Comment: Here’s an article that really makes sense about keeping fit. The question we all ask is, where am I going to find the time to do this with 2,3,4 kids and a demanding job, transportation to and from children’s activities, and housework. But at the same time we know that exercise will keep us fit and make us feel better. So the big push this week is trying to find time to do the short ten minute fitness “events.”

At home, children can work out too because they love to. Squats involving races in the house would tire mom out and make kids laugh. Stairs make the perfect playground. How many can i take in a single stretch?

At work, take a few minutes to chair stretch or use the wall in an office to press off some steam. Stairs too can be used as an effective aid in office exercise.

Here’s the article; it’s from the Spark People:

Small Bits of Fitness Add Up

Exercise Comes in All Shapes and Sizes
— By Liz Noelcke, Staff Writer

“Where did the day go?”

Is this a common question in your life? Many of us jam-pack so much stuff into our daily routines, seemingly there’s no time to relax for just one minute, let alone exercise. Lack of time is one of the most common excuses for not having a decent fitness regimen. But do you realize that in the time it might take you to go through your e-mail, you could fit in a good workout? We’re not talking about giving up 60 minutes either; all you need is 10.

Just 10?
Forget the “all or nothing” mentality when it comes to exercise. Fitness does not live or die by 60-minute workouts; there is middle ground. Short spurts of exercise, when they accumulate, have been shown to share similar benefits of longer workouts.

Your body will reap numerous benefits just by becoming more active. This approach is perfect for times when you don’t have time for a regular workout, or when you want to start off slowly and build up a routine.

Easier Than You Think
Treat these 10 minutes like you would a regular workout. Take 1-2 minutes to warm up and get the muscles ready, including stretching. Follow with at least 7 minutes of exercise at a medium or high intensity. Then make sure to include a 60-second cool down.

Since it’s brief, it’s important to work at a fairly high intensity to obtain all of the benefits. Work at raising your heart and respiration rates. Just like regular workouts, try to include cardio, strength training and flexibility work in your shortened routine. Either knock out all three during the 10 minutes, or plan a 10-minute segment for each area.

Example: Push out 10 cardio minutes on the stationary bike. For strength, do push-ups, wall sits, or lift dumbbells. For flexibility, it’s helpful to just stretch every day. Work different muscle groups and keep it simple. After 10 minutes, you will feel healthier and be on your way to developing solid fitness habits.

But I Still Don’t Have Time
It only takes 30 minutes a day, broken up into manageable chunks of 10. Start with a quick exercise when you wake up. The second session? A lunch break is possibly the perfect time to re-energize and get the blood flowing again. The last 10-minute blitz could come in the evening, even while you are watching TV. It’s an ideal way to involve the family as well. Go for a power walk after dinner with your spouse or ride bikes with the kids.

It is all about convenience; if you try, you can fit exercise into your schedule no matter where you are. Do it at home or at work, outside or in the living room. Start building exercise spurts into your daily routine and you’ll start feeling better.

Comment: Don’t you wish you could give your children this advice and have them take it?

ONE. Give people more than they expect and do it cheerfully.

TWO. Marry a man/woman you love to talk to. As you get older, their
conversational skills will be as important as any other.

THREE. Don’t believe all you hear, spend all you have or sleep all you want.

FOUR. When you say, ‘I love you,’ mean it.

FIVE. When you say, ‘I’m sorry,’ look the person in the eye.

SIX. Be engaged at least six months before you get married.

SEVEN. Believe in love at first sight.

EIGHT. Never laugh at anyone’s dreams. People who don’t have dreams don’t
have much.

NINE. Love deeply and passionately. You might get hurt but it’s the only way
to live life completely.

TEN.. In disagreements, fight fairly. No name calling.

ELEVEN. Don’t judge people by their relatives.

TWELVE. Talk slowly but think quickly.

THIRTEEN! .. When someone asks you a question you don’t want to answer, smile
and ask, ‘Why do you want to know?’

FOURTEEN. Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

FIFTEEN. Say ‘bless you’ when you hear someone sneeze.

SIXTEEN. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.

SEVENTEEN. Remember the three R’s: Respect for self; Respect for others; and
Responsibility for all your actions.

EIGHTEEN. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

NINETEEN. When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to
correct it.

TWENTY. Smile when picking up the phone. The caller will hear it in your
voice.

TWENTY- ONE. Spend some time alone.

Every week I read a dozen articles about Early Childhood Education. I pass by hundreds that say the same thing over and over that we need more classrooms, more teachers, more time learning and taxes should pay for this and it should be mandatory and every politician supports this. But what exactly are they supporting? Do they even know?

What is Early Childhood Education? What is the more they are expecting or looking for, and where?

For as long as I have fought the status quo on Early Childhood, there have been two ideas that dominate the world of the young child: day care and kindergarten.

By its very nature the very idea of day care is to provide a safe, secure and rather dull ten hours of primary care for a child who can’t be home. Day care providers are not paid to teach, and they are not equipped to teach. Tell a minimum wage employee that you expect her to teach, and she will run away and hide. Twenty-five years ago, when I first started in Early Childhood, my idea was to be a “whole” place, a place where kids could come and play and learn and eat well and have a good time. I was blackballed by every other “day care” in town and hated. But I persisted and I have beaten this drum and been ignored until last week when someone at the top of the Early Childhood mountain wrote to me and said, “I’m glad you can’t find the box – never find the box.”

Following day care, a child enters kindergarten. Day care kids can more easily adapt to kindergarten because they’ve never had the one on one, but they don’t know as much because nobody has taught them. Most day care kids we get at the GS can’t wash their own hands, sit for a story or do they know what a letter or a crayon are.

In kindergarten it’s easy to teach kids their letters and numbers and reading comes quickly to the bright kids who really want to know. Then they go on to first and second grade.

So what’s my beef?

Pulling kids into a learning environment is a good thing with all the talk about Early Childhood Education, but who is going to do this? Is it the same people who have done the work so far? What’s the plan everyone is pushing? Has anyone ever thought about a curriculum for Early Childhood?

Over the years, our faculty has found that the learning preferences and differences in very young children can’t be standardized. In my preschool class, I have 3,4,5 year old children. They are all basically at the same ability level. In Miss Amy’s class, she has just turned 4 and 5 year old children who are all at the same ability level. In Miss Kelly’s class she has 5 and 6 year olds who are reading or nearly reading. If we standardized the GS into age grouping, we would never be able to teach anything, because some of our five year olds are still not capable of learning their letters, and some of our threes are ready to learn to read. It’s that complicated.

But reading and math and hand writing are not the only things that need to be taught during the Early Childhood years. Play is learned and play is mastered and through play young children learn to live in the world. Social skills, eating skills, listening skills, follow through skills, and independence are all part of the project of the Early Childhood scheme, and that rarely happens in day care and it only happens in big school when the big school has a low ratio.

Before Early Childhood is standardized and paid for by tax dollars and shoved into the public arena as the savior of the child, I think it’s necessary to examine the status quo and see if public schools and private schools are actually accomplishing what they set out to do with the students they have. Saying “If they had gone to preschool, they wouldn’t have dropped out of high school” is ridiculous. Saying, “He had a good start in every conceivable way. He had a good home, and parent who saw after his education, and that’s why he’s a success,” makes a lot more sense.

I’d like to see the public arena look at successful Early Childhood places and ask what they can do to slowly and gradually incorporate a younger program for some children in time. I’d like to see day care be upgraded to be teaching places.

Today is supposed to be a beautiful sunny day. It’s also supposed to be warm. These are great days for the kids to play outside. And children should play outside as much as possible. Without the restraints of classroom walls, without the artificial light, children can enjoy a kind of freedom that builds self confidence and creativity.

Mrs. St. Louis always says, “The more time kids spend at their desks, the worse the test scores are.” This is based on the idea that we need time to secure what we have learned. We need a time to relax and think about things, and learning one thing on top of another is like too many toppings on ice cream – it just becomes muck.

That’s one reason we have year round school. There is always something to learn, and making that fun among the summer adventures is the task to be achieved. It might be the concept of mazes; it might be a study of the composition of the Earth; it might be paper mache; it might be a new math concept, but learning should always continue and so should recreation.

Today is report card day at school. Then we complete the last in school report card period. We have finished our winter program and considering the weather, we are eagerly anticipating putting in the garden and cleaning up the pond, and fixing the playground moving outside a little at a time. Academically, we will be pushing the limits.

Spring sing is at the end of the month with a giant book sale from Scholastic. We are the smallest school in the country doing this book sale. We receive the same books that a regular sized public school receives, and we do an excellent job.

We are still pulling together our summer program and details will be sent out soon. One of our problems is that gas has skyrocketed. Miss Sandy pays nearly $4.00 per nine miles. So that means our costs go up. The engineering of summer takes a lot of effort. But we believe that children in summer should go, go, go, and many children will not have this chance if it is not done at school. It is our pleasure to provide this opportunity.

More later!

Comment: I’m on a new kick – slowing the sugar intake. Let’s see where this goes. Here’s an article that I got from Thyme for Nutrition. I think it’s from Tahiti.

How Much Sugar Do You Eat in a Day?

March 11th, 2008

Comment: Here’s an article from Baby Fit that seems to fit a lot of people these days. It’s well worth reading. Stress in our lives is a producer of poor health both to a parent and a child. This is an excellent reminder for me. During crazypause, I probably could have said I suffer from all ten of these. Now that I’m older and wiser, I’m probably getting over many of these and settling down. I’m once again eying my back yard.

10 High-Stress Personality Characteristics

Recognize Chronic Stress…Then Do Something About It!
— By Mike Kramer, Staff Writer

10 High-Stress Personality Characteristics

Recognize Chronic Stress…Then Do Something About It!
— By Mike Kramer, Staff Writer

1. Over-planning each day. Do you feel the need to stick to a strict schedule? Do you live in fear of falling behind or overlooking a task?
   
2. Doing several things at once. With too much to do and not enough time, it’s easy to think that “efficient” means doing everything at once. He who chases two rabbits catches neither.
   
3. Extreme need to win. Do you feel like a failure if you don’t come out on top—even when the only competition is your own expectations?
   
4. Excessive desire for advancement. Highly stressed people need confirmation from outside sources that they’re doing okay and performing well.
   
5. Inability to relax without feeling guilty. Do your weekends become opportunities for “accomplishment” and “getting something done.”
   
6. Impatience with delays. When you’re under pressure, everything in life takes on urgency and the additional burdens to get everything done as fast as possible.
   
7. Overcommittment. Are your chronically late or forgetful of commitments? Does your schedule cause problems in personal or professional relationships?
   
8. Chronic urgency. See #6. Now!
   
9. Highly competitive drive. Have you forgotten what it’s like to have fun for fun’s sake? Have you “grown up” so much that playtime actually causes you anxiety?
   
10. Compulsion to overwork. Is your office more familiar to you than your backyard? Do you find yourself missing out on what you might otherwise deem “meaningful”?

Just got this from Larry Caplan and I thought it would be fun for our families:

On Saturday and Sunday (19 and 20) the Vanderburgh 4H Center will be holding their Outdoor Living Expo (formerly the 4H Spring Roundup). There will be hundreds of outdoor products. There will be carnival rides for the kids ($10 bracelets let kids ride all day), workshops, horse rides, games, concessions, live entertainment, chain saw carving, a chili cook off, antique and tractor pulls and more. Entrance fee is only $2 per carload!

It’s been a very calm week. Several of the children whose behavior has been rough have suddenly disappeared from school. They have either left or they have been asked to leave. As a school we’ve never done that before. We’ve always taken the hard cases, and we’ve always done our best by them.

Taking the hard cases is hard on everyone. It teaches everyone patience, and it teaches compassion, but it ultimately gets in the way of teaching. The enormity of the teaching work load is enough to handle without having to do this in an unfriendly environment. When children refuse to learn as a habit, as a regular mode of conduct, they need more than a teaching environment. They need to be re-established in the home. Something obviously didn’t work, and they need to go back into the home and begin again. But often the home is not suitable for teaching or for learning.

Learning is not something that should take coaxing. Learning should be a delight. When you see a child suspicious of learning, it’s heartbreaking. When a child of four has emotional walls thick as Kenilworth Castle a teacher will struggle impart even the simplest concepts. And then, it’s all undone at home. A child who learns love and affection at home is not going to come to school with a set of emotional castle walls, but a child who learns to struggle for his very emotional life at home is going to come to school with his crenels and merlins in fighting mode. No matter what, he will refuse to accept what the adult in charge has to say.

So where does the tough case go? Unfortunately, there are few places that will struggle through a difficult child simply because there is no parental support, and parental support is the most important tool teachers have.

In the years the Garden School has taken difficult children, our success rate is always based on the cooperation of the parent. When the parent refuses to support our teachers, there is no success at all.

One of the things we try to do is to meet every parent every day. This is an important part of school family interaction. That way we can keep up with problems kids might be having at home. Knowing that a child’s dog died, or that grandma is visiting from another state, or that a child is moving or parents are splitting up will take a real toll on a child. It’s so helpful when we know that a household has been upset by something, because it explains why a child might be having difficulty. This way, school and teachers can help a child through a hard time, and behavior for a time can be overlooked.

The longer I’m in this business, the more I realize that families and schools need to bond for the sake of the children. This is why parties and programs are so important. Recreational time is a time when people can get to know one another.

Blessings on everyone today.

Comment: Here’s a new product for those parents who will be traveling or whose children will be traveling. It’s worth looking at.

Launched in February 2008, Forms4Parents.com addresses the need to provide security for children and peace of mind for parents and guardians alike when traveling.
Created by mother and attorney Linda Kagan, Forms4Parents.com allows parents to customize consent forms to their unique family situation and specify custodial authority, medical authorizations, and emergency and insurance information.
Forms are separated individually by category or as packages such as Traveling Parents; Babysitter or Relatives Caring for Baby, Toddler or Children; Traveling Children & Teenagers (Domestic & International Travel); and Americans Living Abroad. Individual forms start at $16.95 and packages start at $34.95.

Comment: I got this nice note from Melissa from a place called FoodTee. It’s right up my alley and I thought readers might find it fun as well. The tee shirt says – Look before you eat! That’s a dough nut.

Hey Judy, not sure if you cover this, or which stories you’re working on in the next few months, but I thought you would find these new healthy living products cute, creative, and stylish—they’re FoodTees. And new to Market are tank tops, yoga bags, and more than 15 new designs. FoodTee products are designed to let people express their unique healthy living values with food images and entertaining sayings that are available on shirts for adults, children and toddlers, as well as on baby organic onesies, totes, aprons and yoga bags. Some of our most popular images are Here.