Friday Post - Bathtime

 We've gotten a lot of bath toys, we've made a few purchases, and we've tried a lot of different hand-me-downs.  Here is a list of toys and gadgets that worked for us.

 My sister had a proper baby bath, like the one pictured here, and it worked really well for her.  It would have worked with our first baby, but we had a little baby sling and a large oval shaped bin instead.  It worked fine.  We had to use that same big tub for baby number two, because when we borrowed my sister's special little bathtub he started trying to roll himself out of it the minute he had any muscle.  This is the kid who at 8 or 9 months was crawling ON HIS BACK USING HIS HEAD FOR LEVERAGE.

 Somehow we managed to get by bathing the first baby without ever needing a faucet cover.  We got one immediately for baby number two, and good thing too, because he's managed to bash his head against it numerous times.  He's also figured out how to take it apart, because it has a pretty simple design.  That hasn't caused us problems, though.  Yet.

 The bathtub floor stickies were essential for baby number two as well, because he gets excited and decides to run or stomp in the bath.  Even with the stickies he has fallen down at least four times.  But I don't want a full mat because they're so much harder to clean.  (He's pretty much learned his lesson at this point, anyway.)  These can just be shoved to dry in the toy holder.

 We got the kids a rubber duck, of course.  We bought the big one, of course.  I didn't really think about how big 32 centimeters was when we purchased it.  It's huge.  The kids like to pretend to ride this thing. They're both CRAZY about it and talk about it even when it isn't bathtime.  He's their friend.

Now, the rubber duck holds air and has a hole in it, which is a big mistake for a bath toy.  They fill with mildew and become dangerous and impossible to clean.  My husband cut a slit in its mouth so that we can bleach the inside of it and water can pour out of it easily.  It will be the only squeezy toy we get.

 The kids like to pour water.  These Ikea stacking cups are fantastic for that, because they have holes in them, and slits for pouring, and they stack. 

The kids also like to drink bathwater, so sometimes I skip putting these in.

These cups are no longer available.  :(

 This Green Toys Tugboat is our favourite toy for pouring, by far, though.  And we have TWO of them in different colours.  Which means they each get to hold one.  They can't figure out how to drink from it, either.  Green Toys does a whole load of awesome bath toys that are designed to drain properly, pour and float.

 We fill out the tub with a pack of foamy letters and numbers.  We got them when my daughter went through her alphabet obsession.  My son doesn't seem to be that interested, so I don't know that he'll catch on as fast as she did.  Also, we're missing a load of them.  But he likes to stick them to the tub, or the wall, or his sister...

 That's pretty much it for toys.  The kids are satisfied with that, and it's easy to keep track of.  We do have a random bath book, but I use it for diaper changes so that I don't have to worry about their bathroom reader getting poopy.  I'll have to get more for potty time.

We store everything in one of these sliding bath toy trays.  Everything else we looked up was hung from a suction hook.  We had suction hooks on a few things in our bathroom and they were constantly falling down in the middle of the night.  Plus, the toy holders made with netting take forever to dry and are a pain to get into.

I have a drawer right next to the tub that this rack fits in perfectly, so when everything is dry, I just shove it in the drawer.  We are completely satisfied with it.

A Northern Alphabet

 Ted Harrison

I love this artist!!!  We had a copy of the Cremation of Sam McGee at my parents house when I was little, and it was illustrated by Harrison.  It was one of my favourite books growing up.

 This book has a fair number of native or northern things for most of the letters.  But ukulele?  Some of them are just hokey.  But I get it.  For most of these letters, there's really nothing you can do.

I still really like this book because he took the tongue in cheek route instead of trying to be super serious about it.  And it's pretty fun to read the names of all of these northern towns and rivers and whatnot.

This is less of a baby book and more of a kindergarten or first grader's book.

ABC is for Circus

 By Patrick Hruby

We had a real hangup about baby books with bad art, and hunted high and low for something that we didn't hate.  This book made the cut.

 I actually really like it.  We all really like it.  The font is great.  The colours are wild.  The shapes are simple and graceful.

Even despite my hangup for circuses, I really like this book.

The words are pretty okay, for the most part.  They put calliope in there!  But they also put x-ray in, which is so lazy.  Though I'm not sure what else you can do for X.

Friday Post - Magna Doodle

 I have this thing about not buying my kids toys ever.  Because, why?  They get so many toys.  They play with them for five minutes apiece.  And then they get this attachment to them and I can't throw anything out without being a serious bad guy.  But my house is a mess!

But we also have this dilemma whereby I can't feed, dress or put the baby to sleep without the toddler crying for attention.  I can get by if I put on her favourite show of the moment, or by handing her my phone so that she can play a game.  I'm not adverse to screen time, but I want to limit it.

We bought her a magna doodle to keep her occupied in these situations, and she's in love.  We hid the stamps from her, because they usually end up lost, and I can't afford to have teeny objects hidden in the living room with a crawling baby.  But I do let her use the magnetic letters that we got her.  I've worked on phonics with her a bit this way, and she loves it because she doesn't have to do printing, but she still gets to place the letters herself.

Sometimes we just make patterns and faces, though.  She loves that, too.

Richard Scarry's Best Storybook Ever

 We love Richard Scarry so much.  His books are old, though, and often compiled kind of weirdly.  This is no exception.

"I am a Bunny" is featured in this book, but most of the pages are missing, and there's an extra page with insects on it that isn't in our board book version.

Other stories seem to be complete.  The nursery rhymes are scattered throughout.  The prints are of varying degrees of quality.

You take what you can get, though.

 Not all of the stories are good, but the ones that we like to read are fantastic.  They label instruments, they explain colour theory, there's counting and letters and all kinds of educational fun.

My favourite is the alphabet of things to feed and not feed a hippo.  My daughter is on the edge of understanding comedy. If you ask her whether we should feed the hippo a nest or a nut, she will angrily explain that she already picked out the banana on the first page.

I'm sure she'll get the joke in a year or two.

Friday Post - Canadian Alphabet

We make a point of always pronouncing Z as "zed" in our house, because that's the British/Canadian way.  We were delighted to find that even some of the educational toys that we were given do that.  It almost makes up for how bad the songs and recordings on them are.

In order to continue the rhyme to the end of the song, and also confuse our children, we often make up our own endings.  They include, but are not limited to:

"Now I know my alphabet, and it's time to go to bed."

"Now I know my alphabet.  Let's sing something else instead."

"That's the whole darn alphabet.  Do you think you've learned it yet?"

Learn to Count with Northwest Coast Native Art

 With art by:

Ryan Cranmer
Corey Bulpitt
Eric Parnell
Francis Dick
Maynard Johnny Jr.
Terry Starr

My parents picked this up at the Vancouver Art Gallery.  It's basically the prettiest counting book we have.  I hope my kids enjoy native art when they're older.

Happy Baby ABC

 This book is both terrible and wonderful.  It was lent to us by a family member, and it was exactly what I was looking for at the time.

Babies love pictures.  This a giant book of pictures.  They're selling it as an alphabet book, but your child won't learn anything useful about the alphabet with this book whatsoever.  They will happily look through the pictures, though.

The pictures they use are stock photos.  Some of them are terrible.  Also, why a picture of lightening?  Baby won't understand that.  And that picture of snow and clouds and scenery is "Mountains"?  It might seem straightforward to you, but that's pretty abstract for a 6 month old.

We still used this book like mad, and our daughter could point to any of the pictures when prompted even before she was a year old!  Pretty impressive.  I like using it alongside the Richard Scarry search-and-find books.

If you really can't stand this book, a cheaper alternative is the Sears catalogue.  But that's for another post.

Friday Post - Mickey's ABC: A Day at the Fair

This is our favourite game right now because it's one of the few games we have that requires only keyboard input.  My daughter knows her alphabet really well, and by playing this game she's gotten pretty good at finding her letters on the keyboard.

 Mickey starts off in his house.  If you press a letter, a word appears and Mickey does a corresponding animation.  The game has Sound Blaster music that isn't annoying and a voice-over that is pretty easy to understand, especially for an older game.

There are words and actions for every letter in his house and separate animations for when he's at the fair.  We like to talk to each other about the pictures and animations as we play together.  Sometimes I'll ask her to find the letter that a specific object begins with to test her on her letter sounds.

Dr. Seuss's ABC

 My daughter loves this book because she already knows her alphabet very well, so she likes to pretend to read it.  The book teaches letter sounds as well as letter recognition.  Some people may take issue with the fact that it introduces all sounds made by the letters, whereas a lot of phonic courses only teach the most common sounds first.

Personally, because we're so far ahead of the curve on this one, I figure if I just expose her to a lot of different books that teach reading, she'll pick it up in the next three yeas regardless of what method they adhere to.

 My husband hates Dr. Seuss for pages like this.  Stupid made up stuff.  And I get it, because I never liked that "Oh the Thinks You Can Think" book.  This one has very few made up animals and objects, so it doesn't bother me.

I also like the layout.  And the verse is altered a little for every letter, so it doesn't get repetitive.

My only problem is that they pronounce Z as "Zee" instead of "Zed". 

But I always read it as "Zed" anyway.  It makes for a delightfully jarring ending.

Friday Post - Toddler Fun

 "Toddler Fun" is a great free app for Android with no ads.  It has five activities.

"stars" is for making stars.  "fireworks" is for making fireworks.  "draw" is a very simple drawing program where the colour of the lines changes gradually, rotating through the rainbow.

What's really great is the connect game.  You connect the dots however you like in whatever order.  When they've all been connected in some manner, they explode into fireworks.

This game taught my daughter to look at where she starts and finishes a line.  It was way easier to do dot-to-dot digitally than on a piece of paper because of the feedback.  She gets angry when she tries to draw something and it comes out wrong.  This game doesn't punish her for being inaccurate, and rewards her with colours and sound when she finally gets it right.

We also use the drawing pad to practice letters.  It's so much easier for her to draw with a finger rather than a crayon.

Friday Post - The Playroom

The Playroom is a game from the '80s by a company called Broderbund. We played it a lot when I was a kid, and I still have the disks. I used it to teach my daughter how to use a mouse. My daughter couldn't draw well at the time (we weren't worried or anything, as she was on track for her age). She wasn't looking where she was putting the crayon before she starts scribbling. She wasn't going slowly. But she really wanted to draw letters.  She would draw the first two lines for an A, then stop because they weren't anywhere near each other, and then proceed to throw all of her crayons and yell.

I felt that if she had a bit of interaction, maybe she'd slow down a bit and be more careful.

The first bit of success we had was getting her to pop the balloon.  I would click on the drawer to let out a balloon, and then pass the mouse to her.  She would move the mouse around and try to make it touch the balloon, which would make it pop.

After two days of playing this game (a few minutes each day), she could move the mouse to any object and click on it.

There are a lot of mini games in the Playroom.  There's a spelling game where you find letters on the keyboard which doesn't require the mouse.  There's also a counting game that I would play with her, but that she can now play on her own.  Most games have varying levels of difficulty.

Some of the games like the storybook scene pictured here, and another game with a clock, are a little too advanced for us, but will be great in a year or two when her control of the mouse and her ability to understand time will have improved considerably.

It's worth noting that while my daughter has enjoyed this game immensely, and likes to be on the computer with me, she doesn't like to be abandoned at the computer, nor does she prefer computer time to books or puzzles.  So we haven't turned her into an addict or anything.

It's also worth noting that learning to use a mouse did have a pretty big effect on her drawing.  No, she still can't do an A.  But between the Playroom and the Toddler Fun app, she can now draw, not only a handful of simple letters, but also some blobby body shapes with a number of appendages sticking out of them.

Animalia

 By Graeme Base


This is a search and find book in which each page -or half page- is dedicated to a letter of the alphabet.  It's open ended in that there is no list of objects and there are no instructions to find a certain number of things.

The detail is brilliant.  There are hundreds of little things on each page to find.  I have fond memories of reading through this book with my mum and learning new vocabulary.  On the P page, There are peacocks, a princess, and other easy P words.  But there is also a doctor, or physician, and a stroller, or perambulator.  

This book has huge pages and lots of colours.  It's fun for young children and adults alike.