Preschoolers on Ice

This last weekend was one of the first beautiful weekends of the year. The boys were in t-shirts and shorts ... so we thought what better time to take them to the ice skating arena and start ice skating lessons.

We are in San Jose, and besides being a little Sharks crazy right now ... the boys love Caillou and Caillou plays hockey. Since Xander was 3 and Caleb was 2 they have been asking for skating lessons. And so on beautiful Spring morning we headed to Sharks Ice, the San Jose Sharks practice facility.

Skating lessons are actually a pretty good deal. The cost is the same as swimming and the lessons go 12 weeks, but unlike swimming which is a half an hour, the boys get a full hour of skating fun.

For the beginners they get a pile of buckets to push around the ice like a walker. They have plenty of instructors, and the kids are delivered to their class.

Xander who is almost five was amazing. He was very fast on the ice, held his feet perfectly, listened to his instructor, maneuvered his bucket with skill ... and next week he will be moved to the boys class. Caleb on the other hand was very cautious, and turned his ankles in to balance. All as you'd expect for a three and a half year old and his first time on skates.

Xander also fell spectacularly. So ... on Sunday we got the boys helmets. Caleb wanted a hockey helmet with a wire mask, and we found some on sale ... well, it is Spring.

To say the kids loved skating is an understatement. Caleb is sleeping with his helmet. We even have some sticks and a net on route (they were also on sale ... well, it is Spring).

Technology for the Preschool Roadtripper

If your car stereo does have an auxiliary option where you can plug in your iPhone or other smartphone device, you don’t need to invest in or carry a large CD collection to keep your young travelers entertained. Several audio entertainment services such as Pandora and Rhapsody offer on-the-go options. With audio download services such as Audible, you can download books and stories in advance and take them with you on your portable MP3 music device or your smartphone. Here we’ll look at three leading services – Pandora, Rhapsody, and Audible.

Pandora is a service that allows you to enter an artist, song, or album that you like and it will then play a recording from that artist if it has the rights to do so. Then, Pandora will play recordings that fit the same profile as the artist, song, or album you’ve initially selected. This capability enabled by Pandora’s powerful Music Genome database, in which Pandora listeners, volunteers, and employees contribute input that helps to define artist and song profile matches.

The great news about Pandora is that it’s absolutely free. You’ll just want to make sure that you have an unlimited data plan with your smartphone service provider. Pandora also has access to a wide selection of children’s music and children’s stories. It’s really wonderful if you want to sample from a wide variety of stories and music and perhaps you will find something that you hadn’t heard of before that you really like. This is the the beauty of Pandora’s music genome database.

The downside of Pandora is that you don’t have complete control over what you can hear next (though, you can skip over a certain number of songs/stories to get to the selection that Pandora serves up next). You can also give a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down” to any selection. Pandora will remember this and will influence what gets played for you later on.

Rhapsody allows you to listen to any recording available in its music library - over 1,000,000 albums. Its on-the-go service is now available for several different smartphones, including the iPhone. The cost is $14.99/month. The key benefit to Rhapsody is that you have complete control over what you listen to (again, as long as your selections are available in Rhapsody’s library).

Just as is the case with Pandora, it’s nice that you can listen to something without the commitment of paying for a CD in advance. If you listen to a story, song, or album and don’t like it, you haven’t spent any incremental money (besides your flat subscription fee) to hear it. If you do like it, you can add it to a playlist within Rhapsody to easily access it again. The downside to the Rhapsody service that you should consider in advance, is that if you ever decide to cancel your subscription, your access to all of the music and stories you’ve been listening to completely disappears. The reality is that you don’t own any of the music and stories, you’re just borrowing them.

Audible is a very different service from the first two in that you are using the service to purchase audio stories and books that you then own. It’s essentially the iTunes equivalent for books and stories. Audible has several different service options, including an option where you receive one “credit” per month for $14.95. The credit is good for just about any audio book or set of stories in its catalogs.

It’s not a bad pricing model, but the challenge is that the price point for children’s stories is typically on the lower end of the scale, so you are not getting a significant savings when you consider the price point for buying the children’s story CD individually without the Audible subscription. However, with your subscription, you also do receive discounts on other books and story sets should you purchase more than one per month (since you would use your “credit” for your first selection). So, it actually does work out such that if you are purchasing several books and story sets, you can build a significant savings vs. purchasing each book on CD individually.

Audiobooks also does have an entire line of Children’s books and stories, called Audible Kids. So there is plenty to choose from and the quality of the download is very good.

Flashback: Getting Around Europe with a Small Child

The answer is train ... okay that was easy.

Actually, there are a lot of options for travel, and most are very budget friendly. The train is often the best form of travel, but sometimes a bus will get you there faster and cheaper ... and once you're off the train, a taxi will get you to your hotel better than lugging your luggage and your whining child six blocks. And as we learned on our honeymoon, sometimes it is cheaper and easier to fly.

In advance of any trip you need to make the decision of whether to bring a car seat or not. If you are planning a trip with a lot of car travel, most countries now require that children under a certain weight have a car seat.  On the other hand, if you plan to use public transportation, many countries don't require car seats in taxis for example. Prior to traveling, it is important to research local customs and laws surrounding car seats.

On our trip to get Caleb we opted not to bring a car seat, and relied on public transportation for the entire trip. In Russia our translator and driver brought a loner car seat for us.

Our main form of transportation between cities in Austria was the train, and between countries was an airplane. Once in a city, we walked (pushing Xander in a stroller) or took light rail. Jonathan bought and studied the Europe by Eurail, but we didn't book in advance, and instead opted to buy tickets at the station on the day of travel.

In some cases this meant that we didn't have an assigned seat, in others we were able to get an assigned seat the day of travel. Either way we have never had an issue getting on a train, and we enjoyed the flexibility of leaving a city when we wanted to.

Hunting for Easter Eggs

Our neighborhood has an Easter Egg Hunt every year with about 18 to 20 children (most under the age of 5).

A successful Easter Egg Hunt depends on personality. When we took Xander out on his first hunt just shy of his third birthday, he wasn't really interested in the eggs. He liked being in the park, and riding on my shoulders.

Last year, Caleb at two and a half was extremely competitive, and managed to find a ton of eggs. Xander would find an egg, open it, comment on the contents, and then go looking for the next egg, which meant he found only a handful of eggs.  We needed to even the playing field when the boys counted their eggs, and examined the loot on the beach blanket afterward.

This year, they both seemed to understand the joy of the hunt. Xander held back examining the eggs until afterward. Also, at nearly five years old, he was very gracious, sharing coveted items like play dough and cars that Caleb didn't find.

The big challenge is keeping Caleb, my lover of sweets, from consuming all of the candy we accumulated. Combine that with the Reeses Eggs, M&M eggs, coconut eggs, and jelly beans that I have stashed away for Easter Day ... and it is a bit of a challenge.