Tonight my wife and I (with her taking the lead) were talking to our six-year-old son all about angels, trying to navigate his series of detailed questions:
6yo son: “What can God do that angels can’t do?”
My wife: “Lots of stuff… [she elaborates]… God can do everything….”
6yo son: “So what does he need angels for?”
I: “They’re his helpers.”
6yo son: “They’re like his little elves… his flying elves!”
Last Christmas a day full of opening presents was overstimulating for our kids, who were at that time all five and under. This year we got a little smarter (or were just better prepared) and let the children drive the presents-opening. If they wanted to stop and play with a present, we let them. If they were ready to open a new one, we let them.
It worked out pretty well. Our two boys each opened a Lego set early in the day, with homemade Lego storage/building trays from the grandparents, and played with them for much of the morning. Then, after a while, we moved into round two of opening gifts. All in all, we opened about 90% of the presents in three different stages on Christmas Day. We’ve opened the rest since then.
Leading up to Christmas we followed our family tradition of nighttime prayer and song and candles with an Advent Wreath. Our six-year-old took the role of “leader” most nights, our three-year-old was “acolyte” (i.e., he blew out the candles), and our one-year-old was the altar guild. (And by “altar guild,” I mean she climbed up on to the table and tried to take apart the wreath and candles.) The short liturgy had the same centering effect for our kids this year as it did last year, though this year there was more fighting over who got to do what.
Two lessons learned as a dad:
#1: It’s easy, even in a Christian home, even when you’re a pastor, to let other things besides Jesus rule your consciousness during the Advent and Christmas season. This feels like it might be a yearly challenge, with due deliberateness required to keep the focus where it should be.
#2: Following the kids’ lead as much as possible leads to a more pleasant Christmas Day. There’s no need to rush through opening presents. (And children seem to receive a lot.) I think how we handle #2 has direct bearing on #1.
I’ve been thinking now about the possibility of giving gifts in each other’s names to charitable organizations as the kids get older. This could become a meaningful part of our Christmas celebrations in coming years.
Parents of kids–what about you? How do you navigate Christmas and the days leading up to it with kids? What are challenges you face? What’s rewarding about it? What helps your family keep focused on what matters most?
This year my three-year-old and six-year-old sons both started school (pre-school and kindergarten, respectively). So the recent arrival of Clara Vulliamy’s Martha Bunny Loves School (Albert Whitman & Company, 2013) was quite timely.
Here is a book trailer from the author’s Website, which gives you a glimpse of the color, font, layout, and movement of the book:
Martha Bunny Loves School is “a happy book all about Martha,” a bunny who is starting her first day of school. She has two bunny brothers (“one huge problem”), but before she gets to them, she shares her favorite color, popsicle flavor, hobbies, and (best of all) her “yellow-and-blue-and-orange-and-pink polka-dot rain boots,” which she wears even to sleep.
Martha’s bunny brothers are going to miss her when she goes. After eating breakfast–her brother Monty will only “eat his breakfast inside his box”–and getting dressed (“I don’t know what to choose”), she has to mollify two sad brothers who don’t know what to do while she’s away. So she founds the “Happy Bunny Club,” complete with badges, a sign, and a secret den.
After trying to fit all of her belongings into her backpack, Martha can’t fit through the door, so ends up packing just her Happy Bunny Club badge that her brothers make for her. At the end of her school day, she happily reunites with her brothers in the secret den.
When I asked my own three-year-old bunny what he thought about this book, he simply replied, “Good!”
“What happened?” I asked.
Martha have too much stuff in her backpack when she go, and she says, “SQUEEEEZE!” through the door. But her favorite stuff came out of the backpack.
Not long after reading Martha Bunny Loves School, my son went off to draw his own Happy Bunny Club badge.
There’s a lot to love about this book. The story is relatable, the plot and conflict and resolution are all compelling, and the characters (especially Martha’s) are well-developed. The illustrations and layout and font are stellar. The colors are vibrant. Here’s a sample page (note the graph paper background and creative use of space and text):
The book aims at ages 4-7 (grades pre-school through 2nd). My 6-year-old thought he was too old for the book, but I don’t think he is. My three-year-old loved it, and older kids (especially with younger siblings) will appreciate it too.
Martha Bunny Loves School is a standout children’s book, one of the best we’ve read in a while. (And we read a lot around here.) It’s been a pleasure to read through it with our little guy, and I’m sure we’ll continue to return to it in the coming weeks and months.
Thanks to Albert Whitman & Company for the copy of the book to review. Its product page is here; at Amazon here. The author’s own site is worth checking out, too.
I mentioned a few weeks ago that my five-year-old son is learning Hebrew, using the materials from Sarah and David. Part of his learning process was to re-shape his English bathtub letters into Hebrew ones, as noted and pictured here. Now (thanks, Diana!) he has real ones:
And he’s pretty happy about them, too:
More updates on our Hebrew learning adventures soon!
Okay, so he’s not really reviewing the Hebrew language, but he is learning it. Wanting to spend more time with my kids this summer, and seeing a voracious appetite for learning in my five-year-old son, I offered to help him learn a language. I told him I could offer Hebrew (of the biblical variety), Greek (koine/New Testament), and Spanish.
He opted for Hebrew. Thinking about demographic trends in the U.S. these next few decades, I gently pushed back: How about Spanish? No. Hebrew. He wanted to learn Hebrew. So we’ve begun.
We’ve been using materials from Sarah and David, a publishing company that specializes in Hebrew language materials for children. The materials are organized in stages, with learning the letters first, then a focus on reading, then finally speaking Hebrew. Here’s a curriculum overview in their own words:
The Sarah and David curriculum was built backwards from Bar/Bat Mitzvah with the goal of addressing reading difficulties students continue to have with accuracy and fluency in the upper grades. Beginning with The Aleph Bet Story and through to The Bar/Bat Mitzvah Book, both teachers and students have a consistent approach to use from year to year to reinforce letters, vowels and reading skills.
Using the curriculum, schools have found that they can introduce the reading process early, teachers learn instructional cues to guide the learning and students practice skills that can be applied to any reading exercise or text. Used in religious schools across the county, the reading program has also proven to be helpful to resource room teachers, special needs and late-start students, and adult learners.
The very friendly folks at Sarah and David sent us most of the Part One materials for review (and set us up with a Web account, which you can purchase here). My five-year-old and I have had just over two weeks so far with The Aleph Bet Story, The Aleph Bet Story Activity Book, The Aleph Bet Story Workbook, The Sarah and David Read Hebrew Primer (from Part Two of the curriculum), and The Aleph Bet Story Audio CD.
We’ll offer a multi-part review as we continue to work our way through the materials. For now, I offer praise for the effectiveness of the learning system. As they say, the proof is in the pudding. Or in the bathtub letters, in this case. After less than a week with the materials, my five-year-old son had used bath time to make this:
From right to left (how you read Hebrew), that’s shin and sin, which look like this:
Cool, huh? I never would have thought to do that.
My five-year-old loves these materials. Nearly every morning on his drive with me to pre-K, we listen to the CD. Nearly every night when I ask him to pick a book to read, he picks one of the Sarah and David books. And he often reads them on his own, or practices the writing and other exercises in the activity book and workbook. I don’t want to be *that dad* who makes his kids learn biblical languages before they can even read Captain Underpants, so I haven’t pushed much at all. He’s really enjoyed learning Hebrew with very little prodding from me.
This has all been really fun for us lately, and Sarah and David has made the learning process smooth and enjoyable.
Thanks to Sarah and David for the books and Web account for the purposes of review. I promised them only honesty, so they have not expected anything of our review. Expect more this summer as we continue to review the materials and learn Hebrew together.
…David, the winner of a new copy of The Honest Toddler: A Child’s Guide to Parenting.
You can read more about the book here. I highly recommend it, whether you’re a parent or not.
To choose a winner, I assigned a number to every entry (both a comment on this blog and a share of any kind qualified), then used a random number generator to select the winner.
Congratulations, David, and enjoy the new book! I wish you the best in your toddler adventures.
Thank you to everyone who entered the giveaway. You can subscribe to this blog using the “Follow” button on the right sidebar, or follow me on Twitter.
Today you can still leave a comment here for a chance to win a copy of the new Honest Toddler book.
To enter, simply comment on this blog post with the best (brief) parenting tip you can come up with. Or just say hi. For a second entry, share the link to this post on FB, Twitter, via mind meld, etc., and let me know in the comments section that you did.
I’ll announce the winner tonight. In the meantime, my review of this wonderful, creative, hilarious, and therapeutic book is here.
There is still time to enter our drawing for a free copy of Honest Toddler: A Child’s Guide to Parenting.
Just today HT posted some great reviews of children’s books.
In the meantime, I’ve reviewed HT’s new book here.
And the link for the HT book giveaway is here. Happy entering!
Being a parent is very simple. There is no reason for you to constantly go to other adults who do not know your toddler for advice or conspiring. What happens at home stays at home. …When it comes to being a good parent, the most important resources are the words that come out of your child’s amazing mouth. If your child is too young to speak, guess accurately on the first try.
–Honest Toddler
Honest Toddler, under the supervision of mom Bunmi Laditan, has now added a full-length book to a popular and cathartic Twitter feed, Facebook page, and blog/Website. I’ve posted quite a bit about HT at Words on the Word already.
Real-life Honest Toddler is a girl, but HT is “asexual,” which makes the whole thing more universal.
And now, s/he has written a parenting guide. The chapter titles alone produce enough laughs to make the book worth the price:
Bunmi has tapped into the psyches of Every Parent because HT, in all the quirky specifics of his/her behavior, is Every Toddler. (“Give a toddler a rag and a spray bottle, and your house will be sparkling before you know it. First it will be soaking, and your mobile phone may have water damage, but after a thorough wipe-down, the results will please you.”)
This Child’s Guide to Parenting is thorough–HT includes everything from media recommendations (music, books, TV) to hygiene (“leave well enough alone”), from restaurant behavior to grandmas and grandpas (“you should learn as much as possible from your child’s grandparents”). Interspersed between chapters are letters from parents to HT and homework assignments (sample: “Visit the toy store and get all the things. Next, go to a field. Run until nightfall”).
The Honest Toddler is hilarious, brilliantly written, and often pointed in its humor (see: HT’s disdain for Pinterest). I was impressed by how much this little toddler had to say. Although, now that I think about it, my toddlers have always had a lot to say.
The open parent who reads this book will be perhaps re-conditioned: temper tantrums are just “loud responses,” toddler ignoring is simply “selective acknowledgement,” and whining is “a legitimate form of speech.”
Honest Toddler, for all his/her impossible demands (duh), has some great advice. Facebook, for example: “Toddlers are tired of hearing Facebook notifications during story time. We’re sick of having to sit in parked cars, fully strapped in, while you make sure you get the last word on a virtual dispute with an acquaintance. This website is a distraction. Log off. Permanently.”
Communication: “Did you know that there are more than four hundred different meanings for ‘no’ in Toddler English?” (with a sample chart). Packing for vacation: “There’s no such thing as minimalism when it comes to packing for a trip with small children.”
Readers of HT’s blog, FB, and Twitter feed will recognize some material here (the “toddler-approved recipes” and physics breakdown of car napping), but not much. This is 256 pages of sheer, highly original, creative genius.
There are occasional moments of dark-ish humor (“There’s nothing special about a child [i.e., infant] who can’t go anywhere without a blanket over her legs”), but, then again, this was written by a toddler.
And, HT, if you’re reading: make sure your mom lets you watch Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. You’ll like it way better than Caillou.
If you’re a parent of a toddler or know one, The Honest Toddler is essential reading, if only to relax and laugh enough to keep one’s head in the game of toddler parenting. (If you’re interested in the possibility of a free copy, I’m giving one away here.)
I have to stop now; my own two-year-old just woke up to join us in watching the late-night basketball game and blogging, and now is requesting–you guessed it–Daniel Tiger and some water.
Many thanks to Scribner (imprint of Simon & Schuster) for the review copy, given to me for the purposes of an honest review. Find the book’s product page here. It’s on Amazon here.
And thanks especially to Bunmi/HT for making me a better parent. Or at least a parent who is able to laugh a little bit more and cry a little bit less as I raise my little ones.
Honest Toddler, under the supervision of mom Bunmi Laditan, has now added a full-length book to a popular and cathartic Twitter feed, Facebook page, and blog/Website. HT’s mom blogs here.
Thanks to Scribner (imprint of Simon & Schuster), Words on the Word has a copy of Honest Toddler: A Child’s Guide to Parenting to give away.
To enter, simply comment on this blog post with the best (brief) parenting tip you can come up with. Or just say hi. For a second entry, share the link to this post on FB, Twitter, via mind meld, etc., and let me know in the comments section that you did.
I’ll announce the winner right here some time next Monday.
And tomorrow I’ll post my review of the book on the book’s official release date. UPDATE: Review is here.
Words on the Word 