Parenting Archives – Corporettemoms.com

How to Use Your iPhone to Store School Paperwork

09/05/2018 by Kat 13 Comments

What are your favorite organization tips as the school year gets underway? We’ve shared tips for preserving your kids’ artwork, as well as why I think a family email address is great for all working parents — but today I thought I’d explain an easy trick I’ve figured out for how to use your iPhone to organize school papers. (Android users, I’d love to hear your tips too!)

This is really a very easy organizing tip, but it took me some time to figure it out, so I thought I’d share. You know how you get all that paperwork at the start of the school year — the teacher’s first name! email address! the schedule for art lessons! the procedure for sick days! the days the kids get off! — and so forth? If you are me, you generally INTEND to file it away somewhere clever, but instead you move it from pile to pile (kitchen to dining table to windowsill) until it just becomes part of the paper floating around the house.

Instead, I’ve started taking snapshots of all of it and then sending it to iCloud Notes. You can create folders in iCloud Notes — I have one for each kid — and individual notes, and each time you get new information (whether in email, on paper, or whatever) you can just take a snapshot and add it to the existing note. For example, for my older son I have a folder with his initials and a notecard that says SECOND GRADE, and it contains the intro info from the teacher, the list of words they’re supposed to be able to read and spell, and other school pertinent school info, like the PIN if he wants to buy lunch at school.

How to Add Pictures and Documents from Within Your iPhone’s Notes

Do You Let Your Kids Play With Water Guns (or, What Toys Don’t You Let Your Kids Play With?)?

06/07/2018 by Kate Antoniades 43 Comments

It’s the season for outdoor water fun — swimming, running through sprinklers, etc. — so we thought it would be a good time to ask: Do you let your kids play with water guns and other toy weapons, such as Nerf guns? For his birthday last year, my son got one of those giant, Super Soaker-type of water guns (from a classmate), and this year for his birthday he received a Nerf gun (also from a friend — not us). He’s been asking for a Nerf gun for a long time and was so excited to get one. The kids’ parents didn’t know that we hadn’t given him any toy guns (I’m not a big fan), and in the end, we’ve let him play with the gifts (although we do have rules, such as “Don’t ever aim them at people or animals”).

If you want to keep your kids away from toy guns, a total ban seems impossible. If you prohibit them from playing with water guns and other weapon-like toys, won’t they just go and use them at a friend’s house and/or get invited to a “Nerf Wars” type of party for a friend’s birthday? (My son, who’s in primary school, has gone to two so far.) Or does it make a difference if you personally show your disapproval? Some parents just give up and go along with with the (stereotypical) reasoning that “Boys will turn anything into a gun anyway.” If we give our kids water guns and so on, should that enter at all into our conversations with them about, for example, why their school has lockdown drills? Do kids really look at violence or guns any differently when they play with toy guns.

I’ll admit that I haven’t been motivated enough to do any Googling about the effects of playing with toy guns, and whether my uneasiness is warranted — and when I finally did, er, today, I learned that research hasn’t found a link between violent play as a child and violent behavior as an adult. Many studies have drawn conclusions like that of this one, as summarized by Slate: “[W]hen kids incorporate violence into their pretend play, they may learn how to control real violent impulses and regulate their emotions.”

So, do tell: Do you let your kids play with water guns and other toy weapons? If not, why — and if so, what are your ground rules (and the conversations you’ve had with your kids about them)? Have you bought things like water guns or Nerf guns for your kids’ friends? If you prohibit toy guns at home and your child receives one as a gift (or gets one in a party favor bag) what do you do, and how do you explain it to your child?

What Crazy Things Have You Done to Get Your Kids to Sleep?

04/25/2018 by Kat 16 Comments

All right ladies, let’s discuss: what crazy things have you done to get your kids to sleep? Both of my kids have gone through extensive periods where they were not good sleepers, so I feel like I’ve read every possible article and tried every possible “get your kids to sleep” hack out there. So let’s discuss: What crazy things have YOU done to get your kids to sleep?

Here’s what worked to help get my kids to sleep . . . and what didn’t:

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Filed Under: Parenting Tagged With: bedtime, posts, sleep

How to Handle a Defiant Three Year Old

03/01/2018 by Kat 22 Comments

Readers, what are your best tips for how to handle a defiant three-year-old, aka the threenager (or a kiddo in the terrible twos)? How do you deal with discipline as a working parent in general — and how do you get your nanny or babysitter on the same page?

Everyone says the that the twos are terrible, but for us it was the threes that have been truly, truly horrible with both kids. When my eldest, J, was a threenager, we were giving him time-outs on a regular basis. (That’s him pictured — after a particularly rough night we woke up to find that he had stripped the bookshelves in his room and thrown all of his books in a pile behind the couch in his room. Sadly, I have no good picture of the time he painted the same couch with poop.) We were constantly frustrated and screaming, and it felt like we were never, ever, ever going to be able to live in peace with our child again. Then, one day we sort of looked at each other and said, “Huh… we haven’t given J a time-out in a thousand years. That’s so weird.” It had just sort of ended. Now he’s a perfectly insane six-year-old who gets up to his own mischief, but thankfully we’re mostly past the screaming/time-out stage of things. But: now my youngest, H, is three and a half, and if the slightest thing goes wrong, he is screeching and screaming. He excels at making messes, and his favorite thing right now is taking a pillow and throwing it to knock things off of high shelves. Charming!

(It’s also interesting to note that in the classic, must-read POOPCUP article, this is a growth stage for parents also — the article was joking about how parenting is pretty easy for “parents of one perfect child under preschool” age, but stuff starts to hit the fan once you get into the preschool weeds. Here’s our whole roundup on great articles on pregnancy and motherhood…)

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Filed Under: Parenting, Toddlers Tagged With: discipline, posts

How to Stop Cursing Around Kids

12/20/2017 by Kat Leave a Comment

Every parent has that moment when your kiddo starts speaking, and you think to yourself: SHIT! now we’ve got to stop swearing so much! We were just talking about swearing at work over at Corporette, and I thought an interesting corollary over here might be to share stories and tricks on how to stop cursing around kids.

As I’ve explained at Corporette, personally I like to joke that I was a sailor in a previous life because, around good friends at least, I tend to swear quite a bit. But when my eldest, J, was starting to speak, I found I definitely not want him to start saying bad words — I didn’t want to be That Mom with the kid who swears like a sailor since I feel like it reflects more on the parents than it does the kids. I’ve surprised myself in how little I want my kid to swear — I don’t even like for him to hear the phrase “that sucks” or “crap,” just in part because I think it’s just as easy to say “that stinks” or “well, carp,” both of which are much more acceptable.

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Filed Under: Grade Schoolers, Parenting, Toddlers Tagged With: posts

Make My Life Easier Thursday: Bumkins Snack Bag

12/14/2017 by Kat 93 Comments

I’d dabbled in reusable bags before when J was in daycare, but we never quite found one that we liked. But when I started packing his lunch for first grade this year, I started feeling wasteful every time I grabbed a snack Ziploc bag for a few raisins or dried mangos. So I thought I’d give these cute reusable bags a try. (He doesn’t really know who Mario is yet, but I figured Nintendo would age with him and be good for his brother as well.) Verdict: we like them. We’re not washing them every single time we use them (although sometimes I’ll just do a quick rinse in the sink and then put them on the drying rack inside out — and they’re definitely not for anything gooey or that you want to keep super fresh — but for crackers, raisins, and other small, dry snacks, we like them. They zip easily and make me feel good that on some days, at least, we’re being kind to the planet. A set of two bags is $7.95 at Amazon. Bumkins Nintendo Reusable Snack Bag Small 2 Pack, Super Mario 8-Bit

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Filed Under: Gear