I’m thankful that a lot of early childhood places are really beginning to focus on emotional awareness. There are so many resources for social-emotional learning for kids now. My child’s preschool is SEED certified (https://www.nmececd.org/seed/) and she’s been working on a feelings journal. At our elementary school we have social skills groups where we explicitly teach kids about emotions and also teach them life skills (we have small groups of kids playing board games to handle taking turns, losing, etc). At home and school we have these little “spot” of emotion stuffies and an accompanying book that explain what an emotion is, what it feels like, and what we can do about it. Our school also uses the zones of regulation (pic) to not only help kids understand but to also help the staff understand how our students are feeling.

Most of mine won’t let you without an appointment and no matter how I answer the questions online it tells me I’m ineligible

The model we have (that’s only a few years old) works like this. My favorite is when it’s trying to get back to the dock, it’ll just move aimlessly until it accidentally reaches the vicinity of it and can make it home. A lot of times it runs out of battery. Or gets stuck somewhere (in the same spots because I can’t tell it to avoid problem areas).

Surprises have an end. Secrets are forever. A surprise is a secret for now, but I can tell you later. Secrets are things I can never tell, which can be dangerous.

I’m very grateful that my district where I teach has very specific library guidelines. Books cannot be challenged based on gender or sexual identity only. Books cannot be removed based on a single passage or paragraph, it must be removed or retained on the content of the entire book. Challenges may only come from parents, employees, or those that reside in the community and they must read the material in its entirety, and then they are excluded from the committee that makes the final decision to retain or remove the book. Once challenged the book cannot be challenged again for 5 years, and only one challenge can happen at a time. Of course, I feel my district would bend very quickly at any state or federal pressure, but at least for now the libraries are left to those who have degrees in library science and hold teaching licenses.

I’ll follow our pediatricians advice.

Yes, but I work in an elementary school and she goes to preschool full time so it’s not bad to be cautious

Then she ate a salad from Costco: an “everything” chopped salad kit with poppy seeds.

My three year old got her first round of Covid vaccines as soon as she was able to and then boosters ever since. My husband and I have both gotten flu and Covid vaccines each year. I guess we’ll have to see if there’s a different way to get her protected this fall…

I would kill time with this for a little while but over the last few months the audio lag has made it unusable in my opinion. After opening and pressing play it would take a few seconds for it to start playing, and then after swiping to the next one the audio from the previous one would keep playing for a few seconds. I could swipe through like 4 or 5 videos until the audio would catch up. Also, the hashtags are nice but at the moment they function where I have to select one, watch it, swipe back to the hashtag page, select another one, and repeat. I want to just be able to scroll through hashtags or someone’s account instead of clicking on individual videos (like you used to be able to). My following page gets stuck after a few videos where I can’t scroll anymore too. I’ll reopen it when the update drops, but there’s definitely issues to iron out.

I call my mom “mom”, but now that I have a kid I use her grandma name more frequently. Honestly it’s a little easier to call her that, I have some unresolved stuff and while we’re friendly the mom term is a little much. My daughter calls me “mommy”, but usually doesn’t enunciate so it’s “mah-ee” most of the time.