Tag Archives: works for me

Family matters, National Blog Posting Month

How my daughter learned to read

11/10/2010 Nichole 5 Comments

This morning my 5-year-old daughter sat down with my 3-year-old son and read “Walt Disney’s ‘Cinderella’ ” to him. It was, of course, an entirely heart-melting moment. But beyond the cuteness, I was also so, so proud of my little girl. She’s been reading words here and there for quite awhile, and I’ve known for some time that she could read. Until recently, though, she hasn’t been confident enough to pick up a book and read it. Here’s what we’ve done to get to this point:

Read, read, read and then read some more. I’ve been reading to Poppy since way back in her pre-crawling days. (I haven’t done as well at

this with Pete.)

I love to read, so the kids see me reading frequently. I think this plays a big role in showing them that reading is important and can be fun.

Poppy started her “official” reading lessons with the Bob Books. It’s a graduated system that very slowly builds reading skills. We used the first three sets last year for preschool.

We haven’t used any sort of reading curriculum this year. It’s been a lot of reading out loud and trying to encourage her to read on her own. And here’s what I credit for her recent leap into independent reading: Pizza Hut. Seriously. Their BookIt reading incentive program is available to homeschoolers, so I signed Poppy up. The promise of a free pizza all her own? It’s motivated her more than my cheerleading ever could have.

So. Reading and pizza. They work for me and for my daughter!

National Blog Posting Month, Social Media

Blog early, blog often: Finding things to write about

11/03/2010 Nichole 2 Comments

I’m participating in National Blog Posting Month, which means I have to come up with something to say here every day in November. I do post pretty frequently. Even so, it’s going to be a challenge to come up with something interesting to write every day. (Disclaimer: There’s no way I’ll come up with something interesting every day. But I will post something.)

Writing regularly is a good idea even if you aren’t participating in NaBloPoMo. For me, it helps me feel like I’m engaged in a world outside of peanut butter and fingerpainting. It also keeps my brain a little bit sharper, I think. (Except for when I’m taking cold medicine. Like, say, right now. Then I write things like “little bitter sharper,” which is sometimes accurate, too.)

I find that it helps to follow a schedule with my blog posting, and there are a lot of meme-type themes that make that really easy. Here, for example, I regularly do Menu Plan Monday and Works for Me Wednesday. The menu-planning is something I do anyway, and it’s really easy to type that up and share it here (even if it isn’t maybe the most fascinating thing). The “works for me” posts tend to be a little more difficult, because they require more thought. But they have made me pay more attention to what I’m doing on a daily basis in an effort to try to notice things that might be making my life easier. (I feel like that didn’t make much sense. Alka-Seltzer cold, take me away!) I also try to do a little rundown on our homeschooling week on Saturdays. The Daily Meme has a bunch of other blogging memes listed.

Beyond those regularly scheduled posts, I tend to just blather about things. (As I’m sure those of you who are regular readers have noticed.) I’m OK with that, but I might need more focus in November. So I’ve found a few writing-prompt sites that I plan to mine for NaBloPoMo. Maybe you’ll find them helpful, too.

Try Creative Writing focuses on prompts for creative writing, which absolutely is applicable to writing a blog. Some of it is clearly fiction-writing stuff, but there’s a lot of personal-experience fodder there, too.

The Write Prompts offers a new prompt every day, which would be a clear and simple way to do NaBloPoMo. They do the theme-days thing, too. Wednesdays are all about poetry, for example, and Tuesdays focus on discussing a provided image (much like what Casey and her friend are doing at YouSeeItDifferentlyThan.Me, but on a Internet-wide scale.)

Marelisa has put together a list of 119 journal prompts. I especially like the “100 Things I Love” section, in which she suggests subtopics of things like “10 People I Love” or “10 Restaurants I Love.” That would make for a nice series.

Do you have a go-to inspiration for writing?

Domestic Blitz

How to remove sticker residue from a leotard

10/20/2010 Nichole 3 Comments

At the end of Poppy’s ballet class, the teacher rewards the girls with a sticker. Poppy usually applies it straight to her front, where it stays until laundry time.

Except for when it stays there all the way through laundry time.

I don’t know if you’ve ever washed a leotard with a sticker stuck to it. But if you haven’t? I’d suggest avoiding it. The sticker dissolves, I guess, leaving behind a sticky, gooey mess. It didn’t get on anything else, in our case, but it did make a great and terrible mess of Poppy’s leotard. There were little goo bits all over it. I tried to rub them away with a paper towel and some water. That made a bigger mess. Then I thought maybe washing it in hot water might sort of melt the glue away. No dice. So I did what I normally do in a pinch: I turned to the internet.

I found a lot of product suggestions, but I didn’t want to buy anything if it wasn’t absolutely necessarily. A few people suggested rubbing alcohol, which I don’t seem to have, and vegetable oil, which required its own post-treatment treatments to remove. And then I found one final, silly-sounding idea: Peanut butter. Peanut butter love

So I slathered the peanut butter all over the sticker residue, tossed the leotard back in the washing machine and hoped for the best. And guess what? It worked. There were a few little glue balls left on the leotard after the peanut butter wash, but the majority of the mess was gone.

Now my ballerina might smell a little bit like peanut butter, but at least she isn’t covered with tiny dots of glue.