Stay at Home Mom

One March 16th I have to make sure to wear something green to bed so that when I wake up on the morning of March 17th (St. Patrick's Day) I won't get pinched by the kids. But its really hard to know how to prepare for April 1.  Several years ago my kids realized that the tides had turned and they were able to outsmart the parents.  For years we had been able to play little April Fools Day jokes on the kids.  It was all great fun.  But then it happened. One early April 1st I went to the kitchen sink to fill up the coffee pot with water to get a pot of coffee started.  I put the empty pot of coffee under the faucet and turned on the water.  All of a sudden I was being dowsed with water spraying out of the hose on the sink.  The handle that you need to press to get the water to spray had been taped open and the direction of the hose pointed directly to the middle of the sink ensuring maximum dowsage.   Squeals of delight came from just outside the kitchen where the kids wer

Kids these days are plugged in.  Technology is everywhere.  For many parents there is a concern that kids won't know how to unplug.  In the good old days of "Leave it to Beaver" a mom might just say "Go outside and play". This past week one mom on facebook reported the following conversation with her child: kid: I just love people with iPads mom: Honey, I don't have an iPad kid: I know This is sort of sad in a way because this was coming from a very very young child already missing that they don't have immediate access to an iPad. At a recent slumber party of teenage girls one girl talked about how she didn't really know how to be alone.  She didn't like not having a boyfriend and she didn't really know what to do with herself if she were home alone. One of the best things we can do for our kids is to teach them how to be quiet with themselves.  How to calm down all the noise that is in their life and come back to a place o

Easter comes early this year. What are your favorite Easter Traditions? When I was growing up I always looked forward to getting a new Easter Dress and Easter Bonnet.  Sometimes the Easter Dress was a hand-me-down from an older relative but it was new to me.  Another tradition was an entire day of getting Easter Eggs ready.  I loved watching those little tablets of dye dissolve in the water and then taking the hardboiled eggs and dipping them into those glasses full of dye with that little wire holder. Today, with my kids, I still love carrying on the tradition of creating brightly covered Easter eggs.  The only difference is that we look for natural solutions to the Easter Egg Dye. Kool-Aid has come up with a cool solution. CLICK HERE to visit the Kraft page the Kool-Aid solution and for more ideas on Easter Eggs. I always love letting the kids experiment with glue and sparkles and stickers and feathers (camouflage easter eggs) and letting them decorate the eggs anyway

Happy St. Patrick's Day! When you have wee ones in the house it is a time for some whimsy and frolic.  Leprechauns are known for their mischievous behavior.  So, it is a fun time to have a little bit of fun with the kids and blame it on the leprechauns. When my boys were little we used to have them set up leprechaun traps around the house so that they could trap these little tricksters.  Of course, the next morning the traps were empty.  As leprechauns tend to do, the traps were tripped but they were empty with only a trail of green sparkles leading away from the empty traps.  Some years the boys would find the milk turned green or the peanut butter jar filled with mushy green peas instead of peanut butter. The fun part for me was always seeing what the kids came up with for a trap. (The point is you really can't catch a leprechaun - they are just too tricky) But remember to wear some green to bed the night before St. Patty's Day because you don't want to ris

How It Began by Corri Riebow This stay at home mom thing is still somewhat new to me, though it's something I've wanted to be since before my daughter was even born. I began my "stay at home mom" journey almost a year ago shortly after my daughter's 5th birthday. I knew that staying at home has it's own challenges, but I was up for it. I went back to work part time after my daughter was born and it was so hard to leave her. I couldn't wait to pick her up from her grammy's house. It was a long bumpy road, but I have never regretted leaving my job to be able to be more available to my family. I worked as a receptionist at an animal hospital for just shy of ten years and though I love being home, being a mom is a round the clock job! Still I feel so blessed to have had last summer off to spend with my daughter, Imogen before she started kindergarten and would be gone 8 hours a day 5 days a week. Like most moms, my days start early and end late, s

From our friends at Spangler Science We made crystal snowflakes using the instructions from the Steve Spangler science website back during the holidays in 2011.  They were such cool snowflakes that we hung them from our kitchen windows.  They are still there today!  We love them.

We celebrate St. Patrick's Day every March 17th,  The celebration marks the passing of St. Patrick himself in the 5th century.  I'm not entirely sure where the leprechauns and the pot of gold came from but they make for colorful pictures for us to decorate and put up around the house and classroom.  Here are some Celtic Knots that you can print off and color. Happy St. Patirkc's Day!

by Corri R ie bow It's March 7th and spring was supposed to come early this year. Here in Michigan, we still have probably 8 inches of snow on the ground. This is a hard time of year for stay at home moms, I think. When winter weather first arrives, kids want to bundle up to go out and play in the snow. But this time of year, kids are getting tired of having to bundle up every time they want to go out. And I'm sure I'm not the only mom getting a little tired of doing the bundling. My daughter is in kindergarten and we've had lots of snow days this year. To make the best of it, we'd sometimes have a movie day or go outside and walk around our 5 acres. I'm hoping we're done with the snow days and it's starting to warm up a little bit. Last night my daughter and I went outside to take care of our ducks. She grabbed her beach pail and shovel from the garage and started filling it with snow! Then she started making "snow castles"

by Freida Suniula Recently I was asked if I thought life got easier now that the kids were teenagers.  I wouldn't say easier, I would say things just change. I found when my son turned 14 years old I would spend more time in my room as puzzled as he was about life. I was more puzzled about what I was doing wrong because he took a turn of silence towards myself and his father. We didn't do anything different. I didn't realize that this was the problem.  I was thinking about reading a few books and researching on the internet about this new son I had over night, but I constantly found myself in my room lying on the bed thinking about when I was that age. Obviously, things were different back then. We had genuine reasons for changing, so we thought. But this silence from my 14 year old was overnight. So I thought about how I wanted to be treated. I stepped back from doing everything for him, had a heart to heart, while he just sat there looking at t

There is an old saying: Divide and Conquer.  As a group "Moms" are powerful.  It seems there is some interest in dividing this power block into two groups.  The Us vs. Them rivalry keeps popping up on a regular basis. Not sure who is behind separating women into two groups.  Who would benefit from it. What are other moms saying about it? MOM COLUMN: Working Moms Versus Stay-At-Home Moms Working women vs. stay-at-home moms What do you think?  Can we find common ground?