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.

Setting up iMessage on an iPad for kiddo to use has immediately turned into Homestar Runner references, and I’m okay with that.

This got a dark chuckle from me.

Kiddo enjoys sending me messages encrypted in runes, and I enjoy brute forcing an interpretation like that scene in Cryptonomicon.

This afternoon was going pretty well until I totally spaced on kiddo’s orthodontist appointment. 😬

Kiddo accidentally emotionally traumatized a giant shrimp in her first D&D session this afternoon, and I honestly think that’s a great introduction to the game.

My office neighbor is starting a “department and friends” campaign, I asked if there was an age limit, and that’s how kiddo is joining her first D&D game later this month.

I feel like half of ClassDojo’s business model is “let’s prey on parental anxiety.”

“Tsk, tsk, tsk, what an uncaring dad I have!”

Since kiddo was really little, her aunt has been sending her “notable women,” “notable people of color,” “notable Indigenous people,” and “notable queer people” books, which has been good for just setting a background level of what we want our kid to be aware of as she grows up. When she came home with a “famous American” project, she was pretty clear up front that she was not going to choose a dude, and she turned to her little collection of books to come up with the three names that she needed to turn in to her teacher for approval before she could start the project.

Kiddo just told me to “make an Insight check” after fibbing to me about something, so it sounds like that D&D actual play podcast we’ve been listening to is making an impression.

No, I’m not ready for classes to start next week, but schools are cancelled for snow and I’m under the weather, so kiddo and I are watching the new Wallace and Gromit this morning.

Sun. afternoon, after chatting with other parents at birthday party: “Wow, spending time with fellow adults is great.” Sun. evening, after Zoom siblings’ game night: “Why don’t I do this more often?” Mon. morning, barely functional from not enough sleep: “Oh, right.”

Kiddo did lots of fuse bead art with cousins over Thanksgiving. When I complained that the train in the instruction manual was out of the 19th century and that kids’ stuff never acknowledges awesome modern trains, she improvised this high speed beauty for me.

Duolingo is one of those apps I really loved once but now can’t see as anything but creepy adware. It’s hard to complain when it’s teaching kiddo more French than I ever managed to, but I still worry I’ve sold her soul to that little green owl.

Kiddo is expressing her distaste for her “read aloud” homework by putting a lot of obviously false enthusiasm into her performance.

My kid is being raised by a mother who is entirely done with anything that smacks of religion and a father who is very non-literal and not very exclusivist, so it’s unsurprising that she tends to pick and choose when she wants to do church stuff with me. If I’m driving over to Louisville to attend church in person, she’ll usually come with me. If I’m attending church via Zoom because Louisville is over an hour away, she tends to read or play in her room instead.

Between my kid’s nascent interest in search engines and my students’ using generative AI despite my discouraging it, I’m thinking a lot this week about directly teaching epistemology as a foundation for other concepts.

Kiddo, covering up one of the tines on a fork: “Look, now it’s a threek!”

Kiddo, putting away laundry: “My sweater! Come feel its soft wrath!”—

I have made so many sneering comparisons between sports fandom and blind nationalism as someone who doesn’t really care about sports, but now that I’ve got a team (my kid’s) to be super invested in… yeah, I actually feel the comparison more, just with more self awareness.

“Aw man, I’m not as good as catching flying socks as I am at catching a frisbee.”

Nothing like taking a break from trying to convince kiddo to help with weekend chores to try to convince kiddo to help with farm chores in our shared Stardew Valley game.

Several years ago, while I was sharing a Bible story with my daughter, she interjected with an urgent thought: “I hope that Jesus knows that I have a pig.” As I wrote in my journal at that time: She’s been big on showing people her stuffed piggy recently: the movers, the plumber, anyone we’re Facetiming with, it doesn’t matter. So, it makes sense that if she got the chance to see Jesus, she’d want to show Him her pig, too.

It is hard to have honest conversations about the difficulty of parenting: Even in reading this post, I tensed up, because these are things you aren’t supposed to say. I’m glad someone was vulnerable enough to write this.

I made a BASIC joke for kiddo’s lunchbox note today. Turns out I forgot to actually put it in her lunch, but once we both got home, I was pleased to see that she puzzled out the syntax on her own.

Being a parent sometimes means developing strong opinions about things you knew nothing about before your kids were born—like what the best optional-second-player mechanics are for platformer games.

Il y a deux ans, j’ai avoué que malgré mon amour pour la musique francophone, il faut parfois beaucoup de temps avant que pouvoir vraiment suivre les paroles. Ce n’est pas forcément une question de compétence en français—un peu, quand-même, mais j’ai souvent le même problème en anglais, où j’écoute une chanson sans vraiment la comprendre. Tout ça pour dire que malgré avoir entendu la chanson « Secret » de Louane plusieurs fois grâce à la radio digitale DKL, ce n’est que ce matin que j’ai vraiment saisi le sens de la chanson.

Last Christmas, we got kiddo one of those Wreck this Journal books, which is why there was a block of ice with “figure out a way to freeze this page” peering out from it that was melting in the sink while I was listening to French internet radio and making a batch of muesli this afternoon.

Kiddo has been really into Greek mythology lately, and this has culminated in presenting me with “twelve trials” à la Heracles—but that basically get me to clean her room.