Wordless Waldorf Wednesday

Wordless Waldorf Wednesday

Wordless Waldorf Wednesday

Wordless Waldorf Wednesday

Wordless Waldorf Wednesday - My Son and His Knot Doll

Montessori Monday

Wordless Waldorf Wednesday - Beginning Construction on Fantasy Real Estate

A Hands On Adventure! A Children's Museum (Pt.1 - Before The Storm)

A few weeks ago some of you may have seen (either via my Twitter, my Instagram, or my Facebook fan page) that I went to A Hands On Adventure A Children's Museum in Lancaster, Ohio.

 "AHA!" boasts:

AHA! A Hands-on Adventure, A Children’s Museum is a 4000 sq. ft. facility in Lancaster, Ohio. The museum was designed and built for children ages 0-7 because of the limited number of educational activities available for this age group in this county.  Older children are welcome to visit, and often do, although we ask them and their parents to have realistic expectations.

The museum has been open to the public since March of 2008. Since then, over 86,000 children and adults have visited, surprising the founders and impressing the community! Visitors have come from as far away as Europe although most hail from within a 50-mile radius of Lancaster.

Twenty-four exhibits and activity areas are featured at the museum, including an 11” Fire Engine with a fire dousing laser, a Ball Mountain of tunnels and tubes, Question Boxes with their mysteries inside and a Healthy Choices bike which tells how much cycling you need to burn off food items. In addition to the new items, the museum also features a Water Table, the Honeycomb Climbing Structure, a Laser Harp, the Build-a-House and the Pretend Play area which includes a Market, Bank, Pizza shop, Veterinarian’s office and Theatre.  Each exhibit carries with it educational components which align with the Ohio Department of Education’s Academic Content Standards and guidelines for preschool learning and Kindergarten readiness. Surveys have indicated that the children’s favorite exhibits are the Theatre, Fire Engine, Water Table and Honeycomb Climber while the parents’ favorite is the Laser Harp.

AHA! receives no taxpayer funding and its existence is solely supported by admission fees, memberships, grants, sponsorships and donations. The “staff” of six includes five part-time employees. The contributions of numerous volunteers help fill in the gaps and everyone from the executive director to our own “Mr. Clean”, is a highly motivated multi-tasker!

Having somewhat recently switched our household over to a hybrid of Steiner and Montessori style learning, play, and environment I couldn't have been more excited to visit 4000 square feet of sensory play for my little lamb.

I'd learned about AHA! through one of my Meetup groups. In the past year my daughter seemed a bit too young to go but at two years-old this now seemed like a perfect and viable option for us. The Meetup listed the price of admission as $5 but did not clarify that unlike area play cafe's where you pay for your child that the adult also needs to pay admission.

Not being from Ohio, and knowing next to nothing about Lancaster I was worried about finding parking. My worry was needless because AHA! has it's own parking lot and if for any reason it were full I think you should have no problem finding parking in the immediate area.

As I stood there paying my $10 admission fee my daughter took off into the museum and began playing. I asked the person working the front if that was alright and they assured me it was.

It didn't take long for her to find a very serious water table.

She loved it, returning often to continue playing in it and sometimes washing her hands in it.

I knew but hope she wouldn't go from the water table to the sand table

and make an unwanted mess of herself for me to clean up - but she did go from one to the other. The mess really wasn't anywhere near as bad as I thought she'd make.

The exhibits were amazing.

The play house that children can help build using faux bricks was really interesting. I'd never seen anything like it.

You can request face paints from the front and allow your little people to sit and paint their faces.

The fishing area was pretty darling to me. The poles were all set up similar to how pool cues are and most children seemed able to remove them with little to no problem

At the end of the strings would be a magnet which they would use to pick up fish that also had a magnet attached to them. However, my daughter felt that fake fishing, much like real fishing, should be done in real water; so she brought a pole over to the water table where she attempted to fish.

She sat down and drove for a moment but quickly lost interest.

I was a little bummed she showed no interest in gardening lol.

The shopping carts from the grocery area seemed to be pretty popular

but I had an expected issue with repeatedly trying to explain to my sweetheart that those fruits and veggies do NOT go into her mouth.

So she took them over to the water table and told me in her two year-old way that she was cleaning the pesticides off.

Soon she had other children following suit.

The excersize bikes were really darling.

Children could even punch in if they'd eaten certain common children's snacks

 and then sit down and burn them off it they wanted.

 Everything was going really well

and I was really impressed with the entire place

until there was an incident that left me seriously uncomfortable and fightin' mad.

Because today's post is already so long come back tomorrow to find out what on earth could upset mild-mannered me so much I considered media intervention.

The Television Diet

I’ve gone on a television diet and I’m hoping that unlike the weight people often gain back after crash dieting that I manage to keep this weight off. We still watch tv but now we are watching much, much, much less.

The fact that I watched too much tv was far from news to me. I grew up with family members that leave tvs on all around their houses just as background noise. I’d gotten very used to that and even a bit comforted by it. Some nights I even chose to use the television to fall asleep – that’s how used to it I was.

Periodically commercials would invade my dreams and somehow I managed to ignore or not notice how unacceptable this really was.  A movie I like or an interesting show might wake me up, even energize me to the point where I watched longer than I should have before falling back asleep.

These are the actions and habits of someone who has "a television problem" and to make matters worse I was worried I was passing it on to our daughter. When previously I thought it was adorable to find my child under the age of one passed out in the floor from watching Sesame Street I was no longer able to see it that way. Only months ago I would joke about how she would wake up in the morning and immediately tell me she wanted to watch Elmo.

Pediatricians aren't the only people or source out there telling you to try to keep your childrens screen time under two hours a day. At first I tried my hardest to avoid letting her even see the tv, but eventually I caved and it became easy to just turn it on for her. Too easy. I told myself it was okay because I would only let her watch educational television.

I've got news for you - tv is tv no matter what's on it. It sounds obvious but it really isn't

Only somewhat recently did I come to truly understand what is meant by, "screen time." We're subjected to lots of screens - tvs, computers, cell phones, hand-held gaming systems, e-readers, etc. I'd managed to notice yet not notice just how many screens I was surrounded by.

Back in March some of you may remember my tweeting about how cutting off our cable seemed like bad timing during March Madness. The choice was one forced upon us. Cable is an expensive luxury we just wouldn't afford - but we still had Netflix. 

We had been using Netflix far more than the actual tv for so long I can't even try to guess just how long it had been and not being subjected to commercials seemed like a serious bonus.

A few weeks ago I walked away from the tv - almost entirely - allowing only about an hour of tv a day. During this hour it wasn't usually even me who was watching the tv - it was my daughter. She missed tv. In fact, she would walk up to the tv and turn it on, or grab a remote and turn one on, or; on occasion, she would even turn the XBox on by herself and hand me a controller.

I missed the tv as well. I was so used to it that I almost didn't even know what to do without it on in the background to catch my attention throughout the day.

Children adapt quickly and I'd say by the end of the week she began to ask less and less. She still asks and still sometimes turns on the tv but she will actually turn it down when offered during my decreasing moments of exasperated weakness and desire for a moment "alone."

The combination of less tv (leading to sensory overload) and the toy library has left me with a child that is a little easier to get to sleep, throwing less tantrums, and is now very obviously having more imaginative and creative play time.

As for myself, I'm feeling a lot less daily stress in general. Series of events that would have left me complaining about a terrible day now no longer seem like such a big deal. Whatever was going on was rough and unpleasant - but hey, that day wasn't bad at all!

Now I just need to work on decreasing my other forms of screen dependance and I'll really be on to something.

The Toy Library

For years I spent an average of three hours per day cleaning. That's just cleaning not my cooking as well. Recently (the last few years) I clean much more - the frequent minimum is four hours. I'm understandably exhausted from all of this cooking, cleaning, blogging, crafting, mommying, etc.

My he daughter had a play date last week which left me unimpressed with her behavior towards her toys. When she was still very young she had a completely reasonable amount of toys. I was able to set them up around a blanket she would play on for the day with no problem.

My father sweetly offered to make one for her in his at home wood shop but I knew he didn't currently have the time to take on such an endeavor and found myself accepting a plastic Fisher-Price toy box.

The toy situation is bordering on the absurd for me. Over the last year we have found my daughter climbing into her toy box and just about swimming in her toys!

What does any of this have to do with her play date the other week?

Despite what I feel was far, far more than the two girls would need to play with barely anything was played with.

I allowed the television to stay on during the entire visit, which the girls ignored until strangely deciding that the near ending of the movie Paranorman was fascinating (my daughter then asked to watch the movie again the next three days in a row.)

I felt that aside from the pitfall of the girls being aged 2 and 3 - both in the mind set of, "I-have-no-desire-to-share-anything-ever" that they were grossly overstimulated by a room overflowing with toys and a television that added to the goings on for hours.

Children that have way too many toys, it seems, have frequently been found to have feelings of entitlement that continue on throughout the rest of their lives.

First, I tried shuffling through her toys to find some that I could just get rid of. This was easier said than done. After two or three passes I had pulled out very little or what I considered, next to nothing.

If you're looking to get rid of any of your childrens toys - do it while they are asleep or someplace else, otherwise they see everything you're grabbing and suddenly want it.

Second, I looked through her toys to see what was "too much". Were any of these items so complete that there was no room for imagination left? Did I feel the kids would learn anything from owning these toys?

Third, I decided to start a toy library.

With the toy library toys your children have forgotten they even own are now more visible and may once again become items they enjoy playing with. Toys are not to be removed from your library unless they are exchanged for toys that are currently out and about in your home. I'm planning on seeing how this goes and probably making my first toy rotation in 1 - 3 months.

Also, by putting away as many toys as I could I hoped to decrease the amount of work I would have to put in several times a day putting away toys. No longer stepping on so many of them would be a welcome bonus.

I waited until my daughter was asleep and pulled out toy after toy. Some were no longer age appropriate - the baby toys went into a drawer in the nursery.

Some I no longer wanted in our home for one reason or another. I put them in a bag to deal with later.

There were toys I thought she was at a good age to play with now. Things that taught colors, numbers,  or shapes - anything that functioned as a puzzle of some sort; these are things that I left out for now.

I stuffed as many toys as I could into a foot locker that I would store in the floor of the closet in the nursery.

Once I had finished the living room toy area looked noticabley cleaner.

When I got my little lamb up from her nap I sat down and waited to see what, if any, her reaction would be to  this change.

Her first chosen stop was to the drawer in my night stand where I keep toys for her to play with in the bedroom. We hadn't seen her playing with those very much so that seemed like a good start. Over the last couple of days I have seen a definite increase in her focus with one toy for a longer period of time.

The other day she spent nearly the entire day playing mommy to a dolly I hadn't seen her touch in months.

The dolly took quite a few naps.

Pooped in her diaper and required immediate changing.

Relaxed in brothers swing.

Had tummy time with brother.

And my little sweetheart even decided what her dolly needed was some babywearing time.