Purge

My Inbox is swallowing me alive. I used to pride myself on having no more emails in my Inbox than I could see on one screen. In the last few weeks, however, it has gotten completely out of control for reasons that are still unclear. I've been filing things away in my "blog to do" folder for that elusive day when I have time to blog. So, I'm just going to purge and link to a lot of things here that you may or may not find interesting. Or may or may not have time to read (I'm voting on "may not" - you won't hurt my feelings). Is it bad that cleaning out my Inbox feels like cleaning up my  house?

So, some reading for your relaxing Labor Day weekend plans at the pool. Wait ... are you doing that? Take me along.

What Should a 4-Year-Old Know: I think this is kind of viral on the Facebook, but was timely for me as I'm trying to restrain myself from worrying about Kindergarten ONE YEAR AWAY. (And also, a few concrete guidelines that help reign in my craziness).

Why I Am The Perfect Mother. God bless "average".

Child Safety: Stranger Danger Warning Needs Updating - I know I've posted about this before, but it is a conversation I need to keep having with Ellen. I like the ideas about teaching safety as a value, just like kindness and honesty and whatever else. Also, adding "Did anything happen today to make you feel uncomfortable?" to your standard questions about the day. And teaching about acceptable strangers.

"If my son wanted to dance, I would kill myself" - can't remember where I came across this, but nice story about celebrating the interests of your children.

Similarly, How Do You Teach The Beauty of Different - good tips.

The Last Time - also went kind of viral, but sweet and tear-inducing. I find myself compulsively documenting Georgia's sweet quirks these days, knowing that in the midst of all these developmental milestones, so many things will fall by the wayside.

How To Teach Kids To Say Sorry - We haven't really used "time out" for Ellen in years. On rare occasion when she is out of control, I do ask her to sit in a chair and calm down before coming back to talk with me. Most of the time, though, we talk things through and I explain why I am upset or frustrated with her behavior and I ask her how she could make a better choice next time. It works pretty well for us. The biggest AHA! I had lately, though, is that for your children to really learn the importance of apologizing, you need to apologize to them when appropriate. Not long ago, I lost my temper with Ellen during crazy-after-work-dinner-hour. I raised my voice and I don't think she expected it and she sulked away to the couch and cried quietly. I felt, in a word, terrible. I sat down for a snuggle and really apologized to her and explained why I had acted that way. Made us both feel better.

My Daughter Went Away to Camp and Changed - I've been very nostalgic for my days at Summer Camp lately. This was a nice article about the importance of activities that belong solely to your children and the happiness that comes with that freedom.

We Need To Talk About Race and How Do You Talk To Kids About Race? - I think a lot of good points here. This is something I fumble through with Ellen in our very homogeneous community. I mostly remember a part of the Nurture Shock book that  talks about the "being blind to color" approach and how it doesn't really work. You need to talk with your children about race and not let them draw their own conclusions. Another area in which I feel ill-equipped to be raising a responsible human being, but I will try my hardest.

Raising Safe Swimmers and Here Comes the Sunscreen (gallery of pics of parents putting sunscreen on kids). Summer's over? How? When?

Well, if you have a kid who started back to school, check this out: Crayola Starts a new Recycling Program

This Morning I Yelled - I've linked to Dash and Bella before, good recipes, great writing

 Great Artist Mom - fun blog by a gal who developed an art program for elementary students. She has good ideas for encouraging artistic behavior, and practical tips on supplies, and nice videos here and there on drawing. A little advanced for Ellen, but she likes to watch me and then color in my drawings. One big take away that we use: "You are the artist of your own paper". I'm trying to get Ellen to not be such a perfectionist with her art ... wonder where she gets that?

Three Huge Mistakes We Make in Leading Kids - Again, I see this so many places, the importance of specific praise for children, not just platitudes.

A reminder to Get In The Picture With Your Kids! We just had our latest round of family pics with our favorite photographer. I wanted to document Georgia as she has changed so much from December, but also to have pictures of me with the girls. I spend most of my days with them, yet have little documentation of that.

I bet you do this anyway - narrate your day to your baby - but this reinforces the importance! The Power of Talking to Your Baby.

Nice series on Slate: How Babies Work - lots of interesting articles on babies, American vs. other, and some science behind infant development and such.

Petite Monet

Our little Ellen is quite the prolific artist. We have gobs and gobs of masterpieces that come home from school, and are made at home, and end up in piles in her playroom before I recycle them.

I really don't feel bad about throwing away the ones that are "scribbles", for lack of a better word. I do keep all the "project" type items that come home from school, and some especially nice paintings or the first drawings of people or letters, for example.

But, how to keep them for the long term?

I have seen tons of great ideas online and on Pinterest. Coffee table "art" books of your child's art. Or scanning the artwork and then creating a big poster. Rotating the pieces in and out of a wall of frames.

I really like the coffee table art book idea the best, though I am sort of paralyzed when it comes to taking a good quality photo of the art to begin with and getting the lighting correct and more or less standard from picture to picture. Our scanner is super old and smallish, so really won't work for this kind of project.

I also saw this new app on Cool Mom Tech this week - ArtKive. It sounds like a similar idea -you can take pictures of your child's artwork and it stores them in some way, then eventually you can make a book. I haven't figured it all out, but it's free to download for a short period of time, so I downloaded it and will figure it out later!

Caution, caution

I follow our little local police department on facebook and, fortunately, the posts are mostly of the "lock your cars" "bike stolen" "traffic work" variety rather than that other nasty stuff.

They did have a good tip the other day, I thought ....
If you take your kid(s), or especially a group of kids, to a busy event - circus, fair, etc - take a picture of them on your phone before you leave the house.

Should they get separated from you -**please, please, please never let this happen to me** - you have a current picture that shows exactly what they are wearing. It can be distributed quickly in an emergency.

(My two scariest "lost child" moments thus far have been 1. in the hardware store as Ellen wandered the aisles just fast enough that she was gone before I turned each corner, and 2. when she was watering with me in the back yard and again, wandered to the front and around the house fast enough that we were chasing each other, but couldn't see each other. Awful. Our rule is that she has to be able to see my eyes if we aren't holding hands.)

I love taking pictures with my iPhone and I bet a lot of us do it anyways, but I've never specifically thought to get a quick full body picture including Ellen's outfit.

Note to self ...

Tip o' the day

Since the iPhone came into my life, I have been terrible with taking pictures with my real camera. Life has been busy, too, but excuses excuses excuses.

I just uploaded all of my pictures from February (probably the fewest in any month since Ells was born) and virtually all of them are upstairs at bedtime. I kind of like it, though, since that isn't something you usually think to take pictures of, but still spend ALL OF YOUR LIFE DOING.

So ... take your camera upstairs. Leave it there. Grab it for story hour or bath time or teeth brushing or general mischief / stalling.

I think you will be happy you did.

Broken record

Are you bored yet with my insistence of photographing your child in everyday circumstances and/or my insistence to get yourself in pictures with your kids???

I am failing at both, by the way.

I do (someday) hope to be better, though.

I thought this picture from Rachel at Sesame Ellis was really stunning:



Doesn't it just perfectly capture the moment? Something that probably happens all the time, yet is so beautiful. It obviously helps that she has the skills to capture the lighting and composition, but me thinks it is something to strive for.

Along the same lines, I find that Pinterest has some nice links to photography things. Here is my Photo board. There were some great shots in this blog post on Photographing Your Own Children by Chubby Cheek Photography.