My son is starting Junior Kindergarten in September so I am becoming very familiar with the school system. I live in Canada so I don’t know if you are having the same issue in other parts of the world, but something that is REALLY bothering me is the emphasis on learning and testing. Yes, yes I know school is all about learning.  I get that. But when I was in school we didn’t start learning how to read until grade 1. Now they want kids to start in Junior Kindergarten (when they are 4!!!) and they give them homework (WHEN THEY ARE 4!!!). I’m sorry, but this just seems to be getting out of hand. How smart do we need our kids to be? I would never proclaim to be a genius, but I graduated with a business degree from a prestigous business school and have managed a successful career for the last 10 years.

And I *gasp* did not learn to read until grade 1.

How much smarter than me do I really expect my kids to be?  Are all kids today expected to be NASA rocket scientists?

One thing I do know though is that my good friend who is a resource teacher has told me many times about the alarming rise in stress among children.  I am sorry but a 4 year old should not have anything to be stressed about.  If it is coming to that we are going too far.

Am I missing something?

The other day I got together with my cousin who I haven’t seen in a couple of months.  Right away she commented that I was looking thinner (yay!) but that my butt was looking flatter (boo!). As you may have read in my previous post In Pursuit of a Flat Belly I am following the Prevention Magazine’s Flat Belly Diet.  As the name suggests it doesn’t really focus much on the butt.   But they didn’t tell me my butt would disappear. This is not what I signed up for.

So I went in search of a great “butt building” routine to get my derriere looking shapely again.  After trying a couple the one I like best is 10-Minute Routine: Butt Toning Exercises from Kaboose.com.  Since it only takes 10 minutes I should be able to squeeze it in to my hectic schedule.

Don’t worry, there will not be any before and after pictures posted.  No one wants to see that.

My oldest niece turned seven in May and constantly has us in stitches with the grown up things she says.

The other day my sister-in-law was telling me a story about how she was getting dressed to go out and my niece came in the room and insisted she try on one of her mom’s frilly bras.  When she had it on my sister-in-law thought it was so funny to see her parading around that she told her to go and show her dad.

“No way” was the immediate response.

My sister-in-law didn’t understand why she wouldn’t do her little fashion show for her dad.  When she asked her, my niece said very seriously, “would you want your father to see you in your bra?”

Good point.

I had the amazing opportunity to write a guest post – I Had No Idea!  A First Time Mom’s Revelations – as part of the Real Moms, Real Views big baby shower event. Now that my kids are both past babyhood, I wanted to share the continuation of the story. What happens when that moist, poop-filled little drooler becomes a… T-O-D-D-L-E-R. There are so many things I wasn’t prepared for. So many things I don’t think I could ever prepare for. It would be sticky. If moist was the name of the game with babies – waking up in a puddle of breastmilk, constant spitup, poop that defies gravity and shoots up the back to their neck – with toddlers it is STICKY. I don’t even know sometimes how my kids manage to get so sticky. It’s as though their skin excreets sugar, I swear. They will get out of the bath and within half an hour they are covered again. Which of course means pint sized handprints on every surface in my home.

Going out without them would feel like I forgot something. So many times I have gone out without my kids (actually, not that many at all, but every time I do manage to get out) and suddenly I freeze in the middle of wherever I am and go into full panic mode because I can’t see my kids.  Then I get a grip and realize they are at Grandma’s and I feel like an idiot.  But that is part of being a mom, it’s a constant state of that feeling you get when you realize you left your purse in a restaurant.

My own phrases would annoy the heck out of me. I didn’t even know I had phrases until I started hearing them repeated back to me a hundred times a day by my toddlers. Invariably whenever they start I always complain to my Mom or husband about where they learned those annoying phrases. And my Mom or husband (who CLAIM to love me) take great pleasure in pointing out that they learned them from me.

That it would be full contact. When I hear new moms complain about their aching backs from carrying a baby everywhere I snicker, “just wait until you have a 30 pounder who refuses to put on his rubber boots” I think with a twisted sense of satisfaction. Misery loves company. Much of parenting a toddler is a full contact sport. Wrestling them in to the clothes… trying to force them to bend at the middle and sit in their car seat… the bruises and scrapes… I perpetually look like I just went 10 rounds with the heavweight champ.

That other parents would become my rivals. Maybe rivals is too strong of a word, but there is definitely a competition between myself and other parents that I never expected. At birthday parties we’re checking out each other’s cakes to see who made the best one. We try to be sly about quizzing our kid’s friends to see if they know their alphabet yet. How we define our success or failure as a parent suddenly depends on how we are doing against our biggest competitors.  It’s not keeping up with the Jones’, it’s outparenting the Jones’!

But despite all of this, I still wouldn’t change it for the world.

It was a busy weekend of playing with the kids, planting our vegetable garden and enjoying time with friends and family at not one but two BBQs.

We could have really used Monday off to recouperate!  Needless to say we were all tired and a little bit grumpy. 

Around 2pm my husband (who works from home) came down for a snack and to grumble about how hard it was to focus on work.  He admitted he was just coasting through the day.

As I looked around the house and at my two small children I realized that as an at-home mom I can never really “coast through my day”.  It reminded me of a great joke I was emailed a long time ago.

Hope you enjoy it…

I mentioned last week in my post I Finally Got My Groove Back that I am making some big changes in my business and in my life.  One of those changes is getting my body back to what it was before I had two babies 17 months apart.

I am lucky that I have never really been overweight. Even after having my kids I was back in my pre-pregnancy jeans within a few weeks.

But (or should I say butt) things never went back to where they should be. 

Drooping, sagging, extra fat where no fat should be. NOT attractive to say the least.  And something I have been self conscious about for a while.

So a few days after my 33rd birthday in March I decided to do something about this once and for all. I talked my friend and husband in to starting the Prevention Magazine Flat Belly Diet with me and I haven’t looked back!

The basis of this diet is controlling your calories and heating healthy fats instead of unhealthy fats.  These good fats are called MUFAs (mono-unsaturated fatty acids) and are found in foods such as avacadoes, nuts, seeds, olives, certain oils and dark chocolate.

Here are the Flat Belly rules:

1. Start with a 4-day anti-bloat jumpstart. The food is rather bland during the jumpstart but definitely gets you off on the right foot. I am actually redoing the jumpstart this week because I am straying too much from the rules.

2. Drinks lots of water (and nothing but water). The book includes a recipe for Sassy Water which is a great alternative to boring plain water.

3. After the jumpstart, eat 1600 calories a day spread over 4 meals. To make this easy to do in a household with children, I modified our favorite recipes to fit the rules. We eat breakfast, lunch, dinner and save our fourth meal for an evening snack.

4. Eat a MUFA with every meal.  We try to find a way to work the MUFA in to the meal like adding nuts to our salad, sauteeing in canola oil, putting flax seed in our muffins.  Sometimes though we just eat a tablespoon of nuts after our meal.

5. Never go more than 4 hours between meals. This rule I find difficult because in our house it would mean eating dinner at 4pm.  So we usually go 5 – 5 1/2 hours between lunch and dinner.

6. Avoid overly processed foods like white flour, refined sugars and fatty foods like fried anything and full fat dairy. For us, we have been able to modify our favorites so we don’t even miss them.  We now make pizza on wholegrain tortilla shells with just a little cheese.  A favorite is fajitas on the grill with  guacamole as the MUFA.  It is easier than you might think to make healthier choices.

Overall I have found this diet really easy to stick to.  It certainly helps that my husband is on board with it (and has already lost 25 lbs!) and that my friend lives right across the street so we make each other meals on days when we feel we might cheat.

What I like best is that I feel we have changed our eating habits so there will be no end to the diet where we start eating our favorites again and put all of the weight back on. 

As of when I am writing this I would still like to lose about 7 more pounds and get my belly truly flat.  We’ll see how my second “jumpstart” goes.  I’ll keep you posted!

Since I started the Parents Only Zone blog in 2006 I’ve struggled with what type of blog I wanted it to be.

It has been so severly neglected at times I considered just shutting it down (if it weren’t for my friend Cassie from Baby Tips Online there wouldn’t have been ANY content at all in 2008.)

But it never felt right to give up on it.

Now I am so glad I didn’t!

A couple of months ago it hit me like a bolt of lightning that if I want to see changes in my life and in my business that I would have to go out and make those changes.  That’s not to say that I ever thought someone else should be responsible for making them for me, just that I was stuck in a rut and didn’t even know I needed a change.

Now that I have a new outlook and a plan for how to achieve my goals, the POZ has an important role to play.  I’m still figuring out the format but I like the current combination of personal posts, lists and site/product recommendations.  And I will be adding  more regular features and guest posts from some amazing mommy bloggers.

Watch for big things over the coming months!