I dunno why you want to spend so much money on toys mom! I’ll happily move old buttons into a recycled canister for hours.
(please ignore the fact that the playroom badly needs vacuuming!)
A few styrofoam balls from an old planet mobile kit, the inside of a garbage can lid. Wheeee spin the balls.
When I pick Kidlet up from day camp, the lunch stuff is still generally out on tables in the party room where they eat. Three days in a row I’ve been, not shocked, but a little suprised at the crap that most of the kids have in thier lunches. The pile of trash is ridiculous for only 8 kids, and includes so many snack sized bags of chips, sugary granola bars, cookies, rice krispie treats, gummy fruit snacks, and other junk food.Â
Is a sandwich, chips, cookies and maybe a piece of fruit still really the gold lunch standard in this day and age when you’d have to have your head in the sand to not know so much more about nutrition than our parents did and childhood obesity is a real epidemic?
I can’t say that I never let my kid eat junk. Of course he sometimes has chips and sweets, but its not every day, nor the bulk of what goes in his mouth. He also understands that those are sometimes foods, and that while no foods are “bad”, some foods aren’t as good for us and we should only eat a little of them.
Stacked ham and cheese sandwich, lil smokies, quail eggs, apple and blueberries, carrot.
He’s been eating so little of his lunch this week, I used one of our smaller boxes and just packed a large snack.
Sandwich, layered cheese flower with fruit roll up face, watermelon and blueberries.
Despite a small meltdown yesterday, kidlet is really enjoying this day camp. It’s one I picked for him just for pure fun. His June camp was about team work and sportmanship. His August camp is science and engineering. Both are designed to be fun as well as teaching, but this week — nothing remotely educational about it. It’s at Inflatable Kingdom (large inflatable jumping, sliding, obstacle course thingies), and aside from the normal bouncy things they have an arts and crafts room with free time as well as scheduled crafts and are bringing in different events each day.Â
Yesterday they had a clown making balloon animals, got temporary tattoos, made masks and did spin art. Today they had face painting and a giant inflatable water slide set up in the parking lot, which apparently kidlet didn’t want to leave even though it was gray and cool and everyone else was covered in goose bumps and ready to go in, heh. Tomorrow they’ve got a rock wall and I don’t know what else.
Pb and J circle sandwich, cheese fishes, golden kiwi, blueberries, babybel cheese and broccoli.
He hasn’t eaten much of his lunch either day — until I pick him up at 1p and then he is starving and wants to finish it on the way home. They do offer snacks several times during the day (mostly healthy-ish, fruits and veggie booty and things like that), so that is probably taking the edge off his hunger. However, I think mainly he is having too much fun to spend time eating. Kids! =)
Day camp this week.Â
Turkey and colby jack on whole wheat “flatout” roll-up, raspberries and blueberries, carrot and broccoli, babybel cheese.
It being summer, kidlet is well aware that it is his vacation from academia. He has no tolerance for map worksheets or math problems or anything that he recognizes as “school stuff”. Still, I don’t want him to lose any skills from lack of use, and he really does need to work on his handwriting, as he was definitely in the bottom few in his kindergarten class for legibility. So, I have had to be more creative in coming up with ways to get his handwriting practice done, reinforce accumulated knowledge, and introduce new ideas as well. We write letters to out of town grandparents, play pirate and draw treasure maps to keep track of where we have hidden our booty, etc.  I keep thinking I need to research “unschooling”, since I envision that method of homeschooling to be about always teaching without formal materials or structured time for academia.
He is still just learning about the 5 food groups so today I offered him one of our kid cookbooks (Pretend Soup, which is geared towards preschoolers and a little young for him, but I realized today that I really don’t have any good ones for the 6-8 range; I’ll have to rectify that!), and asked him to look through it and pick out a recipe he wanted to eat with at least one food from the fruit group and one from the dairy group that we could make together this weekend. (I pre-scanned and found several made with fruit and yogurt, milk, cheese or cottage cheese.)
Once he picked his recipe (Number Salad – cheese in a fruit salad. I think that sounds weird, but he thought it sounded divine), I asked him to make a shopping list so we could buy what we needed. As scraggly as this is, it is so much better than even a few months ago. We’ll just keep plugging along at it. Anyway
He worked at it a little while and handed it to me, “I’m done!” — only the first line was on the paper at that time. I said, “but I can’t read this, what does it say” and he informed me that it was secret code. Upon closer inspection I realized that his super sekrit code was devised using the first and last letters of each word. “Nice shorthand,” I offered, but explained that I might have a hard time figuring out what he meant when I went to the grocery with this list. I might think that he wanted me to buy OnE AwesomE BandanA and MeaN GrasS instead of an OrangeE, ApplE, BananA, MeloN and GrapeS. After pondering that he conceeded the point and re-wrote the list with actual words.
In addition to the various fruits, he also included two “must have” items for his snacking needs:Â “Pepowne” (pepperoni) and “Kota Ceese” (cottage cheese).Â
All in all, I was pretty happy with the effort. He did some reading and writing while we talked about the food groups and nutrition, and he didn’t even realize he was doing “school stuff” 😉 So, do any of you moms out there have ‘tricks” for educating your child with work disguised as fun?
I have to say, I really don’t understand the people that head out to crazy packed venues like children’s museums, amusement parks, and the zoo late in the day. When we go to those places - like today, taking advantage of our Oregon Zoo membership – we go as soon as they are open, or as close to that as we can manage to talk people into when we are meeting others there. At that time of day, parking is a breeze and we are only a few cars down from the entrance. There are no (or very short) lines for tickets. But as we leave a few hours later, it never fails — lines ticket lines are 20 to 30 people deep with twice the lines open, the parking lots are stacked with cars all holding up traffic trying to wait for a spot to open. Geting *out* is almost as bad as the getting in must be for those johnny come latelys. I truely don’t understand what makes a couple extra hours at home worth dealing with that mess, because even once you are inside, its gotta be just as crowded and nuts!
On the other hand, I guess its good for me since the kids are both early risers and I *like* getting them out and about so I feel like I still have so much day left afterwards. I suppose if everyone went early to avoid the crowds, then the crowds would be early in the morning 😉
I’ve taken that picnic bento box out with us several times so far, but I haven’t been motivated to document it since I haven’t really gone to much effort to make it kawaii. It usually ends up looking something alot like this:
At best, I’ve cut the fruit and veggies into shapes. I think his day camp next week provides lunch, so no bento opportunities there either.
If you have ever commented here, you might have noticed that it requires approval before posting (although once approved, you can then post automatically without waiting for approval in the future). That works well to keep spam out of comments, but does require me to manually dispprove/delete all the spam posts that come in, and it’s tedious and somewhat tiresome clicking through a couple dozen posts daily. I’ve been leaning towards installing one of those little fields where you have to type what you see or do a basic sum or something to post, but before I do that and make it more difficult for posting comments, I’m going to try a plugin called “WP Captcha-Free” which, in theory, should prevent bots from being able to post.
“WP Captcha-Free generates a hash (aka token) based on several parameters like time (with a some cushion), post id, IP address, and browser user-agent which should not change between requests (within a short period of say a few seconds). When the comment form is posted the plugin uses ajax to get a hash value and adds it to a hidden field. On the server side it verifies if the hash is valid or not. It uses adds random salt to the hash so that it cannot be guessed.
A combination of a time based hash and javascript (ajax) makes it almost impossible for any bot to bypass.”
I don’t entirely understand all that, so I hope that it isn’t so aggressive as to interfere with actual people!
Â
Mostly quiet day at home for us. Kidlet and I went to the farmers market this morning, but didn’t pick up much aside from some the local strawberries from the same vendor as last week. Both weeks they were a little bit beat up, but oh so sweet and juicy.Â
His favorite bakery vendor (with cookies) from last year never resurfaced this year, and his backup bakery (with pastries) was out this week, but he managed to spy someone across the lot selling these itty bitty 2 bite cupcakes with American flags in them.
He does have some amazing eyesight. It always suprises us the things that he notices and from how far away. Maybe that’s normal for kids. Maybe that’s even normal for adults that aren’t one step away from legally blind. ;) He decided to count American flags on the way home and found 34. I think I saw about 10 until he pointed them out.
Daddy may be taking kidlet to see fireworks tonight; we’re playing that by ear since it would be quite late for him.
Poor kidlet picked up a bit of a sunburn yesterday. He’s never burned before, although I guess I shouldn’t be shocked since I forgot his sunscreen. He has always had very sensitive skin (he’s the kid that couldn’t be in a wet diaper for 3 seconds without getting a rash), and with the weather the way it has been all spring and summer, he had no chance to pick up a little base tan before spending four+ hours running around in a shade-free field.
Egg salad sandwich — I used the new pocket sandwich maker, but it was too big and I had to halve it. Dragonfruit (white flesh this time – cutting into dragonfruit is like opening a treasure chest.  Will it be white? Red? Pink? ;))  and watermelon flowers, baby corn. Small side car (not shown) with a few chocolate filled biscuits with cute little koalas printed on them.
It could have used a little orange or something on the sandwich, but it was really a fat one and already going to be all the way to the lid so there was no room even for a little carrot flower or something like that.