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.

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).

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Today, I attended my first kids’ soccer game since rereading James Carse’s “Finite and Infinite Games” and since reading about Jacques Ellul’s ethic of non-power, and it turns out that makes a difference?

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.

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.

Bien content que ma fille me fasse confiance pour traduire quelques mots fr français dans une épisode de My Little Pony.

Talking in the car about Unicode standards for emojis, like all daddy-daughter pairs.

Every game I bought myself for kiddo’s Switch has really only gotten playtime if kiddo has taken an interest in it.

Once again, ClassDojo shows how much of its business model is built on creating feelings of parental inadequacy.

Cet été, j’ai beaucoup réfléchi sur combien mon travail de prof rend bien plus facile la vie de parent pendant les vacances scolaires.

Playing the Portal series with kiddo is going well, except that she is (understandably, tbh) freaked out by the Valve screen that appears when you first load it.

Kiddo’s Father’s Day card has been addressed to “Dr. Spencer Greenhalgh,” which is technically accurate but still feels off.

“What am I, made of jokes tonight?” - kiddo, after telling two admittedly good ones

So, uh, is my kid’s dream about a peanut butter fountain a good or a bad omen for all the hours we’re spending in the car today?

Kiddo is a wild mix of adventurous and picky when it comes to food. She does not want the unobjectionable ravioli the rest of us are eating, but she is powering through the too-spicy-for-her curry leftovers in the fridge.

Bookmarking this so I can keep thinking about it.

Not only did my e-bike’s battery charger short out but the slow leak in the rear tire also turned into a straight up flat soon thereafter. Thanks to the student-run bike workshop on campus, I still got home in time to pick up kiddo from school, but I remain grumpy.

There was a Little Free Library just outside tonight’s restaurant, so kiddo’s working through a new book while we wait for food.