Coast 2 Coast Mom

This Week Is Going To Fly By

You know how sometimes you have events that you look forward to for months ahead of time, and it's so far away in the future that it doesn't seem as if it will ever get here? In March I was telling myself, oh, BlogHer's not until this summer . . . and then all of a sudden it's July 20th and I have one day to get ready to head to Chicago! Today I'm in my pre-trip frenzy running last-minute errands and trying to account for all of our needs (laundry, food, gifts, biz cards, etc.) and I'm realizing that I should have started packing sooner. (What's new?)

So this morning I'm making lists and checking them twice as we make our final preparations to head out on our Midwest Summer Roadtrip 09, centered around my trip to BlogHer 09: In Real Life. I am SO looking forward to attending and meeting the 1399 or so women I've been reading about and tweeting with over the past several months. I'm excited to meet some to tell them how much their writing makes me laugh, or how I'm such a devoted reader of theirs, or let others know how much I related to a post of theirs, and still other bloggers to ask advice or pitch collaborating on projects that I have brewing in my head.

In a lot of ways, the female blogging community is just that: a community. A collaborative, supportive - at times controversial, but actually rarely combative - group of women, who much like a community of people at large, just want to do good. (Check out @NYCityMama's post on NYC Moms Blog about a recent blogger brunch meet-up.) Whether they're writers, or moneymakers, comediennes, leaders, followers, sharers or instigators, each member of the community serves a purpose of sorts and there's room for all. That's why I'm excited for BlogHer. I can't wait to meet all of them!

The hardest part about this year's summer trip to the Midwest is that my hubby just added more resposibility to his plate at work (yay!), so the timing is not ideal for him to be out of the office. Which means that we will have less time for visiting friends and family in Michigan along our way to and from Chicago because we don't have the extra time to spend relaxing this trip. We'll do what we can to see everyone we can squeeze in, but we expect this trip to be one afterwhich we're going to need a vacation! This week is so gonna fly by.

Take Me Out To The Ball Game thisMoment

Like to take photos of your family, events, daily life, travels, or pets and post them to share with family and friends? Then have I got a new site for you to check out! I was on a call Friday with Vince Broady, founder of thisMoment, to learn more about the recently launched company. In their own words, thisMoment is “an inventive new place for people to save and share their life’s moments.” In my words, it’s a pretty cool site for packaging all of the photos, video, links, etc. that tell the story of your life. For free. thisMoment incorporates your own photos and videos with elements from FaceBook, flickr, Photobucket, or YouTube, and presents them with an interactive timeline, for you to post on FaceBook, Twitter, Kirtsy, your blog or on the thisMoment website. It’s like an “umbrella” sharing site.

Let me just say before I go any further that I have not been compensated by thisMoment for sitting on the call or exploring their free offering, and I do not have a family member or friend who works for the company.

I was so impressed listening to Vince describe what you can do with their offering, and thought that it seemed like such an easy way to gain some organization across all of the sites I use, that I started creating my own “life moment” that night. Li’l Boo’s first baseball game. It was easy to use because you can access it via email, iPhone, Facebook or thisMoment. I’ve already experimented with using the website, and with using the iPhone app. The only downside I experienced was that the website gave me an error message when loading some of the photos (but the uploading worked fine when I reloaded them a second time), and the iPhone app used a good amount of battery power during the Yankees vs Tigers game we attended today – but that was expected. (I gave my iPhone a good workout at the game creating a second mobile “moment.” ;-) ) I really like thisMoment, and I can see us using it all the time. In fact, we’re heading out on our “Midwest Summer Roadtrip ‘09” next week on our way to BlogHer, and it seems like another perfect excuse to use thisMoment to share our adventure with family and friends. Which has me thinking that I may use it to save and share some of my BlogHer experiences as well. Did I mention that thisMoment offers collaboration, so I could post a story and someone else can add their photos, video or comments to it too? (There's a hierarchy of privacy offerings too, don't fret!) How cool is that?

I was so excited about all that thisMoment had to offer, that I’m actually now co-hosting a Twitter party Monday night (July 20th - complete with prizes!) with KeepItClassyJen to show others how easy and cool it really is. Join us and check it out!

Man-Up And Find Yourself Already

As part of the Silicon Valley Moms Blog July book club, I read What Happened to the Girl I Married? by Michael Miller. The great news is that it's a quick read. (Seriously quick. I read it in a day and I'm a WAHM with no childcare over the summer.) The bad news is that it hit a little too close to home. The book chronicles "one man's journey into his wife's life at home to find her and repair their relationship." In many ways I relate to the author's wife. I feel like an unappreciated, unsupported single mother during the work week. I never envisioned, planned, or expected my life to turn out the way it has. I was a successful workaholic, and now, not so much. So I resent it. No, not "it." I resent my husband for allowing this to happen - because I can't very well face blaming myself now, can I?

Though I have to think, if you get to a point where you're unhappy enough, you'll do something about it. As I read the book, I encountered the idea of women being perceived as victims trapped in their situations. When to me, being depressed from becoming a housewive is one situation where exit signs are clearly marked. Unable to find an hour to focus on you and think clearly in peace and quiet? Hire a babysitter so you can regroup or tackle tasks uninterrupted! Feeling like you've lost your sense of purpose constantly re-doing the same chores or carpool routes each day? Apply for a job! Donate your time and energy to a community service project or charitable organization to help find your "mojo" and reconnect with that feeling of defined accomplishment that you may be missing. Unable to keep up with the perpetual piles of laundry and dishes and toys? Then hire a cleaning service or better yet, don't buy so many clothes, gadgets or toys! Go through your belongings and donate some of these items away. It's easier to maintain control and organization over fewer things.

I've "manned-up" myself recently. Our living room and dining room have been notoriously claimed by my son's toys, practically since birth. In order to claim some control over the constantly scattered toys, I recently gave up having a private office/room to research and write in. The past two months we've organized all of my office equipment, documents and the like to box up for the basement and moved my computer to a desk in the corner of our dining room. The office has since been cleaned out, freshly painted and is well on its way to becoming a playroom fit for a prince . . .er, well of trains and dinosaurs and cars, etc.

Unfortunately, I've given up some privacy while I write, doing it now from the wide-open dining room. BUT, we've successfully removed all of the scattered toys from our living room and dining room floor and put them out-of-sight in the new playroom. The space and organization that we have claimed in the living room and dining room now that they're toy-less is priceless. It's as though we have a new home. We can actually see the hardwood! Of course now I can also clearly see the furniture. Which means I have our next house project lined up: purchasing new furniture. (After my husband reads this book, of course.)

I encourage you to check out some other perceptions and takes on What Happened to The Girl I Married? from other SVMoms around the country.

Super WHY! Experiment - Day 1 Resources & Assessment

I specifically held out on trying the PBSKids SuperWHY resources until Li'l Boo was done with preschool for the year so we could do the activities when we had nothing scheduled for these summer days. It turned out be a brilliant idea considering how much rain we've gotten in New Jersey this past month, and I was relieved to have guided educational activities to do with him while we were stuck inside for most of this past month. 

I mentioned before that PBS has a wealth of resources and ideas available for not only kids, but for parents to use to assist with educating our children. What I was most impressed with was the depth of the information. There’s an entire section on www.pbs.org/parents called the Child Development Tracker which outlines the skills most children in a given age-range (ages one - eight years old) develop at that time. This section includes examples of the skills, and tips on how to build those skills in several different areas of growth and development including:

Approaches to Learning,
Creative Arts,
Literacy,
Mathematics,
Science,
Physical Health,
Language,
and Social and Emotional Growth.  

There’s also a section on the PBS Parents site, “Mornings on PBS,” that highlights the preschool theme of the day. Here you’ll find suggested activities and books to reinforce and explore the theme of the day. For example, one day the theme was "All About Me," or "Space Day." In case you were wondering what shows to introduce at what age, there are lists of shows appropriate for each age and development level too. It’s like having a teaching plan at my fingertips!

What I’ve mentioned so far are features of just ONE of the PBS sub-sites - have you discovered and fully explored all of these sites yet?

PBS Kids

 Come play with all of your favorite preschool characters

PBS Kids Go!

 Get ready to GO in their place for big kids

PBS Parents

 Find games, activities and advice for raising your PBS Kid

PBS Kids Play!

 Their fun new way for kids to learn through play

PBS Kids Island

 A national literacy campaign, and part of the Ready To Learn initiative, focused on building reading skills at home, at school, in child care, and in the community

PBS Teachers

 Resources for teaching and learning

Now back to our first day of SuperWHY resource experimentation. If you want to participate and try out the materials on your own li'l ones, these are the SuperWHY assessment documents to complete before you begin the trial to establish a baseline of literacy knowledge. I used these to assess Li'l Boo's literacy development level. 

When I asked him if he knew the story of the Three Little Pigs, he said:

“Yes, it's about pigs who run away from the wolf and hide in a friend pigs brick house and then nothing else bad happens.”

Li’l Boo correctly identified the letters W-O-L-F on the next sheet. Then, on the –all sheet, he knew “Wall,” thought “Fall” was “Fox,” and when I pointed out the –all in Wall, and asked him again what “Fall” spelled, he corrected himself with “Fall.” He said “Ball” on his own before I even pointed and asked the third word!

When asking him the opposite of “big,” he said “tiny.” For the opposite of “bad,” he said “glad.” (Must have been the rhymes on the sheet before that led him to this, but it kind of works on a simplistic level. ;-))

On the last sheet, he correctly pointed to “good,” then pointed to and said correctly “red,” and “small.” So it appears that he's showing signs of pre-reading! Wondering how much advancing will take place these next five days. . .