Life Through the Eyes of a Child - Living Life to the Fullest

Life Through the Eyes of a Child - Living Life to the Fullest Lessons on Living I learned from my Niece & Nephews - ages 11 months through 11 years © 2003 Cheryl Marks-Young

Have you ever spent time with young children? Have you ever really paid attention to them and watched them in their process of discovering the world? It is a truly amazing experience, watching them move through their emotions throughout the course of any given day. We can learn some pretty amazing things from watching children. I believe they can bestow upon adults a veritable PhD in the science of Living Life to the Fullest. Here are some amazing life lessons I have gained from observing my niece and nephews:

1) There is nothing cooler than a handful of Cheerios. Pay attention to the wonders around us and find joy in the simple everyday things - for life is truly a miracle.

2) The world is one big jungle gym play set. Use your imagination and your creativity on a daily basis.

3) If it is within my grasp it's either mine or worth striving for. If you can see your goal just ahead, don't stop now, don't get discouraged, don't listen to those who will try to tell you otherwise - follow your own inner calling and go for it. Grab the brass ring on the merry go-round of life and aim as high as you want to.

4) Don't worry; be Happy - after all playtime is forever. Remember nobody ever left this earth saying I should have spent more time at the office - and if they did, they were smart enough to keep it to themselves.

5) One genuine smile from a child is worth a thousand bucks in therapy sessions.

6) Girls just wanna have fun and boys just wanna be themselves and sometimes it's just the opposite. Let kids be kids and allow them to discover their own world - the one they live in - the one that is called childhood.

7) If you don't like it the way it is, don't worry - my attention will shift in 5 minutes - life is so full of things to do and experience; if you don't like one thing, go try another. Sometimes we make mistakes in choosing jobs or paint colors or clothing or social activities - don't suffer because you were told to when you were a child - you are in control. It's okay to change your mind or admit you made a mistake and move on. As my Boss once said, "Misery is Optional".

8) Adults are just weird big kids. Hey, we like to play too!

9) Eat, Sleep, Poop - Life ain't too bad. If the core needs of everyday survival are met, the rest is a walk in the park.

10) Milk is good but Chocolate Milk really rocks my world. Amazing how just a small shift can change your outlook on life.

What does all this mean exactly?

Life is a wondrous, colorful place to live and experience. We have all the colors of the crayon box to play with. Enjoy it; watch little kids faces and learn the wisdom of the ages of love, unconditional love, enthusiasm, lack of fear, wonder and amazement at simple things - butterflies, smelling the roses, picking tomatoes in the garden, chocolate milk, etc.

Sometimes as we grow hardened by life experiences we lose touch with our own sense of wonder and amazement. We can sometimes get caught up in the daily routine of working to pay the bills and support our families and forget there is more to life than "work". Just slip a child's hand into mine or put a toddler or baby in my arms and all the troubles of the day and the world slip away. Funny that sometimes, the most serious of adults lose their outer shell of "perfectness" and become truly "PERFECT" in the presence of a child.

Try something new today - look at life through the eyes of a child. Look around you for just a moment as if you have never seen the world before. You may just find that by enjoying the everyday miracles of life unfolding one at a time, you begin to experience the world as a wondrous place and a really huge playground.

In the words of Heraclitus, "Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play."

Cheryl Marks-Young is the Founder and CEO of Creative Blueprints, LLC. and Creator of The Perfectionist Guide E-zine. For hundreds more tips on personal & professional relationships and creating a Perfect Life for YOU, sign up for your FREE monthly subscription to The Perfectionist Guide E-zine at www.creativeblueprints.com .

8 Ways To Grow Healthy Children

Parenting can have it's highs and lows throughout childhood development. Keep in mind that as the parent, you are the single most important factor in determining how your children grow up. This article will help show you a couple ways to grow healthier children.

1) Be a positive role model. If you are practicing healthy habits, it tends to be a lot easier to convince your children to do the same. Keep in mind that children tend to repeat actions that they see their role models engaging in.

2) Get the entire family in an active lifestyle. Try to plan times for everyone to be active together. A couple examples include family walks, bike rides, swimming, and gardening. Each family member will benefit from the exercise social family time.

3) Try to limit television, video game and computer times. These habits will tend to lead to an unhealthy lifestyle. Children who sit around on the computer and watch television all day are at a much higher risk of gaining weight and anti social.

4) Encourage physical activities that children will really enjoy. Let children experiment with different activities until they find something they really love. They will stick with this activity and stay healthy longer. Do not let them sit around all day doing whatever they want. There needs to be some sort of structure.

5) Be as supportive as possible. Focus on the positives instead of the negatives. Children will benefit from hearing more positive things than negative. If you celebrate the little things with them as they are young, they will grow up to be more positive individuals.

6) Set specific goals and limits with almost everything. A couple great examples are television and exercise time, and eating limitations. However, if you are too strict, it can have a negative affect on the child. It is possible that the child will look upon adult figures as too strict and even scary.

7) Try not to ever reward children with fatty snacks. This has been seen in the past as highly disadvantageous to children. Each time they do good things they think candy will be coming their way. This easily leads to childhood obesity. Instead you can reward them with healthy fruits and vegetables, even a play date with their friends. A few good suggestions include apples, bananas, oranges, peaches, cereal, and toys.

8) Try to eat breakfast and dinner as a family as much as possible. This is one of the important factors to help children develop their social skills. Try to think of what would happen if the child ate dinner and breakfast by themselves in their room each day. There is no doubt that the child would develop antisocial behavioral factors and possibly become depressed.

Now that you have more parenting tools to grow healthier children, it is time to put them to good use. Always remember that children as like mini sponges, they tend to soak up all the information around them and use it later on in life. Good luck growing healthy!

Donald Mckenzie Jr has been a successful affiliate marketer for more than 2 years. For access to his home business articles and programs, visit his website. http://full-time-income-from-home.blogspot.com

Toy Versus Game

There is a fine line between a toy and a game. If you don't think so, look inside the mind of a child and inside the following article. It may just change how you think about what exactly is a toy.

What's the difference? To a little kid, probably not much. And with games that you only need one person to play, such as solitaire, the distinction can be a very fine one. How many of us have heard our mothers yell at us to "put our toys away" and what's in front of use is a chess set that we used to play war with. Kids have wild imaginations. Has that chess set just become a toy?

In most cases there is a very big difference between what is a toy and what is a game, at least according to our adult minds. But in the hands of a child, either one can be, well, either one.

Dominoes is a great game for two people. There is quite a bit of strategy involved in putting out just the right piece so as to block your opponent from being able to do anything and thus forcing him to pick up a domino. But did you ever see those things in the hands of a small child who's stringing them along the floor in what is turning into a maze of wonders. With the number of dominoes in a set, the number of different mazes that child can make is virtually without limit. So go and tell him that his bunch of dominoes are not toys.

Getting back to our chess example. We all know that a game of chess is one of the most complex games of thought ever created and it takes a superior mind to play well. But did you ever see a kid set up a chess board and start to move the two armies towards each other? As the pawns approach and get within striking distance you're only seconds away from seeing pieces fly all over the place. And so see the knight get up on top of the castle (isn't that what knights do)? and start firing arrows or swords at the opposing bishop is a sight to be seen. And then finally, to see the cat fight between the two queens as the kings stand by and watch is like watching the battle of the titans. Chess pieces can be great toys. And if you've got those new chess pieces that are designed after popular movie characters like Star Wars or Lord Of The Rings, well, who needs real toys?

Take a simple game of cards and it doesn't matter which card game you choose. Did you ever see a kid start to fling those things around the room? They make great projectiles and if you're not careful as an adult passing by, those cards can easily take out an eye. Not to mention the great card castles that you can make. Heck, we all do it. And don't think they're so easy. Kids seem to have a gift when it comes to that stuff.

The truth is, just about any game can be taken apart and turned into a toy. But for the sake of the remainder of articles in this series, we're going to concentrate on toys that were not meant to be made into games.

Not to say they don't ultimately end up as one.

Michael Russell Your Independent guide to Toys

Lego

If you're relatively young, Lego is this elaborate collection of toys that you could make just about anything from. The kits that are available today are just mind boggling. But it wasn't always like that. There was a time when Lego didn't have sets. They were just a bunch of blocks that you put together any way you liked. As a matter of fact, Lego goes a lot farther back than most people realize.

Even though Lego technically came into being in 1916, the first Lego toys were not made until 1932. Their first toys were cars, trucks and piggy banks. They were nothing like what we're used to today. The actual Lego name wasn't official until 1934. It came from a Danish phrase that meant "play well". The founder of Lego, Kirk Christiansen, was known as a very kind hearted man who wanted to make toys that poorer children could afford. This was the main reason that he even went into the business.

The first Lego building brick toys that we're familiar with today weren't made until 1947. One of the first of these toys was a truck that you could put together and then take apart to put back together again. The bricks snapped together. The blocks were made out of cellulose acetate as opposed to the common wooden bricks that most other toys were made from. In 1953 these bricks were given the official name "Lego Bricks".

In the 1950s the bricks were improved upon because the ability of the blocks to lock together was limited. Hollow tubes were added to the underside of the bricks to help them lock together a little better. This also added some much needed support to these bricks. Finally, in 1958, Christiansen died. The company almost died with him. But his partner decided to go on and continue to run the company. Otherwise this may have been the end of Lego.

In the 1960s we were given the first Lego wheels that could be added to the cars and trucks. Before these wheels were created the car and truck tires were blocks, just like the rest of the vehicle. During that time, Lego started to make toys that were targeted to preschoolers. This line went over very well with the kids. Finally in 1963, the blocks were made out of ABS plastic and are still made from this plastic even today. Then in 1964, for the very first time, instruction manuals were provided for their toys.

In 1969 an offshoot of Lego, the Duplo system, can to be. These blocks were much bigger than the Lego blocks, which made them safer for young children, the main reason they were made in the first place. However, even though the Duplo system was made for small kids, the two systems are compatible with each other and can be mixed together.

Over the next 30 plus years, the Lego system became very elaborate. Whole kits depicting various scenes could be bought and put together such as the 1988 model of London, the 1989 Pirate series and more recently, the Knights Kingdom in 2004.

Today, Lego is one of the largest manufacturers of children's toys in the whole world. And just think, it all started from a bunch of plastic blocks.

Michael Russell Your Independent guide to Toys

Play-Doh

2A can of...Well, nobody's really sure what Play-Doh is as its composition is a very closely guarded secret. As a matter of fact, Play-Doh was originally invented to be a wallpaper cleaner and even has a patent for this use. The patent number is U.S. Patent 3,167,440. It was granted to Noah McVicker and Joseph McVicker. Ultimately, these two men realized that they could make more money selling this stuff as a toy than as a wallpaper cleaner. So in 1956 they created Rainbow Crafts to sell their new product.

The thing that most people liked about Play-Doh was that it was non toxic. You could actually eat this stuff and not get sick. The salty taste may not be very appealing but it was certainly not going to kill you. And believe it or not, kids did try to eat this stuff. Drove their parents absolutely up a wall.

Play-Doh was one of the first toys to make its way into schools and daycare centers. It was a simple enough toy that kids could play with and not need a lot of supervision and was versatile enough that you were limited only by your imagination as to what you could actually do with the stuff, which basically came in can and in a variety of colors. Since all the colors were still made of the same substance, you could mix them together with no problem. Of course after doing this it was hard to get each color back into its own can.

The year 1960 was a very big year for Play-Doh because this was the year that the company came up with its first mascot, Play-Doh Pete. The original drawing of this cute little boy had him wearing a smock and a beret. Later on the beret was replaced by a backwards baseball cap. The mascot was put on every single can of Play-Doh that was sold and became as well known as the toy itself.

Also in 1960 the first Play-Doh accessory was created. This was the extremely popular Play-Doh Fun Factory. The Fun Factory was basically a device that you pushed the Play-Doh through to make all kinds of different shapes such as stars, circles and squares. You could chop up these shapes and serve them as food to the kid's dolls. But the Fun Factory wasn't the end of the Play-Doh accessories.

Play-Doh next came out with the Fuzzy Pumper Barber and Beauty Shop. After that they came out with Dr, Drill N Fill. These were all plastic molds. The barber shop was rather unique for its time. The Play-Doh was pushed through this plastic head that made it look like hair. You then took these plastic scissors to cut the hair and style it. Very clever stuff for the 60s.

Eventually, Play-Doh was taken over by Hasbro and they came out with a ton of food preparation machines as that was where things seemed to be going at the time. Everybody wanted to cook. Around this time you also saw things like Suzy Bake Oven and Creepy Crawlers food molds.

But with all the fancy accessories, most kids are just happy to take the stuff out of the can and run their hands through it.

Sometimes, simple is the best.

Michael Russell Your Independent guide to Toys

The Yo-Yo

The yo-yo. It may not be as popular as it was 40 years ago, but you can still get yourself a pretty decent one if you look hard enough. But how did the yo-yo craze get started? For that matter, when was the first yo-yo made?

The truth is, nobody really knows where the yo-yo came from. There are some who say that the yo-yo originated in China. But the first time the yo-yo was ever mentioned was in Greece around 500 BC. The old yo-yos were made out of various materials like wood and metal. Supposedly, when a kid got to be a certain age he was supposed to offer up his yo-yos to the gods.

The modern day yo-yo didn't actually come to be until the 1920s when a guy by the name of Pedro Flores brought one to the United States from the Philippines. In 1928 he began a toy company in California to start making them. His first yo-yos were very unique in that instead of having the string tied to the axle, the string was wrapped around the axle. This made it so that the yo-yo could hang, or what they called "sleep" at the end of the rope.

A year later, a guy by the name of Donald Duncan saw this yo-yo and was fascinated by it. Because Pedro was able to do quite a few tricks with his yo-yo, he drew large crowds by putting on exhibitions. Duncan saw this as a big money maker. So, not only did Duncan purchase the idea of the yo-yo but he bought the company from Flores himself. You know the rest of what happened.

Duncan yo-yos became a monster of a company. In 1946 they moved to Luck, Wisconsin, which became known as the yo-yo capital of the world. They were producing yo-yos there at an alarming rate of over 3,600 per hour. Back in the 40s the yo-yos were made out of wood, but when the 1960s rolled around they started making them out of a very hard plastic.

The early yo-yos were still pretty simple looking. Still, by 1962 over 45 million of these yo-yos were sold. That's not bad considering the country had only 40 million children at the time. Some kids were buying two or three different yo-yos. And that number began to increase when Duncan started making different styles of yo-yos.

But then the legal battles began. The Duncan trademark of the word "yo-yo" was being fought against. The word had become the toy itself. Well, finally, Duncan lost their battle with the courts and in 1965 Duncan was driven into bankruptcy. The Duncan name itself was purchased by Flambeau Plastics.

In spite of this, the yo-yo became more popular than ever. Yo-yo tournaments were being held all over the world. New tricks were being thought of including the popular "walk the dog". There were even more styles of yo-yos than ever before. And then finally, on April 12, 1985, the yo-yo was taken into space.

The yo-yo may have lost some steam over the years, but it is still one of the most popular toys to have ever been made.

Michael Russell Your Independent guide to Toys