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I’m not sure why I didn’t think of this sooner, but in the past few months we’ve discovered that audio books can be a great way to pass the time.  Madeline enjoys them a lot, and Erik can enjoy them for somewhat more limited periods of time.  I really enjoy how it can make car rides more pleasant and laundry-folding sessions less contentious (Madeline complains less about having to fold laundry if there is something to listen to in the process!).   Audio books can also be a great “resting” activity for the kids or something to listen to during a meal or snack time (I’ve often thought I would like to read to the kids during meals or snacks, but I am usually either too hungry or too tired!).

I’ve even found two great ways to get audio books for free (without so much as even a trip to the library!)

Librivox is a site full of free audio books from public domain works that volunteers have recorded and made available on the site.  Of course, this means it only includes books written before 1922.  But, there are many classic works that are old enough to be public domain! The site is not incredibly easy to browse, but if you are looking to see what children’s works they have available, trying going to the advanced search page, and entering “children” for the genre.  A long list of books in alphabetical order by author will greet you!  These free audio books are in Mp3 format that you can do just about anything with — play on your computer, put on your ipod or other MP3 player, or burn to CD.

If you have a Hennepin County Library card, you are eligible to download audio books from two different services: The NetLibrary AudioBooks Center and the Overdrive Digital Catalog.   These services offer both recent and older books for “checkout”, and in many cases you are more limited in what you can do with them.  Most of the books contain DRM or digital rights management.  This is what allows them to just “check out” the book to you for 21 days and then have it not work for you any longer (aka it is “returned” to them).   A limited number of books are in MP3 format, allowing you to burn them to disc or play on any MP3 player.  The rest of the files will work on most computers and some MP3 players and phones.  The technical specifications are different for each of the two services, so read the fine print! Books from one catalog will work on the kids’ MP3 player, while books from the other service will not…though books from both services can be played on our computers.

If you aren’t in Hennepin County, be sure to check with your local library to see if they subscribe to a service allowing you to download free audio books!

So exactly what do we do with the files once they are downloaded? The files from the library that won’t work on our MP3 player get downloaded on to our laptop.  We can move it around the house and listen where ever we are doing chores.  Sometimes I have even let Madeline bring it upstairs to listen in the nook during a quiet rest time.

We haven’t actually tried any of the library files that will work on the MP3 player, so that leaves the MP3 format books we can do as we please with.  We actually have no working CD players in our house or car other than those in the computers.  So, that means we have done one of two things — loaded the files on to a USB stick to play in the car stereo or loaded them on to the MP3 player.

Using the MP3 player offers us the most flexibility, so that is what I have been doing most often.  Not only can the kids listen through their headphones (we actually have a headphone splitter, so both older kids can listen at the same time), we can plug the MP3 player into the living room stereo, the car stereo or a small boom box via a cord that looks like it has a headphone jack on both ends.  One end goes into the MP3 player where the headphones typically go, and the other end goes into an axillary jack on a device.  A simple and cheap way to use audio books anywhere in our house or car!

Whether you want to plan your own homeschool preschool curriculum, find a few worksheets to keep your preschooler busy or find ideas for a few fun activities to do with your child, there are many free resources on the web to meet your needs.  I’ll highlight some resources that I’ve run across…please let me know about any others you like in the comments!

Items with a * are some of my favorites that I use more often!

Worksheets, Craft Templates and other Printables:

*TLS Books and Preschool Worksheets

*DLTK’s Printable Crafts for Kids

Enchanted Learning (paid membership required to access some content)

*First School

ABC Teach for Pre-K (paid membership required to access some content)

KidZone Preschool

School Express for Ages 3-6 (paid membership required to access some content)

Early Childhood Worksheets (some free items, many more require paid membership)

Printable Worksheets at about.com

childcareland.com – Early Learning Activities For Pre-K and Kindergarten (link is to free downloads — other items available for purchase)

Author Jan Brett’s Home Page (coloring pages, worksheets, etc)

Printactivities.com (Printable Worksheets, Puzzle and Maze pages, etc)

Links Specifically for Coloring Pages

Funschool – Preschool – ABC Coloring Pages

Preschool Coloring Book : Letter Coloring Pages

ColoringBookFun.com – Free Coloring Pages – Printable Pages – Holiday Printables

The Coloring Castle

Activity Ideas

*Preschool Express by Jean Warren (some printables and lots of activities)

*Universal Preschool (typical course of study plus basic activities for each skill)

*Preschool and kindergarten learning activities. (Mostly articles, activity suggestions and links)

Preschool Activities — Bags and Boxes (Especially for keeping a toddler or preschooler busy independently)

Themes and Lesson Plans

Free Preschool themes & lesson plans

Everything Preschool Favorite Themes

The Virtual Vine

PRESCHOOL by Stormie (lesson plan ideas plus other assorted activities)

Gayle’s Preschool Rainbow – Activity Central (activities centered around various themes)

Bible Activities and Printables:

Bible Preschool Activities and Crafts

Calvary Chapel Children’s Ministry Curriculum: New Testament (there’s an Old Testament section too)

Christian Preschool Printables

Preschool Bible Coloring Pages : Children’s Bible Coloring Pages : ABC Home Preschool

DLTK Bible Crafts

Today is caucus day in Minnesota. It’s also primary day in 23 other states. As much as anyone, I’m excited about today and really want to see what happens when the dust has settled. That said, I just read a wonderful piece over on David Kuo’s website that keeps this day in perspective.

The great delusion of the build up to sort-of-interesting Tuesday is that it is SUPREMELY-IMPORTANT Tuesday. It isn’t. It is just a day when the presidential nominating process takes its largest leap forward. It is just a day when primary elections are held from sea to shining sea. It is just [sic] day shaped by politics.

Read more here: http://blog.beliefnet.com/jwalking/2008/02/sortofinteresting-tuesday.html

God is indeed sovereign, no matter who gets the nomination or wins the election. Perhaps just as important is the fact that the American public still holds far more power to affect change than the White House. I find these to be very comforting facts.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to go caucus tonight, and might even stick around to make sure that my unbound delegate will stick to the issues I care about at the next level of the caucus. I’m just not going to get bent out of shape about this whole deal. I’m also going to continue working for change where it really matters — in the lives and hearts of individuals.

I hope you can do the same.

As I browse the web every day while feeding Erik, few things usually really stick out to me.  Today, several things did…so, I thought I would share:

On the serious side, I really enjoyed J.R. Woodward’s blog entry about mentoring.    He shares a list of types of mentoring relationships that I think makes for a helpful paradigm.  It looks like this will be the first in a series of entries on the topic of mentoring, and I am definitely looking forward to the rest of the series.

On to the ridiculous…

Can you imagine making a sign like this and doing such a good job that it totally blends in with other signs.  This would make an awesome prank!

If you are looking for Halloween costume ideas, here’s one that really made me laugh. 

And finally, if you haven’t found them already…the lolcats are one of my favorite late night/early morning reading-the-web-while-feeding-Erik timewasters.

Happy Web Browsing!

Is how many wonderful options there are out there for baby carriers. Sure, I had one of those “snuggli”-type carriers with Madeline, but it hurt my back after she weighed about 12 lbs. I had seen ring slings, but mostly only ugly ones!

A couple years ago at Faithwalkers, I met a woman who had a daughter about Madeline’s age (this is when Madeline was 7 months or so old). She was wearing her baby in a wrap (basically, a long piece of fabric) on her back. She told me all about it and gave me a website where I could learn more, but I was really intimidated at the idea of using just a long piece of fabric to wear my already good-sized little girl. But, I made a promise to myself to check into it for my next baby.

Fast forward two years and to make a long story short, I did check into it and discovered that there are a lot of great ways to wear your baby from the time they are born until they are a big toddler! Wearing a baby is a great way to get more done with your hands free, go crowded places without a stroller, comfort a crying baby (that you would be walking around carrying in your arms anyway), keep your little one close while you chase a bigger kid around the park, and more.

The two new kinds of carriers I have tried are pouch-style slings:

And Mei Tais (this is a “BBO”-style Mei Tai I made myself!):

Both of the these kinds of carriers have multiple positions you can use them in (cradle, tummy-to-tummy, hip, and “kangaroo” for the pouch; tummy-to-tummy, forward facing, hip and back for the Mei Tai) — hence the ability to use them for so long.

When it comes to these alternative styles of baby carriers, there’s something to fit every budget — from a do-it-yourself homemade carrier that might cost you a few bucks to make if you get fabric on clearance, to “rare” or trendy imported styles that cost hundreds of dollars.

I think this really must be an up-and-coming trend, because even Target is getting into the act. Many stores now carry “hotslings” in the baby section, which are a popular type of pouch-style sling. If you go to the Target website and search for “sling” in the baby section, you will now find quite a few options, including a couple different brands of pouches and ring slings, as well as one Mei Tai.

Here are a few great websites to check out if you want to learn more:

www.wearyourbaby.com (wearing instructions, do-it-yourself instructions, and more)

crafts.sleepingbaby.net (do-it-yourself instructions for baby carriers and other baby-related items. I used instructions from this site to make my first Mei Tai recently).

www.thebabywearer.com (reviews and info on all kinds of vendors/brands of baby carriers as well as discussion forums — almost more info than you might want to know!)

There are also a lot of local babywearing groups popping up, where you can go and learn first hand about different kinds of carriers, try them on, learn how to use them, and even sometimes borrow a carrier for a month or so. There are groups in the Twin Cities, Des Moines, and Iowa City (just to name a few areas where I know some of our readers live!).

Happy Babywearing!

I just discovered reCAPTCHA, and so far, I love the concept. I really love that they make it easy to use this on your own website.

I wanted to spread the word among the techie (and tech-interested) types that come by this site.  reCAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA system from Carnegie Mellon University that also powers public OCR projects. The concept is simple. Public OCR projects generate tons of words that are difficult for machines to recognize. These are made a little harder and then used as a CAPTCHA for comments or email addresses to prevent spam. The results are then used to digitize books for the public domain. It’s totally win-win!

So, go check it out.

Also, while I’m at it. Everybody should be using something like the GRC password generator to generate passwords. Nice and strong. Useful for wireless access points and personal passwords. You just need a secure way of storing these, since I doubt you’ll remember a long one.

I enjoy reading a few random blogs about various topics that I find interesting. Sometimes I keep up more than other times, but my Bloglines feed-reader keeps me supplied with news about various topics from coffee to church marketing to cheap cooking.

One blog I read fairly often is called “Language Log.” It’s written by several college professors in the field of linguistics. While some of their posts are uninteresting or over my head, I find I often enjoy their commentary about modern uses and mis-uses of language.

They had two posts lately that really made me laugh, and if you consider yourself a grammar or writing geek you might enjoy them too. The writers of the posts billed them as “The dumbest story of the year so far about adverbs” and “The dumbest story of the year so far about adjectives.” You probably don’t even need to be a grammar geek to appreciate the second one. It involves a parent overheard saying to a child (who had just called something “silly”), “Don’t you remember? We do NOT use adjectives!”. That line made both me and Tony laugh out loud!

Spurred by a comment from Tina, I did a little looking into Dinesh’s past.

For the Googlers out there: here is some balance to my recommendation from his Wikipedia page and a critique of him from Campus Progress.

I have no idea if the allegations Tina brings up are true, or if they are whether Dinesh has recanted of his behavior. What I can say, is that if true, the actions she reported are extremely unloving, and I would not approve of them.

I guess as with all things, we must investigate the things we hear as well as the person saying them. Caveat lector!

So, on the way home this weekend, I heard a program on NPR that I hadn’t heard before: Word for Word. The premise is simple; the show plays entire speeches that are relevant and being excerpted for sound bites elsewhere. What caught my attention, however, was not the premise, but the content of this particular speech.

The speaker was Dinesh D’sousa. He is a conservative political scientist. He has a new book out, entitled, “The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and its Responsibility for 9/11.” The speech was from January 23rd, at the Commonwealth Club of California, located in San Francisco. In the speech he gives a very compelling reason to stay in Iraq until it is stabilized — in fact, it’s the most compelling line of reasoning that I’ve heard thus far. Given that he is defending his premise in front of a mostly liberal and intelligent audience, he got grilled at the end of the speech. I have to say, he is sharp, and did a marvelous job of defending his thesis.

I have not read the book, yet, but hearing his speech made me want to. At any rate, I highly recommend that if you have the time, you listen to his speech. It’s free, and it’s here: Dinesh D’sousa at the Commonwealth Club of California.

I realize that some of you reading this have different politics than Dinesh. That’s fine. That said, it’s well worth hearing a very intelligent viewpoint that’s opposite yours, as doing so is the only way to critically think about your viewpoint.

I hope you enjoy this.

It’s true!

Needless to say, a larger company with a real future in the online community of Ames, IA (and surrounding areas) has made an offer that I couldn’t refuse.

So, I sold out.

PlanetRock can now be found at the redesigned Rock ISU web site. (If it doesn’t look new, try refreshing it later in the day.)

Complaints can be sent to the new management.