Ballet of the Elephants
by Leda Schubert
My review
rating: 5 of 5 stars
Winner of the 2007-2008 Texas Bluebonnet Award, this book filled with watercolor pictures of the true story of the Ballet of Elephants was captivating. When Igor Stravinsky (composer of The Nutcracker) was asked by George Balanchine (Russian Choreographer) to compose a piece of music for John Ringling North’s circus elephants to perform to, Stravinsky gladly jumped at the opportunity. My 6 year old listened to the story fascinated by the idea of elephants performing ballet, and was even more enthralled at the end when she realized this had been a TRUE story. Great book for introducing Stravinsky as a composer. Continue reading…
I know you’ve all been there. You just sat down to finally eat YOUR pancakes after standing at the stove cooking them all day and all the kids can say is, “Mommy, can you cut my pancakes?” Five minutes later your own pancakes are cold (GROSS!) and the kid who you first cut up pancakes for is now done and ready for the next one. So, here’s the scoop on how to make things a little easier on ya:
Waffles:
My husband just discovered this method and I tried it this morning and FELL. IN. LOVE.
Use a pizza wheel. I still like to follow the straight lines of the waffle pattern. Shawn likes to cut waffles up like a pie. Follow your heart on that, but definitely pick up the pizza cutter to do it!
Continue reading…
When you live with a budding artist, you live with piles and piles of artwork. And ALL of it is special. And NONE of it can be thrown away. At least, that’s what my 5 year old tells me constantly. And as gung-ho as she is about recycling, I still can’t manage to convince her that we can recycle some of her artwork, too.
So, instead of living with the masses of piles everywhere, I started looking for ideas of what to do with it all to help contain it and keep it from taking over my entire house. I came across several great suggestions like these:
Continue reading…
This is a photo that Kate took on Shawn’s iPhone recently. Â She obviously blurred whatever she was looking at, but the resulting image was just too pretty to delete. Â What’s amazing to me is that Kate’s a better artist on accident than her mommy ever is on purpose!! Â :)
(Many thanks to my friends for the below exchange. This is why we ALL need a support group of other moms to rely on!)
Q: Any tips for handling a 3yo boy who likes to call everybody silly names? (pumpkinhead, pottyhead, poopoohead, boogerhead. I could go on… LOL) We’ve spanked, we’ve done timeouts, we’ve taken away toys, we’ve ignored it, we’ve laughed at it, and we’re all out of ideas. We even resorted to calling him the same name he calls us, (that was short lived as he thought it was the funniest thing he ever heard) and nothing seems to work.
A: We’ve set the rule of no name calling at all, just in case you hurt someone’s feelings when you are just trying to be funny.
AND we’re only allowed to use bathroom words IN the bathroom (which has stopped the embarassingly loud announcements of “I have to poo!” in restaurants, but has also spawned numerous toot and tee tee bathtime songs). To me, this was a safe way for them to get to enjoy those funny things about their bodies which all little ones find so hilarious without shaming our family in public.
But you know, since my girls aren’t allowed to say, “I gotta go poo!” in public any more, we’ve had to come up with acceptable alternatives. Wouldn’t Ethan look so sweet and precious with, “Excuse me, I need to go freshen up.” Priceless. 
By Kay on Tue, Apr 21, 2009
2 Comments