Many states have been considering longer school days, and now Congress is looking to get into the act. I can see good and bad to it, and I’m wondering what other parents think.

The good, of course, is that it means there is more time for activities that schools have been neglecting. I’d love for schools to have enough time for art and music classes, for example, as well as just more time for the kids to play at school.

Many parents who work outside the home would probably also appreciate the extra time that they wouldn’t need to find childcare for.

It would give more time for schools to reach the educational goals set by programs such as No Child Left Behind. I’m not 100% a fan of such programs, as I think it encourages too much teaching to the test, but maybe the extra time could be used to do more than that. I can hope, anyhow. Read the rest of this entry »

Gage for wanting peanut butter on his chicken nuggets, along with ketchup, or me for letting him have it.

He’s just in one of his peanut butter moods today, and apparently peanut butter goes with EVERYTHING. Started out today with nice, normal peanut butter on crackers, but he seems to be in the mood to experiment.

The other experiment today is one I’ve been expecting. We took the side rail off the crib. No nap so far; he finds it all too exciting. But he won’t let us put it back on the crib either. If nothing else, I guess he’ll be really tired come bedtime tonight.

[tags]toddler,experiments[/tags]

I do enjoy seeing what my fellow moms are up to in the blogging world. So many different perspectives. So many crazy children.

No Average Mom is a blog about raising some pretty busy kids. One of the boys is 7 and one of those kids who reads quite a bit, and can learn more than you might be ready for. I’m just waiting for my kids to hit that point.

Candid Quips is a blog about all kinds of topics. It’s divided into categories such as the Good, the Bad, the Ugly, the Sad, the Others… you get the idea. Just a fun read, really.

And me too, of course. Gage’s birthday party is on Sunday, so I’m hoping that everyone is as much on the way to recover as it looks like. Be a real drag to have to call people to say the birthday boy is sick.

This is just an annoying little bug. Mostly kills the appetite with some nausea thrown in for good measure. Other than that and on and off mild fever, you’d hardly know it was there.

Of course, being sick doesn’t give me much of a break. There are supplies to buy, the house to prepare… you know the birthday party prep routine!

If you get into running an online business, one of the challenges is getting your site or sites up and running. You can do it yourself or hire someone.

Once you get the hang of it, using a content management system such as WordPress or Joomla is pretty easy. But making templates can be a lot of work.

There are free templates out there, but unless you want to look like everyone else you’re going to want to customize. For example, I had to figure out how to customize a WordPress template to match the rest of my site for this blog. If you compared it to the original… well, you can see some layout similarities, but I changed it quite significantly. Read the rest of this entry »