The Nanny Tribe

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Stormy Weather With A Chance Of An Indoor Tornado

Hello Tribe,

The rainy season is in full effect!  I am a big advocate that we should all get natural vitamin D every day. But, sometimes there are days this just will not happen.
So what can we do that is quick and simple to keep the little ones busy?  We do not need a tornado in the house.

This day and age most children would love to sit in front of the boob tube and veg out all day. I’ll admit, I need to take a day once in awhile myself. As for the kiddos, they feel it’s a necessity everyday, during all free time. I recently read a really interesting article about child development and too much television watching.  Even though it may not relate to some, it may be an education simple read for you.  I’ll post the link below so I can share this article with you.

As for stormy weather and indoor play. Did you know that Crayola offers free printable coloring sheets? This can be a simple old school activity to keep our kiddos busy. How do you get your child who wants to sit and watch TV or play video games, interested in something a little more educational and stimulating? This can be tricky. I found when it’s time for indoor activities just placing a coloring book and crayons in front of a child may not spike their interest of a fun time.

One tip, make it a process of creation and adventure.  Children between the ages of 2-6 have a natural instinct of using their imagination and curiosity to explore the world around them.  How do we as parents amplify this curiosity? 

One idea is to make this simple play time, an adventure.  Ask them questions of what would be fun to color?  Give them the opportunity to utilize the internet for a constructive adventure, like finding the picture they want to color.  If you have different colored sheets of paper on hand, let your child choose a color.  This is fun because in coloring books, they mostly only offer white sheets.

These simple steps for this activity, now has created and adventure.  It has also given your child time well spent with you and has made coloring a whole new project.  You will be creating everlasting memories and having your child utilize their imagination instead of sitting in front of the boob tube.

Now it’s time to have some fun!

Just a little education: https://www.healthychildren.org/English/family-life/Media/Pages/Why-to-Avoid-TV-Before-Age-2.aspx

A couple quick coloring links: http://play.fisher-price.com/en_US/GamesandActivities/ColoringPages/index.html

http://www.crayola.com/featured/free-coloring-pages/

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Welcome to The Nanny Tribe

Welcome Tribe members,

I am so excited for you to be a part of our tribe.  The Nanny Tribe was created with so much of my love, along with my fears, excitement, and concerns about life and family.  I decided to create The Nanny Tribe with the idea to help those busy families who need a little help with their kids and family. I found that sometimes physical help is not all we need.  With that thought, I wanted to also create a community of people for parents and families who don’t have a support system close by.  This is a bit selfish on my part, out of fear of being alone in a new city without my family and support system around.

Chris and I recently moved to the Bay Area. We were both born and raised in Santa Barbara California, where we have never lived away from our families for any length of a time.  We have always had an incredible, loving, and involved support system surrounding us.  This, made moving away very hard knowing we were on the path to start growing our little tribe.

As a child my mother was a stay at home mom with an in home daycare.  She was always home when my brother and I came home from school.  When we were home sick she was always able to be with us to care for all of our needs.  I have always wanted to be able to do this same thing for my children.  Unfortunately the cost of living in beautiful California is a bit higher and for our little blue collar family, being a stay at home mom was out of the question.

When Chris and I decided to take the plunge and started to think about growing our tribe, many little factors that we had never thought about came up.  For one… How can we afford a child when we just get along ourselves?  How do we fit a child into our busy work Schedule? What happens if our landlord decides to sell our house?  What happens if we have a child that is sick? Can we Afford health care? Are we too selfish to give 100% to an other human being?  1000 more questions like this came up.  As many of you know!  At this time we thought, at least we have our family to lean on when we need help.

About this time last year Chris came home from work and said to me, “Well Nicole, looks like I’m out of work for the next few months.”  In my head I heard, “Well Nicole, we planned to start “trying” to have a baby and now thats just not going to happen.”  The way we hear things when our dreams are being crushed.  I have to tell you, the tears that I shed over the following months, over putting our plans on hold, and the arguments, oh the arguments…

A few months later, in of course the middle of a dramatic disagreement on how our lives were playing out, Chris says to me, “We cannot continue in Santa Barbara if we want to live the life we dream of together.”  There it was, the decision! So we decided uplift our lives, move away from our families, our support system, our home town, our careers, our community.  It was scary and exciting all at the same time.  Chris was fortunate enough to have a career that can be moved fairly easy.  As for me,  I had spent 18 years building my career.  I was finally at a point of feeling content, and now, I’m leaving it for better opportunities.  That sounds like, we are loading up our covered wagon towed by a mule, and going to cross the unknown land of California. To the land of opportunities.

Now its time to start over. As well as, keeping our tribe building on hold.  I shed a few tears today about this, “On hold situation.”  When talking to our family and friends about our move, I was asked what will I do for work when we move to the Bay Area? How was I going to handle being so far away from our family, whom we are incredibly close with?  With these questions on my mind, I decided to recreate what we were moving away from.  Thats when I decided to build a community of people around us.  I needed to build a new tribe for us. So when the time is right and we get to add to our little tribe, we have the community and love we want surrounding us.

A Tribe is a community of people who supports, loves, and trust one another. Some people like to call that a family as well.  All though not all family is blood, thats why I choose to call ours a tribe.  Here in this space I hope to share fun, educational topics to help your tribe.  Post will vary from family topics, recipes, fun family activities, and parental information.

The Nanny Tribe also has a Forum for parents.  This is a wonderful place to ask questions about your children and family.  The Nanny Tribe forum is a safe place to possibly get an other parents advice when you feel you need help from other members of our Tribe.

I want to welcome you again and Thank you for being a part of my tribe.