Picture Courtesy: Flickr - Mojo Daisy

Blessed with a fussy eater myself, I’ve tried most of the ideas below with good results, , and have had relatives vouch for the the rest. You might not end up with a child who can pack it in in 10 minutes flat, but you’ll feel better knowing that she has had something wholesome and filling to eat.

1. Try other ways of getting her to eat her veggies. Puree lightly cooked mixed vegetables, and use them as sandwich spread.
2. Lower your expectations. We all know how great broccoli is for bright sparkling eyes, but if the only vegetable she eats is beet , that’s fine too.
3. Have a list of foods by the refrigerator, consisting of foods that she can eat without having to ask you. Include all her favorite fruits, nuts, and healthy snacks. Having her preferences listed out will make her feel important, and encourage her to reach for an apple or raisins, whenever she feels those pangs.
4. Use a sticker chart to reward her for vegetables eaten that day. Avoid cash treats - here’s a reward system that works even better.
5. Use portion sizes based on her age. She has to eat as many mouthfuls or spoonfuls of veggies as her age. Calculations like these make sense to a child.
6. It’s okay to choose unusual substitutes when she’s having a particularly fussy day. Ice cream over cereal works as well as milk.
7. Compromise if she’s addicted to sugar bomb cereals. Mix unsweetened cereal with sweetened. She gets her sugar fix, and eats the more nutritious cereals too.
8. Occasionally, change your dining setting to make things fun. Eat on plastic trays, or pie tins. Eat lunch in the garden or the balcony.
9. Above all, quit fighting over food. If there are some things she has a natural dislike for, let them go and find substitutes.

Bon Appetit!

The International Medical Corps. is in the running to receive funding for $1.5 million to feed malnourished children. The agency has been chosen from a group of 1,190 participating projects, and all they need to win the grant that they plan to use to feed hungry children in the developing world, is your vote!

Just click here, and you can cast your vote in favor of the IMC to help bump them up to the top of the list, and win their funding. $1.5 million could feed a LOT of hungy children, and all it takes is a click on the VOTE button at the top of the page.

Voting ends on September 29, so please hurry. And if you have your own blog, please consider spreading the word. We don’t all have the time or the energy to feed hungry kids ourselves, but what we can do is vote for someone who will!

…?” asked the bard.

A mighty lot, especially when it comes to a preschooler’s name. Your child’s name, to her, is besides mama or daddy, the only one which is of any consequence to her. We might get over the initial excitement of looking for a perfect baby name, and get used to calling out her’s as time goes by. For her, it’s her identity - a familiar voice calling out her name or seeing her name on a gift package label, or on the inside first page of a book, means more to your child then you know.

Use it often -

• In conversations with her, or drop it within her earshot when you’re talking to others.
• Display it liberally and prominently at home - use alphabet cutouts to display it on the walls of her room, or in shimmering letters on the bedroom door.
• Have it monogrammed onto her towels, and napkins.
• Paint it on her place mats at the dining table.
• Write it on the first inner page of each of her books.
• Look for all the letters of her name on store signs, bill boards etc. Older preschoolers won’t need any prompting from you.
• Write it out on a piece of cardboard, in large block letters and paint in bright colors. Cut out the piece of cardboard into random shapes - use it as her very own name puzzle to put together!

Hope all my American friends had a great weekend!

Here’s a tip to for big time bonding with your child. Think of something that you share with her and her alone - maybe the two of you are first borns (my son and I are), maybe you have a physical characteristic that she shares, a habit or a quirk. It could even be something as simple as both of you having the same number of letters in your name, anything at all.  Use this as a secret code that gives you both membership to an exclusive Mommy-Child Club that nobody else can get into.

This is especially great if you have more than one child - it helps you bond with each individually. And it’s great for building self esteem too.  For now, you’re easily one of the, if not the most important person in her life, and a secret code like this builds her sense of identity.

Photo Courtesy: Flickr- SanJoseLibrary 

I am always vary about recommending other websites to you guys. It has to be a fun and educational website that makes a Mama’s job easier. If they’re selling something, I’d rather not recommend a site featuring products that cost as much as the salary of an office worker in a Third World country. Seriously, there’s a lot of stuff available out there for free, and we don’t need to pay though our noses for access to great resources.

This one, I thought, is a great website that all you preschool mamas will love! It’s called Ziggity Zoom and it’s designed - I love this part - primarily for preschoolers. It’s still under construction, so you’ll probably find some of the activities are a little basic, but they’re constantly adding new stuff, so check them out often.

What I really like is that it doesn’t focus only on art, activities, games and the other stuff we as parents seem to be preoccupied with. Check out the Parenting Tips and Strategies and Go Green sections for advice on how to raise kids who can be balanced, well adjusted adults in the real world. There are tips on how to teach them to save money, recycle, donate to others, get them to help around the house, and lots of other useful stuff.

Check out Ziggity Zoom, and add it to your list of preschool sites to visit.  After all, we can never have too many free resources when it comes to raising the kiddies.

I am not sure how many of you have come across this, but I just found a browser tool exclusively for mommies. It’s called Mommybar, and it’s pretty cool.  Some of my fave blogs are on there, and there are new blogs to visit too.  I haven’t checked out the Coupons, Websites, Shopping and other features yet, but for those of you in the US, this should prove a nifty tool.

I like that I am going to be able to run through the Mommy blogosphere instantly! Plus, there’s a bonus Kids Bar, full of activity sites, educational and coloring pages sites, puzzles, games and lots of other stuff for the kids. I can tell this is going to be very useful during vacation time.

If you’d like one for your blog or site (and I have absolutely no affiliations with the people who run this. Promise.), scroll down, and click on the “I’m on Mommybar” button on the right hand side of your screen.  I use Firefox, and installation went off super smooth.

Talk about preschool teachers from hell. I came across this story via Mommy Life, and it left me first shocked, then sad, and now simply furious.

If you haven’t come across the story yet, 5-year-old Alex underwent what one website very accurately described as “psychological lynching.” The boy who is undergoing a process that will confirm autism - was voted out by his class, rooted on by the teacher! Wendy Portillo asked each child in the class to spell out what they didn’t like about Alex - in front of the boy - and the reasons to vote him apparently included the words “annoying” and “disgusting.” When his mother Melissa arrived to take him home, he was shaken up, and told her her felt “very sad.” He has also reportedly told her since the incident, that he feels he is “not special.”

This is a five year old boy, for crying out loud! I don’t care what Ms Portillo’s excuse is. I don’t care whether she was PMSing that day, or whether she had man troubles - this women deserves to be kicked out of the system for what she did. Shockingly enough, the school still hasn’t taken any action against her!

Barbara at Mommy Life has organized a special card campaign for Alex. Just click on his picture above, and you can access a page with a postal address on it. Please send this beautiful boy a card telling him he’ s special. Tell your kids to do the same. Barbara intends to collect all cards, and hand them over to his mother, so Alex will know what a special boy he is, regardless of what his imbecile teacher says.

Happy Mother’s Day to all of you!  Hug your kiddies a little longer today, and enjoy your special 24 hours!

Photo Courtesy: Flickr- Adwriter

Some cheery news to end the week with.

A Harvard researcher has conducted a study on married couples and happiness,  and he’s come up with the conclusion that married couples are happy - only as long as long as they don’t have kids!  Once kids enter the picture, all happiness, according to his distinguished brain, flies out the window to return home only when the brats have left home.   Here’s the article.

He says, and I quote…

…parents’ desire to get a return on the time and money they have invested in their children is part of the reason they persuade themselves that their offspring are enhancing their lives.

There’s more enlightening wisdom.

Money was part of the reason couples believed their children brought them happiness.    Psychological studies have shown that people appreciate products more if they pay more for them.

And, yet more words from the Buddha…

“We pay for (children) in time, attention, blood, sweat and tears - what kind of idiots would we be to devote all of that to the rearing of our young if they’d didn’t bring us some happiness?”

Gee, I didn’t know I was that miserable.  And here I was thinking my child enriched my life in ways money couldn’t measure.  I think I should go shoot myself.

Am I over reacting?  Do any of you feel this way?  Of course, being a parent isn’t always  a bed of roses, and as adolescence looms on the horizon, there are doubtless many more tear-your-hair-out moments ahead,  but to say that having kids decreases your happiness…?!!

Keep a Game and Art Box on hand for your preschooler to entertain himself. Fill a shoe box, or other cardboard box with art materials, puzzles and other games, and keep it away for a rainy day - literally! When the weather is too bad to play outside, simply drag the box out, and let your child explore. These boxes are also great to send with your kids when they go to visit their grandparents.

Here are some of the things you can include:

• Picture puzzles
• Humpty Dumpty puzzles. Cut out an egg shape from cardboard, and paint on a pair of eyes, and a big brown belt in the middle. Cut into pieces - the younger the child, the fewer the number of pieces. Drop the pieces in a small ziploc bag, and into the box.
• Wash and cut out pairs of juice box fronts - pair up different flavors, and mix all these up in a ziploc bag. Drop this into the box too.
• Cover bottle lids with stars and hearts stickers on each, and put these into another bag. She can match these in pairs.

To take care of art supplies, throw in(in separate ziploc bags)

• wrapping paper pieces
• craft foam pieces
• pieces of felt
• paints and crayons
• glue,
• glitter gel
• stickers
• satin ribbons
• craft shells

You probably can’t have messy crafts supplies to occupy your child on a long drive, but you can have crayons, marker pens etc.. Stick a piece of clear plastic on the inside of a blank paged book, to form a pocket. Throw in a few crayons and markers in there, and keep the book in the dashboard. Pull out when you need a break from that non stop chatter.

Enjoy!