Category Archives: Bringing Up Baby

The travails of raisin’ kids.

This week in photos

I always love my Tuesday nights with the crafty gals. This week was no exception. We has some serious crafting!

Eli created Super Mario characters to do battle on our kitchen table. Stephen caught the whole drama.

The end of the battle:

Liza showed her super remote skills:

Lastly, my finished crochet stash. It seems to grow larger by [...]

Share

Creativity Crisis Solved with an Alien City

Newsweek’s article on the “creativity crisis” has been making the rounds lately. It fits the usual template of such stories: extrapolation of a trend leads to prognostications of vague gloom. In this case, it’s that US kids’ Creativity Quotient scores have been falling since the 1990s.

The article is talking about a specific flavor of creativity, [...]

Share

Photos for a Rainy Monday

Here’s Liza eating her birthday cake at the giant locals kid birthday party we had a few weekends ago.

Here’s Eli pretending to be a robot in the box of one of Liza’s birthday presents. A pirate, my little pony robot.

And lastly, here are the two monsters I finished last night. They are going to my [...]

Share

Fever? What fever?

As you can tell, the fever today isn’t slowing her down much.

Share

Eli’s Kindergarten Graduation was Very Wet

Last Thursday we celebrated Eli completing kindergarten.

Some schools treat this as a full-blown graduation with caps and gowns and all kinds of formality. I am not down with that; I appreciate marking Eli’s transition from kindergarten to grade school, but it’s not really a graduation. Fortunately, Eli’s school didn’t do that. Instead, after everyone got [...]

Share

The Light! The Light!

We live near the eastern edge of the US’s Central Time Zone, which means we get light earlier in the morning. I’m sure it has something to do with relativity and perhaps warp drives. The upshot is that, in the summer, sunrise occurs at 5:30 in the morning.

Eli and Liza care nothing for arbitrary time [...]

Share

To Liza on Her Third Birthday

For your birthday this year we let you pick what you wanted to do and where you wanted to go. This led to us celebrating your birthday on Friday at Chuck E. Cheese with Mumsy, your friends Josh, Kate, Jordan, and some scary clanking animatronic animals. I watched you climb up the kid habitrail all [...]

Share

Perhaps He Will Be the Next David Cage

This morning Eli spent a fair amount of time inventing a new video game. The game starred a Lego version of Perry the Platypus, from the cartoon Phineas and Ferb.

For reference, here’s what Perry looks like in the cartoon. Man, that’s one sweet hat he has.

Anyway, in the game Perry has to dodge bad guys [...]

Share

Eli Loves Technology, while Liza Gets Specific

I’ve joked before that Eli is a child of technology. For instance, he doesn’t understand why only some TVs can serve up hot and cold running Imagination Movers. He does read books, but he views even that activity in a computerized light. He was engrossed in a book one morning, and I had to tell [...]

Share

Easter

Easter morning. Eli’s surprise face. This is the toy he says he’s been wanting his whole life. I think he was excited about it.

Yes, Liza has pink in her hair. Yes, we did it on purpose. She wanted it there on Friday so I put it in. It still isn’t completely gone but it is [...]

Share