Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “parenting”
- kudos:
I was a big fan of Homestar Runner in the early-to-mid 2000s, but I’m still baffled by how into it kiddo has gotten over the past few months.
- kudos:
When I was kiddo’s age, Pokémon didn’t exist yet, so there’s something that breaks my brain about her current enthusiasm for the franchise.
- kudos:
Kiddo last night: “please let me sleep in on Saturday!” Kiddo this morning: wakes up earlier than she does on a school day.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Saga Volume 6, by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan
- kudos:I don’t know what it is about particular volumes of this series that makes them rise above the rest, but this was one of them. Maybe it was adorable Ghüs becoming a badass when needed or a father-daughter reunion or something else. Whatever it was, this series continues to deliver.
- kudos:
Kiddo has EXTREMELY low standards for a pronouncement of “Best Daddy Ever,” but I’m grateful for it nonetheless.
- kudos:
Kiddo is excited to be signed up for soccer, so we’ve spent time kicking her new ball around the past two nights. I’m surprised by how much is coming back to me, given that I haven’t played in ~15 years and that I’ve never been good.
- kudos:
Kiddo is complicating our errand to buy her soccer stuff by insisting on hugging all the mannequins in the sports store.
- kudos:
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.
- kudos:
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.
- kudos:
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.
R. Sikoryak's 'Terms and Conditions' and ed tech
- kudos:My sister-in-law recently gifted me a copy of R. Sikoryak’s weird but wonderful comic Terms and Conditions, which “adapts” the 2015 iTunes terms and conditions into a comic format. I was as delighted by the gift, which I’m sure only contributed to her bewilderment (she knew I wanted the book, but I can’t blame anyone for not understanding why I wanted it). One of the gags of the comic is, obviously, the idea that a comic adaptation would get you to actually read through the whole document instead of just pretending that you have.
- kudos:
The pure joy kiddo showed when getting her first library card was exactly what I needed just now.
- kudos:
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.
- kudos:
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.
on faith transition and letting go of LDS modesty worship
- kudos:I’ve mentioned before that I support the Salt Lake Tribune’s Mormon Land podcast on Patreon, one of the perks of which is that I get access to the Tribune’s Mormon coverage without having to subscribe to the whole paper (which would be a lot of money for someone who doesn’t care about Jazz coverage or Utah politics). Thanks to this Patreon perk, I read a lot of news about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and between that and over three decades that I spent as an active member of that church, you’d think that nothing would surprise me anymore.
- kudos:
I am skeptical about heavy emphasis on STEM as educational policy, but watching my kid learn to program with her new robot today was a real treat.
- kudos:
Skipping my congregation’s candelight service today. Can’t go in person because of family sickness, and they’ve made it clear that they aren’t going to make huge efforts to make it Zoom accessible. Bummed to miss it, but playing Mario Party with kiddo instead is pretty fun.
- kudos:
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.
- kudos:
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.
- kudos:
In recent years, my faith has become less literal, my marriage has become mixed-faith, and we’ve both committed to letting kiddo choose her own future as she gets older. This has meant revisiting family ritual and tradition for end of year holidays, but it’s kind of fun!
- kudos:
‘Kiddo, I’m glad you’re a part of our family.’ ‘… the weirdest family?’ I will never tire of her developing sense of humor.
- kudos:
J’aime quasiment toutes les pistes sur le nouvel album de Stromae, mais j’apprécie surtout « C’est que du bonheur », où il parle en toute franchise des hauts et des bas de l’expérience d’être parent d’un jeune enfant.
- kudos:
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?
- kudos:
Kiddo after waiting and watching patiently while I filled out ballot at early voting: ‘I have to admit, that was pretty fun!’
why I put email back on my phone
- kudos:Since the beginning of COVID-19, I’ve been dismantling a lot of my productivity and organization systems, trying to put less pressure on myself to get things done and be more mindful in how I spend my time. Several months ago—I cannot remember exactly when—this culminated in taking email off my phone and pivoting away from the excellent Things 3 task management app to a more paper notebook-driven approach to keeping track of what I need to get done.
- kudos:
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.
beating Super Mario Galaxy 2 with kiddo
- kudos: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.
- kudos:
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.
- kudos:
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!’ 🎶
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Lego to discontinue Mindstorms robot line after a 24-year run | Ars Technica'
- kudos:Noooo! I was just blogging about wanting to get into this once my kid’s a bit older! link to ‘Lego to discontinue Mindstorms robot line after a 24-year run | Ars Technica’
thank you, Seymour Papert
- kudos:This morning, kiddo was pretending to be a robot, so when I needed her to switch her attention from, say, getting dressed to brushing her teeth, I’d have to pretend to “reprogram” her before she’d cooperate. This got me wondering if she was maybe old enough to try some basic programming activities—something like LEGO Mindstorms. I think that she’s probably still a bit young for that sort of thing, but it made me excited about doing this sort of thing in the future.
ClassDojo and educational 'accomplishment'
- kudos:As kiddo’s school year has gotten into full swing and mine has gotten busier, I’ve spent less time griping about her school’s use of ClassDojo. However, I’ve also become increasingly annoyed at the fact that the weekly update email I get from the company always has the subject line “What did your child accomplish this week?” The body of the email is divided into two sections: The number of “points” that my child was assigned, and the number of “stories” that my child appeared in.
- kudos:
Just wrote in an email that the worst part of academia is when my breaks from school don’t line up with my kid’s. I wrote it flippantly, but I don’t think I’m too far off.
old video games, libraries, and xkcd
- kudos: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.