We started our Halloween festivities early Monday morning. Eli’s school was having Mad Scientist Day, a celebration I can completely get behind, so we put him in my lab coat, spiked his hair, and gave him purple highlights because that’s all the rage among hip young mad scientist these days. I too dressed up, for [...]
If you like storytelling games, and especially if you have young children in your life, I cannot recommend Daniel Solis’s Happy Birthday, Robot! highly enough. Using dice and coins, up to five players collaboratively create a story about Robot’s birthday. The game serves as creativity fuel, helps you practice collaborative storytelling, and is a whole [...]
Yesterday you were born; today you are seven. For your birthday we got you tubes in your ears. Hope you like them! You’ve always been prone to winter ear infections, and this year you’ve been on antibiotics almost continuously since December. The surgery center where they installed your tubes has a hall with fourteen curtained [...]
When I asked for Eli to pose for this photo, I asked him to look sad. He replied that he wanted to be happy. We got kinda bogged down in the discussion after that when I was explaining to him that when the brain slug is on your head you are most definitely not happy.
Brain [...]
Last week Eli came home from school with a large plastic helicopter. “Where did you get that?” Misty asked him.
“Oh, I got one of my friends to trade it to me.”
She paused. “What did you trade him?”
“This two-page comic I made in school. It had two robots and they were fighting.”
We explained to him that, [...]
You may remember that, a while back, Liza fell and had to have stitches in her lip.
A week later, I rolled my ankle while exercising. It swelled up like an angry pundit and I spent the weekend with it propped in the air. Even now I am wearing this crazy ankle brace which, if science [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
