Since our 5 year old son is our first, he’s our experiment.  We try out all kinds of activities, sports, shows, hobbies and more at least once and if it works, we stick with it.  So far, we’re sticking with piano, T-Ball and soccer.  Not so sure about basketball and some of the other things we’ve tried.  Without trying to load him up with too much, because he’s gotta be a kid after all, we checked out Adventure Guides at the request of one of our neighbors.  I kind of consider Adventure Guides to be Cub Scouts “light”.  For those 30-somethings and older, you may recall hearing about Indian Guides as a kid.  Do to political correctness, this is the same organization with a new name.

Adventure Guides Review to Date:

So far, so good.  It’s relatively laid back, the Dads and kids involved are pretty cool and you just participate in what you want to.  You only pay for the events you go to.  There’s no fund raising.  So, if you’re really jammed up for a couple months or short on cash, no problem.  You can pick up later.  They basically have a monthly meeting where we meet at one of the Dad’s houses and talk about the next external activity while the kids play.  Then, the kids sit around in a circle and do a brief announcement about what’s new in their lives (usually filled with some silliness and chuckles), then the kids do a craft.  This is all funded by the host.

As far as activities, to date, we went with our circle and slept over on the Battleship New Jersey (Awesome!), spent a weekend in the mountains doing sledding, game night, a hike in 3 feet of snow and some other neat stuff I probably wouldn’t get around to doing with my kids on a typical weekend, and next, we have PineWood Derby Car Races coming up.  Upcoming for the summer will be some other campout stuff and day trips.  It’s probably about 8 major events per year.  Dads can do something similar with their daughters for the girl-only Adventure Guides as well.  It’s really been a blast, my son can’t stop talking about it and I feel like we’ve really bonded on these trips.  Not that we don’t do a ton of fun stuff with the family, but there’s something different about going away one on one with one of your kids for a weekend for a fun trip.

I’m sure soon, some of his friends will be joining cub scouts and he’ll be asking me about that too, but for now, I’m satisfied with this toned-down version.  Cub Scouts seems like a bit more of a commitment, with uniforms, fundraisers and other stuff that might not work for us.  But, the activities the kids do seem to overlap.  For instance, the trip to the Battleship was frequented by both Cub Scouts and Adventure Guides.

Anyway, I give it a thumbs up.  Curious if you have any impressions of either organization.

When Mom’s out for the day and it’s raining out, boredom can ensue.  Today, the wife took our daughter to a baby shower for the day, so I had the two boys.  Confronted with a lousy forecast and the novelty of new Christmas toys long gone (sad, isn’t it?), I started thinking about some neat stuff to do with them instead of plopping them in front of the TV.

We considered seeing a movie but there was nothing playing that we found interesting.  And that kind of defeats the purpose of avoiding a day full of television – it’s just a higher priced screen.

Bounce Places – We’ve been to a few of these for various birthday parties.  Whether it’s BounceU, Kids Rule, or whatever the name of the chain is, they’re pretty much the same place.  Kids take off shoes, go nuts running and bouncing through various large blow-up obstacle courses and it tires them out while Dad gets to bounce around and act like a little kid with them.  That was our first stop today.  For twenty bucks, we spent 90 minutes of quality time together going nuts.  Today they allowed walk-ins, but some days they don’t so just find a place near you and call ahead.

Arcade -This was going to be our second choice, but the place I had in mind was closed on Sundays, so we didn’t get over there.  Regardless, we don’t have games in the house (yet) and they rarely make it to an arcade so I figured this would be a fun way to spend an hour or so.  Maybe next time.

In the House: Hide and Seek -There are a million things you can do in the house on a rainy day, but we rarely play hide and seek and our 3 year old absolutely loves it.  It never gets old for him, even when he hides in the same spot every time!  Our five year old’s getting to that competitive stage where he really tries to find crazy spots to hide.  Anyway, that’s always fun for a good thirty minutes.

Arts and Crafts -My wife’s real good about stocking the house full of arts and crafts for the kids.  We have an endless supply of paper, stickers, crayons, markets, glue, etc.  So, we basically just wing it and throw together some ridiculous contraption and then present it to Mom when she gets home.

Bath – The Closer - So Mom doesn’t have to walk in and do a bath first thing in, I’m starting bath time now.  I’ll let them splash around in there for a while and chill since I usually move things along more quickly during the week and we’re starting early.  When she pops in, I can say, “They’re bathed – alright I’m gonna finally take my shower for the day after I hit the elliptical for a couple minutes” or whatever.

While a rainy day can stink since we do so much outside when it’s nice, there’s no reason to totally squander a good day with the kids.  They grow up so fast, so we might as well make the most out of these individual moments when the family’s not together and we’re not in our typical routine.

What are some of your favorite Rainy Day Activites?

I’ve been both amused and disturbed when my 5 year old quotes me an infomercial outlining the benefits of the giant cupcake maker, the magic doorsweep or the snuggie.  On one hand, it’s funny what an easy sell he is and how enthusiastic he is about a piece of crap made in China that falls apart once it arrives, but at the same time, it demonstrates just how impressionable young kids are to even small doses of commercial television.

When I was growing up, I don’t recall infomercials like this during kids’ shows.  I also didn’t desire or possess much in the way of material things.  While my friends were all getting the Commodore 64 and wearing expensive parachute pants, my Dad bought me cinder blocks to build a fort in the back yard and I got “practical gifts” like flashlights and pocket knives.  It’s not to say I didn’t want what my friends had at the time, but I think I have a different appreciation for the receipt of gifts even today as an adult compared to friends and kids today.

This is of course, is partially a reflection on us as parents and how we’re raising our kids, but we’re pretty much mainstream, or actually, a bit on the frugal side compared to virtually everyone we know and associate with.

I tend to try and focus our spending on memorable life experiences over material things.  I’m sure the kids will look back more fondly (and so will we) on a trip to Disney rather than boasting that they had a full collection of games for the Nintendo DS when they were growing up.  However, with every holiday and birthday seemingly being met with gifts, gifts, gifts, it seems to diminish the thrill and appreciation of subsequent gifts.  I’m often overruled by my wife, and sometimes rightly so in retrospect.  But I wish on some levels that life could be simpler, easier, less wrought with chintzy crap from the dollar store.  It’s not just the money, it’s the mindset that entices kids to desire more and more “stuff” regardless of its complete lack of utility or enjoyment after the first 5 minutes.

What are your thoughts?

Am I an old fart who forgot what it was like to be a kid or is this generation being subjected to vastly different consumerism than ours?

Is it me or are some parents (usually moms dictate these terms) overly rigid with their kids’ napping schedules?  I don’t mean to knock moms trying to do right by their kids, because I realize that some kids are completely off the wall if they miss their nap for the day or something, but there are some parents who are so rigid with the napping timeline that it’s a little over the top.

We have some acquaintances that absolutely will not budge by even 30 minutes on plans or a get-together if it doesn’t adhere strictly to their child’s standard nap time.  In one case, my wife hangs with a small mom group and when it hits 11:30, one mother abruptly packs up and jets out of there without barely saying a word.  She murmurs something about Johnny’s nap time and how he can’t start late.  I mean, what would happen if instead of laying him down at noon, he went down a 12:15?  Does he turn into a pumpkin?  The kids were having a great time and boom – end of story.  No flexibility.  We have another friend that won’t drive to our house during the day because their child wouldn’t get a full nap at their usual time.  Meanwhile, it’s OK for us to drive to them and have the kid nap in the car or shift their nap time.

Maybe we’re just too lax or real lucky, but since we’ve had to be pretty flexible after moving and drive our kids all over the place to maintain friendships, make doctor’s appointments, hit speech lessons, etc., our kids nap times have moved around to accommodate schedules, not the other way around.

Here’s the funny part…twice per year, times shift by an hour for daylight savings.  The moms have no trouble shifting a noon nap pre-daylight savings to noon post-daylight savings (a whopping 1 hour shift in the span of a day), yet they wig out at the thought of starting or ending a nap 15 minutes from the “clock” time to accommodate a particular situation.

Can someone please explain this to me?

With our kids off from school today, my wife put on a movie for the boys (5 and 3), but it wasn’t Disney and it wasn’t the usual cartoon fair.  She put one of the 1-year birthday videos I made for each sons just prior to their first birthday.  Even after seeing it several times, the kids still love watching their videos (and each other) and there’s just something “authentic” or heartwarming about watching them reminisce about being smaller and how silly we were with them and what it was like being a baby.  Without patting myself on the back too much (because I’m totally deficient in so many other facets of fatherhood and husbandry), I’m really glad I took the time and energy to put together these videos for the kids and I’ll have to do the same for our daughters as well, now 7 months.

Background: Throughout each of our kids’ first year, like many families, the video camera was on all the time and we took plenty of snapshots.  Now, that’s normally where it stops.  Most families have countless hours of video of their child’s first feeding, first roll, first steps, first word, etc., but it never gets put to good use – perhaps a YouTube vid forwarded to family members if anything.  Well, for whatever reason, leading up to our son’s first birthday, I was inspired enough to hunker down and spend probably 20-30 hours total split across a few weeks uploading and editing about 15 hours of video I had captured from his first year.  I figured out how to use some standard video editing software rather quickly and easily, tried out a few digital tricks, and I was on my way!  I’ve used Pinnacle and the Microsoft Movie Editing software for videos now.
I added several of our best shots and then envisioned a theme for the video.  I basically went through each major holiday and milestone, inserted video and pics, made sure to include all the family members I could muster up, and put music to the different sections.  These days, with massive archives of personal music and iTunes, it’s easy to get say, Christmas music for a winter section or a scary song for Halloween, etc.

At each first birthday party, with the whole family there, we put the video on and watched it together for the first time.  People were completely blown away and loved it.  Many, including my wife, cried at the end when I cycled back through the first year and said, “Kev’s growing up”.  I had one wedding planner ask me if I wanted to start doing videos for weddings.  It’s not that I had any great talent at all, nor did I have any prior experience.  It’s just that nobody takes the time to do this.  But, since this will be something our kids (and us) have forever, the grueling weeks of 1-2 hours a night in the basement toiling away at uploads and editing were well worth it.

Lessons Learned

Now that I’m about to start editing my third one, I’ve learned some important lessons I’d like to impart:

• Don’t get so wrapped up in perfectionism and editing each frame to perfectly coincide with a musical queue, digital tricks, etc.  This will end up taking up 80% of your time for only marginal benefit.  I learned this the hard way on my first video.
• Don’t keep watching your partial video hundreds of times throughout the editing process.  This wastes valuable time and drains your energy/creativity along the way.
• Do batch processing.  Download ALL the video at once, just let the tape run, record on your hard drive and go in and edit later.  This is much quicker than what I did the first time, which was to watch little bits and pieces on the camera and then decide to upload little snippets for inclusion in the video.
• DON’T MAKE YOUR VIDEO TOO LONG!!!…Especially if you want anyone else to watch it.  My first one was probably 30 minutes, second one 25.  I might make the next one 20 or so.  When you pop on a video for a party or perhaps another couple who’s thinking of doing the same thing, they don’t want to sit through a 3 hour compilation of every little thing you’ve captured.  I was at one party where someone put on a video which was practically an unedited running stream of 45 minutes of less than gripping video.  Everyone felt imprisoned and couldn’t just get up and leave but you could tell everyone was annoyed.  It’s much more effective for both immediate effect and subsequent viewing to have a nice story to tell – break up themes, and keep it relatively watchable.

Most Importantly – Just Do It!  Upon reading this, you may be one of the millions of moms or dads out there with hours and hours of footage and thousands of beautiful pictures just sitting on a hard drive or tapes somewhere.  Take the time and effort to chip away at this in a methodical fashion and your kids will love you for it.

In this economy, virtually all families are looking for ways to shave costs off their daily living expenses.  Well, now that we have another little one in the house and she’s progressing into foods, my wife started the routine again of making Samantha’s baby food instead of buying it.  When she did this with our boys, some people used to act like it was a little weird or just “too” frugal, but nowadays, nobody really thinks much of it – and it makes total sense to us!

You can buy baby food in the grocery store for exorbitant prices compared to making it yourself.  Since we try and get our kids as much organic, hormone-free, etc. foods that we can reasonably afford, buying organic baby food can really add up.

How Much Can you Save Making your Own Baby Food?

• As an example, let’s say your baby’s eating 3 baby food meals a day.
• At 89 cents per jar for organic, that’s roughly $80 per month in baby food.
• My wife spent about $15 in the fruits and vegatables she made up, so the savings are about $65 per month

Benefits of Making your Own Baby Food

• Much cheaper - you’ll notice a few extra bucks at the end of the month no doubt
• Healthier – no preservatives, fresh
• Better for the environment - no trash
• Tastes Better – not sure the baby notices, but we do.  Baby food tastes pretty bad

How to Make Your Own Baby Food

My wife simply goes to the store and buys some fresh fruit – say, pears.  She blends them up in the Cuisinart, puts them in an ice cube tray and freezes them.  Each time we’re going to feed Sam, we just thaw out a cube that that’s half her meal.  The other half is breast milk with rice (the baby kind). As we introduce new foods, the same can be done for peaches, apples, carrots, etc.

It’s a heck of a lot cheaper and very easy to do!

My wife sure can pick ‘em.  She took the kids to the library and the kids wanted a book on whales.  They love whales and nature.  I was reading it to them tonight and it started to get more and more graphic.

• It kind of started with a whale in a net.  When questioned on the net, I said, “Oh, those men on the boat were just playing hide and seek with him”.
• Then, there was some blood-filled water from a recent whale killing.  I said “Oh, he must have gotten a bloody nose by bumping a ship or something”.
• Then, there are Japanese harpooning a whale, then a dead rotting carcass on the beach and it was pretty much downhill from there…

Apparently, the book was affiliated with Greenpeace or something (nice, happy whale picture on the front – the horrors of the human plague by page 3) and the kids were horrified by the time I got to the end – but I couldn’t just stop reading the thing to them cold, I didn’t want to abruptly stop as if what I had said previously was false.  Well, they’ll have to learn what people do to each other and animals someday; just figured 5 and 3 was a bit young.  I guess we need to skim library books from now on for gratuitous violence.

Maybe we’ll go back to Magic Schoolbus tomorrow night!

We’ve found that our 5-year old tends to become obsessive over various interests.  I don’t know if this is normal since he’s our first, or whether Kevin has an abnormally obsessive personality.  After enduring the same 3 notes of “Carol of the Bells” on his toy piano over and over for hours, days, weeks on end around Christmas time, with the Spring thaw came his love of insects.  We thought we were over the hump last year when he was fascinated with “Brood X” and collected an entire jar full of cicada carcasses and winter came.  Well, this year brought a new brood of cicadas and the cycle started all over again.  Every spider, beetle and ant Kevin encountered continued to bring wonder and amazement.  He sleeps with a book entitled “Amazing Insects” which is full of insect facts for kids.

Indulging Your Child’s Love of Insects

Figuring that this may be the only time in his life that he’s this enthusiastic over anything, we caved and further indulged his love of insects.

1. This spring, we purchased a butterfly house and caterpillars. Watching them hatch, eat and eventually be let free to fly away was such a big deal to him. When butterflies were flying around our porch later in the year, we told him they came back to visit him and he was thrilled.

2. While on vacation, we found a local Butterfly House that allowed you to hold little sticks with sugar on them to attract the butterflies and they’d come right up to you.

3. To cap it off, we found out there there was an exhibit in a nearby city entitled, “BugFest”. On a whim, we researched it that night and went that weekend.  It was really something.  We arrived and they had beetles baked into crackers you could eat (Survivor Style!), insect-crafts, educational time with entomologists, and best of all – Amazing Insects!  They had these crazy leaf-looking insects, crazy spiders, a rhinoceros beetle, every exotic insect you could think of.  Kevin was amazed – and happy.

While not every kid is quite as enthusiastic as Kevin is about insects, it makes him happy and it beats being enthralled with a video game console or television.  While it would be nice to get a break from the incessant chatter about how he befriended a new beetle today and how many cicada carcasses he collected, we’re thrilled to indulge his passion.  Our 3-year old has a passion for dinosaurs that I’ll be blogging about next – subscribe for free in a Reader if you want to hear part 2.

What are your kids’ silly passions and how do you indulge them?

A major concern for many parents is what their kids are up to online.  This is an entirely new realm for the current generation of parents and for anyone that’s never seen the oft-publicized “To Catch a Predator”, it’s evident that there are literally thousands upon thousands of predators online seeking to exploit children.  Aside from this, some parents just want to know what sort of topics their kids are so intent on instant messaging and texting to each other.  With this in mind, I’ve collated a list of a few common abbreviations that parents inevitably see on their childrens’ correspondence, but have no idea what the heck they mean.  The following monikers are probably being used by your children and their invisible friends with the assumption that you have know idea what they’re up to when you glance over their shoulder at the monitor and with this list you can arm yourself with some nifty chat/IM knowledge:

9 – Parent is watching

?4U – I have a question for you

^5 – high five

<w> – wink

@-/- – a rose

:~) – cute

;-P – sticking tongue out

A3 – Anytime, anywhere, anyplace

AAP – Always a pleasure

ASL – Age/Sex/Location

BF – boyfriend or best friend

CAM – Camera

CU – See you

F2F – Face to face

ILY – I love you

L2G – Like to go?

PCM – Please call me

SYS – See you soon

WUF – Where are you from?

While every one of the aforementioned abbreviations could be completely innocent in nature, many of these (especially those in red) could also be code for a predator’s desire to take advantage of your child.  Remember, kids think they’re invincible and nobody can pull one over on them.  But the reality is, thousands of children per year are exploited and as evidenced by the widely publicized television coverage and perv dragnets, there’s an army of them looking to step in and continue the cycle.

Can’t remember all these?

Just bookmark this page or subscribe in a reader and you can always jot down the perplexing jargon you see on your kids’ device and check it out.

In this week’s edition of Why I Love My Kids Wednesday, our children embarrassed us and ratted us out like champs.  I hope you’ll contribute some of your entertaining stories as well in the comments section.

5 Year Old Potty Mouth

So, we found this insanely strange looking beetle in our yard the other day.  Our two boys were enamored with the giant pincers and rapid movements in the little bug case they use for such activities.  At one point, a giant spike started to emerge from its backside.  I had no idea what it was, presumably a stinger of some sort.  Anyway, I don’t even recall saying this, but I must have described it to my wife over the phone in vulgar fashion and my son overheard me.

He was at speech lessons today and was describing this new beetle he found to the speech teacher.  She was listening along when he burst out, “And This Giant Spike Came Out It’s Ass!”.  My wife was mortified.  She just looked at the teacher not knowing whether to laugh or hang her head in shame.

Trash-Talking: Caught Red Handed

You can always count on your kids to rat you out when you’re trash-talkin’ someone else.  Our 5-Year Old got us good this week.  He’s enrolled in swim classes right now. My wife enthusiastically signed him up for swim so he could finally get out of swimming bubbles and kick boards and learn to swim on his own.  She was dismayed to find that each time she picks him up, all the kids are doing is rudimentary activities like climbing up and down a ladder in the pool or playing tag in the water and not actually learning to swim.  This went on for a few days.  At dinner one night, she was venting to me and said, “I didn’t pay all this money so he could play tag in the water”.

So, our 5-Year old comes back from swim this week and tells my wife that he relayed that line to the teacher verbatim, “My Mom Said she didn’t pay all this money for me to play tag in the water”.  In retort, the teacher said, “You tell your mommy that you don’t get to progress to the next stage until you finish this class and she can come talk to me if she likes”.

Wow, talk about ratted out!  Gotta love what your kids selectively share with people from household conversation.

Any good ones on your end?