July 2006

This one comes directly from June Parents Magazine. I guess I need to dust off my Spanish cd’s and practice what I preach, but I thought in the meantime, I could share this good idea with you.

Always wanted to polish up your Spanish or learn the basics of French? Do it! Borrow language tapes from the library, or buy them from a bookstore or at berlitz.com. The practice them around your child. You can also find storybooks in Spanish to read aloud.

Your baby many not actually pick up any words, but research has shown that a baby’s exposure to another language can help improve her mastery of foreign languages down the road.

Grocery store trips are easier when all you need are the 3 essentials for dinner tonight (and you can escape before anyone melts down). Stock up on the heavy and non-perishable items all at once using Safeway.com or Peapod.

Amazon.com just started grocery delivery on the non-perishable (heavy!) stuff with free shipping. The code GROCERY2 will give you $10 off a purchase of $49 (thanks Parent Hacks!) Give it a try.

For fresh organic fruits and veggies, we get Planet Organics every two weeks with 2/3 vegetables and 1/3 fruit. Their site makes it super easy to customize our order so we never get cilantro or stone fruit.

Entertaining Julian in the afternoon is best done outside. Inside he is totally crabby from about 3 to 6 pm. I’ve discovered things he likes and have been lazy enough to just put them all in the backyard at once so that he can roam from activity to activity over the course of an hour. It works so well that I have invited other people to bring their babies over to enjoy our backyard festival.

Feel free to set up some or all of these stations in your own backyard. Mix it up a little. Let us know how it goes.

• The key to the party is water. I have had enormous success entertaining a little dude as young as 10 months with a large plastic mixing bowl full of water and some measuring cups or spoons. That’s Station One.
• Station Two is the tunnel. We’ve got the one in the picture here for about $20 from Oriental Trading. That happy kid is Holden - he’s a tunnel man.

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