I had a very bad experience with our first play date. Tomorrow is our second one with another pre-schooler. I’m hoping for the best.

I was searching on the web to see what can I do to make this a success. Found out that apparently you should prepare for play dates. Here are some tips:

• For the first time, arrange a play date in a park or a common area, so you can see how your kid interacts with the other. You can also get to know the mom.
• For the first play date at your house, invite the mom too. So her child will be at more ease and she also know where her child goes to for the future play dates.
• Talk about rules, if they can’t close any doors, which rooms they can play, where they can eat. Maximum of two hours is a good time for play date.
• Provide small snack if you see they are getting out of control or board. Avoid TV and computer games, play dates are about interacting with others and socializing.
• For when your guest arrives, bring in a quite toy to play together. Like blocks or train sets.
• If you see they don’t get along very well, step in and bring in some play dough or crayon to paint.

I got these few tips from two different sources:

http://singleparents.about.com/od/makingtimeforyourself/qt/howplaydates.htm

http://www.evite.com/app/cms/ideas/play-date

I have already organized all toys and tomorrow morning I’m going to ask my son to give any toys that he doesn’t want to share. Then ask him what kind of activity he thinks his friend will like to play.

Well we’ll see how it goes.

Until later,

I had a Christmas cocktail party a week ago. There were 14 adults and 12 kids including our family. I have to say, I was quite nervous after inviting everyone. We live in one floor and there is no big room for kids to run around.

At the end, I decided to make the party about kids. I had a table of kid friendly food and juice. And I made these cute marshmallow snowmans for each kid to take home. They were so cute I actually used them as my decoration too. Read the rest of this entry »

I live in Vancouver. We have very mild weather, mostly rain. In normal winter we may have one or two day of snow fall and then rain after it. But this year I think we broke a 30 year record. We had two winter storms back to back. I for one am going crazy with the kids at home. My son loves to play in snow but my daughter still too young for it, and she doesn’t enjoy it at all. I miss our rains when we could go out without fear of getting stuck some where in the road.

Here is a few pictures of our winter wonderland.

Until later,

I had this huge episode with my son almost a week ago. Now that  I look back I think may be it wasn’t that big a deal. Last week we had a play date with a pre-school friend. Two firsts for him. One that he had a friend of his own to play with, not a family friend from our circle. The other that he was English speaking. I don’t know if I mentioned before but my son is bi-lingual, he started learning English recently at pre-school.

There was a little language barrier and the maybe the affect of the new place on the other boy. He started playing by himself within the first 20 minutes. As much as my son tried to convince him to play with him it didn’t happen. He brought all his best toys, but all the other kid wanted to do was to play with those toys by himself and expecting my son not to touch them! kids!

What happened at the end was that my son lost it. He was loud, he threw blocks, and very rude with me. All with me not his friend. I was able to find the reason, he was frustrated because he couldn’t make blocks like his friend. Everything was fine after that, although he didn’t want to say goodbye to his friend properly.

This behavior got me thinking. I noticed that for the past few weeks he was most of the time shouting not speaking. And making angry faces. Read the rest of this entry »

I love this tree. It’s an easy way to bring color and holiday mood to any decoration.
This is an adult project, you may get your toddler to help with glittering but the rest I don’t trust my toddler to do.

Material:
Styrofoam cone (tree shape)
Craft liquid glue
Fine green glitter
Ribbons or fabrics in two different color (cut in 2inch ribbons with desired weight)
Pins to hold the fabric in

Glue the cone and then cover with glitter. You can use a fork to be able to hold the cone without touching the glued part and actually use it to dry the glued glitter.

When it all cry fold the fabrics in middle and attach it to the cone by pine change your color each row starting from the bottom. Put a bow on top of the tree so it doesn’t show the flat top.

Be creative and have fun

Until later,