language and my tone of voice that I was not really listening well. Body language sometimes communicates a lot more than your words, so when we are in conversations, we should be sure to use good body language that says, ‘I’m listening!’ to show respect to the other person. That means you’re sitting up, making eye contact, your mouth is closed and not talking over them, and your hands are still.”
Even as I’m saying it, I see all their backs straighten, their eyes fixed on me, mouths shut, with perfect little snowball hands. How darling.
I introduced playdough to my girl a few months ago, but it wasn’t until she turned two that she really, really got into it.
Playdough is fantastic for imaginative play, fine motor skills and well, keeping your kid occupied while you cook dinner. Look, she might even make you a wrap with arugula and cheese while you’re at it!
Looks tasty, right? 🙂
One annoying thing about playdough is its tendency to dry out quickly. We have a lot of little tubs of Play-doh, and even if we remember to put it back into the tub each time, it still starts getting dry in a matter of days, and that’s not as fun to play with. Of course, half the time we forget and leave it out and come back to an icky, crusty chunk of dough that is not pliable at all. No fun. Also, the tubs of Play-doh are so unsatisfyingly small. You can barely shape a strawberry out of one before you run out!
I’m so over that. Now I can use a few simple pantry ingredients to make a HUGE ball of playdough that she can make a grand feast with! Now she has huge hunks of “bread” that she can really cut through with a plastic knife, and lots of pasta “dough” to extrude noodles with. It is so satisfying to have a huge hunk of dough :). I also like that we can make it whatever color we want (although our purple one pictured above came out kind of muddy looking).
She helped me make it last time, and she learned so many fun things through the process! Some examples:
- scooping and leveling flour
- stirring
- pouring water carefully
- red and blue mix together to make… PURPLE!!! PUR-PO MAMA, PUR-PO!!!
- heat causes chemical reactions (okay she might not totally grasp this concept yet, but it was a great introduction to it!)
- how to knead dough
It was a great morning activity and we still have a moist blob of playdough to show for it. I also feel like mom of the year, so that counts for something, too. If it’s your first time, I’d suggest starting the the quarter recipe and making more in the future if you like. Enjoy!!
She loves me.
Just wanted to share.
My heart is fit to burst :).
We’ve come a long way. A few weeks ago, I shared how she was breaking my heart, but these days she is always asking for me to put her down at night. I have, and it’s been so sweet! But we’ve also since decided that, for consistency’s sake, it’s best if we keep that going-to-bed routine as her special time with Papa. On the whole, we have been working hard to make things more consistent for her, and it has definitely paid off.
Last week was awesome. It was a huge turning point for so many reasons, not the least of which was Baby Boy’s sudden ability to sleep through the night (STTN). He went ahead and did that all on his own. WOOHOO!!! Yes! I know! We win!!! Let’s hope it continues! Last week was also awesome because my little girl was so, so sunny and warm and fun and pleasant. I think it had a lot to do with all the moves we have made toward making her day-to-day life more consistent. And her not being sick. I’m so sorry to all the families with kids who get sick all the time. Big. Hug.
At this point, keeping things consistent basically means declining most of the help available to us, and me choosing to just be “on” all the time. Happily, the timing of this happened to coincide with Baby Bear’s STTN happiness… whew! Thank you, Lord!
Last week was seriously one of the best weeks I can remember having in a very, very long time.
I also learned the secret to SAHM happiness. No really, I discovered the key to going through a day nearly frustration-free and as relaxed as can be. It’s a good one.
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