I am trying to get back into a regular routine with my blogs and so here I am with my first post in … well, a little while  When I haven’t blogged for awhile, I get intimidated thinking that my blog post needs to be a thousand words long and contain some important insight.  In reality, of course, I know that it’s more about connecting with people and being honest.

So, to that end, I posed a question on Twitter yesterday regarding hard candies … I have never given any to my kids (2yo “E” and 4yo “J”), but we were at our corner store yesterday and the guy behind the counter (who apparently enjoys watching my kids ransack his store) gave us some peppermint hard candies.  He gave them directly to the kids, but i wasn’t sure whether i wanted my kids to have them, so I scooped them up and told them that we’d have them for dessert last evening.  Once we got home, i posed my question on twitter to see what other moms thought.  I only got five responses (I think most parents were already serving dinner to their kids!) and here’s what they said:

• All moms thought that the 2 year old is too young for hard candy
• Three out of five moms thought that the 4 year old could probably handle hard candy

Special thanks to @katekasserman @cafeofdreams @Trishinspace @deannaschrayer and @PeggyBristerHS who responded to my question.

I tend to be ultra conservative on issues like this.  I figure, why take a chance when my kid would be just as happy with some chocolate instead of something that could be potentially dangerous?  So, I talked it over with J and he was perfectly happy being bribed with chocolate (surprise, surprise!) and he didn’t miss the hard candies at all.  Of course, my 2 year old didn’t even realize what they were in the first place, so she certainly didn’t miss them.

So, what do you think?  At what age do you consider hard candies to be safe for kids?

Readers of this blog will know how apprehensive I have been about starting my son in school.  It turns out there’s somebody who has been even more apprehensive than me – his father!

Our son is turning four and just started in a Montessori preschool.  In our one-on-one meeting with my son’s new teacher, she told us about the gradual transition plan and how within the first week, all the children should be perfectly happy staying for the entire school day – i.e., three hours.  Lucky for me, my husband volunteered to see our son through the transition – taking him to school each day and staying until he was ready to leave.

As it turns out … since my son is in the half-day program, many of the students in his class (other half-day students) are younger than he is – some are barely three years old.  With twenty students in a class, that makes for a LOT of very unhappy new students.  My son has actually handled the transition quite well and his only issue is convincing daddy to leave him alone in the classroom.  Also, my son is very affected by turmoil around him – particularly when other children are upset.  So I think that once the other children calm down, my son will be very content in the class.  In spite of all the upheaval this week, he has actually had some productive playtime in the class exploring new activities.

Next week, I’ll be taking him to school with his little sister along for the ride, so I am hoping that we don’t have any major issues.  There is a parent waiting area that has toys for the younger siblings, so I am hoping that everybody will be content there and that I won’t need to stay the whole time for more than a day or two.

It’s been very comforting in a strange sort of way to realize that there are other parents who are just as neurotic as we are.  At one point this week, there were so many parents with their noses pressed against the glass panes of the classroom doors that the head administrator had to disband the group because they posed a fire hazard!

So, the bottom line is that my son seems to be making it through the transition with flying colors and I am cautiously optimistic about this whole schooling business!  Do you have any stories about the beginning of school? Please share them with me in the comments!

If you have some sidewalk chalk and a flat stone, you have an hour’s worth of entertainment or more.  Check here if you forget how hopscotch is played. On a recent visit to my Mom’s house in Ohio, my kids got to enjoy Grandma’s paved driveway as their art canvass.  Between art sessions, we improvised some early versions of hopscotch.  My kids (at ages 2 and 4) are too young to play according to the rules, but they both had great fun inventing their own versions once I drew out the squares …

With the grid above, here are some ideas beyond regular hopscotch:

• my kids enjoyed reading the numbers and of course we incorporated some counting along the way.
• It can also be good practice for children who are learning to write their numbers.
• If your children aren’t writing yet, they can tell you what number comes next so you can write it.
• We also practiced doing some backwards counting with Mommy jumping along the squares.
• My kids enjoyed trying to imitate my actions as I jumped along the squares.

And a terrific variation is to use letters in the squares instead of numbers.  In addition to the ideas above, you can:

• Use a stone to choose a number and then play “I Spy” with the letter that the stone lands on.
• Sing the ABC song as the children practice their jumping.
• Think up three words that start with each letter.

So, remember these ideas for the next time you find yourself spending time in a place without many toys – just remember to take along a piece of sidewalk chalk (keep it in a ziplock baggy in your bag!).

For the uninitiated, Box Day is what homeschoolers call the day when new curriculum arrives.  The family gathers around, there is a big cookout, a large cake with chocolate dripping off the sides … oh, wait – maybe that’s only my fantasy version!

In reality, this post should be entitled “Why I’ll Forgive Fed Ex Just This Once…”  You see, our box of new curriculum from Sonlight came via Fed Ex ground shipping while we were enroute back from Ohio.  They made three attempts while we were gone and then stored it in the warehouse until we could come and pick it up.  The problem is that there is no pickup location in Hoboken.  The nearest one is in Secaucus which is not far as the proverbial crow flies, but can take a long time to get to depending on the time of day.

I finally screwed up my courage and launched our voyage to pick up the box this morning.  The trip took two hours door to door.  Traffic wasn’t that bad, but there was construction and then the process of getting two kids shuttled from the car to the loading dock where the packages are stored.  Anyway – you get the idea.  I was beyond peeved at having to go all the way to Secaucus to pick up our package and am still considering lodging a complaint.  But the wonderfulness inside our box has dulled my upset considerably!

Here is a picture of my son digging into the box …

Truth be told, he was so enthusiastic because for some reason he thought there were toy trains down in the bottom of the box.  He was a bit disappointed at first, but once he noticed that some of the books are ones that he already loves, he was more content with the contents of the box.

Here is a sampling of the books (with my daughter in the corner of the picture trying to make a grab for the books)…

For a full listing of the contents of our box, check out Sonlight’s P4/5 curriculum.  We are very excited to start reading.  A couple of these books are some of my favorites from when I was a child including Uncle Wiggily and Brer Rabbit.  If you have a box day celebration in your house, please tell me about it – what treasures were in your box?