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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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!’

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. The idea behind all of this was to bring about more balance in my life. By not being able to check my email all the time, I would be less likely to sneak into work mode when “playing jaguars” with kiddo, and the constraints of a physical to-do list are such that I figured I would give myself less to do if I had to write it down and copy it over from week to week.

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!’ 🎶

Noooo! I was just blogging about wanting to get into this once my kid’s a bit older!

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.

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. Do points and stories reflect accomplishment?

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.

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. At any rate, I wish that Portal were still supported by modern macOS, because even if that’s 15 years late, I would gladly play through the game again. In fact, I wanted to show it to kiddo a couple of months ago and was frustrated that I couldn’t!

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.’

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. Besides, I have long term aspirations to run for a school board seat, so this seems like a good way to work my way there; also, I’d guess there aren’t as many dads as moms that are available for 3pm committee meetings (hooray for a flexible academic’s schedule!), so I figured I’d try to balance out some of the gender representation there.

In addition to all the irritating ClassDojo stuff going on at kiddo’s school, I’ve also spent some time banging my head against the wall made up of two forms: One to opt out of FERPA directory information sharing, and the other to opt out of kiddo’s information being shared with media outlets. I’m too tired tonight to get into all the details of what’s been going on, but the short version is that there’s no (clear, easy) way for spouse and I to request that kiddo’s name and image not be shared on school social media without also insisting that kiddo’s name and image not appear in innocuous things like… a school yearbook.

When I was in school, I’d frequently get stressed about whether I was sick enough to warrant staying home. The idea of making a “wrong” choice in either direction was frightening. Anyway, it turns out that anxiety extends to making that same decision for my kid.