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Called Home by the Lord

My mother-Pastor Joyce Dreiman was called home by the Lord on Easter Sunday 2008. I thought that was a blessing because she went to be with the Lord on the day we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.

To give you a little background-Pastor Joyce was diagnosed with lymphoma (Cancer) and had spent approximately a year with chemo-therapy, radiation and surgery for treatment. They had told her the cancer was gone. Approximately 2 weeks later-she had trouble breathing, was very weak and had terrible pain. I called an ambulance on Saturday and she died on Sunday. I would like to
point out-that no-one is guaranteed another moment of life-so you must be prepared to meet the Lord or spend eternity in Hell.

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The Cheerful Giver

It was another typical Sunday morning for Miss Debbie as she came to teach her toddler class at church. She had an established routine, and the children knew what to expect each week and so did Miss Debbie. However, in dealing with this age group, a child will occasionally do something out of the ordinary, and a valuable lesson is instilled in the lives touched by that occurrence.

“Does anyone have money to share today,” Miss Debbie asked her little ones.


”I do,” a few answered.

“No,” several others responded with a pout, my daughter being one of them.

Wanting her students to learn the concept of tithing, Miss Debbie reached into her purse. She handed a few coins to the children who had forgotten. She then proceeded to collect the money and found the children cheerfully willing to surrender the pennies, dimes and nickels that she had just given to them. Miss Debbie was pleased to see how quickly they had learned the lesson on giving.

The following week, Miss Debbie once again asked her young students if they had money to offer. Like the week before, she found that some had money and others didn’t. Before Miss Debbie knew what was happening, my two-year-old daughter, Lana, had sprung to her feet. She grabbed Miss Debbie’s purse, pulled out her checkbook, and brought it to her.

Taken back by Lana’s actions, she said, “Lana, please put that back in my purse.” Lana instantly complied with the request and placed it back into the purse.

However, determined to share money, Lana continued to dig into Miss Debbie’s purse. Unaware of what she was doing, Miss Debbie suddenly heard jingling behind her. She turned and found Lana holding her change purse and handing out coins. Miss Debbie realized the lesson on being a cheerful giver was being taught to her today. She allowed Lana to give the remaining coins to her little friends. Later, Miss Debbie wrote a check and placed it into the offering plate with a smile.

How To Relieve Financial Stress On Baby Needs

Baby showers are wonderful occasions where families and mothers are aided in surviving the financial strain of a forthcoming baby. Babies, as mothers should know, are very expensive after weighing in clothes, furniture, food, toys, decor, and diapers.

But how does a mother get relief of such stress after the initial support from family and friends? Baby showers come and go- but the financial strain just keeps building. To help avoid stressful financial scenarios, there are indeed a few things mothers can do to better their situation.

The First Step: Take Inventory

After the baby shower an inventory should be taken. A list of what was obtained and what is still needed should be created, as it will serve as a great guide for baby shopping later on. You’ll want to focus on the long-term items such as furniture, clothing, or strollers- since other items such as diapers are depleted within a week or less, and usually have little financial weight.

As for what a family should have for the baby, there are a few things to look out for. Baby strollers, cribs, carriers, and strollers are the most basic of needs. More importantly, there should be safety devices installed on items such as wall outlets, to ensure the best environment for your little one.

Although it was previously mentioned that taking inventory of temporary goods such as diapers and food isn’t necessary, it is usually a good idea as well. Stockpiling diapers and food is a great way to save money if you find sales and discounts here and there. It’s also a nice feeling to have a stockpile of goods to fall back on when a stressful schedule forbids trips to the supermarket (or even your wallet).

Keeping Success High With Cutting Costs

If you’ve followed the above tips, chances are that you’ll be off to a great start. But don’t expect this leap ahead to last long; you’ll need extra supplies sooner than you’d think! The trick to keeping one’s life stress-free at this point is to go bargain hunting.

Bargain hunting was made easy with the invention and rise in popularity of the Internet. Now you don’t have to wait for local supermarkets to have sales on the baby items you need. Instead, simply go to online websites or trade with others at online auctions to barter and buy what you need. This technique has enabled many parents to keep costs minimal; making a stress-free environment for families that would otherwise need aid.

Another good tip is to buy generic goods. Instead of buying diapers with fancy labels, or baby food with expensive packaging and name branding, go for the cheaper products. In many cases, they are just as good or better- and cost a fraction of what the brand name products do. It’s perplexing to find families buy such brands, even though they could be saving hundreds of dollars annually and still be getting the same quality of service.

Final Thoughts on Baby Needs

Above all else, make sure a baby is well clothed, is kept safe, and is comfortably living the perfect life for a toddler. Just remember that babies aren’t as stressful and expensive as some make them out to be- simply learn how to prepare and be thrifty, and the difficulties associated with babies becomes nonexistent. And what a relaxing feeling that is!

Find Baby Bargains - Save Money on Baby Essentials such as Car Safety Seats.

Scrabble Lessons

I’ve always been a little competitive in the academic field. Since I am not athletic, I thrive on competition regarding my mind and my own will power to accomplish it. No, I am not a good team player. Nothing frustrates me more than believing I can win, and losing because of the mistake of others. As long as I lose due to my own mistakes or sheer knowledge of someone doing something better than me, I am okay.

So as an only child of a single father, I enjoyed many weekends playing board games with him. He never let me win and so when I did, I knew I had truly accomplished that victory. I will never forget the valuable lesson learned during a competitive game of Scrabble.

This particular game began with a bang for me. I selected the letter closest to “a”, and so had gained the advantage of placing the first word down. With my letters I formed the word “greedy” strategically placing the “y” on the double letter score. Because it was the first word of the game, my score doubled because it covered the pink star in the center of the board.

“Wow, thirty points, ” my father told me. “That is a great start.”

My father looked the board over carefully and played the word “draft” and received eighteen points for his word. No matter how well I did or did not play a word on each turn, I always remained at least five to ten points ahead of my father.

“I am ruling this game,” I thought to myself as we were finally nearing the end. With only a few more letters to play, this game would be over and the win would be mine.

“There it is,” I suddenly said to myself. With four letters remaining I placed an “r” in the spot that formed two words and gave me twenty more points.

“I believe you misspelled that word,” my father challenged. We pulled out the dictionary, and indeed my father was correct. I removed my letter and lost my turn. With one sweeping blow, my father used his last three letters and I subtracted four points from my score. With my spelling error and my father’s last word, I lost the game by two points. I should have known that first word was warning me about the traps of life.

Math Help for Students with Learning Disabilities

Many struggling math students have been diagnosed with a specific learning disability. Some of them share this diagnosis with their math tutors and math teachers in a matter-of-fact way and others believe that tried and true methods will better “reach” them in their disabled state.

Although there are various schools of thought on this issue, as well as whole schools devoted to working with students based on a physiologically or emotionally based diagnosis, it is often best to deal with students in a multisensory environment.

Multisensory learning enables students of diverse strengths and weaknesses to experience a powerful tool. Traditional classroom learning requires that students be quiet and not move while learning large bodies of patterns such as multiplication tables. Children learn geometric shapes and conceptual patterns and spatial relationships almost entirely without movement. Using manipulative tools is not uniform and it is often limited to non-instructional time.

Although much time and money has been spent researching learning disabilities in the area of language, little conclusive research is available in the area of general math skills. Math tests require a variety of conceptual and cognitive skills and no single test can pinpoint a deficit which can be alleviated through a specific intervention or technique.

Often, using diagnoses to approach working with a person who has difficulty in math is counterproductive. Mathematics is a rubric which covers many diverse skills and abilities, form language to organization to sequencing to classification and beyond. Some students hope that when they divulge their diagnosis, a math teacher or math tutor will know exactly how to help them. However, even with established research in other areas of diagnosed disabilities there is much which can only be learned in the practical here-and-now of working with the individual student.

The vast majority of students with learning problems are those who find it hard to remember patterns. This impedes their ability to learn the algorithms of multiplication and division. These students often find it hard to recall multiplication tables. Some of them are so motivated that they devise their own methods of remembering these factoids and patterns.

There is help for many students with difficulties in math - also called “dyscalculia,” a vague but clinical-sounding name for difficulties in the general area of mathematical skills. It’s important to keep in mind that diagnosis implies a scientific approach to problems. It often is not. Sometimes the solution lies in rolling up one’s sleeves and doing what intuitively feels right.

Math Made Easy provides Math help for Algebra help, Geometry help, math homework help using math online tutorial services and math tutorial cd so you can watch your math scores soar.

5 Chores for Toddlers

Submitted by  Meryl Rose  - http://www.chitchatformommies.com

When toddlers see Mom and Dad doing chores around the house, they are often eager to help.  They love to try to do the same things their parents are doing.  Although it may take longer to get the chores done when trying to teach a toddler how to do them, it can help them learn to enjoy housework and develop good habits that will be an asset later on.

The most important thing to remember when selecting chores for toddlers is to keep it simple.  Very young children do not have the cognitive or motor skills to take on complicated tasks.  But there are some things they can do that, after some practice, will be helpful to you.

1. Picking Up Toys

Getting your toddler to pick up after himself can be a great help.  But it’s usually too much to expect him to put everything in its exact place.  A better approach would be to provide a laundry basket or large box for him to simply throw all of his stuff into.  Then you can take it to his room and put it where it belongs.
2. Feeding the Pets

Kids love to help take care of their pets  - to them its like playing mommy/daddy to a little person.  Toddlers are capable of helping to feed pets, but occasional messes should be expected.  To minimize accidents, you could buy pet food in individual packets or cans for small cats and dogs.  Dry food is really the easiest for young kids to handle – if  your child is capable of scooping something in a cup, they should be able to put it on the pet’s dish just fine.  For watering purposes, toddlers can put the water into a small watering can and then pour it into the bowl.

3. Watering Plants

Small children usually can’t resist the opportunity to water plants.  This is another task that could get messy, so make sure your plants aren’t sitting on or near anything that could be easily damaged by water.  It’s also smart to make sure they don’t fill the watering can over half full.  This will help prevent spilling the water in transit.

4. Cleaning the Floors

It may seem like an adults-only task, but floor cleaning is something that kids often enjoy.  The trick is to let them use tools that they can easily manage.  Cordless floor sweepers are ideal for this purpose.  There are also small, working vacuum cleaners and brooms available in the toy departments of most stores.  While it might be too ambitious to expect a child to sweep all of the dirt into a neat pile, he can help get the dirt out of the corners while you go behind him and sweep it all together.  Again, Swiffers are wonderful for kids  - you can find wet and/or dry Swiffers for the floors.

5. Laundry

Every mom could use some help with the laundry, and young children are often happy to oblige.  Toddlers can help sort dirty clothes, and you can even turn it into a learning experience.  You could also enlist your toddler’s help in loading and unloading the washer and dryer.

When your child is old enough to walk and is somewhat verbal, he can start helping with the housework.  Getting your child to help with chores will help him develop a sense of responsibility.  And that is something that you will be thankful for when he is older and can do more substantial housework.

Meryl D. Rose is a mommy to an adorable 5 1/2 year old girl and has been married for almost 13 years to a wonderfully supportive husband. Meryl has over twenty years’ experience teaching and counselling children and parents both in and out of the classroom. Meryl was bitten by the proverbial computer bug and created www.chitchatformommies.com - a website created by moms for moms. Once you enter the website, you will find brand-new as well as time-tested, creative and simple solutions to help multi-tasking moms of today thrive in their most important roles - as mommies.

Math Help: Why is My Child Struggling in Math?

Parents often ask why their children are doing poorly in math, particularly in grades 2-6. For young children, abstract quantities can be daunting, especially when taught in the context of skill drills. Many children do not find immediate meaning in numbers as symbols, although that is what parents and math teachers hope to convey to them.

Children in third through fifth grades who are having difficulty with procedural operations, such as long division and multi-digit multiplication, very often have not had any kinetic activity associated with the learning of the multiplication tables which are the basis for their computations. They become distracted from the procedures of multiplication and division by their concern over the “blank space” in their knowledge of multiplication tables and they lose momentum.

Parents often say that they download tables form the Internet or they use flash cards. Another, perhaps better, alternative is to provide art and craft materials for the student to use in writing his or her own personal multiplication tables. When the tables are personalized and used frequently with pride and familiarity, students gain in experience, confidence and expertise.

Children tend to enjoy having their own personally crafted multiplication tables from 1×1 through 12×12. They use these with pride and confidence. Even taking them to the supermarket to compute the total cost of multiple items will help to make the applications of arithmetic real and valued to a child.

Making a child’s learning experiential is of utmost importance in creating interest in math and developing skills. Many are not aware of the essential uses of elementary mathematical and spatial concepts in daily lives. Heightening awareness of these events is essential to pointing them out to children and sharing experience with them.

Just as parents read to our children, so should they communicate a reliance on mathematical principles. This may vary from family to family depending on individual pursuits and interests. For some families whose common interest is sports competition, a short discussion of the role of sports statistics could make that dreaded skills homework more interesting and relevant to a child’s life. Others may be interested in video games, which use computer programming that requires trigonometric applications. Cartoon animation programming uses principles of topology, the mathematics of mapping in space.

Road trips and map reading are also mathematical adventures for parents to share with children. Topographical maps use numbers in an obvious way, while road maps with scale measurements open the discussion to ratios and scale.

The history of measurement and attempts at standardization can become real when discussing money or the differences among the metric, imperial and U.S. measurement systems.

Toddlers, even with a rudimentary understanding of concrete quantity, can enjoy games of “which is less and which is more?” Counting games and rhymes abound and have been traditionally used to accustom children to quantitative symbols even at very young ages.

Perhaps the most useful tool of all in developing a child’s math ability at an early age is precision in language. Most students who have experienced the “drill and kill” math experience in school are shocked when they start to solve math word problems as a mathematical exercise. These applications of the skills so long deemed to be the foundation of math education are daunting to children who have been trained to believe that mathematical studies begin and end with computation.

If children learn mathematics as a foreign language, with symbols and grammar of its own, they are better able to handle the rigors of higher mathematics - with its whole new set of symbols and logic - and they are more productive students. Reading to a child, discussing concepts of “more and less,” “before and after,” “twice as much” and hierarchical classifications such as supermarket shelf organization and street name organization can pay off in a child’s mathematical performance.

Organization is the key to success in solving math problems. Giving a child adequate writing materials and encouraging him or her to experiment with blocking his work with designs to make it easier to read when he checks his work. Organizing work and establishing a rhythm for work is essential to success at problem solving. It is well worth the expense of large paper, markers and even colored pencils to establish the habit of conceptual organization.

So it really is not all about numbers, but it is about the ability to organize, translate concepts and think inductively and deductively. Many skills and experiences contribute to those goals and - with parental involvement - children can improve their quantitative skills while enjoying the simple pleasures of life.

Math Made Easy provides Math help for Algebra help, Geometry help, math homework help using math online tutorial services and math tutorial cd so you can watch your math scores soar.

Getting and Staying Motivated to Get House in Order

The biggest battle that every mom faces is the finding a time to do everything. Whether you work at home or work outside the home, the duties of the house seem to fall under your jurisdiction. It doesn’t seem quite fair but there it is. So, we have to pull double duty sometimes.

On a good day, it’s not easy to get in the mood to clean house. For one thing, it is always in the back of your mind that as soon as you get things straight, someone will come along and mess it all up again. It’s like that story of Sisyphus in the Underworld. He rolled the stone up the hill only to have it roll back down and he had to do it all over again day after day after day.

Since cleaning is a necessary evil, enlist the aid of some able-bodied helpers. I’m referring to the family. Create a family cleaning day where everyone participates to make the job faster and easier. For example, let’s use Saturday morning.

Each person can get up early before any other activities take place. Assign each person a task. Even the smaller kids can put their toys up and throw trash away. Allow a five or ten minute break every hour so no one gets too tired. With some sort of organization, each job gets done. The motivation here is that you won’t have to tackle all the housework alone.

Certain household jobs can’t wait until the weekend. If I washed my dishes once a week, the smell from the kitchen would be unbearable. Not to mention the fact, that there wouldn’t be anything to eat or cook with. The same goes for washing clothes. My boys go through so many clothes each week that they would have to go to school wearing dirty stuff.

For tasks that you can’t put off, build them into your day. No one likes to do these tasks, but if you tackle them in the morning, when you are already energized to start the day, you are more likely to get the job done. The morning always makes me feel hopeful—like the day is full of promise. That is the best time to get going on activities you would rather avoid.

Tell yourself that the sooner you get finished, the more time you will have to work and to play with the kids. Do what you like later and longer.

About The Author

Cara Mirabella is manager and founder of The Household Helper (http://thehouseholdhelper.com), a site providing tips and resources for cleaning, organizing, meal planning and more. A former “domestically challenged” wife and mom, Cara now coaches other moms, whether working outside the home or a WAHM, to help them save their time, money and sanity when managing their home and family. More information about home and family management coaching can be found at http://thehouseholdhelper.com/Coaching.html

The Single Moms Survival Guide

The Single Mom’s Survival Guide is an ebook written by a single mom. It is full of tips and advice on many of the things necessary to raising children by yourself.

Many of us face the reality of raising our children alone. Those of us who have been there for whatever reason know that it’s an uphill battle usually fought with little to no help. Now it doesn’t have to be that way. With this ebook you can have someone on your side to help you with win those battles. Read more

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