Ogo Bild Hub

My daughter and I spent a fun afternoon at a science museum today, and we popped into the gift shop on our way out.  While I browsed, my daughter played with the display toy out on a table -- she worked on it the entire time, so I decided we should get a set.
We love building toys around here.  She loves building things and builds with something every day, and I love the creativity and spatial skills it develops...skills I think I'm sorely lacking:)
I highly recommend this toy -- the three of us had so much fun playing with these after dinner tonight.  My daughter is three, and a couple of the plastic pieces were a little hard for her to attach to each other (maybe why the box says 6+), but she can attach the plastic pieces into the rubber ball and take them back out all by herself...and is so proud when she does so:)

Song for a Fifth Child

Love this poem -- it sums up so well my feelings..and explains why my house is always a mess. Though some of that "clutter" is intentional and is very much a part of my daughter's learning. We almost always have some creation out on the floor -- a Lincoln Log zoo or a block village or a magnetic tile Chocolate Island.
Because if I worked hard on something, I wouldn't want someone to come by and just clean it up:)


Song for a Fifth Child
 by Ruth Hulburt Hamilton
 Mother, oh Mother, come shake out your cloth,
 Empty the dustpan, poison the moth,
 Hang out the washing and butter the bread, Sew on a button and make up a bed.
Where is the mother whose house is so shocking?
She’s up in the nursery, blissfully rocking.

 Oh, I’ve grown shiftless as Little Boy Blue
(Lullaby, rockaby, lullaby loo).
Dishes are waiting and bills are past due
(Pat-a-cake, darling, and peek, peekaboo).
The shopping’s not done and there’s nothing for stew
And out in the yard there’s a hullabaloo
But I’m playing Kanga and this is my Roo.

Look! Aren’t her eyes the most wonderful hue?
(Lullaby, rockaby, lullaby loo).
 The cleaning and scrubbing will wait till tomorrow,
For children grow up, as I’ve learned to my sorrow.
So quiet down, cobwebs. Dust go to sleep.
I’m rocking my baby and babies don’t keep.

Everybody Cooks Rice

We are an interracial family, and my 3.5 year old daughter has many friends of many different ethnic backgrounds, and yet she had never commented on skin color differences until recently -- once she did, I wanted to run with it and explore the topic of diversity with her in many different ways, so she learns it is something to celebrate and not a taboo topic in any way.

A couple of friends suggested the excellent book Everybody Cooks Rice.  My daughter loves it.

It tells the story of a very diverse neighborhood where everyone has come from a different country and makes different kinds of food, and yet everybody cooks rice!

We have read the book often, at my daughter's request, and we expanded the learning by having her pick a recipe from the back of the book to make.  Each recipe mentioned in the story is listed in the back.

She chose "Great Grandmother's risi e bisi" and we made it for lunch one day.  She wasn't overly impressed, and neither was I, but it was still a fun experiment!

She also recently asked if she could eat her lunch with chopsticks like the 3.5 year old girl ("Just like me!") in the book does -- she amazed me with her instinctual chopstick skills.  She is much better at eating with chopsticks than I am!

I highly recommend this book as a way to learn and celebrate differences while also recognizing our similarities, and also as a fun way to introduce some cooking activities into your home, or as an addition to that already established tradition as it was over here.