Category: tweens

trust your instincts

by Karen, posted in family, fitness, tweens

well. my daughter has been riding at the new barn (http://home.comcast.net/~goodrich-puffer/index.html) for a while now, and loves it here. she is learning things like “posting”, “diagonals”, and “emergency dismounts”…oh my! more importantly, i am not experiencing that vague feeling of uneasiness that never left me at the other barn…the “i can’t put my finger on it, but something doesn’t seem quite right” feeling that mothers (and others) sometimes feel. i don’t feel like that at all when she is riding here. plus, this instructor taught her more in an hour than the prior one did in a month. this instruction makes the other look like…pony rides. expensive pony rides.

have any of you ever had a “gut feeling” about something that turned out to be true? did you follow your instinct right away, or wait awhile first?

happy easter

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, good grief, tweens

one of my favorite holidays growing up was easter. my father loved easter, and always went out of his way to make it fun for us. we had the requisite easter baskets, usually one of the prepackaged, pre-filled ones from the closest department store (we were a family of 4 kids born in 6 years, after all), but i always loved mine. the best part of the day was the easter egg hunt. dad would fill the plastic easter eggs with small change and “hide” them around the house (my father was disabled and not-so-agile, so most of the eggs were at about waist level, in plain sight). we would race around until we had found them all.

this year is the first that neither of my kids believe in the easter bunny anymore. here’s the funny thing about that though: they both still expect baskets and booty from the fictional bunny. as a mother, i certainly don’t want to disappoint them, but this year i wanted to focus on “less is more” and so i scaled things back some. instead of large, overstuffed baskets, i made them easter bunny bags to hold their candy (http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/holiday-ideas/easter-table-decorations), an idea i got from Good Housekeeping Magazine. they were easy to make, and more importantly, they were quick, since it was 10pm on easter eve before i got to actually assemble said bunnies. the other good thing about these little bunnies is that they form an enclosed space within which the contents must conform; no candy or toys spilling out over the tops and the sides…another reminder for me not to go “over the top” with filling them.  i did, of course, fill the plastic eggs with small change for the egg hunt. even though the morning will be rushed, with us getting ready to drive an hour and a half to have dinner with family out-of-state, and the older child getting ready to go to work, we will have our traditional egg hunt.

i would not want to miss that opportunity to honor my dad. 🙂

what easter rituals does your family have? are they carried over from your childhood?

diary of a wimpy kid

by Karen, posted in books, family, tweens

whenever there is a movie that gets my child to request (and then to actually read) the book that spawned it, i am happy. this month it happened in reverse; the movie of which i speak is “The Diary of a Wimpy Kid”. we are having my daughter’s 11th birthday party at Smitty’s (http://www.smittyscinema.com/) and this is the movie she chose, having read the “diary of a wimpy kid” and subsequent offerings in the series over the past couple of months (http://www.wimpykid.com/), long before she knew that there would be a movie coming out about it. she even has the movie poster hanging in her room, a gift from her brother. now, we seem to be surrounded by all things wimpy…and it’s all good.

have any of you adults seen a kids’ movie lately that made you laugh out loud? this one definitely will. some of the kids had seen the movie already, but even they were excited to see it again, and every one of them sat in their seats for the entire hour and 33 minutes, eyes on the screen.