The flower fairy waits for no-one

One of the things I really like about Waldorf education is the attention that the teachers spend on creating a warm, inviting, classroom. Every class I've seen has a "Nature Table", for example, where students bring in interesting or cool things they've found in the great outdoors, be it a rock, stick, leaf, snake skin, or whatever else catches their eye.

In our school, parents also take turns being the flower fairy, which is what I find myself having to deal with tonight, even though it's almost 11pm. The flower fairy, as we say, waits for no-one...

Does Mom's Diet Affect the Quality of Breastmilk?

Breastmilk is undoubtedly the best source of nutrition for infants. But what if mom doesn’t eat all the right things? Will her breastmilk not be good enough for her child?

For years it was thought that the foods in a mother’s diet would affect the quality of her breast milk. Mothers were often encouraged to increase their milk or dairy consumption in order to maintain an ample supply and to avoid eating certain foods like garlicky or spicy foods because they could cause the baby to become fussy or colicky.

There seemed to be quite a lot of restrictions on the mother’s actions in order to do something that was supposed to be natural.

Kids don't need to know how to program computers

My friend Brad Feld has an interesting article on his blog asking Where has BASIC gone? He's talking specifically about what programming language to use when teaching children how to program, but what I kept thinking about subsequent to reading his article is why most children don't need to learn programming.

Note that I'm not saying that interested kids shouldn't learn to program if they're so inclined, but taking a "left turn" from what Brad wrote and am talking instead about whether all kids need to learn programming or not?

To position this well and state my biases, we are a 99% media free household and our children don't have their own TVs, own computers, Gameboys, Sony PSP's etc. In fact, they don't even have live electrical plugs in their rooms. Just kidding on that last bit!

I've often been surprised by what I hear from people both in the tech industry and the general public who seem to believe that all children should learn how to program and that computers should be an integral part of the classroom starting with first grade, if not kindergarten. No surprise, I disagree with that quite strongly!

I thought we'd eliminated DDT, but ...

Did I miss the memo explaining how DDT wasn't really such a bad thing for the environment and so therefore it's not such a terrible thing that the World Health Organization is now encouraging third world nations to expand the use of DDT?

But that's just exactly what's happening, according to the LA Times: WHO May Allow More DDT to Fight Malaria, about a report that "[highlights] DDT as a safe, effective and cheap option for countries to choose" in the fight against malaria.

It's important to realize, of course, that malaria is a dangerous disease transmitted by mosquitoes and that it kills an alarming number of people every year (it sickens up to 500 million people per year and actually kills over one million people, mostly young children in Africa). It's bad.

Fun holiday activities: bicycling and bowling

I will resist the urge to go all alliterative on you, so I'll simply note that it's not always easy to find an activity that appeals to wee ones and older kids at the same time, but we're really lucky to have a 2yo that's a confirmed "sidekick" of the older kids, ready and eager to try whatever is in the cards.

Heck, at 2, she's already jumping off the high-dive at the pool, jumping off docks into lakes, and zipping around on her own little bike (admittedly, with training wheels, but I don't think that'll last much more than a year or so). We've begun pointing out to the older children that they need to be conscious of the behavior they're "modeling" in front of her, least she do something even more dangerous!

Anyway, today was Labor Day, a holiday, so we needed to come up with some activities to get us out of the house and do something fun and physical.