I’m thankful that a lot of early childhood places are really beginning to focus on emotional awareness. There are so many resources for social-emotional learning for kids now. My child’s preschool is SEED certified (https://www.nmececd.org/seed/) and she’s been working on a feelings journal. At our elementary school we have social skills groups where we explicitly teach kids about emotions and also teach them life skills (we have small groups of kids playing board games to handle taking turns, losing, etc). At home and school we have these little “spot” of emotion stuffies and an accompanying book that explain what an emotion is, what it feels like, and what we can do about it. Our school also uses the zones of regulation (pic) to not only help kids understand but to also help the staff understand how our students are feeling.

Out daycare costs were between $205-305 a week, so between $820-1,225 a month. Once she’s 5, school is free.

Being a new mom can definitely be isolating and I’m not a person who does well at being home. I like being active and doing things. I don’t regret having my kid in daycare. I do think the United States needs to do better at giving mothers the choice though. It’s almost impossible to be a single income family, especially with multiple children. But then daycare is so expensive too.

In the US our child started going at 6 weeks old. Daycare (and now preschool) is just as normal to her as being at home. Especially since in her three years she’s probably had over a dozen different teachers. She’s learned to warm up to new people and situations quickly.

I also work in an elementary school. (5 to 11 years old). I see kids that didn’t go to school at all before coming to us. Even some are homeschooled for a few years before starting school. I can usually tell the difference between kids who went to some kind of preschool (3-4 year old program, even part time) and who hasn’t. It’s not always a bad thing but it’s a harder adjustment for those kids.

Using parental controls and not using them can both be valid. But they are not set-it-and-forget-it and let the kid run wild with the device. Personally I’m in the camp of not using them but letting my kid use screens in age appropriate amounts with age appropriate content on devices that are family devices in common areas, plus keeping the conversation going about what she’s engaging with.

Surprises have an end. Secrets are forever. A surprise is a secret for now, but I can tell you later. Secrets are things I can never tell, which can be dangerous.

The chronological version is definitely better on later playthroughs. The gameplay and story work best in the original version. The chronological story is just interesting to see what information the characters are working with in later scenes and to see some parallels.

My husband is playing the chronological version right now and literally finished this part when I scrolled past your post. He played this game when it first came out; we stayed up all weekend to finish.

I would kill time with this for a little while but over the last few months the audio lag has made it unusable in my opinion. After opening and pressing play it would take a few seconds for it to start playing, and then after swiping to the next one the audio from the previous one would keep playing for a few seconds. I could swipe through like 4 or 5 videos until the audio would catch up. Also, the hashtags are nice but at the moment they function where I have to select one, watch it, swipe back to the hashtag page, select another one, and repeat. I want to just be able to scroll through hashtags or someone’s account instead of clicking on individual videos (like you used to be able to). My following page gets stuck after a few videos where I can’t scroll anymore too. I’ll reopen it when the update drops, but there’s definitely issues to iron out.

I call my mom “mom”, but now that I have a kid I use her grandma name more frequently. Honestly it’s a little easier to call her that, I have some unresolved stuff and while we’re friendly the mom term is a little much. My daughter calls me “mommy”, but usually doesn’t enunciate so it’s “mah-ee” most of the time.

When we moved we cleared out our closet of tech boxes. Found a few accessories and whatnot still in there. Consolidated down to just a few boxes to hold accessories and documentation. Now we’re slowly building the collection again, but we’re better than before. (Mostly because having a kid cut our disposable income quite considerably).

I read How to Raise Children Who Aren’t Assholes by her. It was a decent read. I’ll probably pick this up but I feel like so many books just regurgitate the same info