Our elementary school has a “share cart” that’s always in the counselors office. Kids can drop off any part of their school breakfast or lunch they didn’t open and kids can grab something at any time. I think they move it to the cafeteria at lunch so kids can drop off easier.

I’m thankful that a lot of early childhood places are really beginning to focus on emotional awareness. There are so many resources for social-emotional learning for kids now. My child’s preschool is SEED certified (https://www.nmececd.org/seed/) and she’s been working on a feelings journal. At our elementary school we have social skills groups where we explicitly teach kids about emotions and also teach them life skills (we have small groups of kids playing board games to handle taking turns, losing, etc). At home and school we have these little “spot” of emotion stuffies and an accompanying book that explain what an emotion is, what it feels like, and what we can do about it. Our school also uses the zones of regulation (pic) to not only help kids understand but to also help the staff understand how our students are feeling.

The model we have (that’s only a few years old) works like this. My favorite is when it’s trying to get back to the dock, it’ll just move aimlessly until it accidentally reaches the vicinity of it and can make it home. A lot of times it runs out of battery. Or gets stuck somewhere (in the same spots because I can’t tell it to avoid problem areas).

I call my mom “mom”, but now that I have a kid I use her grandma name more frequently. Honestly it’s a little easier to call her that, I have some unresolved stuff and while we’re friendly the mom term is a little much. My daughter calls me “mommy”, but usually doesn’t enunciate so it’s “mah-ee” most of the time.

When we moved we cleared out our closet of tech boxes. Found a few accessories and whatnot still in there. Consolidated down to just a few boxes to hold accessories and documentation. Now we’re slowly building the collection again, but we’re better than before. (Mostly because having a kid cut our disposable income quite considerably).