Mommy’s Little Shopping Secret

I shop for my kids twice a year.

It’s true. I don’t shop sales.  I don’t stop and pick up a little something for them when I’m at the mall (what mall?) or Target.  I don’t panic when the weather changes and they have nothing in the closet that fits.  I simply bundle the kids up and go out to shop for them twice a year while they play on the playground with Dad.

Where do we go for this one-stop shopping, WITH a playground?

We go to Prime Outlets in Hagerstown, MD!  This outlet mall has everything — Carter’s for babies, Gap Kids, Gymboree, Child’s Place … and dozens of stores for Mom and Dad too.  Everything is much less expensive than at the mall, and if we time it right, entire stores are often 50% off the outlet prices too!

We have a system.  Everyone shops in the first store together, then Dad takes the kids to the playground while Mommy shops Carter’s, then we alternate for as long as my preschooler can stand it.  Today, he played on the playground for hours — and absolutely loved every minute of it.  He ran with the big kids, played house with the little kids, zoomed around like an airplane with the boys, and went down the slide with the girls.  He had a wonderful, wonderful time.  Little Bear, my baby, sat and played with the wood chips on the ground — and what baby doesn’t love him a good wood chip?  Daddy and I took turns playing and shopping, leaving the bags with the one on playground duty.

And I did all the fall/winter shopping for the boys — shirts, pants, jammies, jackets, socks, shoes, and underwear.  All top-quality, true-to-size, and 50% off.  Widget isn’t exactly toilet-trained yet, but I know he will be soon, and at $2 a pair for fire truck underpants, how could I pass them up? 

Hey, a mom can dream, can’t she?

This post also posted at DC Metro Moms, one of my new favorite sites!

Little Bear, stylin’ in Mom’s chemo cap at the playground

Books are MOOOvelous!

“Read a book.  ‘Cause books are mooooovelous.  Read a book.  Cause books are adventurous.  Read a book. It’s time to read with Wilbur.”

The characters are cute little farm animals.  The theme song is stuck in my head.  There’s even a little learning that goes on during the new Discovery kids TV show and DVD, Wilbur. 

It’s a cute show.  Widget, my three-year-old, has asked to watch it (as his only TV choice) every day this week.  In addition to pushing reading, the themes are educational (our DVD had episodes on shapes and the story of Wilbur and Orville Wright), so I’m pretty pleased with it.  It’s cute and repetitive, as is helpful for this age, without being mind-numbing for grown-ups. 

In each show, the characters encounter a problem, decide to read a book to discover the solution, think about it, read the book again, and solve the problem.  It’s a great set up, and the little books that they read are good too.  I like it.

It’s not my favorite TV show of the new season, though.  That honor (and the place of honor next to our DVD player) has to go to Word World.

This review was done in conjunction with Parent Bloggers Network.

Bob Books

I have a new find to share with you today!  The first set of Bob Books for beginning readers was sent to me recently by Scholastic and MotherTalk, and I am just in love with these little books.  The drawings are simple and engaging, the stories easy to understand, and the pedagogy that underlies their creation is sound.

Perhaps not surpisingly, it is this last criterion that attracted me first to these little books, but it’s not what keeps us going back to them.

This set of 12 little books retails for $16.99 and provides an introduction to the world of Mat and Sam, Dot and Mit, the vet, and many other one-syllabled characters.  The very first book is the simplest, introducing Mat and Sam and simple actions that use the letters M, A, S, and T.  The next two books add C, D, and I, and the characters Dot and Mit, who is a cat.  The language is simple and the rhymes occasional, but the progression is utterly engaging.

Each book begins with the new letters and a pronounciation guide “H as in Hat” that will be consistent throughout series 1 (with the exception of the letter g, which will be used two ways).  The book ends with a guide on how to enjoy the book with your child further.   The line drawings are kept intentionally simple, so that preschoolers can draw their own stories about the characters they meet.

All these details — and the fact that they were created by a master teacher – keep me coming back to these intriguing little books.  My 3 year old, however, who gets a real kick out of reading so many books before naptime, just thinks they’re fun.

Maximum Ride

Maximum Ride 3, the new teen adventure novel by James Patterson, is just as exciting as I’d heard. It’s been a while since I’d read sci-fi/adventure for teens, but when MotherTalk offered me a peek into this world again, I was excited to take a look.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. When I was a preteen and beginning to read adventure books, I found fantasy and science fiction to be up my alley, but I didn’t really know where to start. It was years before I found Robert Heinlein’s books for boys, and this was well before the advent of Harry Potter. I did find David Eddings, though, and Piers Anthony, and eventually Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, who would fill my mind with imagination of other worlds and other possibilities and other ages, long in the future, after we had “conquered” space.

Well, Maximum Ride 3 happens in the near future, after a conquering of not space but biological limitations. A secret group has adopted and bioengineered changes in babies, growing them with special characteristics as befits their projected place in a New World Order. The resulting birdkids, erasers, and other mutants (if that isn’t too unkind a word for them) have been alternately running from and chasing down their creators in the first three books of this series.

This was my first introduction to Max, the leader of the birdkids, and her crew, but Patterson writes about them so deftly and with sufficient flashbacks that I didn’t feel lost in the crowd one bit. In fact, I think any teen or sufficiently sophisticated preteen could jump right in with the third book, or start with the first book (which spent 56 weeks plus on the New York Times bestseller list!), and enjoy it.

The book itself is a great romp, full of character-building experiences, good dialogue, and real (and sometimes real gritty) interactions. I won’t give the plot away, but there is a teensy bit of romance, of wistfulness, and of reflection, and a whole lot of action in this book.

There’s also a recurrent reference to the birdkid’s blog, which, with its reallife counterpart and millions of clicks, makes this book seem up to the minute and even somewhat participatory. Visit the Maximum Ride website to see just a bit of what I mean.

This book was freewheeling, adventurous, and kept me turning the pages well past lights-out. I enjoyed the book and the re-introduction to the genre, and I’m passing my copy along to a young friend to enjoy as well.

Edited to add: Patterson’s people have really upped the ante here with the website. For every click gathered on the Maximum Ride website, a book will be donated to a child in need by First Book. Lovely. Really nice touch, and one that made me just click on over to be sure that mine is counted too.