To me, this is the best time of the year. I like to sit on the front porch and just chill out and enjoy the weather. Surprisingly, the summer heat in Tennessee isn’t usually too bad, especially if you wait til the sun has gone down.

I sit and think about the past, the present and the future. I think about other porches I’ve sat on, both near and far. I think about how far I’ve come in my life and how much I have to go. I sit and enjoy the silence that sits on my heart and mind. I hope I can impart the joy of this silence into my children’s lives. It’s a necessary part of living, I think.

One of the things about toys nowadays is that you never know what kind of toxins might be in the plastic or paint that is in your kid’s toys. It’s scary, really. With so many things being made in China and the regulations being so much looser there, things get over here that are not safe. Now, the government is working to tighten those regulations up for things that come here from China, but while we wait on that, what are the kids supposed to play with?

Luckily, Jeffrey from The Fun Times Guide To Living Green has us covered. He tells us about Sprig Toys, which makes toxin-free, eco-friendly toys. Better yet, he also links to a cool instructable on how to retrofit toys with LED lights. Awesome. Head on over to check it out for yourself.

I have to admit, I’d laugh pretty hard if my kid brought home a detention slip like this. Then I’d punish him. Then I’d laugh some more.

Photo: Lay-Luh on Flickr

I’m impressed with Holiday World‘s marketing lately. My kids have been begging us to take them to Holiday World for a couple of years now. I went to Holiday World when I was a kid and I lived in Huntingburg Indiana. I was not impressed at the time.

I’ve been following @holidayworld on Twitter for awhile, though, and I can tell things have improved massively in the past few years through their various updates, plus the massive amounts of pictures and info on the website. I’m really, really excited to go, though not as excited as my kids apparently are. The talk in the house has been nothing but Holiday World. I hope they really love it.

I don’t think my own geeky children could tell a better story than this.

There’s been much made about the pressure moms feel from society and then the backlash of the “bad moms”. Jaelithe sums the whole kit and caboodle up well with her post about the situation, describing her own mother alternately as a woman who rocked hardcore and also had her faults.

It makes me think about how people see only one tiny little bit of who a person is on the internet and then has their minds made up about whether that person is a good parent or not. I suppose if you read every post I’ve ever written on the internet, including those that are locked to friends-only and those that are so old you can’t find them anymore, you might be able to form a good opinion on who I really am. But you still wouldn’t KNOW me or whether or not I’m a good mother. As a matter of fact, nobody can, since I alternate between good mother and bad mother all the time.

I think we all do. I think some mothers are better than others just as there are others who are significantly worse. But for the vast majority of us in the middle, we’re all good moms and bad moms every day. It just depends on which way the wind happens to be blowing at the time.

The Wiggles on their own creep me out, but this? What in the heck!?

Over at Babble, Katie Allison Granju says she knows how Katie Holmes feels with the recent scrutiny she’s received about Suri still being on the bottle. Her almost-2-year-old is also still on the bottle. And people are looking at her funny.

My only child that used a bottle self-weaned at 12 months, but I can relate on the weaning issue with my daughter. She was long past 2 before I finally managed to talk her into weaning from the boob, and it was a hard fought battle at that. The “when are you going to wean her from breastfeeding” conversations had started when she was about 6 months old, both from strangers and family. By the time she was ready to wean, we were no longer nursing in public (try being discreet with a giant toddler flapping your shirt up for all to see, ha!) so the only people I was hearing it from was my family. And that was hard.

There is the worry of rotten teeth from the late weaning, but I’m also of the mind that children who need the extra comfort should receive it. I feel lucky that I only had to worry about this with one of my children. My youngest son, like my oldest son, self-weaned at 12 months. Neither of those rough and tumble guys needed the extra comfort.

It’s often hard to judge another person’s actions because the world is so seldom black and white. The woman in this article adopted 2 boys from Guatemala. She had a hard time bonding with them. So hard, that 6 years later she contacted the adoption agency she got the kids from to find them a new home.

The mama bear in me rages at her actions. Imagine, the only mother you’ve known for 6 years suddenly decides to give you up. How cruel and unfair. But, the woman states that she would avoid their hugs and would be stricter with them than she was with her other children. What child deserves to grow up without hugs? What child deserves to be treated worse than other children in the house?

So my opinion is split. On one hand, I think what she has done is cruel. On the other hand, perhaps now the children will have a shot at a loving home. Tell me what you think, Shak parents. Cruel and unusual? Or she did the right thing?

You would think, after looking at this picture of these sweet kids, that they would be perfect little angels and they’d get along exquisitely. Of course, you’d think wrong.

After this summer, I’ll have all three of my kids in school. I almost feel terrible to be so excited about that, since once kids are in school, they slip away from you so quickly. On the other hand, to have some free time during the day again is a very exciting thought.

For now, I’m just trying to enjoy the summer. Tomorrow, we’ll take a long walk on the Greenway, and I’m trying to hunt up pools to go to that aren’t too busy. Tell me, Love Shak-ers, how are you spending your summer at home with the kids?