Kiddo objected to my using the word “enshittification” in a family conversation just now—not because it contains a swear, but because it was too complicated a vocabulary word.

After months of pestering her about it, kiddo relented and agreed to watch the original Star Wars with me (which I will always know as ANH even if I complain about special edition changes, so I guess that’s where I am on the Star Wars purity scale or whatever).

I haven’t watched this in maybe a decade? I noticed the seams and flaws in the movie more than I ever have before, but I can’t not give it full marks for the world that it created. It was interesting to think about all the different directions the not-yet-franchise could have taken after this movie and how many of them I might have liked to see, even if I am a Star Wars canon nerd even to this day.

Family TTRPG session ended with the players using blackmail to become part owners of the in-universe famous restaurant whose owners gave them their initial quest. Feels like success.

Kiddo learned an effective “stop hiccuping” technique from a podcast months ago, but tonight was my first bout of hiccups since then, and I was skeptical. Well, it turned out that it worked, and now she’s really smug about it.

I see that adding kiddo to the extended family Signal chat has had predictable consequences.

I was left unsupervised during the family visit to the local library’s artisan fair, and so now we have this on our tree.

I promise that I understand all the reasons for different approaches to winter weather, but I will also never stop being angry that my university keeps holding classes on days my kid’s school is canceled.

There’s a used bookstore near my in-laws that I enjoy stopping by when we’re visiting. One of the best offerings of this store (at least in kiddo’s mind) is the bin full of Pokémon cards up near the comics. The deal is that you can stuff a provided plastic bag (the kind that comes in board games to hold components) as full as you dare, take it up to the register, and they’ll just charge you a flat five bucks, no matter how many cards you fit into the bag. (You can also fill a larger box for a higher fee, or you can stuff a bag full of Magic cards from the next bin over, but our interest has always been in bagging our own Pokémon cards).

Very nearly discarded a custom bookmark given away at my grandfather’s funeral when preparing to sell some books, and now I feel a great moral weight to clearing my bookshelves.

“Don’t listen to Daddy, he’s being meta at you again.”

Tonight, I was that parent at the older kids’ science fair, explaining to kiddo that for her poster, we will be generating graphs using high-powered statistical software, which will be overdoing it but make the best ones in her grade.

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.

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.

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?

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!”

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.

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 !

Dad tip: Always build in a buffer between the walk home from school and your next meeting so that there’s plenty of time in case you need to clean up a scraped elbow and serve medicinal ice cream.

I’ve studied enough educational psychology to know I don’t believe in a “general intelligence factor,” but not enough I’m confident I could talk kiddo’s school out of testing students for it.

Joli, ce livre ! On l’a depuis quelques mois, mais on n’a jamais convaincu notre fille de le lire avec nous. En relisant la série Brume, on a découvert qu’un quatrième tome va bientôt sortir, et ma fille a insisté qu’on attende pour lire la troisième, comme ça on ne devrait pas trop attendre pour le quatriême.

Grâce aux taxes douanières que notre cher président impose à tout le monde, il est douteux qu’on puisse faire livrer le nouveau tome de cette série-là, mais en attendant, on a enfin réussi a commencer cette série-ci.

For the second year in a row, kiddo’s school is launching a fundraiser at the same time the district announces a decrease in local school taxes, and the juxtaposition is driving me crazy.