Cool idea (I think) for rewarding kids

I had what I think is a really great idea for a reward. Kenny loves candy, and doesn't get it very often. So, if there's a behavior that I really want to encourage, if I rewarded him with a candy for it, that would work out great. The problem is, I don't want to give him that much candy!

My idea is that, instead of actually giving him a piece of candy, I would allow him to spin a "wheel of fortune" device (probably from a board game), divided into a number of different sections. If the pointer ended up on the appropriate section, he'd get his piece of candy!

They say that intermittent rewards (i.e. like gambling) are the most powerful, so maybe this would really work. I don't have a behavior right now that we're working on, so I'll put this in my parenting tips archive.

Oh - bedtime is now working really great. What we're doing is setting up the kitchen timer for about 6 or 7 minutes. If we finish all our bedtime tasks in this time, then Kenny gets a story. If not, no story. This has speeded things up dramatically, and I don't have to do any nagging (other than occasionally saying, "Look, the timer's ticking!").

My new job

About a month ago I started looking for work - and I'm just starting my second week of work now, working on a data warehouse project at Tmobile.

The thing that really surprised me on this job hunt was how easy it was - not just to find a job, but to find a job where they were okay with the schedule I've kept for more than three years now. I work Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with Tuesday and Thursday off. I got not one, not two, but THREE job offers within four days. And they were all okay with me working Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Previously I had the obviously mistaken idea that part time work was very difficult to find, that you had to have worked at the company for a long time and developed a great relationship, yadda, yadda, yadda. I think the thing that made a difference this time was that I didn't make such a big deal about it before actually meeting with potential employers. I mentioned that I had some schedule restrictions, but it was only after I had already interviewed with people, and sold them on me, that I told them what my schedule needed to be like. And they were uniformly fine with it.

Here's the two things that really helped me both with finding a job, and finding a job where they were okay with me working part-time:
1. Highly experienced database professionals are very difficult to find right now
2. I looked only for contract work. That way, there's no hassles with what the company policy on part-time work, do you get benefits, etc. It's very simple - you get paid per hour worked.

Avoiding Colds this winter

I'm just now getting over a cold, which became complicated by a serious cough and sinus infection - the first sinus infection that I've ever had. I was never sick enough to stay in bed, but I was sick enough to stop working out, doing any kind of projects - basically doing anything other than the bare essentials.

My plan this winter is to avoid catching any more colds. I've been doing some research online on how best do this. Basic handwashing is recommended very frequently. But why is it recommended to use alcohol gel based sanitizers only when washing with soap and water isn't available? It seems that the sanitizers would be even more effective. Anyway - I'm proceeding on the assumption that using a hand sanitizer is just as good.

The other recommendation is - avoid touching your face. Touching your nose and eyes in particular is supposed to be a very effective way to transmit cold viruses - exactly what I don't want.

So, I'm planning a two pronged attack:
1. Use hand sanitizer frequently. Maybe I can try to do it every time I get home from being out and about, and every time I get in the car after shopping. Plus at work - whenever I get to my desk from talking to someone, or using the restroom.

2. Don't touch my face at all - if I need to scratch, use the back of my hand.

My endeavor is complicated by the fact that I have a 3 year old son in daycare. Stay tuned to see if I can avoid colds this winter.

Fun is different when you have kids

Yesterday I went to Newcastle Beach Park with both Kenny and Peter. It's not easy to go swimming with a preschooler, when you have an infant with as well. Nevertheless, Kenny and I had lots of fun in the water (and there were friends at the beach who were able to watch Peter for a while).

The epiphany for me was that what I think of as fun has changed dramatically since I had kids. Before, fun at a beach park would have meant hanging out with friends, getting a good swim in, reading an enjoyable book. But now with kids, my priorities have changed. I have a lot of fun, just watching Kenny enjoy himself in the water. We never even went above knee height for me (waist high for Kenny), but Kenny had a big grin on his face the entire time. We played chase, with Kenny and Kenji chasing me as I splashed through the water, and also spotted little fish, no more than two inches long, darting through the shallow water. And fun was had by everyone. Although Peter did sleep through almost all of it...

Feeling peppier every day

So, it's seven weeks post-childbirth now. Peter is doing great, and is starting to -- not sleep through the night, but at least go immediately back to sleep once he's fed at night. So, I'm getting at least about seven hours of sleep, albeit interrupted. That's assuming I can get back to sleep once I wake up at 4. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

And I'm feeling so much better! Every move, during pregnancy, was difficult. Just getting out of bed or out of my chair was an ordeal. But now - the idea comes to me that I need to do something aroud the house, or get something, and pop I go off the couch -- no problem at all! It feels great. I'm eating very well, losing some of the pregnancy weight, working out on the treadmill 30 minutes every day, and also doing strengh exercises. Everything is making a big difference. I'm loving it.

My first few weeks with baby Peter

You wouldn't have known from my blog, but I gave birth on June 28th to a son, Peter. He's a very cute and good natured little baby.

I think I'm enjoying Peter as a newborn more than I enjoyed Kenny. Not from any differences between them -- it's just that with Kenny, I was so exhausted from trying to breastfeed (including pumping, etc), that I wasn't relaxed enough to really enjoy him. That did come after a few months, though.

But with Peter, holding him is like a drug - instant ecstasy! I sit and hold him and watch his little stretches and listen to his little grunts and squeaks, and just adore him. I wonder how he'll turn out...

Toothbrushing success - revisited

A few months ago I blogged about having a new technique for toothbrushing with Kenny, that was very successful. Well, it turns out that over the course of time, it was actually only somewhat successful. Supervising Kenny's toothbrushing was still one of the more stressful parts of my day.

Anyway - I have a new technique, or actually an addition the previous techniques. I pull myself together, try to be less grumpy, and make the toothbrushing into an adventure, by pretending that I can see the "cavity bad guys" in the form of animals. For example, "Look, I see a tiger cavity bad guy! I'm going to brush him away...got him!"

So far, surprisingly successful. We'll see how it works in a week or so.

How to stop unproductive web surfing!

At work, I frequently run a process or query which may take 10 or 15 minutes to finish. Not enough time to really get another piece of work done, but just enough time to waste surfing the web. Then before you know it, the process has been done for 5 minutes, and I'm still surfing away!

So, I've devised a technique to prevent myself from web surfing certain time-wasting sites at work. This is for Internet Explorer 6.0. Go into Tools, Options, then choose the Content tab. Enable the content advisor. Then, go to Approved Sites. It's somewhat of a misnomer in this situation, because we're actually disabling websites. You can restrict yourself from whichever websites you want. The content advisor will prompt you to create a password to get to the site. I put a long string of nonsense text in there, that I'll never remember, and then pasted that string in a text file on my computer. In the password hint, I put the location of the text file. So, if I ever really want to get to a certain site that I've restricted, I can do that with just the extra step of looking up the text file. I haven't yet, though.

This simple tip has gained me a lot of time. I'm a big believer in modifying your environment to make your life better, instead of trying to use sheer willpower to do or not do things.

Toothbrushing success!

Victory is mine! A minor victory, and just for the past 2 days, but still, it feels good. Some background here - my son Kenny is generally a very good boy, but when I brush his teeth, he's incredibly squirmy. Actually, he's always squirmy, and on the move, but that's what being three is all about. It only bothers me when I'm trying to brush his teeth. I'm always having to admonish, reprimand, etc. It's almost the worst part of my day.

So the past few days I've been using the following techniques:

1. He needs to hold his elbows. This has the result of quieting his hands, which quiets his whole body.
2. If he stays still, we get to read two books for bedtime. If he doesn't, he only gets one book.
3. Instead of having him stand on the stool right in front of the sink (and also in front of the mirror, where he gets distracted making faces at himself), I sit on the tub, and have him stand in front of me. No more getting distracted in front of the mirror.

All in all, we've had a few good days now, and the evening tooth-brushing routine is no longer so daunting. Plus, I'm more thorough. I started begin more thorough just recently, when the daughter of a friend of mine (same age as Kenny) had six cavities, 4 of which need to be filled. Yikes!

I'm a sucker for self-improvement

I'm a huge consumer of self-improvement books, and websites and blogs. I don't buy a lot of self-improvement books, but I do get lots and lots from the library. My thoughts about this are two-fold:

1. It's great that I'm interested in self-improvement, making changes, making things better. And honestly, I'm not a slacker in that regard - I'm pretty good at the basics.

2. Seriously - enough of the reading already! Making one substantive change in habits, discipline, etc., would be much better than to read 5 books on how to be more efficient.

I'm a really fast reader, and it doesn't take me long at all to zip through some of these self-improvement books. But I should focus more on actually doing things rather than reading about them.

Limiting TV viewing...

Now that I'm in my last 2 months of pregnancy (and very eager to have it over with, too), I've been watching lots and lots of TV. My energy level is so low that watching TV is about the best I can manage.

I have high hopes and grand plans, though, of all that I'm going to accomplish in the evenings, starting a few months after baby #2 is born. And to do this, my TV watching habits will need to change drastically. Put simply - I have very little free time at all. Soon, with baby #2, I'll have even less. I can't afford to spend large chunks of that time watching TV, if I want to get anything done.

Last night, Eric and I watched the show Rough Science. Great show, very interesting. But the thought I was left with was this - that watching other people do neat things on TV rates about a 1 on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being things that make you a loser couch-potato, and 10 being things that make you a well-rounded, interesting, accomplished person). Actually DOING neat things yourself - that ranks far, far higher - in the 8 to 1o range.

The problem is that a normal brain, when faced with a choice between watching something interesting and/or entertaining on TV, or not watching TV, and having to come up with other plans, will most often just make the easy choice - just watch TV. It takes a lot of effort to do something else - especially if you've been in the habit, like I have, of watching TV as a default activity.

About 12 years ago I moved out of a house that I rented with a lot of other people, where TV watching was the default activity every evening. I moved to an apartment, and made the choice to not have a TV. The first few weeks were rough. I remember looking longingly at the cable plug on the wall. But it got better, and soon I didn't think of it at all, except that I had more time for things, and felt somewhat smug about not having a TV.

So, it can be done. And soon I'll be thinking more about specifics. Like, can we just get rid of the TV? My husband might have a problem with that, being that he bought this monster flat screen TV for himself. What other solutions are there? Our son Kenny frequently watches a kiddie show a day, such as Dora the Explorer and Franklin. Should we limit that?

Stay tuned till next time...

My search for a kid's timer

I've heard a lot about how well timers work with kids - for things like giving your child a set amount of time to clean up, get ready for bed, etc. Generally a kitchen timer is recommended. Well, I've found that kitchen timers are not really that great. We have a manual Oxo timer that goes from 0 to 60 minutes. However, most tasks for Kenny would take no more than 5 minutes, and it's difficult for him (as well as for me) to tell how much time is left on the timer. Plus, there's no warnings when he's getting close.

So I've been searching around online for something else. I found the Learning Resources Time Tracker on Amazon, and was really excited to see it - it looked like exactly what I wanted to find, with a light that starts out green, goes to yellow, and then red when time is almost up. What a cool idea! Then, however, I read the reviews. Some of them were very positive, but many were quite negative, and vociferous about how poorly designed it was and how hard it was to use.

So, the search goes on. Please let me know if you find anything cool!

What's so great about organic foods?

I've been thinking about writing up something on organic foods for a long time. I've never seen much (any?) evidence that they're actually better for you. They certainly are much more expensive. Anyway, there was recently an article in the Wall Street Journal about organics, "Are Organic Food Advocates in Thrall to Mythology Rather Than Science?". Very interesting. Here's some choice excerpts:

"Organic-certification rules only prohibit most, although not all, "synthetic substances and ingredients." The word "chemical" isn't used in the rules because there is no intrinsic physical difference between the categories of synthetic and nonsynthetic substances. They are all chemicals."

"...no currently approved crop pesticide, whether organic or not, has any detectable effect on the health of consumers. The enormous premium paid to purchase organic foods is based on mythology, not fact."

Interesting stuff. Now I need to figure out a good non-confrontational way to bring that up with people.

Minimizing how often I need to go grocery shopping

I try to have us eat as many meals as possible at home. Home cooking (at least, my home cooking) is far healthier than eating at restaurants, not to mention more convenient and cheaper. Of course, you also need to consider the time you spend grocery shopping. I don't particularly enjoy that, so I like to buy items that are nutritious, and stay fresh for a long time.

I collect tasty, healthy recipes for things that don't require a lot of fresh ingredients. For example, 3 bean salad made of various types of canned beans. The only fresh ingredients are onions and parsley. Onions last a very long time in the fridge, so you'd only need to buy the parsley fresh.

Or my corn and black bean salad. Very yummy, the only fresh ingredients it requires are onion and cilantro.

Cabbage, in the form of cole slaw, is great. Delicious, healthy, everyone loves it, and cabbage lasts for weeks in the fridge - unlike green salad, which lasts a few days.

Cauliflower is another very healthy vegetable, and a good keeper in the fridge. Lasts a couple weeks at the least.

Let's not forget carrots! They last forever as well. Need some more carrot recipes. I do have some carrot slaw recipes that are great.

I could use some more tips for keeping cilantro and parsley fresh in the fridge, though. These are some very useful herbs, but they have a tendancy to go all brown and mushy in my fridge.

Tracking finances on Yodlee

I found out a few months ago about a website called Yodlee (the actual URL is moneycenter.yodlee.com). It's site that can aggregate all your finances in one place. Basically you give them ALL your financial information (credit card, bank, mutual funds, etc) and they will download information for you, so you can click one "update all accounts" button, and get your transaction history, net worth, recent expenditures, and so on.

Giving a third party the password to all your accounts is probably a big leap of faith for many people. But I trust online security more than I do credit card security at your average restaurant. And the only time I've ever had a fraudulent transaction on my credit card, it was a local thing, not something that happened online.

Using this website has simplified my life tremendously. Before, I had a monthly routine of putting all my transaction into Microsoft Money, categorizing them, checking the Microsoft Money totals against the financial institution. I had a whole list of steps that I had to go through before I could check off the "did MS Money" task from my to-do list. Frequently I procrastinated because it was so tedious. This made things more difficult for myself down the line.

Now things are much simplier. I just login to Yodlee, update all my accounts (by pressing one button), and check recent transaction to make sure they're all kosher. Of course, there's not nearly as many bells and whistles as I had with Microsoft Money, but there's also not nearly as much work, nor as many opportunities for error.

All in all, I consider this a great leap forward in simplifying my life financially.