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.

Kiddo is strong enough of a reader to do her own bedtime stories, but we’ve recently built up a small collection of French kids’ comics. Since she doesn’t read French, we’ve gone back to me (and mom) reading to her, and that’s kind of fun.

Mais comme ça fait pleurer, la chandon « Secret » de Louane.

Ça continue à être tout mignon et à faire marrer, cette série ! Je suis bien content de la relire avec ma famille.

Kiddo’s school district has gotten rid of ClassDojo (hooray!) and replaced it with what looks like a homebrew platform (tentative hooray?) that still datafies student behavior (boo!) and frames the whole thing in terms of employability and workforce development (super boo!).

In the name of practicing a growth mindset, I am choosing to pat myself on the back for addressing an issue in the kitchen that I likely created through previous inattention.

Elle est jolie, cette série ! On l’a lue en famille au début de l’année, mais j’ai convaincu ma fille de commencer une relecture. On aime beaucoup les dessins, j’adore le langage (que je n’arrive pas à traduire parfaitement), et j’attends avec impatience le deuxième tôme.

Look, nothing really new in here (Clearview should have made parents rethink the same ages ago, etc.), but yes, AI should get parents to be a hell of a lot more careful with posting pictures of kids.

This, but for communication platforms the local school district uses.

Quel monde pourri qui attend nos enfants.

Current levels of home maintenance confidence: Feeling like a god for taking a pocket door off its track and feeling utterly intimidated by needing to eventually put it back on.