FREE Dazzled by Hope Pink Ribbon Pin

Not only does the Breast Cancer Site do great things by funding FREE mammograms for women in need, but they’ll give you something free for helping out too. All you have to do is sign up forTThe Breast Cancer Site’s FREE Daily Reminder Service, and to say thank you, they’ll give you a FREE Dazzled by Hope Pink Ribbon Pin! Better still, they’ll give extra funding toward mammograms for women in need if you are a brand-new registrant!

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Imagine being on a Disneyland vacation.  You have planned, waited and anticipated.  After a whirlwind first day in the Magical Kingdom, you tuck in the kids and hit the sack.  Two hours later, the fire alarm goes off. Loud and startling, we quickly grab the kids and head outside.  After an hour outside, assuming it was a false alarm, it turned out it was not.  It was real.  Smoke filled a hallway, and someone had a fire in their personal suite.

While wiling our time away outside in the California night, it reminded us of a prior, similar experience at the YMCA of the Rockies (a FANTASTIC family destination in the heart of the Rocky Mountains).  We happened to be staying in a lodge instead of a cabin, and in the middle of the night, off goes the fire alarm.  Same thing, only much colder than the California sky.

So what did these experiences teach us? First, assume its real, not a prank.  Two, move fast.  Don’t think about changing clothes and grabbing all your personal belongings.  Grab a blanket and the kids, and move.  Once you get outside, you can wrap up and be safe.

You may have had similar experiences, or you may sometime in the future.  To learn more about the important issue of fire safety, take a look at the National Fire Prevention Association website for great tips and information. Scholastic also has a page with great teaching resources for Fire Prevention Week.

Guest Post by Cat Lichtenbelt

When dealing with a child’s behavior that is less than ideal in the Kindergarten world, there are a few ways to respond. I choked down the denial, and went head first into appointments, web searches, talking with parents, meetings with the Principal. I don’t regret a moment of it. Your best friends are those who guide you without lecturing you. I have one of those and I will always be thankful for her and what she gave me, a name and phone number!

Our son was the child who was unable to sit still at circle time.  He was the one who got so focused on a project he would melt down when torn away from it. His social skills were way behind his peers at times and other times he was adored by his classmates. The opinions of the educators did not match our opinions of him. He was always fixated on details of mechanical workings, recited information as if he was reading a script, yet I said his name more times each day then I had hairs on my head!  I say he thinks like an Engineer, with all the quirks and personality! He destroyed school property and built the Lincoln Memorial out of blocks from memory all in the same day. I cried out of confusion.  Read the rest of this post...

Today, our good friend Cat Lichtenbelt shared her very personal story with us about her struggles and triumphs with Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD). Cat mentioned how many doctors she had to go through before she finally discovered an occupational therapist who was able to properly diagnose her son’s disorder as SPD. So, to hopefully help others out there who may be wondering if their child has SPD, here’s a quick summary of what SPD is. Technically, SPD can be described as a neurological disorder causing difficulties with processing information from the five senses (vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste), the sense of movement (the vestibular system) and/or the positional sense (proprioception).  Read the rest of this post...