Posts Tagged ‘pancake’

The Audiologist

Monday, November 10th, 2008

As I said in my last post, Madison failed the preschool hearing test.  I never there was a chance of that, and I found myself a lot more upset about it than I thought it would be.  I ended up Twittering about it, and a lot of the awesome people on there made me feel a lot better about it.

We lucked out and were able to get her in today to get her hearing tested.  I was a little nervous, but she had a blast doing it.  They did several cool things.  First, they tested to see if she had fluid in her ears.  They put a thing in her ear, and we watched a screen.  If it looked like a pancake when the tone sounded, she had fluid in her ears.  If it looked like a mountain, she didn’t.  We saw two mountains (one for each ear).  Then they did a test to check her middle ear, and she passed that.  Lastly, they tested her manually.  They put in earplug looking things in her ears, and the audiologist went into a different room and talked to Madison over it.  She said words like carports, baseball, and ice cream, and Madison had to repeat the word.  The audiologist told her she did a good job to which she replied that “she practices a lot”.  I am not sure what she practices, but it was pretty funny.  After she repeated the words, they then did a test with tones.  If she heard the tone, she had to clap.  They then did the word test again.  Then they did a last test with some earphone looking thing.  When she heard the beep, she had to say Beep.

The good news is that she passed!  On a scale of 0 – 20 being normal, she scored 5s on most things.  She did get 15 on 800 mhz stuff (it could be 8,000 I don’t remember).  That is still in the normal range, but I could hear when she was missing words, so it is something I will keep an eye on.  Their recommendation was just to keep an eye on it, but she was completely normal.  Woohooo!!!!

Money Doesn’t Grow On Trees — Really It Doesn’t

Friday, September 19th, 2008

Oh the joys of having a four year old (who is almost five and cries almost everyday because she is not five yet).  Madison has finally started noticing things – especially things called commercials.  Every single commercial she sees she wants whatever product their are selling be it a pancake ball maker to a baby that swims (though she said she wanted that and a towel to dry her off too so she is able to think beyond the commercial).  It has gotten to the point that she actually will take the remote and pause the TV to make sure you see what she wants (and no I am not kidding about that).  Needless to say, we have started talking about money.

I will be honest — Madison has no concept of money whatsoever.  However, we have explained to her that daddy goes to work to make money so we can buy things we want.  (Madison asks every morning where daddy is and why does he have to go to work).  This conversation is daily so hopefully one day she’ll get it.  She is too young to understand that 5 pennies is the same as a nickel.  In her head, more coins equals more money.  I am hoping that because we are starting to talk about money now already that she won’t fall into the traps so many of us have.  I don’t want her to be one of the many Americans who carry loads and loads of credit card debt (which her parents do not.  We pay off ours every single month.  If she does choose to have credit cards, I want her to be smart about it.  For example, the one credit card we have gives us 1% of purchases.  That 1% is then directed to the principal on our mortgage).  I want her to be able to live within her means and be happy (which her parents also try to do).

Capital One has stepped up to the plate and has developed a Moneywi$e eLearning tool to help us teach our kids about money.  It is more for teenagers than my little ones.  However, there are definitely some tips on there that I can start teaching my children now.  I have to thank Parent Bloggers for bringing this to my attention.

When did you start teaching your children about money?