Growing Versions

My son pledged with his friend this weekend to visit every playground they saw.  His friend made an important addition to this pledge, to visit every unseen one too.

I am a big fan of ignoring children every once in a while.

 School is in session.  Be sure to bring your cheques for the field trip to the mountains.  The Remembrance Day assembly is starting at 1:30.

I have observed these past few sugar rush filled days that with Hallowe'en candy eating  is only a small fraction of what kids like to do with it. Getting it, redistributing it, and planning what to do with it take up a lot of the time spent with it.  Before they even head out to get the candy, the kids talked for weeks about their plans for saving, stockpiling and/or recommissioning the candy (we could give it as Christmas gifts) after they got it.  Once it was safely back home after being lugged through the streets, it was piled, counted, sorted, categorized, briefly packed up and taken to the library to ensure they weren't too far from it and then finally became stock in a hand made vending machine (with a slot for parents' money) and then arranged as a homebased "snack shack" complete with a price list.  It was even taped together to form a pattern.  Briefly they had a sizeable amount of anything (bonus being that it was as de...

45 minutes selling lemonade=just enough money for a box full of stuffies at the other yard sale 45 minutes sitting at a yard sale=a second hand coffee maker for dad's birthday present

When I come across a place where Barbie has been played with, it is like coming across a series of behind- the-scene still shots of another, more glamourous person's life.  It reminds me a bit of a time in my life when it was possible to gather everything up into a bag and move at a moment's notice (did I ever really live like that?) Observing her living area,  also feels a bit like she dropped everything when she got called away on an important ___________( fill-in-the blank) assignment.  Clothes are strewn through out her living area, mingled with teeny tiny phones, shoes and cooking utensils.She has closets and even an accessory vending machine but they are usually empty. She prefers to spread out her possessions in the open as some kind of record.

We've convinced ourselves too many times that this toy or that one is needed or wanted.  However, it has been the "loose parts" that have carried the day with our kids.  My son's discovery of the marvels of a vacuum hose for marble rolling over took any product designed to do the same.  He has often quipped, as he does about any toy that seems to be having a great time, that he wished he himself was a marble and could go down the vacuum hose track. A pair of 3D movie glasses with the lenses punched out have been frequently thrown into the mix, creating a frisson to a wide range of play scenarios. The crib mattress has an even higher status.  It has been a trampoline, multiple (multiple!) versions of slides and launchers of all sorts.  It has a place of honour/hiding in our living room from which it is extracted atleast once a day.  It fills all kinds of gaps. I remember a moment in time when giving my kid a spoon in a restaurant got us through a cr...

...for the days when you just cannot wait to get back to the bowling lanes.

Toy production and marketing make up a multi-billion dollar part of the economy. In our house, we're living proof that marketing toys directly (or indirectly) to kids makes the world go round. But the things that actually get played with are a whole other matter. 1. Balloons, they really are all that, apparently. 2. Blank deposit slips and stamps keep even toddlers officious. 3.Skipping ropes.(occasionally skipping comes up, but moving things up and down stairs suspended by these darlings is really what they are for). 4.Crib mattresses, no child should be without a crib mattress to slide down stairs, create walls for blanket forts and make tunnels for cars. 5.Sticks. They may just be compost or less to you, but to a child, they can be a companion. 6. Expired membership, credit and library cards  Do not shortchange your child.  They are just itching to play with currency why not spare yourself identity theft by giving them a wallet stuffed with fake cards instead? 7.V...

I had a long list. The list was compiled in an effort to take a stab at eliminating various and sundry sources of stress. Then I heard the author of this  article  on the radio. He's in favour of us all revising how think about "being busy". I had already aborted three attempts to take the bus and go do something productive, but something kept holding me back. After hearing this guy talk about the value of idleness, I decided to not do much of anything. There are big things to be chipped away at, just not today.

It is one of those mornings... ...when I can pile up blankets and make slides and bouncy castles, isn't it?

First it was a stick he wanted to be, so he could sail down the sewer into the harbour. Yesterday, he tells me would love to be a toy car so he could get played with on ramps and get swung on ziplines. However, he has a stipulation.  He would not like to be a car who gets played with by a baby.  Likely, he was heavily influenced by Toy Story 3 where it is made clear that babies play with toys much differently than older kids.  Babies don't understand that toys don't want to be thrown around willy nilly.  For one thing, babies don't know how to build ramps.

On the way to school on Monday morning, we were all a little taken aback when we cast ours eyes upon the very green hill behind the school.  For a couple of weeks until then, we had come to take for granted the first fluffy layer and later, sheen of icy, snow.  It was a source of very free entertainment and it provided a much needed pressure valve to our house/school/office bound days.  Suddenly, it was gone. Despite its brief tenure, the school grounds looked like they were missing something crucial.  It felt a little like there had been a circus tent erected next door that had provided hours of free shows and excitement and a place to head to escape normal life.  And now, it appeared a team of carnies had come in the night and taken down the tent and moved on.  All that was left was the last crust of crunchy crusts of snow for cracking. This morning, a promise of another snowfall is in the air.  My son announced that a bicycle sled would be a fa...

Not to be outdone, when my son started a parachute making kick this week, my daughter jumped in and tangled a tiny doll she had lying around and attached it with left over Christmas ribbon to a dollarama bag too.  She had great fun deciding which was more parachute worthy, tiny girl doll or tiny wrestling figure.  I guess it depends on the criteria, but perhaps, because her parachute was considerably bigger than his, the girl doll fell more dramatically, with a fuller parachute in her wake.

Two years ago we had a good snow year.  We had fluffy good stuff for playing in.  We head across the street to the community sledding hill and played our guts out, slipping and sliding down the "kiddie" hill.  Across the ball field, ominously tall and shimmery, was the "big" hill.  My daughter, then 5, was hesitant to try going down it.  My 2 and a half year old was definitely too small to attempt it.  However, more importantly I suppose, I felt queasy just looking at it.  It was so steep and so many rowdy "big" kids zoomed down the hill at high speed, wiping out plenty, but also screaming with glee. Last year was a bit of a write off as far as fluffy fun snow was concerned. This year though, we have had a nice dose of snow in the past few days and both kids were keen to get started on using their new sleds.  By the time we got outside though, it was raining.  Cold icy rain was running in rivulets down the street.  The wind tunnel...

All the puddles and all the usual mushy places are crusted over this morning.  It is with great purpose that my son declares that there is ice to crack today.  Later in the day yesterday, once things had cooled considerably, he was anxious to get outside again to crack up some icy puddles. He has a baseball bat and jumping feet for the job. That crunch satisfies that urge to break the surface, after all, "leaves in frozen puddles do not move around." This ice breaking is not the loosey goosey corporatized kind of activity we, as adults have come to resent.  It's like work to four-and-a-half year olds, this ice breaking exercise.  

I was invited over to my neighbour's house the other day for Thanksgiving dinner.  Like many Thanksgiving dinners it took all day to prepare.  My neighbour had to go to the farm and pick the carrots and dig out the potatoes and she had to climb a ladder to get at the apples for the pie and she had to "borrow",  not   kill, a turkey from her other neighbour.  The house she lives in is amazing.  It has a loft that you have to climb a tree trunk to get to and it has a compost toilet. She invited me to go to her house for Hallowe'en, when the time comes.