Strange Machines

Our lovely BitofWhimsyPrims doll bought on Etsy arrived on Thursday. She was beautifully sewn and very cuddly! Kitten adored her on sight. Wolf christened her Owly after an extensive review.

2 of these Tiddlywinks sweeties are on their way to us now. I couldn’t help getting these for the kids. Kitten will love dressing Meow and cuddling Breeze.

Feeling crafty today, I decided to make a stuffed liopleurodon for Wolf today. It took me surprisingly just under an hour thanks to a very compliant sewing machine who did not today spit out any thread.

Wolf loves it and declared that he loves it more than Teddy (which is high praise indeed)! He is hugging it to sleep right now.

This beautiful doll and lovely hand drawn card arrived from Chal-Baby from South Africa for Kitten today!

It was from her Godma in Malaysia who remembered her first birthday. Kitten absolutely loves her!

What I love about Etsy is it brings all these talented artisans from around the world together to sell their craft. Here is one of them.

And Kitten says a huge thank you to Godma and she misses you so much!

Hubby fixed this $59 unfinished solid pine cupboard from Ikea and Wolf and I painted it. I liked the used look but am pondering painting another layer over it to look more finished. We will put a layer of beeswax over it after. That’s as natural as we can get for furniture around here.

It seems like since I became a mom I had to overcome many of my fears in order to be a hero to my children. One of them was getting over my fear of roaches.

I used to flee at the sight of a roach but now I have to arm myself with a newspaper and swat it till it is dead. The spray is only allowed if:

1. The roach is unreachable by newspaper.
2. Can find way quickly to the bedroom.
3. Washable area.

After all that stuff is poisonous to everyone and the environment but I have made peace with myself for using it only one out of 20 roaches if at all after trying virtually every safe and environmental method out there but failed miserably.

I have had to resort to roach poison traps which they bring back to their nests and that has been the only way they can be stopped. That and swatting the live ones.

Last night I had to take out 3, rolled up newspaper in hand. Wolf was very proud of me in the morning.

Wolf and I painted this Ikea step ladder with non-toxic Crayola water colours and sealed it with beeswax.

I must confess first. I was a TV addict.

After work, dear hubby and I would cuddle up in from of ole Faithful and watch our fave programs like CSI and munch on junk food. I could not live without TV.

Fast forward to year 2006 and Wolf was born. I read that the cost of watching TV was the opportunity lost spent on other more creative and productive things like reading, playing, or talking to Mom. According to many peer-reviewed studies, kids who watch TV have less vocabulary than kids who don’t, and the latter are more sociable.

I was sold. I swore my kid would never watch television. Ever. And I had to set an example. The TV became a glorified plant holder and took up half the space of the living room. Surprisingly I found life without TV pretty alright, since we were busy with the kids and really have no more free time. I do fantasize about the days when the kids are off to college and I can finally turn on my 35″ TV and watch all the dramas I missed in the last 18 years.

As for the old clunker, we gave it away to an elderly neighbour who was thrilled to have it. She was retired and watching TV every day on a tiny 20″. We figured that by the time the kids were old enough to watch TV, our CRT would have decomposed and we could get a brand new plasma t.v. for $200. And let’s make it a Samsung plasma tv or a Panasonic plasma tv.

And is there credence to all the reports about increased sociability and higher vocabulary? According to people who have met Wolf, he is very sociable with people of all ages and speaks non-stop like a Duracell bunny.

I don’t know about other children, but after 3.5 years of no TV, Wolf isn’t fond of watching it and he would prefer to play or read than watch TV. He went through a brief phase of TV phobia, probably from something he saw on it at Grandma’s house. But he sat through The Lion King (his cousin was watching at Grandma’s) just last week (which from a child’s eyes, seems awfully negative about brotherhood and rather pro-revenge and violence). His first actually.

According to the scientifically-based Nurtureshock, kids pick up extracts from a story, so even if a story with conflict that gets resolved at the end, the child may simply pick up the conflict and not the resolution.

We can’t shelter our children from the media – heck I want my TV back one day – but the first few years are crucial to protect them from the effects of the media, much of which we as adults are already immune to or unaffected by. But children are vulnerable and judging from our viewing of the “children’s movie” The Lion King, I won’t be letting Wolf watch any more till he is much older.

More evidence that houseplants clean our air.

The experiment was conducted by Dennis Decoteau of Penn State’s Department of Horticulture with a snake plant, spider plant, and golden pothos inside “experimental chambers in a greenhouse equipped with a charcoal filtration air supply system to measure ozone depletion rates.”

While it took 75 minutes for ozone levels to come down in plantless chambers, air in chambers with plants reached the target in just 50 minutes. He speculates the plants take in the ozone through their stomates (tiny pores used for gas exchange) and then break it down once inside the plant.

The article also recommended keeping plants in our rooms because:

* Plant-filled rooms contain up to 60 percent fewer airborne molds and bacteria than rooms without plants, studies show.

* People who work in offices with windows and plants are happier than others, according to a study of 450 office workers in Texas and the Midwest. In fact, 82 percent of the participants who worked with plants and windows around said they felt “content” or “very happy,” compared with 58 percent in windowless plant-less offices who said the same.

* Plants seem to make people more contemplative and self-reflective, according to one ethnologist.

For 47 more houseplants that clean your air, check out How to Grow Fresh Air: 50 House Plants that Purify Your Home or Office.

My sinuses have cleared since I put houseplants in my bedroom (since January actually). To date, we have a large Areca Palm (temperamental thing), 2 Snake Plants (hardy), 6 Corn Plants (easiest to manage), and 1 Spider Plant (who goes out for sun and rotates with its brethren outside). These are ideal for an air conditioned bedroom in the tropics. My poor Peace Lily just died. RIP dear fellow.

Since our first review of the Best iPhone Apps for Toddlers back in February 2009, lots of apps have been added to the iTunes store. But for educational children’s apps, some of the best are sequels. Here’s what we have on our iPod Touch now and are still playing.

1. Elephant Song

Wonderfully interactive, beautifully simple pictures, and a lovely song. When my son first played it, it was my morning anthem for a few weeks. After a while, I couldn’t get the song out of my head. It originated in YouTube but found its way to the iPhone, and for that I am grateful. The recent upgrade has made it more interactive. And to top it off, the app is free.

2. Preschool Arcade

The sequel to Preschool Adventure. Again, I woke up to the sounds of the arcade with this game which I’d been reluctant to try because I was afraid it wouldn’t be educational. But the developers very pleasantly surprised me and what followed was an educational, musical extravaganza which taught my son numbers, alphabets, and shapes in an arcade environment. Very cleverly educational and very good family fun for the children.

3. Ike’s Machine

This is also a sequel to Ike the Inventor, this time for slightly older kids. But you get to create things from blueprints that show the formulas (e.g. to make a book, you need 5 units of a blue stick, 10 units of a green stick, and 50 units of a green liquid). I thought it might have been too difficult for a 3 year old, but no, with a few weeks of help, my son soon mastered reading measurements from a blueprint and addition from this wonderful app and can now play it himself. Kudos to the brilliant inventor!

4. The Boy Who Cried Wolf

From the same people who brought you The Little Red Hen, the same delightful little girl narrates the familiar story of the boy who cried wolf, along with interactive characters and a kind end to this morality tale.

5. Dem Bones

A really fun game to teach kids about our skeleton. A skeleton is laid bare at the start with a pile of bones on the ground. The child must then put the bones back to where they belong according which bone is called. Good giggly fun for parent and child to play together.

6. Where’s Gumbo?

A classic “find someone” game turned interactive. Cute and engaging for a toddler, and switches on their seeking radar (see: The Science of Parenting).

7. First Words: At Home

From the First Words series. A child learns spelling by putting the alphabets back into the shadowed boxes. Simple, familiar, and educational.

8. ShapeBuilder

This one sparks everyone’s curiosity. A shape is presented with various jigsaw pieces to be filled. When filled, it transforms into either a gimme or an object you just could not have thought of. Very fun for both parent and child. Wolf played this for hours.

9. Artsee

Similar to ShapeBuilder but this time you use your finger to splatter paint onto the shape and you’ll be asked to guess what it is out of 3 options. I say “you” in this case because I end up playing it too.

10. Old MacDonald’s Farm

Old MacDonald’s has expanded his farm with more animals than Noah could ever hold. This time, we can listen to him sing about sharks, dinosaurs, walruses, and even an octopus. It brought us lots of laughs and very loud animal sounds. No, no one called the zoo.

Part 1, written in February 2009, can be found here. Also cross-posted to my tech blog.