One of the areas I least enjoy about play dates is handling the conflicts that arise when the children play together. Having raised three sons, I was ill prepared for the drama, arguments and fighting that frequently arise when little girls play together. But here are some guidelines I’ve found helpful when dealing with play date fights.

I think before you interfere it is best to try to calmly assess the situation. Is anyone getting hurt? Are the children already crying? Does it look like this is a conflict that they can resolve on their own? Young toddlers generally play within view of their mothers and so you can often see a situation emerging and either prevent it or nip it at the bud. But as our children get older, they tend to play out of our sight and situations arise and explode before we can intervene; then we have to make judgment calls based on what the children tell us.

How many of you are already taking your preschooler to the dentist to have cavities filled? Or even your toddler? Is there anything you can do about that?

There sure is, and I’ll say it simply: little to no candy, and brush their teeth until they are 12. Sound ridiculous and impossible? It isn’t. I’ve done it.

Firstly, don’t buy them candy, don’t reward them with candy, and don’t keep candy in the house. Since I’m a diabetic, there is no candy in our house – period. The more candy children have, the more they crave it. Having candy at Halloween and other special occasions such as birthdays will not set that craving in motion. It is the chronic eating of candy that makes them want it more and begins the swift decay of your child’s teeth.

I’ll admit that I was a candy fanatic as a child – I loved the taste of sugar. It began when I was a young child and lasted until I finally kicked the addiction about 6 months ago because of my diabetes.

Surfing on the internet today I came across a pro-intercountry adoption article written by an adoptee from Colombia who along with her brother and sister was adopted by a Caucasian family in New Jersey. Here is what she says about intercountry adoption:

But if we lacked a clear blueprint for our ethnic identities, we still had plenty of other parameters from which to forge our sense of selves: we were blue-collar kids from Jersey. We grew up amongst the mostly Irish- and Italian-American children of nurses, plumbers, and store clerks. Like them, we indulged in all the rituals of our particular American upbringing. And like most internationally adopted children, we turned out just fine.

My adopted child is taking ice skating lessons in a nearby city. I usually carpool with a friend, but this week I had to drive myself because my son had a doctor’s appointment in a nearby town. The MapQuest directions from the doctor to the ice skating rink brought me along the same route that I used to take when hub and I were going through our home study to adopt a second child. That got me thinking about the issues that concerned me back when we were going through the adoption process a second time. (We ultimately decided not to adopt again.)

One of my biggest concerns was the level of openness to have with the second adopted child’s birth mother. At the time, we had a semi-open adoption with my son’s birth mother, and we wanted another semi-open or an open adoption with the second child’s birth mother. However, I had concerns about whether differences in the level of openness with birth mom #2 would have a negative effect on my first adopted child.

For example, my first (and now only) adopted child’s birth mother asked to receive semi-annual letters, but she chose not to send any letters back to us. My son has never received a letter, card, or present from his birth mother, which is completely okay. However, what if birth mother #2 did want to send these things to her birth child? How would that make my son feel?