“Evie, can you bring me four different kinds of flowers?”

And.. the hunt was on.  She finally found four different flowers so I asked for one blade of grass.  (She brought me a handful…)  I asked for a twig, a vine, a leaf, a dried leaf, something green.. whatever I could think of.  It kept her busy for a long time, and when I finally ran out of things for her to look for… I started telling her to do things instead.  Run around the tulip* tree three times! Go touch the fence!  Run over to the white door! Run around the tulip tree! Stand right there and jump to touch a dogwood branch! Spin around four times! Run around the tulip tree!  (That one was her favorite and she requested it a few times. “Say, ‘run around the tree!’” she would instruct me.)

*It has tulips planted around it. It is not a variety of tree that produces tulips, no, although that would be awesome. Tulips are my favorite flower.

Anyway, that is my parenting hint of the day.  She loved it, and it was great fun for me, too. As a bonus, she was so worn out when I took her in that she wanted to go straight to bed instead of taking a bath. (She is a bit of an insomniac so her desire to go to sleep is always celebrated.)

Incidentally, I also do a minor version of this in the grosser public bathrooms.  Can you touch your head? Can you rub your belly? Can you stand on one foot? Can you point at your knee?  Anything to keep her from touching the toilet or running her hands over the trash can.

Try it!

In other news, I ordered that paper I talked about from Staples Monday morning. It arrived Tuesday, as did an email that said my $32 rebate is being processed.  Talk about easy!

And yet… anyone who has ever had a two year old knows that shutting them out of the action rarely goes well.  So I herded her into the living room and shut the kitchen gate and explained to her that she needed to stay right there just long enough for us to sing the ABC song and then she could come back in.  Now, I have tried putting her on the other side of the gate when she didn’t want to go before, and it usually prompts a fit.  Telling her that she could come back in a minute never worked because “a minute” is not really a construct she understands.  But, the length of the ABC song?  She knows that.   She was totally okay with standing there while I sang to her and she watched me put dinner in the oven.  Before the song was even over, I was back to her and opening the gate again.

(I also do this while brushing her teeth, and I think that there are probably a lot of other times it would be helpful.)

So.. next time you need to do help your small child be patient, try it and see if it works for you.

The rules, as explained on their website:

Here’s How It Works:

1. Kids read any eight (8) books of their own choosing.

2. Kids use the Summer Reading Journal to tell us their favorite part of each book. A parent/guardian signs the journal when it’s complete. You can also get a Spanish-language Reading Journal.

3. Children bring their completed Reading Journal to a Barnes & Noble store between May 26th & September 7th, 2009.

4. We’ll give them a coupon for a FREE book! They choose from a list of exceptional paperback titles.*

* Eligible books will be listed on the coupon. Choices must be made from available stock. No special orders. Limit of one (1) form per school-age child (grades 1-6), please. Incomplete forms will be ineligible for free books.

Too bad that I don’t have a kid in first-sixth grade!  I hope some of you can take advantage of this, though. :)

For those of us ineligible for this program, here’s a small consolation prize–you can take 20% off one item by entering coupon code H4E7B3W at checkout.  This expires on May 2, so if you want to use it, you’d better hurry!

Some of the DVDs start at $6.32, so you get two for that price. I am considering buying Evelyn a couple. They’d go well in an Easter basket, or her birthday is next month. We’ll see.. none of these are shows she has really watched much. Honestly, my husband would love the Spongebob ones, though.

This includes (selected) DVDs of Blues Clues, Rugrats, Little Bear, Drake & Josh, Jimmy Neutron, The Amanda Show, Dora the Explorer, The Backyardigans, Spongebob Squarepants and more. (Whole seasons, too!)

All Buy One, Get One Free Nickelodeon DVDs.

Enjoy!

And with that, I covertly snatched the diaper out of the trash, because…. oh yes we can.

Simply stick the tab back in place and use your sewing machine and a simple zig-zag stitch to re-attach it. Voila! It took me longer to take the pictures for this post than it did to fix the tab.  My machine was already threaded with some brown thread, which was convenient for contrast in the picture.  This diaper will only be worn once, so any color of thread will do.  And no, stitching on the tab will not affect the absorbency of the diaper or cause it to leak.

Evelyn was cloth-diapered until recently, and I sewed most of her stash, so it wasn’t much of a stretch for me to repair a disposable diaper. I wouldn’t undertake a lengthy repair on a single-use item, but this was so simple and fast that it was worth it to me just to make my husband laugh. (I hid the diaper from him so he wouldn’t know what I had planned.)  But seriously, diapers are expensive. This is a size 5 Huggies overnight diaper.  There are 27 diapers per package, and the retail price on the shelf was $12.99 (let’s get real, though. I do not pay $13 for diapers. If that was the final cost, I would still have E in cloth, no questions asked.)  They were on sale for $9.99. After store and manufacturer coupons and rebates, these particular diapers cost me about $2.07 per package, or 7.5 cents each.  (Compare that to paying retail price of 48 cents each–ouch!)  So.. did I save that much by fixing this diaper? No, not really.  However, throwing a perfectly repairable and usable item in the trash grates on me. It’s bad enough that diapers go into the landfill but must we put them there unused?

Oh, and if you don’t sew?  Well, you still don’t have to throw those tab-less disposable diapers away.  It may not be the classiest solution in the world, but a small piece of duct tape is probably going to solve your problem just as well.  ;)  If I had known where the duct tape was, I might have tried it today instead of using the sewing machine!

Things We Have Learned Here

• I am really contrary sometimes, and enjoy doing things because someone tells me we can’t

• Saving a dime is still saving a dime, and saving fifty cents (at retail prices) will pay for can of a mushrooms.

• Waste not, want not!

$5 off Huggies Gentle Care diapers
$3 off Huggies Natural Fit diapers

You’ll have to find them at the coupons.com site, and they may not be located right together.  I couldn’t find a direct link.

I have not personally used these coupons yet, because I am waiting for next week at Walgreens, where you will get back $10 in Register Rewards for every $25 spent. Soo.. $10 x 3 = $30 total – $5 – $5 – $5 coupons = $15 – $10 RR = $5 for THREE packs of Huggies.  (Please don’t buy more than three per transaction, or use the $10 RR to pay for a second transaction like this, though, because it won’t print another that way… but otherwise you can do separate transactions.) If you don’t have a Walgreens, you might also consider using them at Kroger, with Huggies e-coupons loaded onto your Kroger Plus card from shortcuts.com or cellfire.com. (Only one will be taken off per product purchased, but if you buy two packages, you can use two coupons and two e-coupons.)

Rumor has it that the coupons will work on any type of Huggies diaper, if your cashier doesn’t notice or mind, that is.  I don’t know if Although it does say any product, it will reportedly “beep” on a non-diaper Gentle Care  purchase.  To my mind, a cashier should push it through because that is what it says, but your mileage may vary on that usage.

Don’t have a kind in diapers? Might I suggest that these would make good additions to a baby shower or new baby gift?  If nothing else, I am pretty sure you’ll find someone willing to take them off your hands. The average diaper coupon is $1 or $1.50 so these are significantly better than usual.

Anyway, because it’s suddenly in a new location (less than ten feet away), she is suddenly playing with it much more than she did before.  It’s like we gave her a brand new toy by drawing her attention to an old one.  It may not work with a kid that’s much older than she is, but it’s working for Evelyn at 22 months. Give it a try, you might get five more minutes of peace and quiet out of  it.

In the same way, we hide half of her toys in a tub in her closet, switching them out every now and then when she seems bored.  This is good for her because she gets “new” stuff occasionally and then will play quietly with it all for a while, but also for me because I get a break from some of her more obnoxious toys.  :)