Yesterday I read an  article in the newspaper quoting a childhood media expert on how you shouldn't set limits on screen time.  Dr. Michael Rich said, "There should be no time limits on screens because that leads to deprivation and rebellion. Anytime you limit something, kids want it more.”  Although I agreed with much of what the article said, this particular statement is a bogus argument and I have to refute it. Life is about limits! The sooner children learn this, the better off they will be.  I grew up with limits and sometimes I wish I had had more.  I did not feel deprived and I did not rebel.  As a member of the Mormon church, I grew up with alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drugs being off limits to me.  Ditto for my ten siblings.  Now we are all adults and not one of us uses any of those substances, as far as I know. This is anecdotal evidence but I'm not sure that Dr. Rich has anything more convincing to back up his statement. In fact, he actually cites this ot

I'm so excited about my youngest being able to walk the whole way to school!  It's about half a mile from our house to school and the weather has been January chilly but we've been doing it successfully for the last few weeks.  We would walk before too but I would usually take her most of the way in a stroller.  Why?  I guess because I was afraid it would take too long and she would wear out before we got there. For most 6-year-olds, this wouldn't be a big deal, but for Camille this is an accomplishment.  With her gross motor delays (for example, she didn't walk until several months after she turned 2) and her bad lungs, walking to school is not something I take for granted.  I do have to hold her hand or put my hand on her back to keep her focused or we'd get there half an hour after school starts.  (Snow is so interesting, especially with sticks!) So she's not going to be going without me for a while, but that's okay.  It gives me a good reason to

I've read so many interesting books lately!  I came across Learned Optimism:  How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Martin Seligman, as a result of reading How Children Succeed by Paul Tough.  Tough said that this book was the founding text for the positive psychology movement, teaching that optimism is a learnable skill and not something you're born with or not.  So I decided to check it out. Not too surprising...this is an optimistic book.  Seligman says that he came into this field as a result of his graduate work which showed that dogs who are trained to become helpless become very passive.  That also goes for people.  This seems obvious to me but apparently this was a new idea in the psychological world.  Gradually he did more and more studies, and realized that people can be taught new attitudes so that those who are naturally inclined to be passive and feel helpless can be taught a more optimistic outlook.  Pessimism is equated with feeling helpless about your li

One perk of living here is going to Vocal Point concerts.  They're an all-male acappella group and they're really fun to watch.  The music is clean but still appealing to the teenagers. We went on Saturday night and took everyone at home except our youngest.  Thanks to my planning ahead (!) we got really good seats on the third row.  It was a fun concert.

Yet another family tradition we've started in the last several years is ice skating on MLK Day. Sometimes we go ice skating up at the outdoor rink in Midway, UT.  The weather is usually sunny and I really enjoy skating outside.  But that rink is not as child-friendly as Seven Peaks in Provo.  The Midway rink doesn't have walkers for beginning skaters and they don't let you hold a child or take one in a stroller. For that reason, we decided to go to Seven Peaks this year.  Our youngest, Camille, really wants to learn how to skate and she needs a walker to help her learn how to balance and glide. The sessions are two hours long with a Zamboni break in the middle, and she was out on the ice the entire time.  She loved it! And she made a lot of progress during that time. My older children loved it too.  They are good skaters even though they only skate a few times a year.  They play tag and it's fun to watch them zoom around.  They really have a good time together.

I'm a little late to the party (the book came out in 2012), but I recently finished Heaven is Here by Stephanie Nielson.  She's the famous blogger who got in a horrible plane crash and got burned on 80% of her body.  It's a very interesting book.  She does a good job of helping the reader to live the extremely difficult experience with her.  I heard about her plane crash not long after it happened and then I started following her blog.  But following the blog didn't give me the details like her book does.  I think I cried through half of it! Here are some impressions: 1.  Severe burns are one of the hardest injuries to recover from because so much of your identity is wrapped up in what you look like and what you can do.  She had a lot of trouble emotionally accepting this new reality.  She wanted to go back to her old life so badly.  For a while, she couldn't do anything for herself.  She has largely recovered her previous physical capabilities though, somewh

Family vacations are a lot of work for the parents, especially the moms.  But they are worth it!  A tradition that has recently emerged in our family is that we take a little trip right after Christmas.  As our children have gotten older, it has gotten harder to find times when we can all be together.  But Christmas break works really well. It started the year we lived in Germany.  We lived in Germany from May 2005-May 2006 while my husband had a Humboldt fellowship.  He took a sabbatical from his job and did research for a year at one of the Max Planck Institutes in Germany.  We decided to go to Paris right after Christmas.  Paris was pretty darn cold and I would have preferred to go at a warmer time but this seemed to be our best option. Standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, feeling cold We visited the Star Wars exhibit at The Museum of Science of Industry--nice and warm I think this building had the tomb of Napoleon--it's been too long My boys loved the cann

As a mom, I'm always looking for ways to help my children be more successful in life.  I'm not looking to raise the next president of the United States or a millionaire or anything like that.  I just want my children to have the self-discipline and skills to someday successfully raise their own families, remain strong in our religion, contribute to society and just generally be good people. So when I saw this title, How Children Succeed:  Grit, Curiousity, and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul Tough, I was really interested.  Talk about an ambitious title--this topic could fill volumes!  Now that I've read it, I found it to be a very interesting book that unfortunately doesn't give me many ideas about raising my own children to be successful. This book doesn't focus on average children from middle-class families.  It mostly focuses on children growing up in very adverse circumstances, such as south Chicago in the projects where drugs, gangs, violence, and

I have really been neglecting my blog!  I waited too long to start on Christmas preparations and I paid for it in the month of December.  Oh yeah, and I've been reading a lot of good books. Christmas was good!  Here's a little recap: We had Christmas Eve at my parents' house.  My family ate at our house and then went over to my parents' to watch the children put on the always entertaining and traditional Nativity play (reverence is not our strong suit at this event.)  My sister-in-law brought over her mother's great costumes--complete with donkey ears!  My youngest has been talking about it for weeks so fortunately she got to be Mary.  And the teenagers hammed it up. Then we sang raucous carols like we always do and headed home except for the older kids who stayed to play the water game for an hour or two.  What's the water game, you ask?  It's basically playing Uno, but every time you lose you have to drink a full glass of water.  The first