The funniest Harry Potter-inspired comic strip ever. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

I was talking to my mom earlier, maybe around 2:30, and she told me that she was doing housework. She told me about how she had done laundry, straightened up the bedroom, dusted, washed her floors, and she was in the process of cleaning the bathroom. I paused and said, “Wow. I’ve had a shower, and uh, yeah that’s about it.”

I felt so disappointed in my lack of motivation compared to my Mom the Cleaning Machine(tm) that I hung up and did some cleaning up in the bedroom, washed the dishes, did some laundry, cleaned the kitchen and the table, and I feel a little better now. Sheesh.

Anyway, the reason I had called her was to tell her that I was featured in a section of the Montreal Gazette, in their Saturday Extra section (page B2, woo). It included a link to my blog and some quotes from me and it was very nifty and made me sound articulate and witty.

My first reaction was, “well this is really cool!” My second reaction was to suffer from some mild performance anxiety as I realized that now a bunch of new people would come here and what on earth would I write about?

Luckily for you, I remembered a funny Hayley story from earlier this week, so hi to all the Gazette readers and here’s what had me laughing hard enough that I cried the other day.

Last weekend George’s sister was visiting and she gave Hayley a five dollar bill. It was meant for her piggy bank but instead, she decided she wanted to keep it in a wallet. I gave her one of my old ones and she was very happy to stuff the bill inside. When she went shopping with her aunt the next day, she took her wallet in a purse but didn’t spend it.

Fast forward a couple of days. George was heading out for a bit one evening and we needed toilet paper. He was just intending to stop at a nearby convenience store where you can get four rolls for a couple of bucks. He didn’t have any actual cash on him and didn’t want to bother with the bank card for two dollars, so he asked Hayley if he could borrow the five dollars from her and said he would pay her back the next day after doing the grocery shopping.

Oh HELL no. Hayley was outraged and refused to let him take her money, perhaps not understanding that she would get it back in about 12 hours. George said it was totally her right to say no and said it wasn’t a big deal so he went out and used the bank card and that was the end of that.

Or so we thought.

The next day, George’s dad called and asked if he could take Hayley out and have her over to their house for supper. We said that would be fine, so Hayley got dressed. Then, thinking she might go to the store, she pulled a chair out from the table and dragged it over to the buffet. She climbed up and opened my sugar canister, and pulled out an almost-full bag of sugar. Underneath the bag was her wallet!

When I asked her what the heck she was doing with her wallet in the sugar canister, she looked at me and said, “Well I didn’t want anyone to take my money.”

It took me a long time to stop laughing, but in between I managed to explain that no one would take her money and she didn’t have to hide it from her parents, that we respected her enough to not just take it after she had said no.

It was damn funny though. What a monkey.

This blog post is hilarious, only because it’s someone else instead of you. Kind of gross, perhaps, but hilarious nonetheless.

Breanna is clearly my child. We had several nice, warm days (well, warm for March around here anyway) and a lot of unpleasant rain that wiped out the vast majority of snow. There were lots of big patches of lawn and it looked very Spring-like indeed, even though I know better than to expect Winter to really be over so soon.

Breanna loves to go outside and loves to look at Hayley playing in the snow but she’s still just a bit too small to fully appreciate it herself and she gets frustrated trying to walk through snowbanks.

Last night it started snowing, and it’s still coming down now. I just pulled the vertical blinds aside at the sliding doors so Breanna could look outside and the snow on our balcony is up to about her hips.

The look of utter disgust on her face was priceless. If only my head included a built-in camera so I could have taken a picture of the dirty look she gave the snow. I’m sure it’s the same face I make when faced with yet another Winter day.

This post is a few months old now but it’s still the primary reason I started reading Mike regularly.

This may be my new favorite blog. I am on a serious Africa kick, what with watching Blood Diamond, reading randomly about Africa on the internet, and re-reading The Poisonwood Bible. Finding this blog was perfect timing.

This is the shortest video I have ever posted but it’s still funny. Oh, the things we teach our kids (though to be fair, I think it was Hayley who taught her this one).

A little while ago, the Parent Bloggers Network launched a review campaign for a DVD series, Your Baby Can Read. It’s a set of DVDs and educational flashcards created by Dr. Robert Titzer, designed to help children from infants to age five learn to read.

I fully admit up front that I was highly skeptical. I tend to look at all these “give your baby an edumacation!” products as being a lot of pressure to keep up with the Harvards and the Yales. However, I decided to give the starter DVD, DVD #1, and the sliding flash cards a try. I didn’t necessarily do it to teach Breanna, though I was curious about it; I mostly did it because at age four, Hayley is very interested in reading. She “reads” her books to herself after we put her to bed (telling her the stories based on the pictures and from memory of our reading together time) and she does know her alphabet so she enjoys asking us how to spell various words for her to write out. She can write her own name, Breanna’s name, Mommy, Daddy, Angel, and Henry, so I figured it was definitely worth it to give it a try. I love reading and have been an avid reader for longer than I remember but I have no clue how to teach someone to read so I was curious about the system.

As I expected, Breanna wasn’t particularly interested. I wasn’t surprised because she’s not that interested in what’s on television anyway. If Hayley’s watching something, Breanna will come running for the theme songs but lose interest after that. Beyond that, she likes when I have music videos playing. As a result, she enjoyed listening to the songs on the DVDs and occasionally liked looking at the babies and young children, but she wandered off a lot.

However, Hayley was very into the DVDs. She sat and repeated the words, played the games, sang the songs, and enjoyed the whole process. She also really liked the flash cards; they have the word printed on the front, and it slides apart to reveal a picture explaining what the word is.

Dr. Titzer is an infant learning expert and he believes in multiple methods of learning because he knows that not all people learn best in the same ways. Because of that, the DVDs also use a variety of learning methods – they will show the word on the screen for visual effect, they will have someone say the words for those who need audio for learning, and they also show examples. If they show and say the word clap, they will also show a baby (or a gorilla!) clapping. They also show the words to a couple of popular songs and at the end they have games where you have to find the right word.

There are a lot of things that I like about the DVDs. I like that they use different fonts for the same words. I taught Hayley the alphabet with capital letters and then worried that she wouldn’t recognize the lower case version or different type settings. Clearly I don’t give kids enough credit because she didn’t seem to have any trouble with that at all. I also like that they only use kids in the video. Other than the introduction to parents where we see Dr. Titzer, the actual learning segments only have shots of babies and young kids.

The words seemed odd to me. Instead of really simple words like apple or banana, it seemed really random, words like tiger and elephant, words that don’t necessarily show up in every day conversations. However, as MotherBumper’s review noted, these words also show up in a great deal of children’s story books (and hey, look at the words in Dr. Seuss books – now THOSE are weird).

The program advises that you get your children to watch the DVD (whichever one they’re on) twice per day. It’s preferable to have them watch it with you but at least they’re more realistic than SOME learning DVDs in that they acknowledge this may not always be possible and that it’s okay to put the DVD on while you do other things. Still, squeezing in two viewings a day could get tricky if you have two kids on different levels.

Final verdict? Okay, here goes.

I do think it could be beneficial to Breanna down the road but at this moment she has little interest in the actual words. On the other hand, even when it comes to books she would much rather look at the pictures and has no patience for the reading part. I can rarely finish reading a page before she squeals angrily and flips the page. Hayley? Hayley always loved books and enjoys being read to. As I mentioned, she’s also very interested right now in the process of learning to read and was very gung-ho about the DVDs and flash cards.

Did they work? Yes. She can’t read every single word on all the DVDs but she surprised me with how quickly she learned many of the words. She can now read hi, no, nose, cat, dog, tiger, elephant, clap, arms up, arms down, mouth, and several other words that I’m forgetting. She also quickly learned the concept that adding S to the end is still the same basic word, just more of them (ie, cat vs cats) and that adding ING to the end makes it an action (clap vs clapping).

I will keep showing them to Breanna because I have a feeling it will click at some point; she’s very good with baby sign language so it could work. However, at this point it was totally worth it just for Hayley.

Will it help your baby read? Maybe. The science makes sense, the DVDs are cute (and as a bonus to parents, they aren’t completely obnoxious either), the songs are fun, and I’ve seen it work.

We’re going to put the DVD on later today for more learning fun.

Now here’s a nifty tool for bloggers – you can use Zookoda to email summaries of your latest blog posts to help encourage people to visit and return to your blog. Want to know how? Keep reading! (this is a sponsored post)

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I usually go to snopes.com when I need to disprove some sort of alarmist email someone sends me. It was really refreshing to read a story on snopes about a little girl who wrote a letter to God after her pet died; a postal worker responded to her with a letter “from God” along with a copy of Mr. Rogers’ book When a Pet Dies to help her cope. Snopes lists the story as being true and it is the sweetest thing I’ve read in a long time. If you’ve ever had a young child try to cope with the death of a beloved pet, it may make you cry; I did.