Category: Parenting

I’m watching the trailer for Pixels, because Angela says it was shot in Toronto and there are recognizable landmarks. There are (it’s possible the entire film was shot on University Avenue) but that’s not what grabs me. It’s these three frames:

And I am momentarily confused. Does it seem horribly backwards that we sent human beings into outer space before we invented Donkey Kong?

It’s the following night. I’m watching the first episode of Halt and Catch Fire, because Angela had to go help our youngest fall asleep and I wanted to save Daredevil for the both of us. The show is set in 1983, but 1982 is still on my mind. It’s mostly laughable technology references (ahem desoldering a chip and then pulling it out of a socket) but there’s line near the beginning that catches my booze-addled mind:

Joe: Now tell me one thing that will be true about computers ten years from now.

Cameron: Computers will be connected across one network with a standard protocol.

I had been prepping myself for some crazy too-fast or too-slow answer, but wait a minute, it really was only about ten years from the mass release of the PC to the introduction of the world wide web. It only seemed like much longer to my then-teenaged self because, perhaps, I was a teenaged self.

It is 2015. More than 40 years since the moon, more than 30 years since Donkey Kong, more than 20 since the web. Almost 10 since the iPhone, if we’re picking random technological milestones, so another one should be coming soon, but it’ll take until I’m at least 50 for me to see it or at least decide what it is, apparently.

In the meantime, I build robots with my four year old son and wonder if he will tackle the hard problems that I never noticed until they were solved.

So The Oldest is in school now, and his kindergarten class is on Twitter, because of course it is. Which isn’t to say it’s a bad thing, at all – having prompts for end of day conversations has been a huge help to get past the “how was school?” / “good” / “what did you do?” / stuff roadblock.

(aside: I usually deal with this by asking what the funniest thing was that happened that day, which doesn’t always work, but when it does, often involves the kind of humour that I can relate to and can only hope he learned from someone else or I’m in trouble.)

And it’s great to see what they’re up to. I was curious about privacy concerns when it started, but the team’s done a great job in not showing faces in photos, addressing kids by initials, and so on (all that said, I’m still not linking to the feed, and I don’t follow them directly, but that’s just my tinfoil hat in action and I’m in WordPress admin right now so I can’t notice that his picture is probably in the header of this very website shut up shut up shut up OK?)

But speaking of photos, there are of course pictures on most tweets, which leads me to instantly skip over the text and search for my kid. Which means having to remember what he was wearing that day so I can identify his faceless form, and I’m so happy that I have a positive use for that skill other than scary abduction what-if cases.

This can go too far, though.  A while back there was a tweet about boots lining up nicely in the hall. So what did I do? Looked for the kid’s footwear.

A tad obsessive, sure, but at least I have an opportunity to log for posterity that the kids (at least one of them, I guess, or at least his sense of fashion) rank higher than funny cat pictures on my list of things that entertain me on the internet.

Bought some books today. Paper ones, because there were too many unread ones in my Kindle to see them and my bookshelf of similarly unread books had a little more room.  And, as a father sometimes does, at checkout I thought maybe I’d throw in something for the kids.

So I go over to Amazon’s toy section. Which has a lot of toys. But hey, categories!  And one of them is “Learning & Education” which is secret code for “I brought more crap into the house post-Xmas but OMG DO YOU WANT THEM TO GO OT HARVARD OR NOT?”

However.

Here’s the list of top toys for 2-4 year olds, sorted by popularity:

That’s right, the most important lesson for young children to learn, as voted by most purchases, which would imply as believed by most parents, is how to mow the lawn.

I’m not necessarily disagreeing, I just don’t have a lawn.

On a side note, the number 6 option was a stacking game that you could probably modify into a Towers of Hanoi puzzle, which every 2-4 year old should be able to master easily. Because I’ve been trained to recognize possible Hanoi games at every opportunity.  Fun side note to the side note, while I was in shopping mode this season I found a Hanoi game as a puzzle gift, “based on an ancient mathematical puzzle,” though this was for adults who like to feel like they still have the skills and passion for learning that they remember from grade 3.

Filed under “I have no idea what to do with this:”

You know how in disaster movies there’s sometimes a crush of people trying to escape armageddon, say via one tiny boat that’s being protected by some military types, and everyone’s panicking, and there’s inevitably a parent in tears thrusting their young child forth, hoping to save at least him or her, even if it means never seeing each other again?

I’ve been picturing a similar scenario except instead of a boat, it’s a TTC streetcar.  And instead of a disaster, dad just realizes he only has a child ticket and no adult tokens. But they’ve been waiting so long and the streetcar that finally arrives is so packed already, desperation and insanity have taken over.

You probably have to try taking the Queen streetcar with a youngster to understand. These things get crazy.

OK, maybe not that crazy. Outside of rush hour, anyway.

And yeah, if child protective services ever starts reading blogs, I’m doomed. Filing this under “parenting” instead of “stupid movie plot ideas” probably doesn’t help. But don’t worry, the kids will be safe, thanks to another idea in my head involving ostriches.

(Photo swiped from Way Out In the Margin)

I sometimes find the time to read “adult” books, by which I don’t mean sexytime, I mean ones with three syllable words, but most of my reading these days is in the “stories for very young children” genre.  And I read a lot of books, but not a lot of individual books.  There’s a financial and space aspect to reading the same book over and over, but mostly it’s because kids have favourites and never ever get tired of them.

So here’s the start of some book reviews.  Not so much the content, use of language, educational value, and so forth as what goes through my head when I’m reading it for the 900th time.  Because as a parent, you’re going to have to consider the impact on your mental wellbeing.

Book number one: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.  From Wikipedia:

[quote]The book is known for its playful, circular pattern. A boy gives a cookie to a mouse. The mouse asks for a glass of milk. He then requests a straw (to drink the milk), a mirror (to avoid a milk mustache), nail scissors (to trim his hair), and a broom (to sweep up). Next he wants to take a nap, to have a story read to him, to draw a picture, and to hang the drawing on the refrigerator. Looking at the refrigerator makes him thirsty, so the mouse asks for a glass of milk. The circle is complete when he wants a cookie to go with it.[/quote]

And all I can think of is that it’s Tea Party propaganda about not helping homeless people, because they’ll just want more.

My view of popular culture has definitely skewed since having kids.

The other day we did the CrossFit WOD Jeremy (21-15-9 overhead squats and burpees) and my coach said “if this goes bad, I’ve got the perfect song queued up.”

Of course, he meant this:

http://youtu.be/MS91knuzoOA

But I thought he meant this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ut9_nhyTlkc

When The Eldest was born, he had this thing where he wouldn’t sleep if he wasn’t in someone’s arms, or alternatively, we had this thing where we didn’t know how to put down a baby, but in any event, there was a period of several weeks where Not A Lot Got Done due to a combination of zero energy and zero free hands.

At the time, we had cable, so TV was Consumed.  We didn’t have a fancy-pants digital media setup at that time, just cable, so the TV that was Consumed was whatever the network was throwing at us, which wasn’t always (or often) of our choosing.  Especially during the daytime.

Yep, daytime TV.  And plenty of it.

And that’s the excessive preamble that I promise will eventually tie back to The Eldest, but mostly it tries to explain why I was watching Ellen one day.

On this particular episode of Ellen, which is the only one I remember, which doesn’t mean that I didn’t watch any others, or that the others were forgettable, but I will concede that many episodes may have congealed in my mind into one massive talk show that lasted 39 hours, and (pay attention!) on this episode, there was a guy playing ping pong.  There was a girl playing too; she was from China and really young and really good, but the guy is who stuck in my memory because he was on some kind of American Ping Pong Team, and he said something that made An Impression.

He’d been playing ping pong since he was two years old.

As I write this, The Eldest is three, so I guess he won’t be on Ellen for ping pong, but what struck me on that day was that this guy’s parents must have recognized some kind of aptitude/interest and did everything they could to foster it.  Or, maybe it was one of those things where his grandfather was a champion ping ponger, his father the same, and he had better learn to like it.  But I prefer the former.

And ever since, I’ve paid close attention to The Eldest’s activities (and now The Youngest’s as well) to see if any patterns are emerging that could be Aggressively Fostered.

And that day has come.

My eldest boy has what it takes to be a competitive Easter egg finder.

Easter was months ago, but he still has his basket of plastic eggs that he demands we hide around the house.  And he’s really good it it too. I mean, sure, we’re not burying the eggs in the yard or anything, but I’d hazard a guess that he’s finding them at a four year old’s level, at least.

Hiding the eggs is another story, unfortunately.  He has this habit of talking about where he puts them, and when it’s my turn to find them it’s more of a tour where he takes me to each location.  And there was that one time where I was sitting on the couch with my eyes closed and he hid an egg on my lap.  Which, to be fair, is the last place I would have looked, but his talking gave it away.

I don’t know about any venues for a competitive Easter Egg hunter, but my job is a parent is to make his dreams become reality with a minimum of tedious research, so my path is clear: in addition to helping him with his training, I need to start lobbying the International Olympic Committee to make this thing into a recognized, medal-winning sport (failing that I guess I can go to the Nobel people.)

The trick will be to have a hand in defining the rules so that competition-grade eggs happen to be the same plastic shells he’s already using, because then he’ll have the edge of experience and I won’t have to buy more crap, and I’ll also need to ensure that “finding” is in a totally separate category than “hiding.”  Because let’s be honest, most of my job is observing and helping aptitudes develop, but that also means setting things up so he can play to his strengths and not his weaknesses (though he’s welcome to prove me wrong.)