Aubergine

We voted.

We took Bean with us to the polls this morning and took turns playing with her while the other filled out a ballot.  She is too young, certainly, to understand what we are doing or why, but it feels important to involve her in this process, even now.  I remember going to the polls with my mother when I was young and it impressed on me the importance of having one's being counted.

I have never missed an election since I became old enough to participate.  A few times I have chosen not to vote for a particular measure or position when I don't know enough or have a strong opinion either way, but I have always cast my vote for president.

I was excited to see that a number of other parents had young children in tow this morning, too.

In other news, I am working on a project that is taking my attention away from this space, so I may be a bit quiet for a while.  I'm looking foward to sharing what I'm working on with you when it is ready for prime time!

Conflicted

I slump against the counter, crumbs under my bare feet, palm on something sticky.  The LHM is still sitting on the floor with Bean, where she patted the floor to indicate we should join her. “Eh?” she said, using her all-purpose question word. “What is this? How do you do it? Will you help me?” She looks at me with her eyebrows raised and I translate it to mean, right now, “Will you come sit here?” After I sit, “Dah-jee? Eh?” to her father, patting the floor on her other side. He joins us, holding his tumbler of water, which she immediately appropriates.

Drinking out of grown-up cups is her newest skill, but pouring water is one of her favorite activities and this is a heavy glass cup, so who knows how this is going to go. She takes a drink and sets it on the rug next to her. She looks around, then signs, “Book,” which she has spotted up on the edge of the counter opposite us. I get up get it and hand it to her father. I have already read my quota of board books for the day. I stay up, because while resting felt good, sitting on that dirty floor was grossing me out.

“I know an old lady who swallowed a fly,” he begins. Bean picks up the tumbler again and peers into it.

“Honey, be careful,” I warn. She doesn’t even look at me. It is 5:30 PM and I’ve lost most of my authority, and my belief in my authority, by now. Especially now that Daddy is home. Now her hand is in the glass, up to her wrist in water, and she is twisting it, making the water swish back and forth. The LHM is holding the base, but I know this is going to end in a mess.

I watch, pondering whether I should mop the whole floor while it is wet, or if I can get away with just sponging up that section. I’m glad he’s drinking water and not milk. She pulls her dripping fingers out of the cup and watches water fall from them onto her lap. She brushes her palms back and forth against each other, signing “Clean!” and grinning up at me. Water droplets fly out across the floor.

In the morning, at her water table in the yard, or in her bath, I love to watch her experiment with the world this way. But by the evening I have grown tired of picking up, cleaning up, and changing clothes. I need to start dinner and am thinking forward to all the things I need to finish before I can fall into bed. And the list is always longer than the time remaining before a reasonable bedtime.

“It is hard to find the line,” I say, to myself, to him, to her, “between letting her explore and maintaining some kind of order in this house.” I want to be a fun mom. I want to join her in seeing the world as a science experiment. I want to let her remind me that the world is a fascinating, wonderful place.

But in the evening I want a tidy house and a quiet, obedient child. In the evening these things are beyond elusive. They are so far from the reality of the situation that some nights I just want to sit down on the filthy floor and cry in frustration. She would probably come over and crawl into my lap. She would hold my face with her little hands and look into my eyes. Which would just make me feel guilty. I’m so relieved when he walks in the door after work each night and she runs to him.

The LHM smiles sympathetically at my distress but doesn’t answer. And doesn’t take the glass out of her hand. I know I usually err on the side of order. He errs on the side of fun. He can handle more chaos than I can. And he hasn’t been managing this particular kind of chaos all day.

She puts her hand back in the water and swishes some more. This time I say nothing more and let her play.

I hate the playground

I hate taking my daughter to the playground.  In my pre-child life, I would walk past parks with playgrounds and see parents standing around with coffee cups in hand, visiting and laughing while their kids scampered over the equipment and ran, laughing and holding hands across the sand.  At least that’s what I remember.  

My actual experience of taking my own small child to the playground is something like this.  Before she could walk, I would sit on a blanket on the lawn under the shade of a tree in a circle of other moms while we shared snacks and stories.  The hardest part was keeping the kids from mashing their snack into another kid’s face.  Mostly we never left the blanket.  It was lovely!  

But then she became mobile.  

Even before she could walk, my child was determined to climb. I could lift her to the top of the slide and hold her while she rode down, but at the bottom she’d flip herself over and scramble back up the slope as far as she could.  Even on the new “less-dangerous” plastic slides we have around here, there was a high risk of her slipping down and off the edge, probably catching her chin on the way down.  

Stairs are for climbing, clearly, but even on the toddler-sized equipment in my neighborhood park (where “toddler” means "too big for my child"), the stairs were half her body high and the platform at the top had one long open edge at the height of my shoulder.  Still, she could climb those stairs on all fours faster than I could get up them on two and she did not inherit my fear of nights and edges.  And then, of course, I’m at the top of the slide with her and we all know it is dangerous to go down a slide with a child on our lap, but what do I do now?  She isn’t going to wait for me to climb back down to be ready to catch her before she launches herself down that delicious slope.

And don’t even get me started about the big kids who chase each other through the little kid equipment, pushing the babies out of the way as they go. I feel like a grumpy old mama but I really want to tell them to get back to their own quadrant of the park to play with kids their own size. 

Also, there never seems to be any shade over the play equipment. The slides get hot. The rails get hot. Mama gets hot. Mama hates getting hot.

So mostly we just don’t go to the park.  This truth is on my personal list of my failings as a mom.  No baby book. No swimming lessons. No parks.

Last weekend, though, we went to Oktoberfest in Campbell with my sister and her husband.  We parked a few blocks away at the Campbell Community Center.  After we left the festival, Bean really needed to stretch her legs a bit after being confined in her stroller and before I strapped her into the car for the 40 minute drive home.  So I released her to run on the lawn next to the pool. That was fun for a minute, but she’s an explorer, so she wandered off down the path and I followed with the stroller a short distance behind. The Community Center is an old, pretty complex of buildings with wide, shady paths and mature landscaping. Late on a Sunday afternoon the place was pretty quiet and we had most of the complex to ourselves. 

She was in little Bean heaven.  She’d go up the steps to a door, check the handle, come back down.  Run up the wheelchair ramp to the next door, peek at me through the bars, then wander back down.  Up onto a bench, around a tree, jump off the edge of the concrete into the flowerbed.  I could see her practicing all of her large motor skills - all the things playgrounds are good for - but in a context that didn’t freak me out. No hot slides that slide too fast and launch my baby into tan bark.  No shoulder-high unprotected edges just waiting for her to step too close. No big kids racing past and pushing her down.

Ironic, isn’t it, that an environment not at all designed for small children turned out to be a much safer and interesting playground than the actual playground?

Now I just need to find a similar place for her to explore in my own community.  Because I don’t think I’m going to get over my loathing of the park playground until she’s, oh, I don’t know, 16 maybe.

Where do your kids like to play that isn’t the park?

Really bad mom habits

I have recently been practicing some of the following bad habits:

• Staying up too late at night when I know she always wakes up early in the morning.
• Drinking too much caffeine to compensate for the prior bad habit.
• Letting her eat all the protien off of my plate so that I only get the carbs.
• Eating her leftovers after finishing my own meal.
• Asking her question when the answer is not negotiable. ("Do you want to get ready for bed now?")
• Paying more attention to my agenda than her needs. (Going to Target at toddler lunch time is a really bad idea)
• Frittering away my child-free time on Facebook and Pinterest.
• Not asking for enough help.
• Failing to nurture my friendships with other grown-ups.
• Feeling really guilty about not having a handmade Halloween costume in the works.
• Feeling like I’m not doing enough, well enough, or often enough.

 What are your bad mom habits?

 

Memories in the mending

Last night I sat at the kitchen table and worked my way through my mending basket. First the bra that had an escaping wire got a patch.  Then I modified another bra to add nursing clips (and yay! I have bras that fit again!).  I patched a hole in a pair of my man’s favorite pants so his underwear don’t show at the office and hemmed a pair of PJ pants that were about a foot too long for me.  

Then the hand mending: A button missing from my flannel pajama top and a stuffed chipmunk belonging to Bean that was losing her plastic glasses. Since Bean started wearing glasses last spring I have brought home a small family of stuffed animals who wear glasses, so she can see herself in her surroundings.  We have a Magenta dog, a Hello Kitty wearing big Buddy Holly frames, and this girl chipmunk who sports some hip purple specs.  Specs that were, unfortunately, not sewn well enough to withstand a toddler’s curious fingers.  They came loose within a few days and I tossed the doll into the mending basket to deal with later.

Later became much later, as happens with the mending pile.  My basket has been living on my man’s dresser, which happens to be right next to our bedroom door.  Each time I go in or out of the bedroom, I walk past it.  And if The Bean is in my arms it is right at eye level.  “Oh, no!” she exclaims, each time she sees her chipmunk with her loose glasses.  I tried to bury her better in the folds of the flannel pajamas, but one foot still showed and Bean’s “Oh, no!” reminded me day after day of my procrastination.

So last night after she was asleep I committed myself to fixing stuff.  

As I sat stitching loops around the plastic frame, connecting them back to the chipmunks ears and cheek, I felt a wave of anxiety and sadness wash over me.  I was a little girl again.  I woke up and came out of my room and saw my favorite doll on the couch.  But something was wrong with her.  Her long ears were missing!  Where did her ears go?  My mom had cut them off, following the logic of some conversation I didn’t remember having with her. She thought she was doing what I had requested, but I was devastated that my doll had been injured at my mother’s hand.

I remember the heaviness of grief in my chest, maybe for the first time in my young life. I was inconsolable. I remember holding her and crying. I was still at the age when I believed my toys were alive, had feelings and souls. Something had happened to her when she was out of my protection and it was awful.  I had not been there to protect her.  I let her down. I wanted her back the way she was before and also I understood that could never happen. I was angry at my mother but also I felt guilty.  Somehow the misunderstanding felt like my fault. I had done something that had lead to this grievous injury to my very favorite creature.  I didn’t know how to apologize or to fix it.

Even now, 35 or more years later, I feel sadness at this memory.

As I stitched my daughter’s doll, I realized that my procrastination at her repair was based on fear of unintentionally triggering my child’s grief in the same way.  It was so unlikely to happen - clearly she was more grieved by the broken glasses than she would be by them repaired - but I was afraid of making a misstep and hurting her. I know how deeply attached young children become with particular toys and it can be so fraught, as a parent, to negotiate through those feelings when communication is still so limited between us.

After I knotted off and trimmed my thread I tucked the chipmunk into the basket on Bean’s changing table, where she would be sure to see her this morning.  After we got up today, both of us still in our fuzzy pajamas, I whispered to her, “I have something for you.” She stood up and grabbed my fingers, excited for me to lead her to her surprise.  We walked down the hall to her room and I kneeled down next to her and pointed up at the basket. “Look, honey.  Mama fixed her.”  She dropped my fingers and reached up with both arms, her face open and happy as I watched her anxiously. I lifted down the doll and Bean tucked her in to her chest with one arm, swaying her body and tapping the chipmunk’s head gently in her sweet imitation of the way I snuggle her own small body to my chest in a bear hug.

This time, at least, I feel reassured that I did right by my girl.

Low-tech toddler toys

With kids returning to school the last couple of weeks I'm  seeing a bunch of posts on homeschooling blogs about how to keep toddlers busy.  It makes sense - the big kid and the parent need to do lessons, but what is the little kid supposed to do? 

There are no big kids being homeschooled in our home, but this parent still needs chunks of time during the day to do other things.  Sometimes just time to make dinner! I noticed recently that I have been turning more and more to iPhone and iApp games to distract The Bean when I needed a few minutes, but I have mixed feelings about doing that.  The science on the subject is unclear but what I see happening is that she gets hyper-focused on the screen.  She doesn’t respond to my voice or other things going on in the room. The more she uses the device the more she wants it, but the more time she spends playing games the more quickly she loses interest in them.  Not that she wants to put the device away, she just wants it to do more, something else, something more interesting. And when it doesn’t she gets very frustrated. This all looks like addictive behavior to me and I don’t want to feed that.  It is one thing when I'm sitting right next to her and interacting with her, but when I'm trying to get my hand free this just doesn't feel like the best way to do it.

So I’ve been reading up on toddler busy bags (check out my Pinterest board where I’ve been collecting ideas) and various activities appropriate for a smart and curious 19 month old. I’ve been specifically looking for things that I can make with stuff I already have around the house.  I few weeks ago I made an I-spy bottle out of an old water bottle, some rice and some plastic farm animals, which was only semi-successful.  She carries it around the house sometimes but hasn’t quite figured out how to manipulate it to see the different animals. 

Last night, after she was done with dinner but not ready for bed yet (but mama was!) I pulled a plastic tub out of the recycling and cut a hole in the lid.  I got a handful of various-sized puff-balls and showed her how to fit one of them through the hole.  That was all she needed!

This simple toy entertained her for more than half an hour - ages longer than any iDevice has kept her attention!

First she put all the little balls into the tub.  Then I showed her that the lid came off and she dumped the puffs out and fed them back through the hole again.  Then she spent some time figuring out how the lid worked.  Then she started sorting the puffs into different parts of her highchair tray.  Then she put them all back in the tub by the handful and pouring them out again.  Then we talked about what colors the balls were and how some were bigger than others.  She selected her favorite - a large purple one - and put the rest back in the tub.

At that point she was finally ready get in pajamas so I put the toy away, but she carried that little purple puff ball all the way to the bedroom and still had it clutched in her fist when I moved her, sound asleep, from my lap to her bed.

Have you found simple ativities like this that your toddlers love?  I'd love to hear about them in the comments!

Ordinary Life in Pictures

I read an article a while back about how photo apps with filters are influencing how we remember our memories.  I don't actually think that is a bad thing. The filter I used on this photo is the way I remember this moment.  It was a long day. I felt a little gritty from exhaustion.  And I looked across the room at this scene, my heart went "ka-thunk" with a big jolt of happiness. Softly out of focus is exactly right.

 

How to survive a sleep regression

Doesn't she look sweet when she's sleeping?  

She hasn't been looking like that much recently.  More like a squirmy, whiney, wide-awake and exhausted toddler.

We have been weathering the dreaded 18-month sleep regression.

"Sleep regression" is the term generally applied when your normally well-rested baby suddenly refuses to nap, fights bedtime, regularly wakes up too early, or wakes up repeatedly all night for no apparent reason.  The experts say they come at expected intervals - 4 months, 9 months, 13 months, 18 months and 24 months (give or take a month) - and last between 2-6 weeks.

Bean's 18-month regression hit early, right around 16 months.  Which also happened to be when she started walking in earnest.

Naps were still mostly OK, but she started fighting me at bedtime.  Wanting to nurse but squirming constantly, wanting to play and just taking forever to fall asleep. Some nights it was a two or three hour ordeal.  Then she'd wake at midnight, at 3, at 5, at 6.  We were both wiped out every day and I just coudn't seem to pull out of the downward spiral that is an overtired baby.  And then my own exhaustion hit me like a brick wall.

That was about three weeks ago.  I went into survival mode for a while but now that we have had a couple of nights of improved sleep I wanted to offer up what worked to get us through.  If nothing else, so I can come back and read this post when she's in the next regression!

Do Whatever Works

I have a friend whose newborn only slept 20 minutes at at time for many months.  She tried lots of things to change his sleep patterns, but eventually she just went with it and did whatever she could to keep him and herself as rested as possible.  Eventually, thankfully, he grew out of it.  

I think of her on our worst days, when none of the things that worked to soothe Bean last week are working at all.  Think outside of your normal repoirtoire and pull in techniques for drastic situations. Here are some of the things that worked for us:  

• Long car rides on days when naps were elusive. For some reason she sleeps longer in the car than anywhere else, so I also resorted to this trick when she became way overtired.
• Letting her play in her crib in the dark long past bedtime while I sat nearby and read a book on my phone.  Eventually she would settle, even if it sometimes took hours. At least I got some reading time.
• Bringing her into our bed when she woke in the wee hours and holding her firmly in my arms until she fell back asleep (after crying, but never for as long as I feared).
• An solid bedtime routine.  On really difficult days, a warm bath and then right into pajamas in a dim room helped her settle a little faster.
• On days when she wasn't to tired to manage dinner, feeding her a meal with a mix of protein and carbs helped her sleep more soundly for the first part of the night, even if she still woke up early in the morning.
• Trading off responsibilities with the partner. Bedtime had been my domain since the beginning, but I just couldn't handle it every night any more. Ask for help if you need it! 
• Drive through coffee for mommy while she slept in the backseat.

 

Protect Your Own Rest

I got into a really bad cycle of staying up too late on nights bedtime took extra long because I was so desperate for "adult time."  Early morning waking and crying spells after those late nights were pure torture.  I had to institute a strict bedtime for myself, even if it meant I was leaving my to-do list unfinished.  

I also gave myself permission to do no housework during her nap.  If she napped in the car I read a book.  If she napped at home I got myself a cold drink and caught up on Facebook or blogs.  We ran out of clean underwear a couple of times, but it kept me mostly sane.

Make sure to keep up on your exercise, your vitamins and eating a balanced diet.  I slipped on all three of these and ended up sick in addtion to exhausted.

 

Don't throw in the towel

It is easy to let the routines go when you are just trying to keep it together every day.  But I routines are important, even if you can't completely maintain them.  I tried to keep naptime at about the same time every day, make dinner at the same time every night, and then move into the regular bedtime routine.

Just be willing adjust if that particular day the routine is not going to cut it.  If she was too tired to manage her regular dinner I'd offer a yogurt squeeze pouch instead.  Nap boycott today?  Into the car we go. But tomorrow we will be back in the rocking chair at noon to try again.

 

Don't Doubt Yourself

At the beginning of this regression I tried really hard to figure out what was wrong so I could fix it.  Was she teething?  Was the room too light?  Was she hungry? Did she need more activity during the day?  Less?  What did she need that I wasn't giving her?

It took a handful of days to realize this was just going to have to be endured. I wasn't doing anything wrong. But until then I gave myself a lot of grief about what a bad mom I was.  

Don't do that.  You're doing great.  This is normal. It sucks, but it is normal.

 

Remember This Too Shall Pass

The biggest lesson I have learned about raising a child thus far it that everything changes.  

That really cute way she would get so excited that she'd shake before a bath?  She doesn't do it any more.  That annoying way she'd try to bite me when she was frustrated?  Doesn't do it any more.  

Sleep regressions are like that, too.  Hang in there.  It will end.  The baby will sleep again soon, and so will you.

I promise.

A List of Lists

My attention is so fragmented right now.  My Bean finally learned to walk last month, and while she is not yet running, she is climbing.  On the couch, on the coffee table, on anything that will help her get to anything higher, and on the dining room chairs if we leave them pulled out. 

We had fallen into a nice groove, she and I, where I could tell what she was doing in another room by the sounds I could hear.  That allowed me to sit at the dining room table and she could just range around the house without my direct intervention. But now no room is safe unless I'm in it.  And I'm not even totally confident of that.  

My writing time has been scarce. My pre-writing planning that usually happens outside of my childcare hours while I'm just doing my day-to-day stuff has been wiped out by the necessity of being totally hands on with this toddler while she learns the ins and outs of gravity from a new perspective. I'm trying to capture fragments of thoughts as they flit by and my notebooks are getting filled with random notes and scrawled messages that I may or may not be able to decipher later.

A month or so ago I read some summer exercises for writers at SheWrites. It included the suggestion to utilize lists. One example was to make a list of fears to overcome. 

Since it seems that all I'm writing right now are lists, I started thinking about how to turn that into an exercise instead of an annoyance.  What kinds of lists would be interesting to create.  Here are a few I thought of:

• A list of things that make me come alive (can you get to 100?).
• A list of things I want to learn.
• A list of things to let go of (physically or emotionally).
• A list of places to visit.
• A list of people I miss.
• A list of people who think I'm awesome (useful to have on a bad day).
• A list of risks I want to take.
• A list of favorite foods.
• A list of things I can do in 5 minutes to relax.
• A list of things summer sounds and smells.
• A list of holiday memories.
• A list of travel memories.
• A list of things I want to research and write about.
• A list of stories I want to tell.
• A list of people who inspire me.

What lists do you keep?  What lists would you like to keep?

 

My top 5 parenting books

 

When I found out I was pregnant I went on Amazon and ordered a stack of books that I thought would help me make sense of what was happening to my body and my life.  Then the morning sickness hit, and I was nauseous when I tried to read.  By the time that passed I was gearing up to start grad school. 

My daughter's birth came and went and most of the books remained in a pile next to my easy chair, unread.

Following the pattern I set back then, I haven't read very many parenting books in the last 16 months.  But of the few I read, these have been the most useful.

The Nursing Mother's Companion, by Kathleen Huggins

Breastfeeding was supposed to be easy.  I had breasts, I had a hungry baby.  No problem, right?  

While I'm grateful that my breastfeeding journey was simpler than it turns out to be for many moms, it was not nearly as simple as I expected.  I read this book cover to cover when my daughter was 3 or 4 days old, my nipples had blistered and cracked from an improper latch, and I had no idea how to tell if my milk had come in yet.  I was desperate for information.  This book answered all of my questions and did it clearly enough that I could understand it even in my shell-shocked and sleep-deprived state.  If you are a new (or repeat!) mom and you plan to breastfeed, make sure you have this book in your house before the baby arrives.  It may save you some sanity when you really really need it.

No-Cry Sleep Solution, by Elizabeth Pantley

Sleep was another thing I thought was going to be so easy and then it wasn't.  I thought we'd just sleep with the baby and everyone would be happy.  I didn't really realize how often the baby would wake up and what that meant for all of us sleeping, or not sleeping, which was what was really happening. When I started hearing other moms talking about sleep training and co sleepers and what "sleeping through the night" really means (hint: not 8 hours), I decided I needed to know more about how babies sleep and what I could influence and what I needed to live with.

Pantley's book offered me information on baby sleep cycles and tips for easing sleep transitions, and didn't make any suggestions to let the baby cry, which I knew I would not be willing to do. It helped me understand better where she was developmentally, how much sleep she should be getting, and to be more clear about what was important to me about our sleeping situation.  We actually didn't change where or when the baby was sleeping as a result of reading the book, but I felt a lot more at peace about our decision to co-sleep and we made some minor adjustments that helped me sleep better myself. When I became more confident my interactions with Bean around naps and bedtime and developed a better going-to-bed routine, the whole process got a lot easier.

Many months later, when I was finally ready to move her to her own crib, I re-read Pantley's book to help me figure out how to make that happen.  It took about a week of bumpy nights, but Bean started sleeping better and more soundly very quickly.

Baby-Led Weaning, by Gill Rapley and Tracey Murkett

Several of the moms in my circle of friends were talking up this book when they started introducing solid foods to their kids, who were all a few months older than mine.  After eating out with them a few times and being totally impressed at how well their babies could manage a wide range of foods, I decided to check it out.

I guess by not reading all those pregnancy books when I was pregnant I missed the instruction that you are supposed to start your baby on pureed food. I found the Baby-Led Weaning approach to be a perfectly logical way to introduce food, encourage healthy eating habits and help your child develop a wide palate of tastes and textures. 

Food is a big deal in my house.  I love to cook and to eat, and to share the tastes I love with my family.  It turned out to be so much fun to let Bean try new foods mostly on her own terms and develop her own individual tastes.  She has always been really clear about what she likes and doesn't, when she wants more and when she's done.  And honestly, she'll try anything and enjoys some surprisingly strong-flavored dishes. 

And I didn't have to buy or make a whole bunch of special food for her, so we all win!

Bringing up Bebe, by Pamela Druckerman

This isn't actually a parenting book.  It is a memoir, sort of, and one mom's research into the differences in parenting styles between French and American families.  While the author has drawn criticism for over-simplifying both cultures and for focusing on families in a very narrow socio-economic range, I still found it fascinating.  

I'm often slightly horrified by families where the kids seem to be running all over the parents. "Be the grown up!" I want to scold the parents.  "How will your child respect anyone if you don't insist that he respects you?"

It was heartening to me to discover that the instincts that were leading me to set clear boundaries and have expectations for my child's behavior, even at a young age, we in line with parenting practices somewhere, at least.  Although there are things I disagree with that are normal practice in France (early weaning, for example) there are also things that I'm very envious of that would make such a difference in the US (government funded early childcare and preschool).  

Mostly it was a fascinating look at two different parenting styles and the potential pros and cons of each.  I always think it is a good a idea to take the lid off of our customs and beliefs to figure out what they mean and why we do them, even if we choose to continue on exactly the same path we are on.

The Toddler's Busy Book: 365 Creative Games and Activities to Keep Your 1 1/2-to 3-Year-Old Busy, by Trish Kuffner

This is the newest book on my (virtual) shelf.  Now that all the babies in our little circle of moms are toddlers, the emails in our group are often about a) What are you guys cooking for dinner? and b) how do I keep this kid entertained and prevent him from jumping off of the furniture??   

This book, again, was recommended by one of our group.  I've only just begun to delve into it, but I'm loving the suggestions so far.  It has arts and crafts, learning, and play activities for both indoors and out and even suggestions for a Rainy Day Box that is a parent's secret weapon on those rainy or sick days when the day just seems to stretch on forever.

But best of all she has a whole chapter on how to organize for your toddler, including what you can save or re-use from around your house for various purposes.  This is a fantastic resource for parents or caregivers of toddlers, especially the especially busy ones, like mine!

 

What are your favorite or lifesaving parenting books?