It’s birthday party time again for our soon to be 9 year old son. Since he and his friends are getting older and more rambunctious I thought it would be best to have the party somewhere other than our house. We decided on a local Nature Center that rehabilitates injured animals for return to the wild and houses some severely injured animals in a lovely little zoo. These animals look perfectly fine, but they would be unable to survive in the wild for various reasons. [more]

Q: When is a car like a frog? [more]

After talking a bit about hot Christmas toys the other day, and how hard it’s going to be to find and buy TMX Elmo in the runup to Christmas, I thought I’d talk a bit about another hot Christmas toy… The Nintendo Wii. As it turns out, Amazon took pre-orders for the Wii for a short time early on the morning of September 15th, but the orders came in so fast that they had to stop. [more]

“Where parents do too much for their children, the children will not do much for themselves.” -Elbert Hubbard

By now, any parent worth their salt has heard the term “overscheduling” when it comes to putting your kids in extracurricular activities. While parents understandably want to provide their kids with opportunities, it’s definitely possible to push things too far. Our own ‘policy’ has been to keep our kids out of organized sports until they start kindergarten. [more]

This is an excerpt from a real conversation that I had with our (then) five year old one day after kindergarten last year:

Me: What do you like the most about school?

Him: Umm, I don’t know.

Me: Well, what do you like the least about school?

Him: Umm, listening, I guess. Because sometimes when I’m listening my feet start aching.

As it turns out, he had a really good reason for saying this — during circle time, they had to sit with their legs crossed (Indian-style, if you will), so his feet literally start hurting whenever he had to listen for long stretches — but I could hardly contain my laughter when it came out of his mouth.

Raising4Boys participated in two carnivals this week. Here they are along with links to our posts that were included in each.

The Carnival of Personal Finance included “Teaching a Six Year Old to Save.” Also included was “Treasury Securities: A Survey of What’s Available” from fivecentnickel.com.

The Carnival of the Vanities included “Summer Swimming Pool Experiences.” Also included was “Roadmap for a Successful Relocation” from fivecentnickel.com.

Have you had a chance to buy your TMX Elmo yet? If not, you might be hurting when the holiday shopping season is in full swing… Described as “the most secretly guarded toy of the pre-holiday season,” Fisher Price recently unveiled the TMX Elmo on Good Morning America, and it’s (apparently) already hard to find them, although you can still buy them from third-party sellers on Amazon.

Thankfully, our kids have never really coveted these sorts of ‘hottest of the hot’ toys, so we’ve never been faced with the mad pre-Christmas scramble to buy this sort of stuff. Hopefully that won’t change… [more]

If only they made people take a test and earn a license before having kids. Wait a minute… They’re thinking about doing just that in New Zealand! Indeed, a panel of experts has proposed that all parents should have to sit through a parenting test if they want to maintain custody of their children. [more]

“Life affords no greater responsibility, no greater privilege, than the raising of the next generation.” -C. Everett Koop