A big thank you to Fulton County Schools for our annual fall long weekend. Tomorrow, Mary and I are headed off to the beach and to the mountains respectively, to escape a loaded weekly schedule. Finally, a catch-all opportunity to do all those family things we’ve been putting off since the beginning of school. It’s a very quick slide into the holiday season, so here’s our most recent Things We Loved before we have to switch gears for the end of the year.
Continue readingChild(ish) Reads: Momfluenced
When our blog project started, Mary got slightly offended about Child(ish) Advice being conveyed as a “mommy blog”. I told her, “You are a mom. You have a blog.”
Child(ish) Advice the blog is obviously a type of long-form media and we have multiple social media accounts; so regardless of our following, I guess we qualify as “influencers”. And today, even though this is a book review, it is also a bit of a meta moment.
Continue readingYour Restaurant Game Plan
It feels 100% weird that I am writing this post on taking kids to restaurants when I just had a very frustrating experience on Saturday. But here we go…
When I was in high school, my little sister was about a year and a half old. My stepmother had made it a point that every Friday, they would go out to a restaurant for lunch and work on manners. I’m not exactly sure what this meant because I didn’t really see any actual teaching or etiquette going on. Instead, it was more like sitting in a booth with a toddler and correcting every single move she made.
Continue readingExpectation vs Reality: Table Manners
“Eat dinner as a family”, they said.
“It’ll help boost morale and connection with your kids,” they said.
“It’ll be a great time had by all,” they said.
Then why do we feel like we’re banging our heads up against the wall when our kid’s behavior and manners at the table are like a scene out of Gremlins? Well, no one said it was going to be easy (and if they did, they are liars).
Family dinners have been a cultural norm in the US for decades. But all those wholesome Norman Rockwell scenes of sitting together and politely eating a meal are not the realities of what we ACTUALLY experience on a daily basis right now. In fact, it’s quite the opposite (kids getting in and out of chairs, refusing to eat their food, spills/messes on the floor, you and your spouse trying to talk over the calamity, etc).
Continue readingJumping Rope
Do you know how hard it is to come up with a title about jump roping that doesn’t go back to a cheesy song?
After our cartwheeling post, we started thinking about all the other recess activities we used to do in grade school: hanging on monkey bars, playing a rousing game of 4-Square, or that one week where it seemed everyone wanted to jump rope.
Although the jump roping origins is unclear, we do know it was brought over by the Dutch in the late 1600s. Kids were jumping and developing games with songs to keep themselves occupied. Some used two ropes, explaining where the term Double Dutch came from. As it gained popularity, kids would use any material (clotheslines, braided rope, etc.) they could find to make a rope and play with their friends. Unfortunately in the 1950s, with the expansion of television and radio, kids began spending more time indoors.
Now, if you peruse the internet about jumping or skipping rope, you’ll find that this pastime has generally been rebranded as a great cardio workout (Woohoo, Jump Rope for Heart). No doubt it is, but let’s talk about what else it can do for our kids’ development.
Continue reading
Child(ish) Advice 