From left to right: Slide, shopping cart, kitchen, doll cradle, flashlight, workshop, pitching machine, tee, lawnmower, Pooh cart, vacuum cleaner, and basketball hoop

I really like Little Tikes products.  Here is a picture of Peytra and Stryker with all of the Little Tikes products we own. None of these were bought brand-new by us.  They were either bought from craigslist or rummage sales, or are hand-me-downs.  Only the hammer (not pictured), pitching machine, and tee were given to us new as a gift.  So you know they can handle the beating they get from kids.  They are sturdy and for the most part don’t use batteries (except for the flashlight, and also the pitching machine that has no off button – thanks Uncle Chris and Aunt Christina).  But seriously, they are toys that last and encourage imaginative play, so I recommend them.

Another recommendation I have is the book NurtureShock:  New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.  It’s about 8 chapters or so on different areas of recent studies on child psychology.  One of them is about how to praise kids (specific praise is best), another is on how lack of sleep affects kids (one hour too little per night, and a 6th grader will perform like the average 4th grader in school), and another chapter is on why kids lie (I found out lying is actually a sign of intelligence, since the kid has to think of an alternate reality.).  I learned how to encourage early language development in babies (respond to their babbles often, don’t just ignore them or carry on your own monologue).  In this chapter, I also learned that Baby Einstein videos really do not help babies learn words at all.  The reason is that the videos don’t show the faces of the people speaking, so it means nothing to babies.  The research shows that regular tv is more beneficial than Baby Einstein videos.  There is also a chapter on why siblings fight.  I don’t remember reading about how to stop the fighting once it happens, but the authors said that a child’s relationship with his best friend before the sibling is born is a good indicator of how the older child will behave toward the younger.  If he has good social skills with his friend, he will carry those over to his sibling.  But if the sibling arrives first, the oldest has no incentive to learn good social skills with his brother or sister, since the brother or sister will always be there, no matter how the oldest acts.

So anyway, I found these things interesting, so I thought I’d pass them on!