Another Saturday, another bout with guilt and anxiety sparked by my general ignorance of home maintenance.

One of our newest family traditions is kiddo watching a Homestar Runner video during her bedtime snack while I do some dishes and see how many of the lines I still remember verbatim.

I think one of the most endearing nerdy things about our marriage is how in our texts, we still use the Can Haz language from the meme culture of when we first met.

One of kiddo’s library books right now is part comic and part choose your own adventure, all wrapped up in a solo TTRPG adventure. It’s a bit too old for her, but we’re both loving it.

I’m a big fan of Delisle’s comics, but in the past, I’ve skipped his series on parenting. This morning, though, a friend visiting Brussels offered to bring me back a copy of Delisle’s « Chroniques de Jeunesse », so when I went to the library later in the day, I couldn’t help but pick up something else he’s done. His art is great, and his stories are funny and sweet. My only complaint is that I couldn’t read the original French edition (though I should be glad Kentucky libraries carry the English translations!

Jon Sciezka and Julia Rothman’s “The Real Dada Mother Goose” is a real delight. It’s not often that kiddo checks out books that are homages to Dada, Oulipo, and other things I studied as a French major.

The pure joy kiddo showed when getting her first library card was exactly what I needed just now.

I enjoyed this movie, so I kind of want to give it four hearts. The visuals were interesting, it tackled important themes, and I appreciated its board game love and its leaning in to pulp sci-fi weirdness and just not caring. The more I think about it, though, the more I remember its clunkiness, the way it often moved too quickly, and the lazy bits. I liked it, and I’m glad we watched it as a family, but I doubt it would hold up over time.

I have never needed to write a recursive function in any of my (admittedly quite limited) professional programming, but when messing with kiddo’s robot today, I remembered the concept from a Java class in college and pulled it off in block programming. Pretty happy with that.

Today, kiddo is rediscovering her set of Story Cubes. I had forgotten her insistence that the comedy and tragedy masks on one cube face are actually Grey-style aliens.

Kiddo’s uncle is teaching her the Pokémon TCG, which is pretty delightful.

My reputation as an uncle is increasingly becoming associated with tabletop RPGs, and I’m not upset about that at all.

In the Greenhalgh home, Mommy’s been sick for over a week, which means Daddy’s not gotten a lot of work done recently. Final grades are due tomorrow, though, so kiddo might get a lot of screen time today.

Oh, so this is why my family’s gotten rocked by flu the past five days.

Our family does NOT have a ’too many books’ problem. We may, however, have a ’not enough bookshelves’ problem.

Boosted kiddo’s motivation to help put away the dishes by convincing her to think of it as a magic trick (making the dishwasher’s contents ‘disappear’). Boosted my own by remembering it’s now legal to play Mannheim Steamroller Christmas music around the house.

Feeling better today, so we’re joining the family Thanksgiving gathering about 20 hours later than planned. Looks like our holiday plans will retain their general shape despite yesterday’s disruption.

Woke up feeling lousy, so now I get to spend the next few hours figuring out if it’s the sort of thing we need to update (i.e., cancel) our Thanksgiving travel plans for.

‘Kiddo, I’m glad you’re a part of our family.’ ‘… the weirdest family?’ I will never tire of her developing sense of humor.

Looking at the haul of new library books in our living room today, I realized that we’re both a family that buys a lot of books and a family that saves huge amounts of money thanks to the library.

Kiddo is coming with me to class this afternoon, which is fun—but complicated by the fact that my lecture today is the most controversial and ‘adult’ of the semester for this class. Still, maybe a kid will have important insight on controversies surrounding content moderation?

Kiddo after waiting and watching patiently while I filled out ballot at early voting: ‘I have to admit, that was pretty fun!’

My parents are hosting (almost) everyone from my big family for Thanksgiving this year. Given growing numbers of food preferences and restrictions among us, I wonder whether we’ll have a big inclusive-but-non-traditional Thursday feast or whether dinner gets balkanized.

Using the Stardew Valley soundtrack as a chores anthem seems to get kiddo more excited (or at least less resentful) about helping out around the house.

About a month ago, I blogged about the approach we take to playing video games around here, which is to check out old games from a local library and play them on the Nintendo Wii we liberated from my parents’ basement a couple of years ago. Earlier this week, that approach bore some fruit: After repeated cycles of keeping the game out as long as we could, returning it for a couple of weeks, and then checking it back out, kiddo and I beat Super Mario Galaxy 2—a game several years older than she is for a console that’s been around for nearly as long as her parents have known each other.

Especially proud of kiddo’s growing sense of humor when it involves successful wordplay. Tonight, she went from ‘my legs are wobbly’ to ‘my legs are wallabies,’ and it was great.

Kiddo’s response to our complaining that we’re also tired: 🎶‘When you’re a kid you get to sleep, but now you don’t, now you don’t!’ 🎶

Going through old things and found a letter from my grandfather. It’s all typed except for a signature and a handwritten line at the very top: “All errors, be it spelling, grammar, etc., are fault of computer!!”

Thanks to a French Burger King commercial, I’ve just learned the French translation for “Paw Patrol.”

There’s a great xkcd strip (see below) about someone who always plays video games on a five-year lag because you get to enjoy all the good games with less of a hassle: I love this strip for a few different reasons. First of all, I’ve never been a hardcore videogamer, so if I do ever play a big title, it usually is about five years after the fact. Second, I think there’s something about it that gets funnier (or else makes me feel older) over time: It’s funny to think of someone only discovering Portal in early 2013, but now that “five years late” is almost “ten years ago,” there’s something kind of absurd about the strip.

It’s September, and we’re on our second cold of the school year. 😩

Kiddo’s classmate thinks our ridealong setup (which attaches a third wheel and second seat for kiddo to my normal bike) should be called a tricycle. I love it, but it enrages kiddo for reasons I don’t get.

This afternoon, kiddo tried to walk out of the library to the car without stopping her book, which makes me optimistic about her development as a reader.

‘If there was a dimension where they didn’t brush teeth, I would want to live there.’

Today’s email from ClassDojo claims that they are proud of my kid and that the message is sent with love. I get that this is a thing that marketing departments do, but I find the cynicism appalling.

Early in the school year, I signed up to be a parent representative on one of the Site-Based Decision Making (SBDM) committees for kiddo’s school. I had already started being a rabble-rouser about ClassDojo and some of my other edtech concerns, and I wanted to show that I could put in work where my whining was: That is, that I wasn’t just going to complain about things, but that I was going to show support for the school by helping out where I could.