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Parenting Press®Welcome to the April 2009
“News for Parents”
This electronic newsletter has dozens of ideas that we at Parenting Press hope you’ll find helpful and interesting. To suggest a story topic or to comment on article content or format, please use the link after each article; we welcome your feedback.
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IN THIS ISSUE
- WHAT’S NEW?
- FEATURES
- POTPOURRI
- COMING ATTRACTIONS
- Making Memories with Fashion
- Gather Memories for Oral Histories
- Opening Windows on Your Family
- How Much Sleep Does Baby Need?
I. WHAT’S NEW?
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Celebrate with a Theme Cake
Celebrating with a sleepover or a pool party? With a boat trip or a jaunt to the zoo? Of course you’ll want refreshments that complement your theme!
Cakes by Eileen Kennedy-MooreThe Parenting Press expert on theme cakes is Eileen Kennedy-Moore, author of What About Me? 12 Ways to Get Your Parents’ Attention (Without Hitting Your Sister), clinical psychologist, and oh, yes—mother of four.
For a slumber party, Kennedy-Moore made a miniature cake for each guest using small loaf pans. Besides the basic frosting, she used marzipan to mold heads—complete with appropriately colored hair—for each bed, and then added brightly colored frosting for the quilts or bedspreads. You could also use skin-colored gumballs for heads and add hair with frosting or licorice strings.
Fairy Cakes by Eileen Kennedy-MooreRather have a pool party? On a sheet cake, outline a pool with pebble rock candy for the paving and shrubbery cut from flattened gum drops. Add paper parasols, blue frosting water and a sugar wafer diving board. For swimmers, use candy or marzipan to create the heads and arms that show above the water. For inner tubes, what’s better than Life Savers?
You could kick off a boat trip with a dock surfaced with sugar wafers; add a railing made with Tootsie Roll “posts” and licorice stick cross-pieces, and make sure there are lots of candy fish swimming in the frosting sea below. The rock candy pebbles will make a good seawall, and you can create “sand” with colored sugar.
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Conversation Tips: Keep It Short and Simple
Got a socially struggling teenager? So does a member of the Parenting Press crew. When he asks a girl out, he too often hears, “Sorry, I have to wash my hair.” So we’re always on the lookout for suggestions, and recently we found some surprisingly helpful ones in a book intended for young women, You Lost Him at Hello: A Saleswoman’s Secrets to Closing the Deal with Any Guy You Want (Health Communications, Inc., 2008).
As author Jess McCann points out, successful salespeople are usually great talkers, but even more important, they are great listeners. The same holds true in social situations—of all kinds. McCann’s rule: let the other person talk 75 percent of the time. She advocates the KISS principle: “Keep It Short and Simple.” In other words, when you’re asked a question, make your reply short and simple, and then turn the conversation back to the other person.
McCann has an unappealing name for talking too much: “Verbal Vomit.” Some people talk too much because they’re naturally chatty. Others are afraid of an awkward silence. Others think that the only way to impress people with how great they are is to flat out tell them. But, she reminds, “What makes a person like you has less to do with what you say and more to do with how you make [that person] feel. People like to feel that they are being heard.”
She also makes a point that is important for all of us, especially those of us parents new to a neighborhood, school community, or other group: don’t discuss personal problems that you aren’t over. “When you complain about a bad situation at home, work, or anywhere else, you could end up giving [others] . . .Verbal Vomit with a twist of headache,” McCann writes.
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The Story Behind ‘The King and I’
How often do you watch movies that claim to be based on fact and wonder how much has been romanticized—or completely fictionalized? If your family has recently watched “The King and I,” you can learn more about Anna Leonowens, who did spend several years in Bangkok in the 1860s as governess to the wives and children of King Mongkut, in “Governess: the Life and Times of the Real Jane Eyres” (Walker & Co., 2008).
As the subtitle indicates, author Ruth Brandon researched what life was really like for the women who provided home schooling for the young children of middle and upper class families, especially in the 1800s. She does this by profiling several well-known women who left behind diaries, letters and memoirs that describe what was often the only respectable way for a slightly educated single middle-class woman, often English or European, to support herself. Unfortunately, most did it for very little pay, no benefits, and no job security: they lost their jobs when their charges were old enough for boarding school or tired of French and drawing lessons.
Like many other governesses who took assignments in exotic locales, Leonowens wrote two memoirs of her time in what was then Siam. She used the stories to create a second career for herself in America, as a lecturer, and then in 1943 another writer used them as the basis of a novel, “Anna and the King of Siam,” which led to a play and then the 1956 musical with Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner. Brandon points out how little of the novel and musical were fact, in part because like some of the other women described in “Governesses,” Leonowens had exaggerated claims about her family background and credentials when she sought teaching assignments, and then again in her memoirs. (What is interesting is that research in the 1970s proves that Leonowens’s son Louis, shown in the movie as a friend of the heir to the throne, did indeed grow up to have a close relationship with the next king. He pioneered the teak business in Thailand, and in 1905 founded a company which still exists today, Louis Thomas Leonowens Company.)
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Ideal for School Projects: Early American Life
If you have a child who is studying life in the early days of the U.S., ask your local librarian for a copy of The Salt-Box House: Eighteenth Century Life in a New England Hill Town.
Based on newspapers, diaries, wills, deeds and letters, this fictionalized record of several generations of a family and its home was written in 1900 by Jane de Forest Shelton. Just reprinted by Rvive Books, it chronicles how people heated and illuminated their houses, cooked and served their food, made and purchased clothing and household goods, traveled and amused themselves. The story starts in colonial America and concludes in the late 1800s, when the last resident of the house died in her mid-80s. It also describes women’s dowries and “hope chests,” funerals and how both the homeowners and their slaves “dated” and married.
This would be an excellent resource for kids creating dioramas or tracing the development of such household basics as tinderboxes and matches, dishes and cooking methods and furniture.
II. FEATURES
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Tips for the month
Each Saturday, Parenting Press posts a new parenting tip and the previous week’s tip is moved to the archive. The topics planned for April are:
April 4 — Becoming Jealous of a Sibling
April 11 — When Envy Rears Its Uncomfortable Head
April 18 — Parents Need Friends, Too
April 25 — How Temperament Affects Potty Training
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Family Fun Ideas — April Fool’s and April Pool’s Days
Take advantage of April 1 to model jokes that are both fun and kind. . .and then, if your community is one of the many to celebrate April Pool’s Day, get your family soaked later on this month.
Especially for the very young, make April 1 a day of surprises, silly puns and riddles, and gentle jokes. Roll tiny gifts, perhaps just a couple of candies, in tissue paper and tuck them in the toes of shoes, so the kids can’t get their feet in. Feed them lunch for breakfast and breakfast for lunch, or pack a goofy limerick in the lunchbox. Head out the door in your pajamas, an old school uniform or some crazy get-up (plaid shorts over striped tights, maybe?) and wait to see how the kids respond.
April Pool’s Day is when many public swimming pools have safety carnivals and let kids try out rescue kayaks and other gear. With its focus on water safety and learning to swim, you’ll find all sorts of free events around the country—from Bellingham WA to Lakeland FL, from Norfolk VA to Chandler AZ. For information on what’s happening in your community, check with your community pool, Y or swim instructors.
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Community Service — National Library Week
Our goal with this column is to suggest ways that you can model the concept of sharing and giving back to your community. There are other practical advantages to community service, too. Kids can use these projects to meet school or youth group requirements for community service and to start building resumes that they’ll use when applying for first jobs or college. This month we’re highlighting National Library Week, which has been sponsored by the American Library Association since 1958.
This year it will be observed April 12-18. The ALA calls this week “a time to celebrate the contributions of libraries, librarians and library workers in schools, campuses and communities nationwide--and the perfect time to discover how ‘worlds connect @ your library.’ ”
Here are a few ideas for celebrating at your school or community library:
Nancy Pearl Action FigureHave kids stop by and ask the library staff how they can help, either in library week events, or any day. Perhaps there’s weeding to do, a planter to fill with flowers, graffiti to scrub away, or books to sort for a book sale.
Organize a library card sign-up campaign.
Host a book party using the ALA’s “worlds connect @ your library” theme, asking each guest to bring a book from a different part of the world, ancient, modern, real or fantasy.
Plan surprises for your librarians: a plate of cookies, a thank you card or maybe even the deluxe version of the only librarian action figure ever created, Seattle librarian and author Nancy Pearl!
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Raise funds with a Parenting Press Book Fair
Would your school or group like a new fund-raiser?
For years Parenting Press has been offering its carefully written books on child guidance, problem-solving and dealing with feelings through preschool Book Fairs. Now our Book Fairs are being expanded to schools, churches, child-care programs, parenting groups—any organization that can use parenting and children’s books.
More information about our Book Fairs is posted online. You’ll find a copy of the brochure, an explanation of how much you can earn with a Book Fair, a step-by-step guide to make Book Fairs easy and fun to organize, and downloadable promotional materials.
III. POTPOURRI
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Special of the month — Expanded and Improved Toilet Training Guide!
This special has expired.
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