Ottawa Olympic Torch Relay meets Parliament Hill Christmas lights!!

How cool is this? According to the NCC’s website, the annual Christmas Lights Across the Capital festival, otherwise known as the lighting of the downtown holiday lights, will this year coincide with the arrival of the Olympic Torch in Ottawa:

On Saturday, December 12, at 7 p.m., the 25th edition of Christmas Lights Across Canada will be launched with an illumination ceremony on Parliament Hill. This year, the celebration is set to coincide with the arrival of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Flame, as the Olympic Torch Relay reaches the heart of Canada’s Capital Region.

This brilliant symbol of Olympic spirit, as well as over 300,000 dazzling lights, will light up the night as Christmas Lights Across Canada kicks off.

The festivities on Parliament Hill will get under way at 5:45 p.m. Residents and visitors, along with dignitaries and special guests, are invited to gather on Parliament Hill to join the celebration for this special moment in the countdown to the 2010 Winter Games.

The evening promises to be a magical one, with fun and entertainment for the whole family. Mark December 12 on your calendar! More details will follow.

Edited to add: Thanks to the NCC, I’ve got more official details on the Parliament Hill Christmas Lights/Olympic Torch Relay in this post.

Canadian Toy Testing Council: Best Toys for 2010

This time of year, it seems like every website, TV show and magazine is offering up the “Best Bet” toys for the holiday season. I’m always a little bit skeptical though: can I trust Disney to objectively assess the other guys’ toys, or am I just getting a thinly disguised “Best Disney Toys” list?

That’s why I’ve always enjoyed reviewing the Canadian Toy Testing Council Best Bet Toy lists. The Canadian Toy Testing Council (CTTC) has been assessing toys on the basis of design, function, durability and play value since 1952. Here’s their schpeil:

Every year, hundreds of toys are selected as representative of those being offered on the market. These toys are then tested by Canadian children in everyday settings, to assess design, function, durability and play value. The Council rates each toy, awarding Three Stars, Two Stars, One Star, Novelty or Not Recommended. You can find the ratings and a review of each toy tested in editions of the TOY REPORT, published by the CTTC. The Council also reviews and evaluates Canadian children’s books to promote child literacy.

Toys tested by actual families? That’s the kind of review I want to read. The CTTC released their list of the Best Bet Toys for 2010 on November 16, along with a Battery-Powered Toy of the Year award and a Children’s Choice category.

I can tell you from personal experience that their Children’s Choice recommendation of the Step 2 Sand and Water Transportation Station is right on the money. Our was well-loved by the 7 year old, the 5 year old and the toddler, right out of the box.

137:365 Sand and water table

One of their “Best Bet” recommendations is Ganz’ Webkinz, which continue to enthrall all three of my boys. The big boys love them equally for the cuddle-factor and the online component, and the little guy just likes to hug them and make piles of them.

I am intrigued by the recommendation for Uno Moo. Lucas might be a tiny bit on the young side, but it looks to me like a game all three boys could play together. Uno is one of those classic games that the boys seem to love. Another unbeatable classic is Lego, which has my boys enthralled in a full-on addiction. I tried Tinker Toys one year, thinking the building factor would hook them, but we found the pieces annoying to assemble and not very versatile. Have they changed Tinker Toys since we were kids? Didn’t they used to be better?

My other favourite toy recommedation continues to be Cranium’s Super Fort. We gave one to my nephew for his birthday a year or two ago, and just this past weekend my sister-in-law was mentioning what a great gift it was and how much play value they got from it. (Ha, I just googled “cranium super fort” to find the link, and came up with my CTTC post from 2007. Apparently I am starting to repeat myself!)

By the way, you can also read the full report on all of the toys reviewed by the CTTC’s testing families online. I wish it were a more interactive, searchable database, though. You can even sign up to be a testing family — something I keep meaning to do but never seem to get around to.

Shhh, don’t tell the boys, but this Christmas will see a lot of Lego under our Christmas tree. That, and Wii games. Wii is coming out with Lego Rockband — it’s like they’re reading our minds! It’s the perfect family gift.

Care to share your inspiration? What do you think will be a big hit at your house this holiday season?

The lion that roared

We zipped down to Southern Ontario this weekend to visit my brother’s family for my neice’s and nephew’s joint birthday party. The low point was standing at the side of the 401 on Friday afternoon, having just cleaned vomit off a toddler and his car seat, unable to get the lock on the Thule roof rack to engage and making contingency plans in my head like “if we pile the contents of the suitcases in the car around our feet and leave the suitcases themselves on the side of the road, we might be able to fit everything into the vehicle.” Luckily, it didn’t come to that, but I am not overly impressed by the fickleness of the lock system on the Thule.

The high point was visiting the Toronto Zoo with my brother’s family on Sunday afternoon. I love the Toronto Zoo madly, and we make it out there about every second or third year.

Tristan has been working on a Grade 2 science project, in which he had to choose an animal and make a diorama of the animal in its habitat out of a shoe box. We blew off most of last Sunday afternoon actually constructing the diorama (have I mentioned how much I love the homework?) but thought stopping off to visit the lions on the way home from our mini-vacation would give him some real-life perspective to add to his oral presentation.

The weather was perfect for a visit to the zoo. It was mild for November, although grey and cloudy. Because we visited off-season, the parking was free but a few animals had been removed from their habitats for the winter. I’m not sure if it was a factor of the time of day we visited or the weather conditions or dumb luck, but every animal seemed to be out frolicking and putting on a show. It was easily the most interesting visit to the zoo I can recall.

Since we were still facing a four-hour drive home to Ottawa after the zoo, we didn’t have time to meander as much as I might have liked. We peeked in at the elephants, laughed at the bathing hippopotamuses, admired the gangly giraffes, and were delighted by the antics of the baboon family.

The lions are at more or less the farthest point from the parking lot, so the kids were already starting to get tired by the time we got to the lion enclosure. Each other time I’ve visited the zoo, the lions were simply lying majectically in the sun with imperious and inscrutable expressions. Yesterday, though, we must have wandered by just behind the zoo keepers, because the lion and lioness were both munching happily on the bloody remains of something meaty.

Lion eating

Once he had finished his lunch, the lion got up and wandered over to the lioness and tried to get her attention, but she was still eating. He stretched and did that kneading-with-his-paws things that cats do — so cute! — and then wandered away again. Then suddenly there was this sound… I looked all around at first, thinking there was some sort of speaker that was amplifying the noise, but there wasn’t. It was the most intense, low-pitched rumbling noise and it actually took me a minute to realize it was the lion. He wasn’t exactly roaring, just kind of grumbling, but holy crap! If that was him mumbling to himself, I can only image how terrifying an actual angry roar must sound. Aha, I thought to myself, so that’s why he’s the king of the jungle! It was truly the experience of a lifetime, just to feel that rumbling roar deep in my own chest — well worth the $70 admission price to the zoo!

Obviously looking for mischief, he wandered back over to the lioness and they tussled for a bit, making me wonder if what we’d heard wasn’t some sort of rutting call. And then they stretched back out on the grass and went back to looking imperial and inscrutable.

Lion and lioness

As if that weren’t enough to make the trip memorable, we wandered over to the polar bear enclosure just in time to see one polar bear push another one right into the pond. And right behind them, the wolves took to a mid-day howl… the sound set the hair at the back of my neck on end.

It was well past the boys’ bed times by the time we finally rolled into Ottawa last night, but it was such a memorable trip to the zoo that I think we all agreed it was well worth it. Not to mention the fact that Tristan now has some excellent first-hand knowledge of lions for his science project, and I got a whole bunch of photo fodder!

Zoo mosaic

(As always, you can see the full set on Flickr.)

Project 365: I am running out of titles for these posts!

I think I’ve managed to clamber over the brick wall of uninspiration that’s been sitting on my Muse for the last week or so. After about 10 days of feeling completely uninspired and worse, feeling like a talentless hack who happened to luck into a few good shots, I am feeling rejuvenated and excited about taking pictures again. I can’t figure out if my mood improved because my photos did, or vice versa. Regardless, it’s good to be enjoying the 365 project again. I’ve still got more than two months to get through!

I just can’t seem to stay away from leaf pictures. I can’t say in 40 years I’ve ever found them quite so compelling before, especially the ones lying in discarded heaps and blown up against fences. Like these ones!

290:365 More wet leaves

This was from the same day, the tail end of my rather bleak mood last week. I wanted something stark and November-y. I think this qualifies.

290b:365 Tree trunk

This picture was a failed experiment. I’d been trying to shoot through a glass with water droplets on it (the water droplets magnify and distort the image underneath) but I just couldn’t get it to work. Since I had the Scrabble board out anyway, I thought I could figure out something to do with it. It was actually Beloved who came up with the idea of putting the blog title out on it. Might work well as a banner some day, with some tweaking!

291:365 Postcards from the Mothership

When it gets to be the end of the day and I still don’t have a picture, I’ve gotten in the habit of practicing my portraits with the kids. This one was a near-miss — something about it bugs me, it just doesn’t do him justice — but good enough for the picture of the day.

293:365 Lucas laughing

I took this one a couple of days later, and *finally* got the picture I was trying to capture over the last couple of weeks.

Lucas in the land of chalk drawings

(Hey, Project 365 is all about learning, right? And I’ve learned that you have to take a LOT of shots to get just a few good ones.)

And the very same day, I took this one, which is one of my favourite pictures ever. I didn’t even notice the bubble on his lips until I was sorting through the pictures later that day.

295:365 Bubble breath

This next image was inspired by a really amazing TtV shot of one of my contact’s toy camera collection. It’s nowhere near as wicked-cool as his shot, but it’s mine and I like it fine. My small but growing vintage camera collection:

292:365 TtV camera family portrait

Saw this on my way to work, driving along the Canal early one morning and it caught my eye. They’ve got the little huts in place for Winterlude skating, making for an interesting reflection in the still Canal water.

294:365 Waiting for Winterlude

I see these as my transitional pictures. They’re half-way between fall and winter — frost on leaves! The first version is the macro, through a close-up filter.

296:365 Frosty leaf

And this is the non-macro version:

296b:365 The non-macro version!

Please admire that tiny sparkle of sunlight in the very centre of the frame, because it pretty much perfectly captures how I feel right now!

Five things I love about my Mazda 5

As you may remember, I made a (ahem) somewhat involuntary switch from driving a Dodge Grand Caravan to a Mazda 5 last July, when I wrecked the van and it burst into flames. (You know, I’m still a little twitchy even five months later?)

I’ve been meaning to write a follow-up post for months. Even though I was a very reluctant comer to the title of minivan owner back in late 2007 when we bought the Caravan, I had come to love the feeling of driving around in a spacious, elevated and insulated little world of my own. As it turns out, we had the minivan for exactly the right amount of time — I’m not sure we could have easily managed those earliest days with a newborn, when you never leave the house without a stroller and a bag and a bumbo or some sort of other seat and a ridiculous amount of other gear. One thing I’ll say for the Grand Caravan, we never lacked for places to put stuff.

That was my main concern in switching back to a car, even a station-wagon sized car like the Mazda 5. Would we all fit, with a car seat and two boosters? Would there be enough room for a full load of groceries? Would it be up to the task of hockey bags, strollers, and the rest of the crap we haul around with us?

Turns out, the answer is yes.

Truly, I love the Mazda 5 to death. Not only does it have more than enough space for us AND our stuff, but it doesn’t have that soul-sucking stigma that a minivan has, and it’s way better on gas. Here’s five things I love about my Mazda 5:

  1. It fits a full load (and I mean *full*) of groceries without flinching. I usually fold down one of the seats in the third row (it has a 50/50 split) and that together with the bit of space at the back is more than enough room. And, when I had to bring home new closet doors from Home Depot, to the amazement of the young fellow helping me cram them into the car, I managed to fit an 7′ x 4′ box into the Mazda and close the hatch by folding down every seat except the driver’s seat and the one directly behind the driver.
  2. Even with all the seats in use, there’s still plenty of room for day-to-day stuff. There’s just enough room in the back for a couple of grocery bags, or a folded up stroller, or a couple of backpacks, and it seats six quite comfortably. (Can you tell I have issues with space?)
  3. It has heart, and pep. I drove a little Mazda 323 for about a decade, and this car reminds me of why I loved it so. When you press the accelerator, it wants to go. It doesn’t feel heavy and lumbering like the minivan did. It feels, even with the automatic transmission, like you’re driving it instead of just steering it.
  4. It’s cheap to fill. The $75 fill-ups with the minivan made me choke every single time. The Mazda takes $45 to fill and I can get 500 to 600 km of city driving from that.
  5. I can park it easily and I don’t need a step-ladder to scrape the windows. The minivan was just a beast to manouever, and a bear to clean off in the winter time. I haven’t had to do anything more than an ice-scraping so far this year, but at least I can do that in a couple of minutes. And, I can reach the middle of the windshield!

185:365 My new Mazda 5!

In the interest of fair reporting, there’s a couple of things I’m still not quite sold on. The automatic wipers are a little flaky. The ride is not as smooth as that of the Grand Caravan — but to me, that just adds to the “driving instead of just steering” enjoyment of the ride. I miss the giant double glovebox of the Caravan and the extra space around the seats, and I think the middle seat might get a little messy in the winter with kids with snowy boots clambering over and around it to get to the back row of seats. Ingress and egress from the back is not bad, but was far easier in the Caravan.

We haven’t yet attempted a road trip with the Mazda, so that’s the last hurdle to be attempted before I give it a full five-star rating. When we bought it, the dealer threw in a free Thule roof rack system, so there *should* be plenty of room for our stuff. We’ll see!

In all, we had the minivan for exactly the time we needed it: our first year of adjusting to being a family of five. I’d read a lot of press on the Mazda 5 before we bought it, and many people opined that it would be a perfect car for a family of four but maybe not more than that. In all, I have to say that it is the perfect size for us. I may not feel that way when I’m the shortest one in the family, but I’ve got a couple of years left to worry about that!

A whimsical walk

My to-do list today had about 357 items on it. I’m sad to say that “take two hours out of the morning to go for a walk and play outside with the boys” didn’t even make the list. I’m hoping the fact that we actually did it redeems me just a little bit.

And what a whimsical walk it was! First, we came across these smiling pumpkins waiting for the trash collector. Something about the way his teeth have sunken in in the ten days since Halloween caught my fancy, and I was glad I had the camera with me to memorialize him before his date with the compost heap.

Jack waiting for the garbage man

Not even a block further down the road, we found this treasure trove of old tech magazines in someone’s recycling bin. I call this photo “Looks like someone got a Mac!”

Looks like someone bought a Mac

The magazine proclaiming PC’s untimely demise is from October 1995! Made me snicker and think of the old Mark Twain quote, “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

*whispers*: Will you mock me if I momentarily thought of filching the whole pile? Part geek, part pack-rat, I could barely restrain myself.

It’s a good thing I did, though, because if I had loaded up the wagon with 15 year old computer magazines, there wouldn’t have been room left for the toilet tank cover that I did filch from another person’s garbage pile. Oh yes I did!! Someone in my house who shall remain unnamed but whose name rhymes with Smeloved accidentally cracked ours into half a dozen pieces recently, and do you know it costs over a hundred bucks to replace just the lid on the toilet tank? And that’s if you can find the right brand at Home Depot, which I couldn’t. And did you further know that no matter how lazy-ass of a housekeeper you are, every time you walk into your bathroom and regard your toilet-tank lid held together with duct tape, you lose just a little bit of your self worth?

So I’m actually quite proud of myself for stealing the toilet tank lid out of my neighbour’s garbage. It was both an economically AND ecologically sound decision, and I only felt a little bit ghetto walking home with it in my wagon while the baby had to walk. (And you should be grateful that I did not take a picture of it. Because I thought of it, I really did.)

I did take a picture of this, though:

Simon bubble pop

And this:

Lucas in the land of chalk drawings

And as for the 357 untended items on that to-do list? I don’t regret ignoring them at all. Not even a tiny bit.

Celebrating four decades with 5 things about Sesame Street

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the debut of Sesame Street. I love Sesame Street madly and deeply, and have since I was a preschooler. I may have mentioned that once or two dozen times before.

You know who else loves Sesame Street? My kids. Of all the children’s programming we have on DVD and tape, everything from Blues Clues to Looney Tunes to Pingu to Thomas the Tank Engine to the Schoolhouse Rocks series, the two things that Lucas wants to watch are the Muppet Show and “Bird.” Big Bird, that is. We have two old skool Sesame Street DVD collections comprising six disks of 1970s Sesame bliss, and they’re in nearly constant rotation at our place.

In honour of the best children’s program on television, here’s five things about Sesame Street.

  1. The same puppeteer, 75-year-old Carroll Spinney, has been playing Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch since Day 1. (Have you ever seen the very first episode, where Big Bird’s head is pointy and Oscar is orange? It’s very, um, disquieting.)
  2. In 2005, Cookie Monster went on a health kick and changed his iconic anthem from “C is for Cookie” to “A cookie is a sometimes food.” I think of this, together with the introduction of the inexplicably appealing but unbearably grating Elmo, as the show’s nadir in my own estimation. (Lucas, on the other hand, worships Elmo even though he doesn’t appear in the early episodes we watch on DVD. I saw a four-foot Elmo in the window of Mrs Tiggy Winkles and thought it would make a fun Christmas gift, until I choked on the $179 (!!!) price tag.)
  3. In its first season, the show won a Peabody Award, a Grammy and three Emmys, and Big Bird appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Sesame Street now holds the Guiness Record for most Emmy Awards, with an impressive 122. (Do the math — that’s an average of three each year for 40 years!)
  4. The guest star on Sesame Street’s first episode was James Earl Jones, long before he was the voice of either Darth Vader or CNN, reciting a very solemn alphabet directly into the camera. Apparently, the show receives more requests for guest-star spots than they can accomodate each season. Here’s the full list of celebrity appearances. And check out this terrific compilation by Musicradar.com of the 11 greatest Sesame Street guest songs — I think my inner indie fan loves the Feist and REM ones the best.
  5. The Old School DVD collections carry a disclaimer that says “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.” I’m still perplexed by this. Is it the Ladybugs at the Ladybug Picnic discussing fire insurance? Is it the trippy, psychedelic animations? Is it the obvious Snuffleupagus-ism? Hell, I’d rather have the boys watching vintage Sesame Street than (insert name of any show produced by Nickleodeon or Disney here) any day.

And one bonus item: have you been watching the Sesame Street doodles on Google? If you’ve missed them, the Huffington Post has a slide show with all seven of them. The one with The Count is my favourite, I think.

(Hat tip to Shannon Proudfoot and her fun articles in the Ottawa Citizen this weekend, from which I filched some of the content for this post!)

Happy birthday, Sesame Street. 40 rocks!

NurtureShock: A book review in two parts (Part 1)

Back in early 2007, the blogosphere was a-cackle over an essay that appeared in New York Magazine. The gist of it, from what I could glean, was that we were over-praising our kids, and that too much praise was a bad thing. I never did get around to reading the source article, but I frothed in more than one blog’s comment section about how ridiculous I found the concept. Too much praise? No such thing. After all, I was raised on a steady diet of affirmation and praise, and I think it was one of the factors that most strongly contributed to the best parts of the adult I am today.

In the last week or so, I started hearing buzz about that theory in the background noise again, and found out that the authors of the original article had expanded it into a book that was getting a lot of interest. The book is called NurtureShock, and the general idea they posit is that we’ve been ignoring some of the most important scientific discoveries about children, learning and parenting. They propose to “use the fascinating new science of children to reveal just how many of our bedrock assumptions about kids can no longer be counted on.”

They were on CBC’s The Current last week, and although I missed it, the buzz reminded me that I wanted to check out the book. I was 104th in the queue when I requested it from the library, but lucked into a copy on the two-week “express reads” shelf the very next day.

I had the blog post half-written in my head as I walked out of the library. I was going to do a thorough, scholarly analysis and discount the theory on a point-by-point basis. I was going to tear it to pieces. I could hardly wait. I still had 20 minutes left to kill in Tristan’s skating lesson when I pulled out the book and started reading, pencil and notebook at my side. I was on page four – FOUR! – when my jaw dropped open in shock and dismay.

They were describing Tristan. To a perfect T. I did a 180-degree about-face. They were — gasp! — right!

The chapter starts with Thomas, a child whose IQ test scored him among the top one percent of the top one percent of applicants to his school:

Tristan Thomas didn’t want to try things he wouldn’t be successful at,” his father says. “Some things came very quickly to him, but when they didn’t, he gave up almost immediately, concluding, ‘I’m not good at this.'” With no more than a glance, Tristan Thomas was dividing the world into two — things he was naturally good at and things he wasn’t.

In the last year, I’ve seen this pattern a LOT in Tristan, in everything from riding a bike to drawing to math problems. Most things are easy for him, but the things that aren’t make him want to quit immediately. He’s reluctant to try, in case he might fail.

I read the rest of the chapter with avid interest. Turns out, their theory is not so much that praise itself is detrimental, but that gratuitous, insincere and non-specific praise is. They review a scientific study in which two groups of students were asked to do puzzles well within their ability. One group was given the single line of praise “You must be smart at this” while the other was given the single line of praise “You must have worked really hard.” The students were then offered the choice between two puzzles. One choice was a more challenging puzzle that researchers told the kids they’d learn a lot from attempting and the second choice was an easy test, just like the first. The results? “Of those praised for their effort, 90 per cent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The ‘smart’ kids took the cop-out.”

Carol Dweck, the researcher who engineered these studies, was surprised by the magnitude of the effect of praise on the students’ choices. She theorizes that praising the effort gives the child a variable he or she can control, while praising an innate characteristic like intelligence “takes it out of the child’s control, and provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

The chapter goes on to discuss the culture of self-esteem building that has been inherent to parenting advice for the last three or four decades, following the publication of Nathaniel Branden’s The Psychology of Self-Esteem. The authors note that the idea of promoting and preserving a child’s self-esteem has become “an unstoppable train [where] anything potentially damaging to kids’ self-esteem was axed. Competitions were frowned on. Soccer coaches stopped counting goals and handed out trophies to everyone. Teachers threw out their red pencils. Criticism was replaced with ubiquitous, even undeserved, praise.”

Another researcher, after reviewing 200 scientifically-sound studies on measuring self-esteem and its outcomes found that “having a high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement.” In fact, he believes that “the contiued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents’ pride in their children’s achievements: it’s so strong that ‘when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves.'”

Ouch.

And yet, the more I read, the more “Aha!” moments I had. One of my pet rants is the ‘culture of entitlement’ we seem to be living in right now. No wonder “failure is not an option” in Ontario schools… and small wonder that adults bring the same attitudes into the workforce.

I was so gobsmacked, so excited by what I read, that I couldn’t wait to talk to Beloved about it. I stood in the kitchen and talked about how clearly I saw Tristan in the examples. He scores quite well in just about every subject, and yet he is so obviously reluctant to try things he won’t immediately excel at. He is very risk-averse when it comes to trying new activities, but loves to do the things he does well.

Beloved was obviously listening to me, but he was regarding me with an expression on his face so curious that I eventually stopped in mid-sentence. “What?” I asked.

“You don’t see it, do you?” he asked, and I blushed. I did see it. “It’s not just Tristan, it’s YOU!” I skulked out of the kitchen muttering, “Stupid book, stupid praise, stupid husband thinks he knows me so well, what does he know, grumble grumble grumble…”

Of course he is right. He’s so right. It is me. My name is DaniGirl, and I am a praise junkie. I need to be validated. This blog exists because of my fundamental need for external validation. From the time of sentinence, I have made choices that would please my parents and those around me. And, I hate to fail. Really, really hate to fail. My ongoing struggles with French are a case study in my unwillingness to take the necessary risk of possibly making a mistake in public and looking foolish in the name of learning. If I can’t figure something out practically immediately, I lose interest.

Now, I also believe that the strong sense of self that my parents instilled in me from birth has practically everything to do with the fact that I am a happy, confident and successful adult who has achieved by age 40 just about everything I set out to do in life. In the grand scheme of things, I’d rather be a vaguely needy praise junkie with a successful career, loving husband, stable environment, lovely children, supportive family and terrific friends than an independent and persistent homeless crack addict. But I have to say, the first chapter of this book has given me lots to think about.

When I got to the end of that first chapter, I turned the page and realized the subject had moved on to an examination of whether kids getting, on average, an hour less sleep is causing ADHD, obesity and lost IQ points. Another interesting theory, perhaps, but I was anxious: where’s the rest? Where’s the answer? I want more on the subject of praise, please. Twenty-six pages hasn’t covered this in nearly enough detail for me. I need a roadmap, and a checklist. I need a work sheet. What if I fail?!

In all honesty, I’m not sure I can dial back the praise. It is too deeply ingrained in who I am, and in how I raise my boys. It is fundamental to who I am. I will, however, be more selective in my praise, and try to praise what the boys can control over what they cannot. I like the idea presented that the brain is a muscle that grows with each mistake made and learned from, and I’ll definitely be incorporating that into my mothering repetoire.

I’m almost afraid to read the rest of the book. What other deeply-held and fundamental tenents may be toppled like the Berlin Wall by the time I’m done? I’ll come back and let you know whether I can even look myself in the mirror by the time I’m done.

In the interim, as always, I’m curious as to your thoughts. Can you praise a child too much? Have we as a culture become self-esteem junkies? Is there any hope for an inveterate praise junkie like me, or should I just focus on saving the boys from praise addiction?

Holiday cards – your preferences?

Yes, it’s early. I know, not even the second week of November and it’s my second post about Christmas — third if you count the Christmas light in my 365 post! But I’m trying to wrench a little organization into my life and planning ahead is giving me a small sense of control.

So! Christmas and holiday cards. Given that I’m such an avid photographer, you’d think I would like photo cards, but I’m not terribly fond of them for us. In the past, we’ve sent the boys’ Sitting With Santa photos as our annual card, but I’m more partial to an actual card. There’s more room for a message, and — well, I don’t know why else I like an actual card better, I just do! Not just any holiday card, though. I like a folky kind of image the best, simple and not glittery and not hokey. I spend way too much time thinking about this, don’t I?

For years now, more than a decade actually, I’ve been saving all the holiday cards we receive. The day the tree comes down, the photo cards go into one pile and the traditional cards go into another one. The photo cards get saved and the other cards get recycled into various Christmas crafts. Last year we made bead-marble fridge magnets out of Christmas card cutouts, for example. You can cut them up to make great gift tags, too.

So I’m really just rambling on because I’m curious… do you prefer to send out store-bought cards, hand-made cards or photo cards for the holidays? And what do you think of those annual newsletters? (I’d send out an annual newsletter myself, but it’s easier just to link to the blog!) Have you ever done an official portrait sitting for your card or do you use a favourite snapshot from the year?

You can mock me now, but blink twice and it will be mid-December…