Parenting

Balancing Act: All About Postural Control

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

“Stand tall. Sit upright. Shoulders back, tuck your bottom…”

While your grandparents might want you to be prim and proper, posture is much more involved than just how you look. How we sit, stand, or maintain any upright position without support requires postural control. We do this daily without much thought or effort so that we can use our energy and focus on more complicated tasks. But for some, especially kids, just sitting in a chair without falling is a challenge. It may not seem like a big deal, but almost any activity we do requires sustaining an upright position against gravity.

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Things We Loved: August

| Patti Webb

Hello Readers,

Mary and I are introducing a new series to share what’s been going on with us personally, as well as what we’ve been loving as moms, bloggers, and chaos coordinators. Things We Love will also link to our #FoundItOnAmazon Idea Lists.

(Note: We do not get a commission for these. We’re still babies in the influencer world…)

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Child(ish) Reads for Kids: Emotional Regulation

| Patti Webb

For the last two weeks, we’ve been talking about emotional regulation and how we can model and assist our kids to be more mindful in tough situations. In this episode of Childish Reads, we wanted to flip the script and pick books for kids to help with this type of regulation at early ages.

Last week, Mary and I hopped down to Barnes and Noble to find some new and classic kids books to help lay the foundation for emotional recognition and processing.

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Cheer Up, Emo Kid…

| Patti Webb

A couple weeks ago, my toddlers where downstairs in their playroom. We were just hanging out after snack, and my daughter Aeris decided to play with a set of Leapfrog building blocks, similar to Duplo.

Aeris is much more independent compared to her sister, and is very focused on what she wants to do with her toys. In this case, she wanted to take all the single blocks and build one tall, skinny tower.

She had about four blocks left when her tower started to bow and snap. She tried reassembling it but once it got too tall, it wouldn’t stay upright. She is only about 3′ tall, and she could not keep a hand on the tower and attach the last few blocks to the top at the same time.

I could see her frustration every time the tower fell. She was getting red in the face, she was slamming down blocks trying to get them to fasten tighter, and she was refusing to let her sister help her. More importantly, she hated that her vision of what she wanted to do wasn’t working.

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