Sans le faire exprès, il nous est arrivé (à ma fille et moi) de passer un été du jeu vidéo français. En début d’été, j’ai acheté « Rayman Legends ». On avait beaucoup aimé jouer à « Rayman Origins » sur notre Wii avant de nous offrir une Switch. Comme ça nous manquait un peu, j’ai décidé d’acheter la suite pour retourner à ces souvenirs-là. Rayman me paraît un jeu bien français, même si je ne suis pas sûr de pouvoir défendre cette impression. C’est surtout l’animation du jeu, qui me semble mise en vedette d’une façon qui est digne d’un pays qui valorise la bande dessinée et le dessin animé.

I genuinely appreciate that my job is flexible enough that I get to be primary parent over the summer, but I’d be lying if I said that I enjoy every single moment of it. Enough of my self-conception is wrapped up in my professional identity (and enough of my anxiety is wrapped up specifically in parenting) that it has taken some real re-orientation over the past several years to turn this into a more positive experience. This summer has not been without bumps in the road, but it feels like it has gone particularly well.

Am I playing fast and loose with tracking kiddo’s time for summer reading programs? Yes, but she’s also a kid who never gets angrier at me than when I tell her to put down a book to come to dinner, so I think I can get away with it.

One perk of using Markdown/HTML-based slides is that I can work on them from my phone’s text editor when sitting a few rows back from kiddo at a summer library event.

Kiddo is at a half-day summer camp this week, which is freeing up my mornings for work. However, the camp is across town from where we live, so rather than driving all the way home for a couple of hours of work, I’ve been driving to a nearby branch of the Lexington Public Library to set up my laptop and get some work done there. It has been really nice!

Spending part of my Father’s Day afternoon exploring a rhyming dictionary with kiddo in an urgent care waiting room, and I actually think that’s kind of perfect.

“C’mon kiddo, you need to try to get up.” “Sorry, dad, I rolled a nat 1, so I have to stay in bed.”

Don’t love the idea of AI as coparent, but gendered divisions of labor also suck.

Ever since importing my Twitter archive into the Day One journaling app back in March, I’ve been able to revisit things I tweeted over the years as part of my almost-daily scroll through Day One’s “on this day” feature. (In fact, it’s an almost-daily scroll because I’m having to purge the tweets that actually don’t work well as journal entries). That’s how I learned this morning that twelve years ago today, I reached out to Jonathan Coulton on Twitter to ask if the line “je suis celui qui suis” in his “barely remembered French” track Je suis Rick Springfield was an intentional reference to a similar line in the Bible or just a “crazy coincidence.”

(Me, I’m less upset that she’s getting x-rays than that her school will have her make up the state testing she’s currently missing.)

Kiddo is asking a lot of questions about Marie Curie on her way to get her first set of x-rays, and it’s the first time I’ve ever wished she doesn’t read as much as she does.

Il nous arrive souvent de trouver que les meilleurs « romans graphiques » que ma fille trouve à la bibliothèque sont en fait des traductions des bandes dessinées françaises, et ça me plaît beaucoup.

Look, I know I’m always complaining about my university employer’s schedule being out of sync with local schools, but I want to point out the absurdity of it being easier to deal with kiddo’s school suddenly cancelling for snow because I’m on Spring Break.

For the past three weeks, we’ve been doing “daddy translates a French kids’ comics series” at bedtimes. We just finished the last volume, and it did not end the way kiddo wanted, so we had a conversation about fanfic and fixfic.

Kiddo and I often play a little bit of Switch together right before or after dinner. Last night, she was humming what my spouse and I both thought was a nonsense melody that she was making up—but that immediately reminded both of us of the Romanian dance song Dragostea Din Tei as featured in the classic internet meme Numa Numa.

It turned out that kiddo was humming Dragostea Din Tei—the adults had both forgotten that a version (or sample? I dunno) of the song features in Mitchells vs. the Machines, but she’d watched it recently on her own, and that’s what she had in her mind when singing during Switch time.

One of the best things I’ve done recently in terms of feeling good about myself as a parent is draw my attention to how often I “show up” as a parent rather than insist on evaluating “how I do” when I show up. (This reflection brought to you by two weeks of snow days).

Kiddo got excited when the number 67 came up in the D&D actual play podcast we’re listening to. I thought at first that it was a “six seven” joke, but it turns out she liked that it sounded like 6d7.

Kiddo has decided that she can get away with ignoring requests so long as it’s because she’s reading something. The most annoying part of it is that she’s right that we’ll grant a lot of latitude for that in particular.

Kiddo was asking me questions about the manuscript I was writing, that got us talking about science fairs, and then she basically reasoned her way into the idea of a meta-analysis.

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?