And now for some holiday preachy...

It's official. Every baby shower celebration we attend from now on will find us carrying a paper cutter as our gift. Not kidding.

The good reason is this: paper chains are awesome! They're so festive, they're so easy to make, they're so inexpensive (a chain made from old homework papers would be recycled and so fun), they're timeless. The "preachy" is this: We were at the dentist this week and in the waiting room there were TWO televisions with movies playing and a video game offering. On top of that there were children in that room playing with their own video games - I guess what was available wasn't good enough. Sorry, but it was the proverbial straw for me. I was sitting in the room thinking, "We are not parenting our children in a new, innovative way...we are collectively pathetic."

And that got me wondering: How often do kids sit and work in a way where they have to just think, daydream, imagine? And the answer for too many of our children (I'm including my own too) is not often enough. I did not walk 5 miles in the snow uphill both ways when I was a kid, but a generation ago kids did occupy their own time at their bus stops with no props, they sat in the car during errands and looked out the window, they made up games at the doc's office while waiting to be called...

Don't even get me started on how this led me to think about this issue and its connection to nature-deficit disorder! Anyways, my answer to this collective pathetic is paper chains. They are almost therapeutic in their quiet and calm making and kids of all ages love them. Love. Them. Babies love the colors and the paper (with supervision of course), toddlers can help with the order of the chains and the tape holding, and this is a great fine motor activity for older kids of all ages. My kids can sit and make them for a very long time. It's time for us to teach our children the lesson of what can be learned in times of quiet.

 It's a fun one. Preachy over. xo