Sharing a little childhood

I've been having a proud mom moment these days.  Those who know me know I'm a voracious reader.  My dream job when I was 9 was to become a children's librarian.  (I didn't, I'm a teacher).  We all have something in our childhood past that we want to share with our kids.  For me, that's Disneyland (we haven't gone yet) and certain books. I know, books.  I have such fond memories of books.  Not picture books, but kid novels.  I've been looking forward to the day when one of my kids would share a love of these books with me, and it's happening!
My oldest child is 6.  He too loves books.  This past summer we read through our first chapter book together (James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl).  He loved it.  He wanted to read Stuart Little next as he loved that movie, but we have yet to find a copy. So I put off getting another chapter book as he settled into grade one and this year's hockey season.  Then a couple of weeks ago I went looking for books for my kids at the library with my younger son and daughter while the older one was at school.  My eyes fell onto the shelf where the Beverly Cleary books are.  Beverly Cleary!  Was it possible?  Could one of my kids be ready to share in a love of Beverly Cleary?  I picked Ribsy, the tale of Henry Huggins dog who gets lost at the shopping mall and has all sorts of adventures trying to get back home.  The verdict?  He loved it.  We would read half a chapter or a chapter a night before bed.  Finally he said to me, Mom, I just want to keep reading, so we spent a good hour on the couch as I finished reading the book to him.  And he wants more.  He was so excited when I told him that there was a whole series of Henry Huggins books.  This week we brought another one home (Henry Huggins, the first in the series).  It's funny because I didn't think about Beverly Cleary to share with my sons, I had the Ramona books in mind to share with my daughter when she got big enough.  I've discovered that the Henry Huggins books were the first written by Beverly Cleary who was a librarian at the time she wrote them.  The boys at her library were looking for books about boys like them so Henry Huggins was her response.  The first one was published in 1950 and they hold up well.
So there's my mom moment of the week.  Sharing books of my childhood with my son.  What kinds of things are you looking forward to sharing with your kids?

Moving and dealing with change

It's been a season of change for us here at Clever Mamas. Jill has welcomed her new baby girl to her family! And I (Kris) have moved a couple of provinces over into a very large city.
Change of any sort can be good, but it can also be very stressful. As adults we have the brain capabilities to know what is going on and (hopefully) have the tools to adjust. It's still a shake up to our system. Now take yourself back in time. You're just a little person and your whole world has been disturbed. Your brains aren't fully developed yet so you don't have the tools to deal with it all. That's the place my sons are in right now.
My boys are 5 and 2. They have lived in the same city their entire lives. They had a community of friends who loved them and a real sense of security. The city they lived in was relatively small.
Now they are in a huge city, a different house, a different school (for my oldest), and no friends aside from each other and mom and dad. I know I am emotional dealing with it all and I'm in my 30's. There are emotional reactions to be expected by my kids too (and surely many of them have arisen).
Here's some tips on how we are dealing with teaching our kids to deal with the change and challenges associated with moving.

1. We started to prep them for the move a while back. They knew that they would be moving after Christmastime this year. We talked about it a lot and looked up all the new things that their new city would have to offer them so that they had things that they could be excited about.

2. We had some good times in the goodbyes. Our oldest had a sleepover at his best buddy's house. We had a bit of company over in the last while and made sure that the people who were really important to our kids had a chance of a good visit.

3. We read books about moving. My parents gave our kids the book The Berenstain Bears Moving Day for Christmas which has been a great tool. Our local library had also created a Moving Day pack of books which we borrowed to use as a jump off for discussing the move with our kids.

4. We encouraged (and continue to encourage) our kids to talk about their feelings and help them label what's going on inside of them. Kids need to know the power of words. It's a great tool for anyone. To be able to say: "I feel sad", "I feel excited", "I feel angry" helps kids immensely sort out what is going on for them. You can help pull this out of them, give them the words they need to express themselves, what they are feeling and why. Allow them the freedom to have emotions, rather than bottle it away, deciding that they are too young to really know what's going on. It can be as simple as my 2 year old said to me the other day. "I'm sad mom, I want friends".

5. Use the tools you have but don't allow your kids to get away with too much while feeling so much. While this is the time to be understanding that there may be more emotional outbursts from your kids, it is not the time to let them get away with any poor behaviors, you don't want to be fixing that mess up later on. Keep your standards. Sure, there have been more time outs and consequences in my house lately, but they are necessary. Just because my kids are feeling sad does not allow them to start kicking, shouting at us, or picking on each other. My standards for behavior have to remain in tact or we won't be able to move on from this time of transition. There is a difference between being empathetic to their feelings and allowing them to wallow in self-pity. I'd rather be empathetic.

I'm sure many of you have your own tips and tricks for dealing with all sorts of life changes. Moving is just the one I'm dealing with now (next up for us is preparing for life with a new baby). Many tips transfer over from one situation to the next. I'd love to hear what tips you can offer me to help my family through this time too!

The Big Mess

These are my kids' toys. Most of them. More were added to the pile after this picture was taken. Why do we have such a pile of toys? It all started when one of my boys informed me he didn't have enough blocks to build his castle. Well of course he didn't because there were maybe 5 blocks in the actual block container. The rest were in various toy storage places around the house: downstairs where we keep the hockey sticks (spare pucks perhaps), in the drawers under his bed, in my handy dandy living room storage baskets and scattered randomly in the closet. We'd also started to run out of Duplo, couldn't find any of the doctor's kit and didn't have quite enough firetrucks to run the Fire Department. The toys were a real mess. A somewhat neat mess, they were all put away somewhere, but absolutely no organisation left to them whatsoever.
This is a thing about being a parent that other parents don't warn you about. You know your kids will have toys, what nobody tells you is how the toys start to take over. I looked at this pile and though, really? Really and truly our kids have this many toys? How did this happen? I also realise that more toys are coming (my son turns 5 next month).
So armed with baskets and containers (and the notion of a garage sale in mind), we (meaning mostly me) searched the house for toys...all the toys. My kids got a great kick out of the fact that Mama was the one making the big mess! And then we began to sort. A pile like this can look intimidating unless you have a plan in mind. We started with the Duplo and worked our way from there (brush blocks, regular blocks, airplanes, trucks/cars, animal/people figures, instruments, dress up, doctor's kit, tools, puzzles...). The kids really did dig in and help (especially as they realised that they could find long lost 'favorites'. At the end we had something resembling this:

This ring of orgnanisers went around the entire living room. It also included a pile of things for the garbage (broken toys and other various items that really had no reason to be). It gave me a good idea of what I'm going to grab at a later time (when the kids are not around) for the garage sale. We discovered that yes indeed we really do have a full set of wooden blocks (although we are still missing one piece of the Thomas track).
Something great that helped get my oldest ready to do something like this was read Too Many Toys by David Shannon. It's a wonderful book that uses humour when dealing with this.

Wonderful, marvelous pigs!

I've had this book in my stack for a long while. Having taught kindergarten for more than a few years I have more than my share of kid books. When I started having my own kids, I took my favorites out of my classroom stack and put them aside for my kids to enjoy. My oldest and I rediscovered this book last week. Phoebe Gilman writes in the lovely rhyming tradition of Dr. Suess. Jillian Jiggs is her feature character, a lively (if messy) little girl. In this tale Jillian discovers how to make these cute little pigs (making her room really looked as if it had been lived in by pigs). The last 2 pages of the book demonstrate how you can make these pigs, so we did. They are pretty easy to do. I sew very minimally and very basically. Here's what you will need:
-an old pair of tights (I went and bought a pair at Value Village for under $2)
-needles
-polyester thread
-ebroidery thread
-a button
-polyester stuffing (I took mine from an old throw pillow)
-felt or fleece (for ears)
-scissors
First cut the end of one leg of tights about 25 cm (10 inches)

Fluff out your stuffing and fill 3/4 of the stocking

Begin sewing on his nose, eyes and mouth with the embroidery thread


use a whip stitch (polyester thread) to sew on the ears

make 4 small stuffing balls for the feet

one at a time, place the stuffing balls in place onto the body, use embroidery thread (it's thicker) to tie around the ends of the feet (tie them tight)

twist the open end of the pig into a tail and knot it, cut excess stocking off

And here's the pig!



Of course with 2 or more kids you have to be prepared to make 2 or more pigs. I made the 2nd one slightly different than the first to tell them apart (slightly different button noses and different colour ears)


Find The Wonderful Pigs of Jillian Jiggs