I started to wonder when my kids would be old enough to give it a try.  Age five? Four, maybe?  Then, I saw a write-up on Cool Mom Tech for a series of Sesame Street video games.  My mother-in-law got one for the kids for Hannukah, and they took to it pretty well.  The controls were kind of clunky, but it was neat that they got the hang of it. How fun! A new activity!

Then, while at my mom’s house in December, someone got the idea to try to teach the kids how to do Wii Bowling.  I was skeptical that they’d be able to figure out the coordination… hold this button, swing your hand, release it at just the right time, swing forwards and not to the side, etc.  And, at first, it was pretty comical.  It would take quite a number of tries, just to get the ball out of the avatar’s hand and straight into the gutter. Daniel, especially, had a hard time. Rebecca tends to be a little bit better at hand-eye coordination and following directions, while Daniel just gets excited and distracted and starts flailing about. But regardless, they loved it and wanted to keep on trying.

When we got home from that trip, I figured I’d let them keep on trying.  And, within a couple of days, something crazy happened. Daniel, especially, got quite good.  And really, REALLY into it. Rebecca improved, too, but seems to prefer solo hand-held games (like on the iPhone or a little Vtech gaming device my dad got for them). Plus, she seems to lose interest when there’s an actual competition going on, especially a competition that she isn’t confident she’ll win. I’m sure she doesn’t get that from me or anything.

Anyways, Daniel got freakishly good. Though he can’t actually read, he recognizes nearly all of the prompts on the screen and knows exactly how to turn on the different games, add controllers, choose players, and more.  Seriously, he can almost do it faster than I can.  He’s surprisingly exact with pointing and clicking the controller, and has explored everything the Wii Sports and Wii Play discs have to offer.  Just this morning, he kicked my ass in bowling (not for the first time) and rolled a 203. Seriously, that’s a lot of virtual strikes and spares for a 3.5-year-old.

Now, of course, we’re getting downright obsessed with the thing. Seems like nearly every other phrase out of his mouth is, “can I play a game on the TV?”  The weekends are even worse, without the break of preschool and the general lack of structured plans.  He’s like a junkie who needs his fix.  And lest you think Mr. Distractable would lose interest after 15 minutes or so… oh, no no no.  While he may pop from game to game on the disc, he can stand in the living room and play for hours at a time. HOURS.

So, now, I am faced with the need to put some limits on his gaming time.  We didn’t have quite this trouble with TV shows – we eased into a routine wherein we had fairly specific times at which we would watch TV, and somehow saying “no” wasn’t hard to do.  This, on the other hand, has morphed into something big fairly quickly, and I’m playing catch-up on setting rules around it.

And, admittedly, I have not been in a huge rush to do so. While I feel some guilt surrounding the amount of screen time, I’m also enormously pregnant and enormously tired.  Letting him do some more bowling lets me lie down some more, or at least make dinner in relative peace.  Not to mention the insane winter snow and cold, as well as unpredictable napping, which keeps us from making many afternoon plans outside of the house. And I do try to play the games with them whenever I can muster up the energy and enthusiasm (hence getting my ass kicked in bowling, and tennis, by my preschooler son).

But, yeah, it makes my life easier, even if it’s rotting my kid’s brain. Way to go, mom-of-the-year.

Anyways, I need a plan. I’m thinking it’s time for some kind of chore chart, where the kids can get a sticker or stamp for some job done (cleaning toys, feeding the dog, etc.), and can use that to earn game time. I can’t quite decide what should go on the chart, and how much time should be earned. Though, I suppose if I actually sat down and dug up some motivation to really think about it, I could probably figure something out. (Again: tired, pregnant, kinda lazy.) If anyone has suggestions for favorite chores/jobs appropriate to the 3.5-year-old set, as well as suggestions for time earned, I’m all ears.

How does it work in your house? Do your preschoolers play video games? Do you set limits on them? What are your house rules?

This time around, there is no registry, no baby shower.  No gifts pouring in from excited relatives for the first-time parents.  And, on my side, there was no immediate need or anxiety to get it all in the weeks after my mid-pregnancy ultrasound. Which is not to say that I already had everything I needed… in fact, I had long since sold or given away everything.  99.9% of the clothes, gone. Carseats, sold.  Exersaucer and swing passed along years ago.  I don’t regret chucking it all. Baby #3 was such a question mark, and I had no need to store it all in my attic for 3 or 4 years, just in case.

Nah, this time I really haven’t been sweating it.  Having been through infancy before, I have a much clearer sense of what I do and do not need, not to mention when I actually need it.  I know that, even if I slacked off until the very last moment, I could order a carseat and a pack of diapers from Amazon and they’d be delivered before I was discharged from the hospital, and I could send my mother-in-law to Target to pick up a few onesies. In short, I have been in no rush to accumulate baby gear.

Until recently.

Suddenly, I’m on something of a baby shopping spree. Much more so than before, I am picking things up gently used from people in my Moms of Twins club. The website we use for our group has a separate section for classifieds, which I’ve largely ignored for the last year or so. Now, I scour the digest when it arrives in my email every morning.  I’ve scored a swing, a bouncy seat, a clip-on high chair (no free-standing one this time) an exersaucer, a play mat, a moby wrap, a high-end breast pump with a shopping bag full of bottles and storage bags, and few other things… and I think I’ve spent about $100 on all of it, combined.  Several of the big items were free, and one was something I originally bought for my own kids, and it has found its way back.

There are some things, though, that I want new.  My carseat (don’t get me started on how ridiculous I think the higher weight limits are), my stroller. I have a weird thing about wanting new clothes, and I know it’s probably wasteful or silly, but it’s my thing.  Sales at Old Navy and Target and Carter’s have the closet in the spare room suddenly brimming with onesies and footie pajamas in size 0-3 months.

And, of course, there’s the subject of the not-spare-for-much-longer room, where there is still a queen-sized guest bed instead of a crib.  The new crib is in a box in the garage (thanks to the fact that the old ones were recalled), but I haven’t yet picked up a mattress.  There’s no dresser for storing all of those little clothes I’m accumulating.  I’m tempted to make a run to IKEA, but given my recent history and overall energy level, that seems unwise.

Still, things are coming together. Time is ticking down, supplies are piling up. I’ve got a list of things I still “need,” but I’m not worried. I’m fairly low on the nesting intensity level. We’ll get it all, eventually.

Daniel adores his (it’s actually a set of Superman pajamas), and though he completely soaked the shirt at lunchtime, insisted on wearing the cape again after nap, so I ended up safety-pinning it to another shirt.  Rebecca had to be coaxed out of her “spinning dress” for nap, and asked to put it back on again within 30 seconds of waking up (though neither time did she want to remove her other clothes to put it on – it’s a onesie with attached skirt).  There was a major bedtime tantrum when she had to take it off for the night.

I honestly wasn’t sure if my kids were old enough for dress-up, yet, but I guess the answer is YES!  Rebecca and I went to Joann’s today and got some fabric to make a cape for her, too.  I suspect there’s some elastic and tulle in my future as well…

Especially so that my kids tend to start the day at the incredibly reasonable hour of about 7AM.  Sometimes they wake up earlier and chat for a while, sometimes they sleep even later and don’t require my attention until nearly 8. (Insane! I know!)  The trouble is that, every now and then, Rebecca will wake up extra early (like 5:45 or 6AM).  Not only have I grown so used to the luxury of 7-7:30 that I can’t handle the sight of a 6 on the clock, but she tends to be pretty cranky if she gets up at that hour and clearly needs more sleep.  And yet, shockingly, my attempts to tell her that it’s “too early” or “not time to get up yet” have fallen on deaf ears.  Since, brilliant though my children are, they cannot yet tell time.

Enter: the Good Nite Lite.

My friend Rebecca got one first, on recommendation from someone in our twin club.  After hearing her raves, and a few extra early (and cranky) mornings, I hopped online and got one for myself.  The deal is that you set your bedtime and wake-up time on the clock.  At bedtime, the light turns on and is a blue moon.  The blue moon stays on all night.  At wake-up time, it changes to a yellow sun.  The sun stays lit for a couple of hours, and then turns itself off for the rest of the day.

Want to know how long it took my kids to adjust to their new light?  Approximately 15 seconds. Seriously.  It arrived in the mail, I set the time and put it up in their room.  That night, I told them that the blue moon means it’s nighttime and time to sleep.  When it turns to a yellow sun, that means it’s morning.  They thought it was very cool.  And the next morning, at 7AM on the nose, the excited shrieks came from their room.  “MOMMY!  Sun is yellow mommy!  Means it’s daytime!  MOMMY! Sun is YELLOW!”

A couple of times, Rebecca woke up cranky while the moon was still blue.  I went in the room and asked her what color the light was. “Blue.”  And what does that mean? “Nighttime.”  It wasn’t an ungodly hour in the middle of the night, so I didn’t really expect her to fall back asleep.  But I offered her a book to read in her bed, and told her to tell me when the light turns yellow.  And then I walked out.  And that was that.

This is genius for toddlers and preschoolers.  It gives them a way to understand daytime and nighttime, even if sunrise is early (though we do have blackout shades in their room) and they can’t read a clock.  They have the independence to figure it out for themselves, and it removes the burden of argument.  It’s not that mommy is making me go back to bed.  It’s that the clock says it’s nighttime.  End of story.

The only down side is that the days of sleeping in (or, at least, lounging contentedly in their beds) seems to be mostly gone.  While I don’t think the yellow light is enough to wake them up if they’re asleep, I suspect much of the time they’re already quietly awake, and see the change of color, and immediately feel the need to notify me of this event.   And on the “minor annoyance” front, the light does have to be plugged in, but does not come with a long cord (just the outlet plug coming straight out of the back).  So I kind of had to jerry-rig an extension cord to hang it on a mostly un-used lamp.

But those two small complaints aside, I love this thing.  It resolved a somewhat minor but annoying issue in our sleep routine (and, as we know, better-rested kids are happier kids, and happier kids make happier moms), and removed a power struggle.  At this age, I will be grateful for small victories.

Disclosure: I was not compensated, or in any way asked, to write about this thing. I just like it, and thought you should know!

“It’s a helmet,” I told them. “It keeps your head safe.”

From that point on, every time we saw someone riding a motorcycle, both kids were thrilled to announce that the person was wearing a helmet.  And that Gramps (my dad) wore a helmet on his motorcycle.  Keeps his head safe.  Then, they noticed people on bicycles were wearing helmets, too! Would you even believe it?! Oh, the excitement that can bring to two-year-olds!

At any rate, my mom decided to get the kids a pair of tricycles for their birthday (blessedly with attached parent-push-bar to save my back).  I assembled them yesterday morning and they were thrilled with their new toys. I decided to pull my car out to block the street end of our driveway and let the kids ride their bike on the pavement.

As I brought them over to ride their bikes in the driveway, Rebecca became rather distressed. “Need a helmet! Need a helmet!”  Daniel chimed in, “keep-a head safe.”

Damn. Guess they were listening.  You know, it’s not like I saw a motorcycle and thought to myself, “hey, there’s a teachable moment, I’d better capitalize on it!” No, I just kept talking and explaining just like I always do when they’re in the back seat of the van. Looks like they take it in, huh?

At any rate, it took a couple of different stores, but eventually we located toddler-sized bike helmets. Purple for Rebecca, Sesame Street with Elmo for Daniel (it was slim pickings, let me tell you).  They kept them on for the rest of the afternoon.

It all started innocently enough.  There was the swingset, a much-loved hand-me-down from my aunt that the kids use every day it isn’t raining or snowing.

And late last summer we took Snickollet up on an offer for some free outdoor push toys.  The kids were big fans.

After much drama, we added the play house from my mom.

Then we were housebound for a few months while everything was buried under a foot of snow and ice.  But eventually it melted, and just like my hastas get miraculously larger every single year, so does the population of kiddie stuff in our yard.  The newest additions include the wagon we scored at the twin club sale.

And the bench my dad couldn’t resist buying on a trip to Lowe’s (at least it isn’t plastic).

Plus, a kid-sized picnic table, which theoretically sits eight. Hey, when nearly all of your mom friends have twins, it doesn’t take long to add up a playdate to that kind of number.

And then my in-laws came to town. And went a little nuts in Toys R Us.  What with the crab-shaped sandbox…

And the dueling Cozy Coupes they’ve been wanting to get for a year.

Thank goodness I have a giant yard, but it’s beginning to look a bit over-run.  I at least try to “park” some of the toys in a more out-of-the way corner of the yard.  Not like I could hide the fact that a pair of toddlers live here, but at least I don’t have to look like I’m constantly prepping for or recovering from a yard sale.

He’s still, he’s still Daniel from the block.

Oh, and Rebecca loved her new purple shoes so much, she nearly refused to take them off for naptime.

The temptation was too much to resist at Whole Foods this morning, so they picked their own colors and are now the proud owners of the first pairs of Crocs to ever grace our household.

— — —

P.S.  You didn’t forget that tomorrow is Thursday Theater, did you?  Theme: Giggles!

I sold for the second time.  My van was pretty full upon arrival for setup on Friday night.  Two high chairs (nice timing, right??), a diaper pail, a bunch of toys, and a big Rubbermaid crate filled to bursting with clothes.  And then, my friend was selling her Maclaren.  It was in such lovely shape… and the Peg Perego that was so bugging me was right out there in the van….  I ran out, wiped it off, brought it in, and slapped a tag on it (for the same price I was about to pay for my friend’s Maclaren).  I called M on the way out to the car, and I could almost hear him roll his eyes when he said “do whatever you want, honey.”  Heehee.  So the nice black & red Maclaren was sweet loot purchase #1 on Friday night.

Saturday morning, even more people arrived with even more stuff.  I knew immediately what I wanted, and was glad that my very early arrival meant I was 5th in line.  I tried to pretend I had some pride, and barely restrained myself from running when we were allowed in (not everyone is so restrained, trust me…).  I made a beeline back to the large equipment area.  SCORE!  THE WAGON IS MINE!

Heh.  It was all good after that.  Got a couple of books and an item or two of clothing for the kids.  The sale was absolute madness, and it appears that nearly every single thing that I brought was sold. There was almost a fight over my stroller, and it was sold within the first 20 minutes.  Glad my friends convinced me to bump up the price from my initial thought!  Three hours later, with the exception of one toy and a handful of shirts, all of my stuff was gone.  I’ll find out later, but I’m going to guess that I’ll be getting a check for over $200. Wohoo!

In the meantime, the kids friggin love their new wagon.  Especially, for whatever reason, the cupholders.

I’ve gotten such a cool opportunity for a giveaway, I’m all excited to share it with you.  You see, it’s National Reading Month, and I’m not sure there are many causes more worthy of celebration.  M and I were both big readers growing up, wasting pair after pair of batteries in our flashlights, reading entirely too late into the night.  We can only hope to inspire the same willful disobedience in our kids, who seem to be getting a good start as they ask for more and more stories every night (and morning, and afternoon).  For as tiring as two toddlers can be, I can never turn down a request to read a book.

Well, the folks at LeapFrog are all over this.  Head over to their National Reading Month page and you can pledge to read a certain number of hours with your kids this month.  And to celebrate, they’re letting little ol’ me give away one of their Tag Readers.  It comes bundled with three books, including The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs & Ham.  How cool!  I think it’s great to have more ways for different kids to interact with books, and this is a nifty tool to help encourage independence in young readers. (Not to mention like a $75 value……)

Here’s the rules for the giveaway. First, check out Christy’s review at About.com’s Family Computing site.  Leave a comment below between now and Sunday, March 22 at 5pM Eastern, telling me one thing you learned about the Tag Reader from that review that you didn’t know before, and also what book you most hope they have included in their library.

For additional entries, you can tweet all about it (just don’t forget to include me: @etowndz), and/or write your own blog post and be sure to link back here.  Just leave an additional comment for each additional entry (no more than one Twitter entry per person, per day, please).

Remember, this ends next Sunday!  Good luck!

Also, be sure to check out Christy’s Family Computing blog for lots of super info and reviews on technology and kids.  And, check out the other mom blogs featured that will be participating in this giveaway!

3 Carnations
So Much More Than a Mom
What about Mom?
Parenting by Trial & Error
My Sweet Baboo
Verbatim
Miss Britt
Stop, Drop and Blog
Callapidder Days

One of Rebecca’s favorite new words is “on.”  As in me saying “Would you like me to turn this on?”  And she responds “haan-ah.”  She’s even starting to say it unprompted, grabbing a toy and holding it up for me, saying “hann-ah?“

But, since last week’s storytime meltdown, her new favorite thing to put haan-ah is her Harness Buddy.  Yep.  The oft-maligned baby leash.  She finds that cuddly dog and brings it to me.  “Haan-ah?”  I take it from her and she holds out her arms for the straps, and then proudly walks around with it until I insist on taking it off for breakfast or to get in the car.  I guess that’s what the manufacturers were going for, making it all soft and cuddly.  She adores that thing, and it’s hilarious to see her going about her morning (or afternoon, or evening) with her little doggy backpack on.  It’s really just entirely too cute for words.