Crazy Ride Home

This Thanksgiving was a particularly busy one this year. On Thursday we went to my paternal grandparents house for lunch and for dinner we went to my step-paternal grandpa's (that would be my step-dad's dad) house for dinner. On Friday, I went and got my hair highlighted, something I haven't done for three years. Then we went to my uncle's house for Thanksgiving dinner with my mom (the joys of divorced parents!). Saturday morning we woke up early to go to my in-laws house (I don't like the word in-laws, I feel like it has a bad connotation, I happen to like my in-laws). The drive there was great. Both boys slept and it was nice and peaceful. However, Sunday afternoon turned out to be a different story. We left Anne and Frank's (my in-laws) house around 2:45. It was a wet, chilly, rainy, cloudy, yucky day. Jim decides to not stop at Sheetz to get gas before we get on the highway, rather he waits until we pass the highway to try to find one. At first it doesn't look like there is one on this side of the highway so he goes to turn around right before I spot a Speedway. So he pulls into a parking lot to go back out the same way. We should have seen this as sign. Once we are on the highway, he realizes that he left the gas flap (whatever the little gas door is called) open, so we have to stop at the next exit for him to close it. Again, getting back on the highway, we enter a traffic jam. While in the traffic jam (that is actually moving decently, so a traffic backup we'll say) we see a small dog on the side of the highway!
Me: Jim there's a DOG on the highway!!!!
Jim: What am I supposed to do?!
Me: PULL OVER!
Jim proceeds to pull over, not quite wanting to. I hop out of the car and head towards the dog. The dog heads toward the middle of the high way. I follow dog into middle of highway. Cars stop for dog and women following dog. He had his back to me so I just had to pick him up, arms extended, saying please don't bite me, please don't bite me. Traffic resumes. If you knew me, you would know that I'm not a huge dog person. There are very few dogs that I actually like. I used to like dogs when I was little, but I kind of feel like that's just what you're supposed to do when you are little. Like dogs. As I have grown-up, my feelings towards dogs has developed into more of a tolerance than a love for them. So I'm holding this little Chihuahua (how it should be spelled: chiwawa) looking thing, praying it doesn't bit me, hoping it doesn't have rabies, fleas, or some rare unknown dangerous stray dog disease. I walk back to our car, which is now not very close. In the cold wet rain. OK so I rescued the dog from its fate as road kill, but now what? Jim suggests a blanket from our trunk. Back out into the rain. Again, getting back on the highway, now with a stinky, wet, shivering, skin and bones, poor little dog on my lap. In my head, a huge debate on whether I suggest keeping this little furbag. After a few more miles of stopping and going, Jim is fed up and decides that perhaps taking Route 42 would be a better idea. He of course tells me this after about wrecking us because he is looking on the map he pulled up on his phone.
Jim: I think if I take this road and that road, I think that road turns into Route 42.
Me: Whatever you think.
Off the highway. Now we turn down a couple roads and who should awake, but Blake, screaming his head off. I try to use my GPS on my phone, but it decides it doesn't want to keep service. So now I have a stressed out husband, screaming baby, and stinky dog in the car. And we are lost. In the few seconds the GPS was working it said to turn in a 1/4 mile, I know we have gone over a 1/4 mile.
Me: Just pull in somewhere until the GPS starts working so we know which way to go and we are not driving in the wrong direction.
Jim: Well I don't know which way to turn.
Me: Yeah that's why you're stopping to see where we need to go.
GPS decides to work and we turn around. Luckily we had barely missed our turn. We do as the GPS tells us, and turn right. However, the GPS is trying to get us back to 71 not rte 42.
Jim: I think we need to go the other way.
Me: Then go the other way.
Jim: This is taking us to the highway.
Me: Then go the other way.
Jim: Well we're further down the road so we should be past the traffic jam, right?
Me: I doubt it.
Come to highway. Parking lot.
Jim: I think, I'll go the other way.
Me:
Again, heading home now on a route instead of a highway. As we approach the light we have now come at from a third direction, we have to stop a little ways away because everyone else has decided to skip the highway. A small road intersects right before the light, a car is at this road trying to turn left. Jim inches forward so this car can get out and turn left. CRASH! BOOM! SCREECH! Turn around to find car we just inched forward to let out, has hit a car driving in the left lane (there were two lanes a straight lane: right lane, and a turn lane: left lane). Luckily, the guy behind us gets out of his car to check on the people. Glad I didn't have to be a hero twice in one day because I don't know what I would have done with dog and screaming kid and already stressed out husband. (Big boy Joseph was sound asleep). The rest of the trip just escalated in stress, Blake wouldn't stop crying and we continuously got behind someone going 15 under the speed limit. At one point the GPS was increasing projected arrival time home. After Blake cryed for a good hour we decide to stop and Jim goes into Wendy's to feed him. At this point Joseph finally wakes up.
Me: Joseph
Joseph: Uhhh...(normal wake-up grumps)
Me: Joseph look what's on Mommy's lap
Joseph: Opens one eye
Me: Do you see what I have
Joseph: Both eyes wide open. Almost a whisper, A doggie!
Me: Yeah it's a doggie. Do you know where I got it?
Joseph: (after a pause) No, I don't.
Me: He was on the road and about to get hit and I picked him up.
Joseph: Is he coming home?
Me: Yep
Joseph: Can we keep him?
Now how in the world does this three year old know to ask, can we keep him? We don't talk about getting a dog, or a cat, or any pet. How does he know how to ask in the sweetest voice possible, can we keep him? Luckily, while trying to figure out what to do with the little furball, I called my dad who is willing to take him.  However, we have to keep him overnight until he is able to come pick him up on Monday.  So luckily when asked this sweet little question I was prepared.
Me: We're going to take him home tonight, but Grandpa will be keeping him at his house and we can go visit him and he can come visit us.
Joseph: Oh
Jim comes back with a much quieter Blake and we are on the road again. However, the quiet is only temporary. Finally, after 4 extremely long hours, we make it home. Four hours, for a normally 2 hour trip.

Halloween

What a great Halloween!

Not winning best day ever award

I was feeding e her bowl of rice cereal mixed w carrots and green beans when blake decides to pound on the bowl!

Lunch didn't go so well

I was warming up tacos from last night. I changed josephs diaper, it was like 3 minutes! I go into this!

Temporary Insanity!!!

I know I have not posted on here in a long time! I feel so bad, I have just been uber busy trying to get some part-time work from home jobs. I have one now with Powell Marketing Strategies http://www.creative-science.com/powellmarketing/strategies.htm where I call businesses and try to "sell" them a new CPA. I'm going to start calls today, so we'll see how it goes! I'm hopeful! The problem is that it is commission only. I get money if I make a successful appointment so here's hoping people need  new CPAs!!! My other pursuit has been to contact all parenting classes online to see if they need an instructor. I have actually only emailed 5 places and 3 of those 5 have expressed an interest. However, so far, nothing has come to be a definite. My other task is to continue to post for jobs on eLance, which I have been very bad about doing. I am a little discouraged with that because it is so very competitive. I really need to take more skills tests on there so I look super awesome with all high scores but so far I have only done two. One was on analytical skills (which I think is very important) and I received a 95% and I'm in the top 5th percentile. The other one was computer skills and I'm in the top 20th percentile, which isn't too bad. Oh and I got accepted as a tutor on Elite Tutors Online http://www.elitetutorsonline.com/! I'm just waiting for my first student! So hopefully with ALL this work, something will amount to something :o)
And on top of all this I am getting patterns http://leilaandben.com/vest.htm so that I can get started on Joseph's Halloween costume. He is going to be Woody and we have the hat, his aunt is getting the boots, and I have cow print material to make the vest. I just have to make it.  I got a sewing machine for my birthday, which I absolutely LOVE, but have made a total of zero things on it :o(  I have all this material and ideas and plans, but of course no time to do it.  There are SOOO many things going on right now, I don't know how I even have time to go to the bathroom! Because on top of all this our basement is in shambles. We accomplished painting the walls, but all the furniture is still in the middle of the floor. We are working on making it an "extra room" for the kids to play in and for me to work on crafts and sewing, but we have gotten as far as hauling all the toys, office stuff, and craft stuff to the basement and painting the walls.
I know this is totally just rambling, but I hate to not have something posted on here at least once a week. I hope to get a schedule down and will include posting as one of my tasks, so until then I will maintain my temporary insanity and do what I can!

Tips for Remebering Your Leftovers

I don't know why I had never thought of this before, but at least I do it now! I never really realized that when you open a jar of spaghetti sauce, you are only supposed to keep it for two weeks after opening. I just assumed that any food product was good until the expiration date (or after but that's another post). On one of the spaghetti jars (Prego, I think) it said, good two weeks after opening. Then I started noticing it on some other labels too, like salsa. We would NEVER remember when the last time we opened something so I would end up just throwing it away (unlike my husband I err on the side of I-don't-want-to-be-in-the-bathroom-all-night).  However, with Blake's baby food (and Joseph's when he was a baby) I use a Sharpie to put the date we opened it since it is only good for two days after opening. Well, duh, why don't I just do that with everything I open! Now I do it for everything and it helps us to keep in mind when we should use something up. So not only do we prevent yucky tummies, we also save some money because we use all of what we have before we buy more. Then I got even more brilliant and have been using a wet/dry erase marker and labeling our leftovers. I write what the leftover is and the date it was made right on the Tupperware container. Now there is no more fear when opening an old Tupperware container, that you hope are black beans, because when looking through the foggy plastic sides it definitely looks like something black. I even write on foil what inside is too, that way I can just pull it out and know what it is without having to unwrap it.  Now I have a Sharpie and a dry erase markers by the fridge. They even make dry erase markers with magnets on them so easy access and you don't have to lose them between the counter and the fridge. Genius!

Teaching Babies Sign Language

When Joseph was a baby we taught him sign language. We are doing the same with Blake. It was amazing how much it helped him to be able to communicate his wants and needs to us! We introduced sign language probably around 9 months. It was hard for us at first because we would forget to do it. We started with the sign" more." I would try to remember to do eat, change, milk, more and all done, but our main focus was more. They suggest doing it at meal time because babies (and just about every animal) are motivated by food. However, Joseph was less than interested in eating. Therefore, I started to do it when we were reading books.  He loved reading books and he would want to read one after another. When he was around 10 months old I was reading him the book Hug by Jez Alborough, he kept wanting me to read it over and over, so I would sign more each time we would read it again.  While I was signing "more" Joseph signed it, too!! It was so exciting! Once this happened he caught on more quickly.  It was interesting, but with Joseph his signs started right about the time that he started saying words.  I think the signs encouraged him to communicate more and helped his verbal language development as well. Even more interesting, was once he was efficiently communicating verbally, he stopped using the signs. It was like the signs were a transitional phase for him. It really helped to alleviate temper tantrums because he was able to let us know what he wanted and we were able to fulfill his needs. Otherwise, we would have just had to sit there and guess what he wanted. I would highly encourage all parents to use sign language with their children. It doesn't have to be a planned out curriculum and it doesn't even have to be very many signs. Of course, if you want to incorporate more signs, I can't see how that would hurt, but at least doing a few helps tremendously. Below are some articles I found on sign language. I always appreciate when things aren't biased so I have included articles both for and against/indifferent to teaching babies sign language.


Below are abstracts from scientific journal articles (you have to pay to view the complete article): 

Teaching gestural signs to infants to advance child development: A review of the evidence 

Abstract

Should parents be encouraged to teach their hearing infants to communicate using gestural signs? Does signing in infancy advance child behaviour and development as claimed by many commercially available products for parents? To answer these questions, a review was undertaken to evaluate currently available research studies that examined the effectiveness of prelingual signing for normally developing, hearing infants. Databases, reference lists and the Internet were searched for relevant documents using a pre-determined search protocol. Seventeen reports met the review’s inclusion criteria and were retrieved and evaluated. The review failed to support claims that signing facilitates language development, due to insufficiencies in scientific methods and to equivocal results. 

http://fla.sagepub.com/content/25/2/235.short

Left Hemisphere Cerebral Specialization for Babies While Babbling

Science 30 August 2002:
Vol. 297 no. 5586 p. 1515
DOI: 10.1126/science.1074941 

Baby babbling is the universal developmental milestone before the onset of language production in humans, yet little is known about whether the neural determinants of this behavior are fundamentally linguistic (1, 2) or reflect only oral-motor developments (3, 4). In adults, the presence of right asymmetry in mouth aperture during linguistic tasks as contrasted with left or equal mouth opening during nonlinguistic tasks has been widely used as a key measure of left hemisphere cerebral specialization for language (5). Given the noninvasive nature of mouth asymmetry studies, this technique is ideally suited to inferring whether functional cerebral asymmetries of babies' earliest productions exist. If babbling is fundamentally linguistic in nature, then left hemispheric specialization should be reflected in right mouth asymmetry while babbling. If babbling is fundamentally motoric in nature, then equal hemispheric participation should be reflected in equal mouth opening while babbling. The results will provide insight into the neural basis of babbling and hence into the origins of human language.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/297/5586/1515.short

Below are internet articles (obviously not as reliable as above):

The Philadelphia Inquirer
Parents finding benefit in teaching babies sign language as well as speech
http://articles.philly.com/2010-07-19/news/24970863_1_american-sign-language-basic-signs-hand-movement#.ToNmAVEi6Sg.blogger

5 Reasons Why Parents Teach Signs to Hearing Babies

by Eileen Ladino, M.A.
In the past decade, a growing number of parents worldwide have discovered the joys of using simple sign language with their preverbal babies. Why sign language? Babies can gain control of their hands long before they develop the oral motor skills necessary for speech, so signs allow little ones to express their thoughts without crying or whining - a bonus for both babies and parents. But reducing frustration is just one reason parents love using Sign Language. Here's what researchers Linda Acredcolo, PhD and Susan Goodwyn, PhD, the authors of Baby Signs: How to Talk with Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk (Contemporary Books, 2002), have found in their 20 years of research on the effects of Baby Signs on babies' development. Sign Language . . .
1. help babies talk sooner . . . and boost spoken vocabulary
2. empower babies to direct adults' attention to what they want to talk about
3. reduce frustration
4. provide a strong foundation for early literacy
5. stimulate intellectual development
1. Using sign language with babies help them talk sooner
One concern that parents have is the effect of sign language on speech development. Acredolo and Goodwyn have found that Baby Signers actually talk sooner than non-signers. The reason being that they are using expressive language from an earlier age, playing with words, ideas and pairing them up before they have even developed the oral motor skills necessary for speech. In addition, they have found that by age 8, children who signed had stronger reading skills than those who did not. For more information on this NIH funded research, please go to http://www.tinyfingers.com/benefits.html
2. Sign Language Empowers Babies to Initiate Conversations
Most babies will show signs of wanting to communicate by coming up with their own simple gestures: they will raise their arms to say "Pick me up," reach for things they want, pat the couch to say "up", or open their mouth wide when they want more food. Signs expand on this idea and offer children an opportunity to communicate about specific ideas or concepts.
After returning from a walk around the neighborhood, Isabel looked at her mom and signed "airplane."
"Yes," her mom said, "we saw a big airplane up in the sky today. It was flying to a place far away."
In this exchange, the child expressed a topic on her mind and the parent was able to elaborate on it, modeling language on a topic the child initiated.
3. Sign Language Reduces Frustration
Parents and researchers agree that after learning sign language as a communication tool, both child and parent have fewer moments of frustration that stem from a lack of communication. Tantrums decrease, and parents have found that they can discipline or redirect their child in public without using their voice, therefore avoiding embarrassing moments for the child.
The most frustrating age for a toddler is 17-22 months because although he is mobile and he understands what you're saying, he may not be able to communicate about what he wants. Sign language can help clarify communication between parent and child, replacing grunts and whining with clear expressions of thoughts. Children as young as 6 to 8 months old can understand the signs for "milk," "more," and "all done." Between 8 and 12 months, children often begin signing "more" when they are out of Cheerios or would like another push on a swing, or they will sign "all done" when they have had enough to eat or want to leave the mall. Once children start speaking, parents have found that signs help fill in the gaps until the child is able to intelligibly communicate all the thoughts he wants to share.
4. Sign Language Provides a Strong Foundation for Early Literacy
Signs make books more meaningful to babies. Your child can be an active participant in story time, labeling pictures and predicting what comes next in their favorite books. This kind of participation and interaction helps children understand the similarities and differences between concepts. When they first learn the sign for "dog," they may generalize it and label all mammals in a book "dog." Once the parent has helped them learn to see the distinguishing features of a dog, a horse and a bear, they can then learn to generalize the sign for "dog" to the family pet, a stuffed animal and the star of Blue's Clues, given appropriate feedback from adults.
5. Sign Language Stimulates Intellectual Development
Participation in reading activities, along with the vocabulary boost inherent in early communication, lead to stronger early reading skills. Marilyn Daniels, author of Dancing With Words: Signing for Hearing Children's Literacy (Bergin & Garvey, 2001), found in her research that hearing students in pre-kindergarten who had the benefit of adding the visual and kinesthetic (movement) elements of sign language to verbal and written language scored significantly higher on standardized vocabulary tests than hearing students with no sign instruction. Adding sign language to verbal communication has been found to help enhance a preschool child's vocabulary, spelling and early reading skills.
Conclusion
Many parents find that using Sign Language with their baby stimulates language development, strengthens the parent-infant bond and provides a window into their baby's world. For information on classes, books and videos, please see Tiny Fingers or contact us at classes@tinyfingers.com
________________________________________
Eileen Ladino is the founder of Tiny Fingers. She earned an MA in Deaf Education from Gallaudet University and has 15 years of experience as a teacher of both deaf and hearing students and as a freelance sign language interpreter. She is now experiencing the joy of using American Sign Language with her own hearing daughter and is dedicated to improving communication between babies and their parents & caregivers through her tiny fingers classes and materials.

Parmesan Carmelized Onions - Onions even I will eat!

When I went to Marcella's (a local Italian restaurant), my friends ordered Parmesan Crusted Onions and they were actually very good (and that's to someone that rarely likes onions). I decided to try to make them myself. They didn't turn out quite the same but good nevertheless.

Grocery List
1 medium to large Spanish onion
1 1/2 Tbsp sugar
olive oil
Grated Parmesan cheese

To Make
Use a medium to large skillet or pan.
Turn the stove to 6 or medium heat. Put 1/4 to 1/2 inch of olive oil in the pan. While the oil is heating cut the onion into 1/4 to 1/2 inch slices.  Once the oil is hot put in 1 1/2 Tblsp of sugar and stir. Before putting in the onions test the oil to make sure it is hot enough. Take a extremely small piece of onion and put it in the pan, if it sizzles its ready. Once the oil is ready put in the onion slices. Turn them over a few times until both size are a nice golden brown. Once both sides are a golden brown, remove from pan and place them on a plate. Sprinkle with a generous amount of Parmesan cheese. The onions at the restaurant were all together, mine separated when I cooked them, but still good. Enjoy!