Avant Parenting Archives
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Avant! Welcome to my parenting blog archives
As you can see by the dates below, this blog is no longer being updated. However, there’s lots of good stuff here, much of it as true now as when it was written. Please feel free to browse, or follow these links: One last piece of parenting advice: Enjoy today even if it’s a rough…
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Drought or deluge
I was mentioning to someone that we had exceeded our yearly average rainfall, which was a bright little piece of news amidst floods, landslides, and tsunami. “The problem is,” she said, “we don’t have average rainfall. It’s either drought or deluge.” How true that is. This morning my husband looked out the window and said,…
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Science inspirations
We had another year of the ups and downs of the county science fair, and I can once again say that this is a great experience for kids. It can be a little hard on the parents. Here are my pro’s and con’s of the science fair. Pro: This is a whole-child learning experience. Most…
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Face that book with a smile
I just finished reading The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. It’s a much more subtle read than the title might imply. He’s not actually saying that my brain has been taken over by Facebook. He’s only implying it. Or something like that. I’ve been having trouble with my short-term recall these…
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How to teach science
We love San Francisco’s Exploratorium. For kids who love science, or just love to mess around, the Exploratorium has it all. You’ve got fun stuff, and weird stuff, and gross stuff, and fascinating stuff. You’ve got physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and other disciplines I can’t think of right now. You’ve got fog and noisemakers and…
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Going green, going cheap
A friend and I were talking about how all this emphasis on “going green” was getting her down. Her family is presently in reduced economic circumstances, and she said, “I feel like we can’t afford to be green!” So we started to talk about all the ways in which her family is actually living a…