Parenting

Decorating your first nursery can be a fun, but daunting experience. Picking out your theme and color scheme is always exciting, but we often overlook the most important part of decorating – our child’s safety.

All of the safety devices available on the market often confuse many first time parents today. Baby proofing can become a scary and sometimes expensive task. If you feel that you are overwhelmed, there are child safety experts you can hire to come to your home, inspect it, and tell you their recommendations of what should be removed, locked up and replaced. This can be expensive though, and many of us feel we can do it ourselves if we have some general guidelines to go by.

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Children develop their identity by learning what they like about their environment, their way of dressing, their way of relating to others and the world. For children to develop an identity of their own, parents, the children’s earliest programmers, must sponsor this development of identity. You do this by being aware of your child’s actions and behaviors, and what those tell you about him/her.

For example if your child has a cluttered room, and has to save everything, you probably have a sentimental child that doesn’t like to part with things. If you cleaned your child’s room and threw away “the junk” that they had too much of, you might be ignoring who your child is as a person.

Children, not unlike adults, show their identity in many ways. They show it through the pictures in their room, the friends they associate with, their dress, food choices, activities, etc. They are giving us clues about who they are, as well as taking from us certain things they admire and incorporating those into their identity. Many parents, because of a lack of awareness, forget to ask children important questions that can reveal clues about their child’s belief and value system, and really help instill in them a healthy sense of self.

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Teaching your child about our universe couldn’t be easier with Celestia. It’s more fun and interesting than books, of course.

Celestia is a free 3D space simulation application that lets you explore our universe. Celestia is a PC-based program created by Chris Laurel. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. This amazing software allows you to tour the solar system, explore planets, and beyond. It claims that you can travel to any of over 100,000 stars.

You can set the time speed. 10 times faster, 10 times slower or even freeze the time. You can zoom in and zoom out by scrolling the mouse.

You can have a tour guide or demo if you are lazy to navigate. Don’t know the name of a planet? No problem. Just click on the planet and the name will appear.

The pictures look like real and the navigation is very smooth.

That’s not all.

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Kids today are technologically savvy. Preschoolers play games online. High school kids have their own web pages and blogs (online diaries). The Internet can be educational, fun and an important social tool for kids of all ages. Unfortunately, what comes with it is the possibility of danger. How can we as parents, who are many times technologically challenged, protect our kids from dangers online?
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You can wear out your mouse-pad surfing all the top ranked baby websites, fill your shopping cart to overflowing with the must-read baby magazines, manuals, and momoirs, but, in the end, it’s your mom-friends who tell you what you really need to know. Here are five all-important lessons about motherhood that I learned from other moms.

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