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Eating Me Out of House and Home: The Need for After-School Snacks

17 Comments / Back to School, drinks / By

We were also sent some Cars 2 lunch boxes from Clintons back to school range over the summer. Mini had a day out last week, which required a lunch box and he decided that he wanted to use the Mater box, which is a pretty unusual shape, but actually it is a great shape for taking drinks upright and took all his lunch with room to spare, plus the great thing was that no other cold had one the same, which meant that it was easy to identify. The lunch box had a pull out handle, which made it easy to carry too.

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Are Your Children Time-Starved and Toy-Rich? Finding Balance and Quality Time

20 Comments / parenting / By

The true measure of a nation’s standing ishow well it attends to its children – theirhealth and safety, their material security,their education and socialization, andtheir sense of being loved, valued, andincluded in the families and societies into which they are born.

I am sure by now most people will be aware of the BBC

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Letting Go: Allowing Children to Play Outside on Their Own

18 Comments / parenting / By

MadDad had an idyllic and pretty independent childhood. It was very Enid Blyton, well it would be he lived and grew up on a farm and spent most of the summer holidays returning home only to eat and sleep. I grew up with a pretty similar upbringing. We would venture out on our bikes to the nature reserve, the allotment, park or the beach. I loved it and when I was small we were allowed in certian peoples houses and the back alley.
One of our reasons for returning to our native North East was the fact that we wanted to give our boys a taste of the freedom we grew up with. Now before anyone starts with the kiddie fidlers and all that. I am a firm believer that there were such people when I was growing up and I distinctly remember being flashed at the local park, however, I also believe that there are not more of them nowadays, just that we are more aware of the dangers.

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Encouraging reading in boys

15 Comments / parenting / By

I wrote a post about encouraging writing in my boys and wanted to followup with one about encouraging reading. I am an ferociously reader. I adore books and lap them up, no, that is not quite right I adore reading. I love words, their meanings, the way they make me feel, the places they take me too. SO for me it was key that I introduced my boys to books very early on in their lives.

Make books available

We have books everywhere and we make sure that they are within their reach, We have them in the loo, in bedrooms, in the sitting room, we have a bookcase on the landing and one in the conservatory too. When the boys were smaller I made sure that books were in a box at their level and we rotated them. We were offered a free trial of Reading Chest and I have to say Mini loves it. He gets three books delivered and we can post them back when he has read them and we get three more in the post. It is superb if you are looking for books which are pitched at their ability and you do not have a library or in our case there is no reading scheme in Reception, which means Mini doesn’t get any books he can read, just ones that we can read to him.

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Laughing at, not laughing with

21 Comments / parenting / By

We are going through a learning curve here in the mad house. I try to let my boys have freedom, I believe in letting them play outside and try to encourage them to be independent, but with two boys who are 15 months apart there is a fine line to walk. Mini wants to be out with Maxi and I want to encourage them to look out for each other. In order to help facilities this we have purchased a set of walkie talkies for the boys, which work really well when they remember to take them out! But yesterday things went wrong.

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Is his best just not good enough?

19 Comments / parenting / By

arriet over at Plan B, wrote a really interesting post about how far would you trust your husband and as with all great posts, it really got me thinking. She referenced the post from The Guardian I about being a foundation parent and the fact that woman remain the foundation parent in the household and how this is very 1950’s.

The reason it got me thinking is how very different to my life it is. I was a stay at home mom when the boys were small. we made sacrifices and returned back to our native North East of England so that I could remain at home and be the boys primary care giver and influencer and look after them during the day, however, this has never meant that I am in sole charge of them and the house and when MadDad steps back through that door he takes on more than his fair share of the work.

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