Book Review: Litle Moon Dog

I picked this up at a library book sale, it had been discarded from the library, so it isn't a brand new book by any means. I don't know why I got it, maybe the artwork looked interesting. It's about a man and his dog on the moon, after all. For some reason, my son got obsessed with it.

He doesn't let us read it, there are too many words for a 2 year old. But the gist of the story is that the man and his dog live quietly and peacefully on the moon. Once a year, the hippy fairies show up on their hippy bus and disrupt the quiet! The dog loves it. He loves them. Then he goes with them back to their planet and they aren't as nice to him there. He misses his man. So the man comes to get the dog and they live happily ever after.  The  moral of the story is: don't let fun get in the way of comfort. Or something like that. The lesson I learned is: for a two year old, artwork is more important than stories.

Beach!

This summer, I thought about enrolling my toddler in the rec center's toddler swim class. But when I found out that they do not offer classes during the month of August, that idea was out!
Instead, we decided to go to the beach by the Coralville Dam once a week, on the hottest weekday of the week. It's a lot of work to do for just 90 minutes of beach time, but, like camping, after you do it once or twice, it's not so bad.
We packed the big beach bag with towels, swim suits, life jacket. We put the little plastic shovels and toys into the beach pail and we had a bag of food. Sometimes I would make an easy meal to eat on the beach- salad, for example, or turkey sandwiches. Other times I would pick up a pizza on the way to the beach (I have an insulated bag that will keep the pizza warm for an hour). I would leave work at 4:30, pick up the boy from day care and drive to my husband's office where we would change into swim suits, fill our water bottles and then leave for the beach. We could usually get there before 6:00. It might sound like a lot of time but we were driving in opposite directions (to the east side of Iowa City then west to Coralville then north to the Dam)...and dealing with rush hour traffic.
But then we would arrive and swim and play in the sand for about 45 minutes and then sit on the towels to eat. The little boy was hungry enough to actually stop playing for a few minutes to eat dinner with us, he even happily ate a lot of the salad! Then he would play in the sand, we would swim and take him into the water and let him kick and splash. You know, "swimming lessons"!
In the end, I think he got a lot more out of the beach this summer than he would have with swim lessons at the rec center.
There are people out there who think lake water is gross and unsanitary, and I feel sorry for that misconception.  Kids just don't get the same experience of playing in the sand and waves when they're at the rec center pool. During those hot summer days, it's great to watch a kid explore a lake on a beach. Save the indoor pools for winter time.

How Much Junk (or Kid's Treasures) Should We Hold On To?

My 97 year old grama recently moved out of the house she had lived in for 60 years, so I got the chance to dig through the closets upstairs. She saved a LOT of stuff, which is both good and bad.
Bad because it's in no sort of organized order. I found some special photographs and documents in the middle of a pile of Christmas cards from her friends. And who has the time to leaf through every page of her stuff to find the treasures?
Good because I took a lot of hand-written journals, letters, etc. home to scan and share with the extended family. And some artwork from her 3 sons, maybe even her grandchildren.

Now that I have my own child and a house full of things I just can't throw away, I'm thinking about this- 60 years in the future, how much crap will I have accumulated? What precious treasures from my son should I hold on to and what should I throw away?
I like the idea of scanning, saving and backing up. We are already in the habit of doing this with our photos and video on the computer. I could scan the kid's artwork and save it along with the photos. But it's not the same as having the original.
Grama had a few photo albums and scrap books of photos that were really well labeled with who the photos are of and the dates and locations. But- the boxes of photos of random people in the 1940s- no one knows who the people are, even though they are cool photos to look at and you hate to throw those away!  It's just like how the photos on our computer are saved in chronological order but have no notes to say where we were and who were were with.
Maybe that's what Facebook is for? 
I would say these days most people are "archiving" their memories with Facebook- but I seriously doubt that in sixty years, we'll be able to access those tagged photos as easily as we can today. Genealogy data is important to save for future generations, and so are photos, video and even kid's artwork. But there are so many more photos and hours of video of today's kids vs. the kids of the 1940s-50s!
We just need to find the fine line between preserving the precious things and getting rid of the unnecessary crap.
But, when something has been held on to for 60, 80, even 100 years- who is the asshole in the family responsible for tossing it out?
It's a hard call to make.