At our house the toddlers have lots of books. Nanna always bought books and constantly read to them, even when they were infants. So they love books and I try to read to them often, but don’t do as good a job as Nanna did.

One thing that hinders me from reading to them as much as I should is technology. (Sure, Poppy, blame it on technology!)

But you can download children’s books to the iPad that are animated and read themselves! iPad books do a much better job than I ever could. In fact, the toddlers would rather watch We’re Going on a Bear Hunt from the iPad because it animates the artwork on the pages of the book. No matter how enthusiastically I may read the book to them, I can’t make the pictures start moving around!

Continue reading →

This new sandbox is awesome!

Last week I built a new sandbox for the toddlers. It’s not really that big from a two-dimensional perspective–five feet by five feet.

But, I should have been thinking three dimensionally when I constructed it because it took 25 bags of sand to fill it up.

That’s 25-fifty pound bags of sand. 1,250 pounds of sand!

But it was worth the effort. The toddlers love it and spend hours playing in it.

For several weeks before I constructed the sandbox my left elbow was hurting. It became so painful that it kept me awake at night.

Continue reading →