Seven participating attractions of the Brandywine Museums & Gardens Alliance offer FREE admission this Sat., Jan. 23:

· Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, PA
· Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE
· Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts, Wilmington
· Delaware History Museum, Wilmington
· Hagley Museum & Library, Wilmington
· Rockwood Museum, Wilmington, and
· Winterthur Museum & County Estate, Winterthur, DE.

In addition to Free Museum Day, you can enjoy free admission to the Biggs Museum of American Art in Dover, DE every day, and the Delaware Art Museum waives admission fees every Sunday.

Two four-year-olds, brother and sister, a morning to play dress up.

The game is Prince and the Princess... a slight spin from Mom and Dad, because in Mom and Dad they take care of animals and go on trips. In P&P, the Prince tries to fight off dragons and monsters while the Princess attempts to set up a wedding ceremony in her plastic high heels, yelling at the Prince to stop swinging his sword around.
Hhhmmmm.
Perhaps I have overdosed them on Disney?
Time will tell.

I read an interesting book called The Sixties, in which the author reminisced about starting up an alternative school in London, and of how they believed in free form education. They were rebelling against the soul crushing uniforms and endless memorization of the straight schools.

And then she said that in her sixties now, looking back after raising her own child, she can see that the mind develops over time, and that a small child cannot get through all of the conceptual layers at once. So it is actually preferable to have them memorize. She sees that it is really, more helpful in the long run to just get the rules of grammar and mathematics down, as tools to use later, because they have the rest of their lives to ponder the deeper meanings of things.

“Mommy, are their skeletons in that graveyard?”

“Yep.”

“Will they get up and walk around?”

“No, no – that only happens in stories.”

“So they are just bones?”

“That’s right.”

(2 hours later)

“Mama, do you go to school?”

“Oh, I did, but I am finished now.”

“Our school?”

“No, I lived in a different town, so I went to a school out there.”

“You lived with Mommom?”

“Yes.”

“In her house?”

“No, we lived in a different house back then.”

(2 hours later)

“Are we moving mama?”

“No sweetie, we don’t have any plans to right now. Why?”

“I don’t want to move. You moved as a little girl, right? (pause) I want to keep our dog.”

“Honey, if we moved, we would take her with us.”

“How?”

“In a truck, we would pack everything up and take it all with us.”

“Who would live here? New people?”

“That’s right.”

“And we would go live in their house?”

“Well, we wouldn’t swap… we’d probably be in a different house.”

(4 hours later – bedtime)

“Mommy!!” (sobbing)

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t want to grow up!!”

“What? Oh, honey, why?”

“I don’t want to leave you.”

“You don’t have to leave me. You can stay as long as you like.”

“But you left Mommom.”

“That was my choice. Maybe you might change your mind when you get older. You can do anything you want to do sweetie.”

“I don’t want to grow up! How do I stop it?”

“Well, you can’t. But it takes a long, long time… just go slowly and enjoy where you are now.”

Shots.
My kids hate them.

Last year, at four, I thought we were over the screaming agony, but I was very, very wrong. They recovered by the time we got home, but their absolute wailing and screams of terror flooded the first floor of Paoli Hospital with echoing gloom.

So, here I admit that I really was going to blow off the flu shot this year. Why go through all of that, since they are big enough now that the flu, while unpleasant, would probably not be life threatening?

I was generally ignoring the whole H1N1 thing - especially since no one had the vaccination anyway. My reservations ranged from an aversion to medication in general when not completely necessary, and a mistrust of media hype surrounding things we are 'supposed to be afraid of'.

However, as more and more cases cropped up in Downingtown, not Mexico, not New York, but right here in my hometown, I did my homework:

Guillain Barre syndrome, it turns out, can also be caused by contracting the flu, so I ticked that off of my list of concerns, along with the one in a million chance of it happening anyway.

All reports verify that the mercury levels are as safe as eating a big helping of fish.

...And my pediatrician called to say that they have the nasal spray available. So when they asked if we would like to come in next Friday for dose one, I stared down at the letter from our preschool reporting that they have one case verified (and would we all please keep any possibly ill children at home?),
I said absolutely.

Isn't there some joke about certain people enjoying any food served on a stick? Well, apparently it applies to my children. Grandma turned them on to corn dogs (ick!), so after school in a panic to make people happy, I skewered a couple of hot dogs onto bamboo skewers and voila! happy four year olds! We then moved on to rolls on a stick, PBnJ sandwich squares on a stick.... I think I am on to something here. Next - broccoli on a stick!

So, a lot of parents I know are freaking out about the date change for kindergarten enrollment. it used to be 5 by 9/30, now it is 5 by 9/1... what did my friend at preschool say today? FOUR years of preschool seems a bit much, doesn't it? Her son has a 9/9 Bday date and she just got the news.

I am lucky that way, we are March Bdays here, so no gray area. But what to do for the rest? Further consideration had me leaning toward two or three days of preschool, and then, hey, take advantage of the time to offer your child karate lessons, or swim lessons or a combination of skill building things they would otherwise be too busy for. Granted, there's the financial issue, but do what you can do, right?

Sticky situations abound... and I know, preschool and K are now considered the blocks upon which educations are built. But I am of the opinion that life lessons can come from anywhere, a preschool teacher may have some, but there are always other avenues to be explored.

Toys R Us trade in on baby gear

I just saw this on Good Day Philly... Goodwill doesn't take strollers, so it is a nice alternative.

Just Like Family: Inside the Lives of Nannies, the Parents They Work for, and the Children They Love

Just Like Family: Inside the Lives of Nannies, the Parents They Work for, and the Children They Love

By Tasha Blaine

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Like Tasha Blaine, I once took a job working as a nanny. Also like the author, I thought it would be a relatively easy gig that would allow me the freedom to write while working in a nice, supportive environment. We both quickly realized that working as a nanny is one of the most intense, draining, undervalued, and emotionally taxing jobs in our modern society.

In Just Like Family, Blaine combines her personal insights, her MFA, and several years of research to closely follow the lives of three different nannies in three different cities over the course of one year. The portraits she paints read more like a novel than the sociological study they really are, and that makes her book as entertaining as it is informative. There is Claudia, a young mother who came to New York City from Dominica and still dreams of a career in nursing; Vivian, a college educated career nanny in Massachusetts running for nanny of the year; and Kim, a nanny with twenty years of experience who accepted a live-in position in Texas on the eve of her second divorce.

It is the intimacy of these stories that make the book so compelling. That level of absorption allows a unique opportunity for Blaine to educate readers about how complicated it is to work in such an emotionally intense environment. A nanny is not only charged with raising young children, but must navigate the complexities of another family from the inside, all the while enduring the stresses and hardships of a primary care giver in a society that still holds childcare near the bottom rung of the economic food chain.

Whether or not to have children, and then how to go about raising them, will be a central issue of feminism as long as a feminist movement is necessary. Childcare is simply not very highly valued here in the United States. It is not monetarily valued, and it is not socially valued. The author Ann Crittendon said that someone once asked of her, “Didn’t you used to be Ann Crittendon?” when she was home with her first child. I know how she felt.

When I decided to stay home with my twins, I found that even those closest to me suddenly treated me as though I’d died and been mysteriously replaced by a cardboard mommy cutout. Having no idea how completely consuming it is taking care of small children, they assumed my sudden loss of interest in pop culture (and personal hygiene) must have had more to do with my giving up on life than with not having time to spare for it.

There is a widespread cultural bias against the work of childcare that completely ignores how much time and energy it takes to raise a child. And in a culture where human resource and intellect is fast becoming the most important currency, it is astonishing that childcare is dismissed as something less than absolutely crucial to our survival. If I could afford a nanny, believe me I’d have one, but I’d be a much better employer for having read this book.

Review by Jen Wilson Lloyd