The International Museum of Women

Courtesy of GRS, I have newly discovered the International Museum of Women.

I had never heard of it before, but it certainly has caught my eye now.

This Week in the Oh Waily Household

Last week in the Oh Waily household was an interesting one.
We discovered that young Master Oh Waily grows like a sprout and that he can waily waily in a loud voice when given the needle.  In addition you also know that Miss Oh Waily is learning some practical life skills in the form of cutting things.

This week will bring other new things to talk about.

This morning, for example, Master Oh Waily went for a visit to the osteopath.  And will likely be doing so once a week for the next month.  You may ask - what does an 8 week old* baby need with an osteopath?
Master Oh Waily has a decided preference for the right.  The right side, that is.
No matter what starting position he is put into, he will make every effort to shuffle himself around so his head is able to roll ever so gently to the right.  This had become more noticeable in the past few weeks, along with a mild flat patch on the back right hand side of his head.  After trying all the usual tricks to encourage a bit more balance in his world view, the Plunket Nurse suggested osteopathy as a potential.
So here we are, attempting to loosen up his slightly tight right hand side and therefore gently realign everything else in the process.  I am hopeful of an improvement in the balance of his choice of world view.  Since arriving home, and having a sleep to recover from the effort of staying awake for so long and having a strange man gently tickling your neck and head, it seems to have started promisingly.  During our next playtime we seemed much more amenable to facing straight up and to the left.  We looked much more comfortable lying straight and did not seem the least inclined to look into space on the right hand side instead of looking at George** on the left hand side.

The osteopath also kindly soothed my fear that I had been remiss in my treatment of my son, and suggested this type of pattern is reasonably common and is thought to be the result of either a position taken up pre-birth, or perhaps something that may have occurred during the birth itself.

Either way we are now on the road to a better position.

Then there was the long weekend (Labour Weekend, for those non-Kiwis of you) of which the Oh Waily family made the most.  On Saturday morning, later than we would have liked, we made our first group outing to the zoo.  The young Master slept dutifully through most of this visit, which meant his sister was free to run and run and run and run all over the place.  She was most upset when she wasn't allowed to follow Burma all the way around the zoo on her walk.  A pleasant outing had by all.
On Sunday Ms Oh Waily was let loose with some money in Spotlight and Payless Plastics.  Sans children and spouse, I went to town and wandered the aisles assessing potential edutainment values.
Yes, I know.  It is sad when a couple of hours spent in such cheap and cheerful surroundings brings this degree of enthusiasm out in me.  I know.  I need to get out more.
Anyway, on to the reason for said enthusiasm - other than free time, unencumbered by little folk.

Spotlight produced a small, eggshell blue box for storing Miss Oh Waily's animal family cards and associated fridge magnets.  And it also produced chenille sticks and two sorts of beads.  Now, are you asking yourself - what are chenille sticks? - if so, you are not alone.  When I first spotted them, I thought to myself... "are these the pipe cleaners I'm looking for, or not?"
Turns out that they are.  If anyone knows when or where pipe cleaners suddenly became gentrified and turned into "chenille sticks", enquiring minds would like to know.
The major let-down I had in Spotlight was the hope of finding reasonably priced, reasonable quality cane or woven baskets.  No such luck.
Payless, on the other hand, produced a floral vinyl tablecloth, 11 wooden (sort of) "Pub chips" bowls, 96 old-fashioned wooden clothes pegs and a bright red 15 litre plastic tub.  What a haul.  I'm just sorry that I can't show you a photograph of my newly acquired stash of items.***

Don't laugh, or call the men with the little white overcoats, it is a great stash of things if you are planning to expand your ability to edutain you toddler daughter.

Here, briefly, is what all this will turn into - with photographs to follow at some undefined time in the future.
The chenille sticks/pipe cleaners and beads are for a threading activity (which Mr Oh Waily couldn't wait to introduce... about 10 minutes after I got back with all the goodies); the little blue box is for storage on her shelf; the vinyl table cloth is for laying out under wet and/or dirty† activities and for acting as a general purpose "mat" for mat work; the "Pub chip" bowls are for the beginnings of learning about counting as are the 96 old-fashioned clothes pegs.  The bowls will no doubt do multiple duty in many other storage and activity-holding forms.  The bright red 15 litre plastic bin will be doing duty as a sensory box into which, at some future time, I will be allowing water and sand... not at the same time I hope... and anything else textural‡ that will need containment.

I promise to post photographs of these items in use as soon as I have a functioning camera and we actually sit down to do the activities.  I will also post a short list of blogs from which I have "stolen" these ideas, so you can see what other fun and educational things you can do with your children.

Finally on Monday, Mr Oh Waily took the Little Miss to the swimming pools for an afternoon of splashing, jumping, roly-polying and general good fun.  And Ms Oh Waily was again allowed quiet time to herself, at least partially.

And that is just the beginning of the week.  I'm sure I will find more to regale you with some time before the weekend, presuming I get my camera sorted.  (Can you tell I'm feeling a bit at a loss without it and am getting slightly obsessive about it's need for a new battery?)

Anyway, putting my camera anxiety aside and moving on, does anyone have activities to share?  What do you do with your kids to edutain them?  I know Amanda recreates the Ice Age for her boys... and as a trained anthropologist I can reassure you Amanda that there was indeed a Toyotasaurus !!

I'd love to hear about all of your adventures in kiddie-land.  Feel free to leave a comment or a link to your blog or photos.

---

* today to be exact.

** thank you Auntie Clare.
*** remember, from previous posting - the camera battery is stuffed !
† read: rocky, sandy, soily, or anything else messy that I don't want to spend hours cleaning out of the carpet or off the tiles.
‡ read: mucky, messy, filthy, a pain to clean up, etc...

Master Oh Waily Grows

and grows and grows.

We went for our "6 week" check-up with the Plunket Nurse yesterday and got a bit of a surprise with Master Oh Waily's latest vital statistics.

Did someone put something in his milk?

At two days over 7 weeks old Master Oh Waily’s vital statistics were…

Weight: 6.03 kg
Head: 41 cm
Length: 60 cm

You may be asking why a growing baby should be a surprise to his mother.  Well, cast your mind back to his measurements just two days shy of being 5 weeks old...

Weight: 5.12 kg
Head: 39.5 cm
Length: 57 cm

That means our little man has put on another 3 cm in length, 1.5 cm in head circumference and just a smidgen shy of 1 kilogram - all in 18 days !!   You know - less than a month - and only slightly more than two weeks !!

I guess this is the growth spurt that the baby books like to refer to.  It certainly is backed up by his eating and sleeping pattern over the past couple of weeks - why wait more than two hours to ask Mum for some more milk?  Eat some, lie and gaze at the world some, sleep an hour, eat some more and repeat.  Thankfully he was civilised enough to only do this during the daytime, and actually managed to sleep for two or three hours through the night before deciding to ask for something to fill his tummy again.

This all keeps his statistics at or above the 85th percentile.  If he keeps growing at this rate, he does stand a chance of making it as a loose forward for the All Blacks.  And if he does, then I'm guessing that his genetic make-up is coming from my father.  As anyone who knows Master Oh Waily's parents in real life can tell you - neither of us is likely to fall into the 85th percentile of growth stats for either gender.

Master Oh Waily gets the needle

Yes it was that week.
This past Monday Master Oh Waily went for his six week immunisations.

Did he wail?
On both legs?
Oh yes !
Like a banshee.

Poor little soul.  Have you seen the length of the needles for the immunisations?
Have you seen the thickness of the chubby little thigh it has to go in to?

I could swear that babies wail not because of a stabbing sensation so much as because the needles go so deep that they could almost be collecting bone marrow !

Oh well, only another four lots to go before he's school age.  What a thought.

Activity of the Week: Cutting

This is actually multiple activities for this week, covering two versions of cutting.
Little Miss doesn't have a long attention span yet, so spending lots of time on one activity is something we don't quite manage.  This means that we try to do at least two activities a day and so far the favourites have been the button sorting game, the rice pouring game and the scissor cutting game.

This week we are revisiting the safe use of scissors, and adding in the safe use of knives for cutting.

Unfortunately our digital camera's battery has been playing up and will not hold a charge anymore, so the images will be few and far between until this can be replaced.  I did manage to take some photos of her cutting activity before it died, so here is a look at the newest activity the Miss has been doing.

***

Cutting Objects: Playdough

With the use of a small butter knife and very thinly rolled out playdough, we are starting to learn the actions required to cut things safely.  Naturally the knife is not razor sharp and doesn't have any serrations at this stage of the process.  It is, however, still sharp enough to do this practise.
This idea is one of the Montessori Practical Life Skills, using playdough was our innovation.

First up, here's the equipment:  a small butter knife, and some playdough rolled into small sausages.

After that we have some action shots of Miss OWW and her cutting technique.  Note that despite being over two years old, there is no definitive sign of hand dominance yet.  Miss OWW is left-leaning for some activities and right-leaning for others.  She often seems to want to do things left-handed but then finds herself passing objects off to her right hand in order to complete what she wants to do.  Perhaps she will take after her great-grandfather and be ambidextrous.  (My grandfather wrote with his right hand, but did all of his other tool work with his left. Mind you, he was brought up in the very early 20th century, so there is a chance that he was completely left-handed but forced to write with his right at school.)



The Blue Dough - Lefty



The Blue Dough - Righty



The Red Dough - Lefty

***

The last photograph is a bit gratuitous since the process is obvious from the other two, but since I don't have any images of Miss OWW with scissors in hand I thought I would throw in a freebie dough cutting one to tide us over.
Did you also notice that we have a degree of elegance in our cutting technique?  Take another look at the second cutting picture - see the pinky?  We might be eligible for tea with the Queen if she keeps that up.

As for the other cutting activity, I will show you what we are doing with scissors just as soon as the camera is back in working order.  Might be a week or so, depending on how accessible batteries are.
In the meantime, I'd love to hear from everyone what they are doing with their little ones.

The Activity Corner

Another idea gleaned from Tim Seldin's book How To Raise An Amazing Child the Montessori Way is the idea of simplifying the display of activities and toys.
This suits me down to the ground and as it happened I had been trying to find ways of making Miss Oh Waily's toys less cluttered while still being available to her in the living room.  As well as this I was also looking for the best way to reduce the number of them available at any one time so she didn't become overwhelmed by choices.  I had tried a number of approaches finally arriving at using boxes to keep things as much under control as possible.

But going on a spending spree to get a range of decorative boxes wasn't on the cards, so we made do with what we had.  It wasn't ideal and we still had too many toys out and too much mess on an ongoing basis.  I loved the beautiful photographs of storage in Seldin's book and was inspired.  But with the monster mortgage staring over my shoulder, there was no way to go out and get a whole bunch of neat box-style shelving and trendy wicker baskets just to hold toys.

In the end I got fed up with the play corner being a constant mess, and re-purposed a bookshelf from our front room into a clean, easily kept toy storage corner for the little Miss.  So far it is working.  And I am making an extra effort to encourage Miss OWW to take one toy out at a time, and replace it back on it's shelf before starting off with another.  She is still a work in progress on that front, but we are seeing the occasional glimmers of hope there too.

So here it is - The Activity Corner.



Miss OWW can reach all the objects except the top shelf, which is where I have put her art supplies for now.  Personally I'm not quite ready to deal with Jackson Pollock-esque art all over our walls, so this is my form of controlling that possibility.  The kid sized table and chairs is something I had wanted for her for ages and our lovely daycare owner told me about this very, very reasonably* priced (and nicely finished) set.  Thanks to Gran and Pop for getting them as a present for our little Miss !

We still get a bit of mess - wait until I tell you about our first attempt at pouring - but on the whole reducing the number of items and making them completely visible has been a good thing.  As it turns out, Miss OWW quite likes the new activities I'm presenting to her, even more so than playing with her toys.  The little table and chairs are in almost constant use, and take the weight of an adult so we can play together there as a family group.

I'm very glad to have put this idea into practice, especially in the main room of the house.  It means that she continues to be included here, but it quickly looks like an adult room with a little tidying.
The next phase is doing a similar thing to her own bedroom.  This will take a while because we have to decide whether she will be staying in her current room, or moving to one of the others when it comes time for Master Oh Waily to have his own space.
But that's for another time and another post.

If you have a dedicated corner of the house for your little ones, I'd love to know what you do and how you have organised it.

---

* nearly half the price of other versions for sale in some retail stores - and much, much nicer (no laminate to be seen).

Oh Waily Activity of The Week

The following post will be starting with an explanation and a disclaimer.

Explanation:
This will be the beginning of a new Oh Waily series.  It will be a weekly* post showing what new activity** the Oh Waily family is trying out.  As you may have gathered from an earlier post, I am currently pondering what to do for Miss Oh Waily's ongoing edutainment.
The jury is still out on the idea of a Montessori pre-school, and from what I have read so far may stay out.  In the meantime, while I am still thinking and researching the options (Monterssori, Classical Trivium, Homeschooling, mainstream preschools/schools, etc.) we will be instigating some of the very sensible and attractive (to us) ideas gleaned from reading Tim Seldin's wonderful book How To Raise An Amazing Child the Montessori Way as well as those I have pinched from a number of blogs that have made themselves at home in my NetNewsWire.  I will let you know who these good folk are in due course.

Disclaimer:
Many of the activities in this series will smack of Montessori activities, but that is not the sole source or inspiration.  If you are visiting for the first time and are a dyed-in-the-wool strict follower of one or the other, or the other other, ad nauseum version of Montessori, please don't leave nasty comments regarding the missing steps or lack of any anal-retentive "rules" you may feel I am ignoring, missing or misrepresenting.  I am in no way claiming any relationship, knowledge or trained skill in the "Montessori method".  I am an educator by way of being a full-time Mum, not by way of a B.Ed., or any other form of teaching degree. ***
I will do my best to identify the source and inspiration for each activity, including links to books and blogs.

Here endeth the one-time only preamble.  Now we can move along to the actual activity of the week.

~^~^~

Sorting Objects: Buttons

This was one of the first activities that I chose to try out with Miss Oh Waily.  It came from Tim Seldin's book (see above).  I thought it would be a good starting point to assess her interest in doing planned activity, and what sort of skill level and capacity she might actually have.  Turns out that this was a walk in the park.

What we used:
Buttons - 3 types, 4 of each type.
Bowls and recycled baby food jars.
A tray with a mat.

The first step was to lay everything out, then show Miss OWW what to do.

The next step was to let her do it.  And off she went.  Red buttons first.

Then the yellow buttons.

And finally the blue buttons.

Until we are finished.

As I said, this was far too easy and she did it first time.  Then she got bored and just started to mix the buttons up deliberately, with a sly smirk on her face while watching for my reaction.  So I thought I would ask her to put the biggest buttons in one jar - which she went ahead and did.  Then I asked her to do the same with the smallest buttons.  Again, all done on first attempts with no prompting by me.  Now I need to find a more challenging version of sorting.

~^~^~

* or bi-weekly, if I run out of time, energy and a co-operative toddler.
** or activities, if I have the time, energy and a particularly keen toddler.
*** I believe this is called full disclosure.

Master Oh Waily Update

I haven't quite managed to overtake myself, but as a treat for actually keeping on keeping on with laundry, daycare drop-offs and collections, jungle gym visits, gardening and general child and house-care, I am taking a bit of time out today to write this update.

At one day shy of 5 weeks old Master Oh Waily's vital statistics were...

Weight: 5.12 kg
Head: 39.5 cm
Length: 57 cm

So my little love has grown 5.5 cm in length, his head has expanded 3 cm and he has added 1.22 kg to his little frame.  Of course, those stats are sooo last week and we are putting much effort into growing.  No doubt we have an extra centimetre in length and another 200 grams to add for this last week, but who's counting.  Oh yeah, the Plunket nurse is.  Well, we'll see if that prediction is accurate at next week's clinic visit.

Just by way of comparison, I took a look at his sister's statistics and found that at her 6 week mark she was just a little shy of him - 4.4kg, 38 cm head diameter and 54 cm long.  In fact it takes her until 11 weeks to hit or pass his 5 weeks statistics.  I guess that's why he's between the 85th and 97th percentile on the WHO growth charts and his sister is just hovering on the 50th.

Variety is the spice of life.   Anyway, that's how he is stacking up in the growth department.

---

Just a note about my earlier comment about my blog entries becoming an even more endangered species due to my need to not ignore "stuff" anymore, I have to say that I may have been a bit premature on making that pronouncement.  Having squeezed in quite a bit of reading time over this past week, mostly Montessori related, I have become more enthusiastic and determined to eke out some blogging time.  Therefore I countermand my earlier suggestion that you will be seeing less of me.  In fact, you may actually see more of me than I have managed for the past year.  How ironic.

To Montessori or Not To Montessori

... that is the question.

In the quest for the next stage of learning for my little Miss OhWaily I have been looking for activities to introduce to her, and hopefully inspire her to continue to be adventurous and inquisitive.
This led to the library and almost immediately to the books based on, or purporting to "be" Montessori.  There are quite a few.  Clearly it has become very trendy and, judging by the cost of Montessori products sold online, it has managed to squeeze a huge premium from parents on the back of that.

Saying that, having read two or three 'do-it-at-home' Montessori books, it has struck me as a good system to integrate into everyday life.  I don't have difficulty with the concept of sensitive periods, or the three-step (or period) method of teaching since we instinctively have been doing that as it turns out. I love the idea of making the most of Miss OhWaily's emerging skills and interests to encourage her to become more independent.  I also like a great number of the activities I have read about and am keen to introduce them.  So far we've only managed to do a sorting activity (buttons) and a pouring activity (rice) but whenever she gets the chance we are playing (working) with the buttons or pouring rice from jug to jug.

My real issue is whether a formal Montessori environment would be a good option for her part-time daycare (or playgroup as we call it).  Having continued to read about Montessori online, through websites and blogs, I'm not sure that I want to commit Miss OhWaily to a stricter version.  Our little girl is very boisterous and talkative and while I have no objection whatsoever to her learning manners (an indoor voice would be a wonderful thing) and patience and respect for others and their workspace, I am concerned that the emphasis placed on manners might mean that she loses her exuberance.

This is proving to be a puzzler for me.  I have two conflicting "wants" - I want her to learn good manners, increase her concentration and "work" independently on the one hand, and then on the other I want her to play and be exuberant, energetic and physically very competent.   From what I have read so far (and it is only a small amount) I haven't managed to reconcile both of these aspects yet.

I'm sure a visit to a Montessori daycare or two will help me evaluate this issue.  But then, in addition to my own evaluations I will also need to understand Maria Montessori's actual theory enough to see if the daycare is actually implementing that theory.

I guess what concerns me is that like all theories / philosophies / religions, you get a range of adherents.  Some are laid-back and loosely follow the "rules" while others do so strictly and rigidly.
I'm middle of the road in many respects, and I think that's where my views on this sit too.  Not too loose, not too tight.  Just right.  (Do I sound like an advertisement? Hmm)

If anyone out there has has a good / bad / indifferent experience with this (or any other) system of pre-school education, I'd love to hear from you.  I understand that in the end I will need to decide if this way of doing things suits my daughter's temperament and needs, but I'm the sort of person who likes to gather as much information as possible before drawing a final conclusion.

I've ordered "The Absorbent Mind" from the library, so I will continue the investigation and in the meantime I will continue to introduce some aspects of activity and home design into our daily life.

If you made it this far thanks for listening to my "thinking out loud".  It's nice to have this sounding board.

Master Oh Waily's Arrival

"Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear."
- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

That's the idea anyway.  Or so the Emperor would have us believe.
I'm hoping he's right.

I am now testing my mettle in the world of parenting multiple children.  Are my knees quaking at the thought of entire days where I juggle the needs of my bright, beautiful toddler daughter and my sweet, relaxed, new baby boy?

"Oh yes !", as my lovely little daughter has taken to saying.

Still, I'm sure it won't be all that bad.  Other people do it, and some of them with more than two kids.  Good grief, what is there to be afraid of?
Perhaps it's the ability of my dear toddler to wander off to any room in the house and potentially create varying forms of havoc on unsuspecting walls with her marker pens, crayons or chalk.  Thankfully the chalk masterpieces that have previously adorned our various walls have been very easily removed from display.  We have yet to witness similar marker or crayon art, but I suspect it is only a matter of time and inclination.

In the meantime, what has Master Oh Waily's arrival meant for the Oh Waily family?

The main change has been sleep.  Everyone's ability to get some, the quality of it and the longevity of it.

The OWW parents are living in the land of sleep deprivation and are currently working on an evil master plan to counteract that particular side-effect of having a new infant in the house.  Currently it mostly revolves around the toddler and the timeshare use of a grandparent and spare bedroom.

The most obvious change for Miss Oh Waily has been the alterations in her normally good sleep pattern.
Perhaps the disappearance of Mum & Dad in the middle of the night* and the non-appearance of Mum for a couple of days** spooked young Miss Oh Waily.  We no longer seem to have a happy-to-go-to-bed daughter and have received a stupendous number of "curtain calls" some nights before she finally gives in and falls asleep.  That would, in itself, be almost livable but for the fact that during Master Oh Waily's first two weeks she also made an irregular habit of waking up some time around 2am and doing the same sort of thing - only instead of going back to the living room it became our bedroom.
Fortunately over the last week and a bit (fingers crossed, touch wood, throw that pinch of salt over the shoulder...) she seems to have settled out of the middle-of-the-night visits and the evening curtain calls have become intermittent.

I'm just hazarding a guess, but I am inclined to put this down to the often touted "regression" that toddlers go through when a new member of the family arrives.  On top of that Miss Oh Waily appears to have been cutting all four of her back molars during this time - and that's also interfering with her usually lovely temper.

Other than that, Ms Oh Waily is learning that she needs to add at least another half an hour to her prep-them-to-go-out-anywhere time.  And even that may be a tad close when attempting to make an appointment time.
She also notes that there are only two choices with regards to everything else that isn't directly baby or toddler related - you either keep working while the children are having synchronised sleeps until "stuff" is done, including using that precious little amount of time that belongs to you to wash the poopy nappies, or; you ignore it.   Personally I find I can ignore quite a bit of stuff, for quite a bit of time.  Then I find that ignoring it for quite a bit of time makes it even harder to catch up with and worse yet, to live with.  So ignoring it is now a non-option in Ms Oh Waily's daily life.
What that means in practice is - this blog entry is going be an even rarer species than it's stablemates already are (unless my non-ignorance of "stuff" means I catch up and overtake myself); my "fun" reading time is cut to about 30 minutes once a week; my eyes occasionally take on the look of a panda's and I may tragically find myself becoming a Mummy-Bore***.

As a result of this alteration in my daily life a little part of me is looking forward to and admiring this stage of motherhood where reading books while drinking good coffee is a possibility.  I am particularly relishing the opportunity to indulge in such glorious in-and-on-the-bed reading sessions with both of my kids.  Little Miss has had some of that - Hairy Maclary surely counts as much as Harry Potter for a toddler. ;-)
This has to be the ultimate in family time.

So the upshot is - we're tired, but we're adjusting and getting used to the new rhythm of our family life.
And yes, I will become a bit of a Mummy-Bore with my blog entries.  Mostly because I don't get enough reading time.  Honest.

---

* why did both of my children decide that getting down to the nitty-gritty of arrival should occur some time between midnight and sunrise ??
** despite visits to Birthcare (the very nice place our actual hospital shunts you off to within 3-4 hours of giving birth, complicated or caesarian births excluded) to see Mum and new baby.
*** these are the women you previously crossed the road to avoid.  No conversation can be held about anything except children - their children specifically, and just how great they are and what they are doing that will astound and amaze you. ;-)