When I was growing up, our family had a three-VHS set of the original Wallace and Gromit shorts, and while “Wallace and Gromit fan” was never at the forefront of my identity, I have always loved The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave. Naturally, things that I loved as a kid are near the top of my list of things to introduce to kiddo. I showed them to her a couple of years ago—probably near the beginning of the pandemic—but she had no memory of them, so this weekend, I had the pleasure of reintroducing her to the series. Between Friday and Sunday, we watched all four of the shorts, starting with The Wrong Trousers, then A Close Shave, A Grand Day Out, and A Matter of Loaf and Death.

Saturday morning dad biathlon: Solo walk and run for latest couch to 5k session then 7 mile roundtrip on bike (kiddo on ridealong) to play at local playground.

One of the most prominent joys in recent parenting has been discovering that the same Jon Agee who was writing palindrome and wordplay books when I was a kid is still at it—and watching kiddo enjoy them even more.

Je suis deçu de ne jamais avoir réussi à enseigner le français à ma fille, mais je suis quand-même content que cette langue reste un moyen de communication secrète entre mon épouse et moi.

The biggest upside to my failed efforts to teach kiddo French is that I can still use it to communicate secretly with my spouse.

Kiddo and I are getting back into the “Magical Kitties Save the Day” TTRPG, and she keeps asking me when we can play next. Feels like a win!

A couple of weekends ago, I had my first experience with a Community of Christ Reunion camp. Kiddo and I only stayed for a long weekend rather than the whole week, but it was still a great experience. By far the best experience I had at Reunion was a Monday morning class for young adults and “90s kids” (which is not a label I’ve ever actively applied to myself, but it fit just fine. It was a remarkable class where we were eventually going to be talking about Job but never really did (maybe they did on the following days, after we left)—instead, our first class just made it clear that this was a place where it was okay to feel like you didn’t have your life together, okay to be anxious about the future, okay to not feel like a real adult yet, and okay that the expectations you’d set for yourself in late adolescence didn’t quite pan out as you’d hoped.

The title of this post is a bit misleading. My wife and I aren’t really big on “Parent’s Day” celebrations: Years of Latter-day Saint “all women are mothers” (read: motherhood is the most important part of womanhood) Sunday services grated on us during our years of infertility, and even now that we are parents (and aren’t practicing Latter-day Saints—though my current denomination certainly isn’t immune from a cringeworthy celebration of parents either), it’s just not a thing we do.

Yesterday, we picked up a ridealong bike someone was giving away, so a daddy-kiddo ride is absolutely on the agenda for Father’s Day 2022.

I have some regrets about being a week late on this article review because I took my kid camping—but not a lot, to be honest.

Tomorrow morning, I’m leaving for 3ish days of camping with kiddo. This is the first time that I’ve gone camping for well over a decade, and I’m a bit nervous, even though I’ve got lots of (rusty) Scouting experience to draw on and even though we’re also going to be staying in a cabin at a semi-structured church camp. Probably not too much to worry about in terms of camping.

Kiddo catches a glimpse of the ref list for the research statement I’m preparing for tenure: “Why does it say Greenhalgh so many times?”

Kiddo believes that Star Wars stormtroopers are robots, so she started singing beeps and boops to the tune of the Imperial March (which she learned from a yoga video??).

Kiddo was worried about today’s medicine because box described them as “tablets,” and she thought that meant chewing up something shaped and sized roughly like an iPad.

Today’s dadding: hidden pictures during Zoom church, making homemade muesli while kiddo’s chicken fingers were in the oven, and introductions to Bananagrams and the 1951 Alice in Wonderland.

Kid’s elementary school principal claims COVID is over, but pretty clear that’s not the case. Glad we can get her boosted now.

Would like to give teaching the kiddo French another try this summer and would be happy to receive advice. Have an app and some videos in mind—may also add some light TTRPG elements to efforts.

There are A LOT of perks to working in the same unit as a Library and Information Science program, but ‘we keep getting children’s books delivered, please take some home’ is high on the list.

Behind on grading, but today’s victories include a thank you note from a high school English teacher for a book I sent b/c it reminded me of him and my kid’s insistence we read through a D&D sourcebook together (complete with beholder impression).

Our school district is surveying parents about moving their spring break to align with my employer’s, and I am SO on board for this.

Crossing fingers!

Compelling case for asking about the tech environment adults are creating instead of hand-wringing about what kids are doing in it.

Big parenting milestone today: kid’s first tabletop RPG character. Glad that there are game designers with this young an audience in mind because it was already hard to wait for this age!

Small parenting victory of the day is kid’s reaction to watching The Magic School Bus: “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever watched!”

No paper could sell me on Vygotsky (and sociocultural theories of learning generally) as much as being a parent has.