Mom Confession: I have officially let the Baby’s colic get the best of us over the past few weeks. At first, I was really on top of it – I didn’t let the crying overwhelm me or fray my nerves, but as August wore on, the days seemed to get longer and the crying seemed to get louder. My big boy was home from Summer Camp, vacations and school and was trapped in our house right along with me.

While I worked hard to schedule play dates and activities, there were many days where just getting out of the house to grab drive through coffee was as much as we could handle. I started to worry that with most of my attention on the baby and trying to find ways to soothe her, I wasn’t prepping Gray enough for the upcoming school year. 

While Gray has attended Mother’s Morning Out for the past two years, preschool is technically his first year of structured education. I had grand plans of spending the month of August talking about some of the topics on his school year syllabus (yes, he has a syllabus!) so that he was familiar with the subjects before school started – but my Mom Plans and high expectations had to take a back seat to our real life chaos.

Despite it all, I still really wanted him to get back into school mode so when Amazon reached out to see if we might be interested in trying the educational apps, stories and programming on the Fire HD 8 Kid’s Edition I couldn’t say yes fast enough. And, true to form, it’s taken me an entire week to write this post because I haven’t been able to form coherent sentences with a crying baby girl in my arms, so my big boy is now officially a preschooler!

I know, without a doubt, that the Fire HD 8 Kids Edition has helped him as he transitioned into his new classroom and has helped him ways that I didn’t anticipate, like social skills.

Currently, he’s rocking Daniel Tiger most often, which I love because it’s teaching him about his community and other’s feelings, something any three year old needs to work on. He’s also super into puzzles and he’s chosen a few apps that puzzle shapes and letters and I’m always impressed that he can figure them out (sometimes, I can’t…).
Every Fire HD 8 Kids Edition comes loaded with a free year long subscription to Amazon FreeTime Unlimited which allows you to download the content that you deem age appropriate for your babes. And the parental controls are a major bonus – there is a separate parent dashboard that you can access to monitor screen time, set content restrictions and even establish what type of media your kiddo plays and for how long.

You can crank up the minutes they are allowed to access books and limit the time they can play in the app section or even set a bedtime that automatically locks the tablet at a certain time. I’m crazy into the bedtime feature because I let Gray take his tablet to quiet rest for a few minutes and set it to shut off after he’s had some down time. After that, it’s snooze city and we all rest easy. 

And for my fellow boy moms, this tablet can take a beating but does come with a two year warranty – and I know from experience that the warranty process is easy and worth it. We’ve cracked a screen or two in our day and knowing we don’t have to go sit at a kiosk in the mall to rescue our tablet is a plus in my book. 
You can read more about the Fire HD 8 Kids Tablet here and I am excited to share the apps, books and programs that we are loving as the preschool year progresses!