Kids Parents Club

New book by Jacqueline Wilson titled ‘Love Lessons’ has got good press and readers replies. By the way, you can buy it on Amazon right now. Well, I’m not a big fan of Jacqueline Wilson at all but however if teenagers have loved this books – why not? Probably I would prefer my daughters read books of other authors but what can I do if she does read this one:-)

Well, the story is about fourteen-year-old Prue and her sister Grace who have been educated at home by their controlling, super-strict father all their lives. They know they are different to ‘normal’ girls but their attempts to find out what being an ordinary teenager are like – buying nice clothes instead of wearing Mum’s odd hand-made garments, reading teenage magazines etc – are greeted with fury by their Dad. But when Dad has a stroke and ends up in hospital, unable to move or speak, Prue suddenly discovers what it’s like to have a little freedom. Unable to cope with their education and a sick husband, the girls’ mother sends them to the local comp and they experience school life for the first time. Prue had never thought it would be so bitchy and that she’d find it so hard to fit in. The only person she can talk to is her kindly, young, handsome Art teacher, Rax. She and Rax bond over art lessons, and soon he asks to babysit for his young children while he and his wife have a night out on a Friday. This becomes a regular ‘date’ and Prue can’t wait for the ten minutes they have along together as he drives her home. As her feelings for Rax develop, she begins to realise that perhaps he feels the same way about her. But he can’t act upon them, can he?

I guess each of us have ever noticed that listening a favorite music makes feel better. We teach our kids to sing and listen music and they have their own preferences on the way. Besides that don’t you know that this music can make you smarter too? The point is to choose the right music.

Don Campbell wrote wonderful book called “Mozart Effect” then looking through this book you will know a lot of interesting things including the beneficial effects of certain types of music.
Some of the benefits are:
Improves test scores
Cuts learning time
Calms hyperactive children and adults
Reduces errors
Improves creativity and clarity
Heals the body faster
Integrates both sides of the brain for more efficient learning
Raises IQ scores 9 points (research done at University of California, Irvine)

It’s really very cognitive and helpful reading not only for parents.
No doubt, music, as a cultural artifact, has a very positive influence on the emotions. And what else you know exactly, that is when we play or sing with our kids together we learn to hear each other and that is also very important. Competing behavior includes also visiting concerns, musical performances and festivals. Since almost everyone has now computer and internet access we have great opportunity to find and buy any needed tickets, though it were concerts, sports, arts, theater, Reading Festival Tickets or just family events thickets. By the way, for all those parents who prefer such kind of music as major rock, indie or alternative acts Festival Tickets are available online now. Anyway check out detailed Reading Festival Information for choosing the most acceptable show for both you and your children visiting. Children under 13 (12 and under) are admitted free but must be accompanied by a ticket holding adult of course.

Once there were three little pigs who lived together in mutual respect and in harmony with their environment. Using materials that were indigenous to the area, they each built a beautiful house. One pig built a house of straw, one a house of sticks, and one a house of dung, clay, and creeper vines shaped into bricks and baked in a small kiln. When they were finished, the pigs were satisfied with their work and settled back to live in peace and self-determination.

But their idyll was soon shattered. One day, along came a big, bad wolf with expansionist ideas. He saw the pigs and grew very hungry, in both the physical and ideological sense. When the pigs saw the wolf, they ran into the house of straw. The wolf ran up to the house and banged on the door, shouting, “Little pigs, little pigs, let me in!”

The pigs shouted back, “Your gunboat tactics hold no fear for pigs defending their homes and culture.”

But the wolf wasn’t to be denied what he thought was his manifest destiny. So he huffed and he puffed and he blew down the house of straw. The frightened pigs ran to the house of sticks, with the wolf in hot pursuit. Where the house of straw had stood, other wolves bought up the land and
started a banana plantation. At the house of sticks, the wolf again banged on the door and shouted,

“Little pigs, little pigs, let me in!”

The pigs shouted, “Go to hell, you carnivorous, imperialistic oppressor!”

At this, the wolf chuckled condescendingly. He thought to himself:
“They are so childlike in their ways. It will be a shame to see them go, but progress cannot be stopped.”

So the wolf huffed and puffed and blew down the house of sticks. The pigs ran to the house of bricks, with the wolf close at their heels. Where the house of sticks had stood, other wolves built a time-share condo resort complex for vacationing wolves, with each unit a fiberglass reconstruction of the house of sticks, as well as native curio shops, snorkeling, and dolphin shows.

At the house of bricks, the wolf again banged on the door and shouted, “Little pigs, little pigs, let me in!”

This time in resp?nse, the pigs sang songs of solidarity and wrote letters of protest to the United Nations.

By now the wolf was getting angry at the pigs’ refusal to see the situation from the carnivore’s point of view. So he huffed and he puffed, and huffed and puffed, the grabbed his chest and fell over dead of a massive heart attack brought on from eating too many fatty foods.

The three little pigs rejoiced that justice had triumphed and did a little dance around the corpse of the wolf. Their next step was to liberate their homeland. They gathered together a band of other pigs who had been forced off their lands. Their new brigade of porcinistas attacked the resort complex with machine guns and rocket launchers and slaughtered the cruel wolf oppressors, sending a clear signal to the rest of the hemisphere not to meddle in their internal affairs. Then the pigs set up a model socialist democracy with free education, universal health care, and affordable housing for everyone.

Please Note: The wolf in this story was a metaphorical construct. No actual wolves were harmed in the writing of the story.

excerpt from J.F.Garner’s book “Politically Correct Bedtime Stories.”

Friends care
Friends share
We need friends
Everywhere!

I have a friend
Whose name is …..
And we have fun together.
We laugh and play
And sing all day
In any kind of weather.

Swedish artist, Carl Larsson (1853 – 1919) is known as portraitist, book illustrator and printmaker. His most famous works are the house he designed in the small village Sundborn and watercolor scenes of everyday life there. His paintings are filled with warm, cosines and kindness, especially these 2 ones which are relating with Christmas Days. So this is the cause why I choose to put them here today.
Christmas Morning.
Fairy Tales.
Carl Larsson came from a poor family and studied (1866–76) at the Konstakademi in Stockholm, supporting himself throughout this period. From 1871 to 1878 he contributed illustrations to the comic journal Kaspar and the Ny illustrerad tidning . From 1875, for several decades, he was a prolific book illustrator, his most renowned work in this field being his drawings for Fältskärns berättelser (‘The Barber-surgeon’s tales’; pubd 1883–4) by Zacharius Topelius, and the Rococo-inspired watercolours for the Samlade skaldeförsök (‘Collected attempts at poetry’; pubd 1884) by the 18th-century Swedish author Anna Maria Lenngren. However, that Larsson produced most of his own prints.