Anxious but trying spouse and dad who's working on (and sometimes even succeeding at!) introducing my kid to bikes, games, books, French, and more.

You can subscribe to this content through this RSS feed or this Mastodon account. You can also subscribe to all of the content on this website through this RSS feed, this Bluesky account, or this newsletter.

I sometimes write in French! To only see the French content (which is also available below, alongside English content), please click on [fr] in the site header.

🔗 linkblog: I’m officially done with YouTube Kids



I’m glad we never started down this rabbit hole, but that’s not to claim that I’m a superior parent for not ever using YouTube Kids. As Johnson says, it’s capitalism all the way down, and all parents are stuck in scary media ecosystems in one way or another.


📚 bookblog: The Dragon Awakens (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)



We bought the English translation of this comic after falling in love with the series in the original French. The goal is to donate this copy to kiddo’s school library, but we couldn’t help but read it as a family first. It’s darling and wonderful, but it loses a bit of the fun in translation.




Picking up a sick(ish?) kiddo from school has me thinking of this decades-old panel from Ultimate Spider-Man.


image from



Is there a technical term for the tension a parent feels between disapproving of what U.S. schools emphasize and how they operate but still being proud of their kid for doing well within that system?




Okay, so there are already concerns that quantified behavioral reward/punishment systems reinforce existing inequalities. Did no one at kiddo’s school think about the implications of letting parents literally buy good behavior points by joining the PTA?


image from



We thought we’d intentionally given kiddo an uncommon name, but the local youth soccer league seems to have recruited all of the other kids with that name, and it’s very confusing for her.




Genuinely good kiddo joke: “What do you call it when people made of jewels steal something? An ametheist!”


📚 bookblog: Malaventure en pain d'épices (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)



Bon, j’avoue que elle devient de mojns en moins intéressant, cette série, mais je peux beaucoup pardonner pour une aventure en Alsace.




Silly me, worrying about getting up on time to get kiddo to school early for a morning activity. I should have just trusted my brain to continue its streak of waking up an hour early and refusing to let me back asleep.


📚 bookblog: Le dit des cigales (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)



Bon, ce tome-ci a été moins intéressant pour moi que le précédent, mais ma fille l’a beaucoup aimé. J’ai trouvé qu’il se passait trop, qu’on n’explorait pas trop la magie dans la série, etc. Pourtant, c’est mignon. En plus, le prochain tome a lieu en Alsace, ce qui sera fort intéressant !