Grumplestiltskin » kids

I Don’t Clean Fish Tanks.

EDubya — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:13:30 +0000

I mentioned Small’s affinity for fishing that came seemingly out of NOWHERE, right? The kid is like a real life Benjamin Button. If I wasn’t actually there when he was born, I would swear that he was an old man trapped in a 7 year old body. Bolstering my case is the fact that he has always had these random interests that seem too old for him, like when he was turning four and all he wanted for his birthday was gardening accoutrements. Seriously.

He likes to fish and go to the driving range.

He loooooves to study past presidents.

He talks about eggnog season all year long.

There are few things he is fonder of than sitting around playing Risk or Life.

These are all clues to the little codger brain he conceals behind those big brown eyes. He was somewhat blotchy and weird when he was born, come to think of it, and he did have a bum ticker. Who knows…

I bring all this up because last year he wanted a fish tank for Christmas. Despite the fact that they would be entrusting this venture to happen under my watch, his grandparents were happy to oblige. Worth mentioning is the part where I am certified as a black thumb of aquatic wildlife care, so this was a dicey undertaking. We did quite a bit of research on what kind of tank would be more likely to survive ~~his~~ my death grip.

He ended up with a BiOrb. First…it looks REALLY COOL. It was relatively painless to set up, the hardest part being the few days you have to condition the water before you start tossing guppies in it. We took him to the store and helped him pick out a King Beta, which he took home, plopped in the bowl and dubbed “Lucky”. After the tank balanced with the new occupant, we added three more little guys. The first few hours wondering if the Beta was going to eat the new fish were interesting to say the least. Talk about a life lesson. I might as well have set them down in front of a “When Animals Attack” tv marathon. Thankfully, there was no bloodshed and the roommates have done quite well together. Somewhere along the line, we ended up with a host of tiny snails in the tank too, probably hitchhikers on some of the greenery we bought.

Blah, blah, blah…. the real miracle of this tank is this…

We set it up in January and I have cleaned it twice.

TWICE.

You heard me. Twice.

If you are careful about keeping the environment balanced in it, this tank is pretty much maintenance free. Can you imagine a hamster cage you cleaned twice since January? *shudder* This tank has made it possible for the first time EVER IN MY LIFE for me to keep fish alive more than like three weeks. The best I ever did before this was probably a batch of Sea Monkeys. Miracle, I tell you. If you have occasion to pick up a tank this is the one to get.

Next up, puppy tanks…

Wishbook, How I Miss Thee

EDubya — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:32:04 +0000

I’ve always felt that I had about the best timing for a birthday possible. Mine is in June, which means that growing up, I never went more than six months without a crapload of presents. From the parental perspective this is a pretty sweet deal as well. You have six months to think up good present ideas inbetween festivities. Two of my own monsters are not so lucky. We’ve got one birthday right before Thanksgiving and another right after Christmas. That’s a long dry spell. More importantly (because it is *my* problem) that is a lot of pressure to come up with good ideas all at once.

bah.

These kids also have a pretty big family, so ideas must also be provided to aunts and uncles. I’m just not very good at ideas. That’s a lie. I’m pretty good with ideas, but I’m GREEDY as all get out with them. I want to be the one giving them the awesome present that will define their childhood, like my growing up skipper doll or my white plastic record player.

You know how I managed to acquire those two magnificent gifts? The Sears Wishbook. I basically used it as my own personal shopping list. I just circled what I wanted, and sometimes it would magically appear. What I didn’t realize at the time, was that this was probably as good a deal for my folks as it was for me. They never had any question what I wanted. It was right there. Circled. Multiple times. In pen. With a big “E” next to it. By the way, some benevolent soul on Flickr has managed to scan several Sears Wishbooks of that era in their entirety. If you are so inclined, you really should check them out. It is such an outstanding trip down memory lane. Here’s 1977, 1979, 1980, but he’s got tons more.

There is no equivalent now for the Sears Wishbook. We get tons of catalogs, sure, but they just aren’t of the same weight. Anyway, on Sunday I had this idea that I would take the kids to Toys R Us, and bring a notepad and we would walk around doing basic recon on what kinds of things they might like for Christmas. No surprise, they were totally into it. I ended up with some really good ideas, written in pencil, in my own little wishbook.

Innovators Stand Up and Be Counted

EDubya — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 06:09:22 +0000

Remember when the Tech Museum of Innovation opened in downtown San Jose, and it was SO VERY COOL and a huge destination when you had friends in town? That was a little over ten years ago. Sadly, we all know that ten years might as well be 100 years in software. Sometime in the last ten years The Tech has become crazy dated, and nowhere near as “innovative” as it’s moniker would have you believe.

Some of the exhibits are still pretty cool. The earthquake simulator is a good example of that. The robot deal that spells your name out of wooden blocks…very cool. In fact, many of the more mechanical exhibits are definitely worth seeing and playing with.

But…

What the hell has happened as far as keeping current with the software exhibits? Nevermind the seemingly high percentage of these things that just. don’t. work. (hardware failures, crashes and reboots on WINDOWS 98, I might add) The things that *do* work are often hopelessly out of date. Particularly glaring is one exhibit where visitors can make their own personalized web page, with a few customizations in the colors and backgrounds, sort of like a rudimentary blog. They can even put their photo on it, snapped by an attached webcam. They can use a bar code scanner to load in the exhibits they have already visited, and then give a little summary of their experience about each of them. That sounds pretty good, right?

EXCEPT THE WEB PAGE YOU PRODUCE IS STRAIGHT OUT OF GEOCITIES CIRCA 1998.

It’s bad, friends. Really bad. Is this really representative of innovation? HERE?? We are smack dab in the middle of Silicon Valley. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a web developer and *THAT* is the personalized web page we are showing off at the Tech Museum of Innovation? WHAT KIND OF MIXED UP WORLD ARE WE LIVING IN???? I’m sure it was great when they launched it, but come on…there are a bazillion free websites where kids can set up a personalized page about a million times snappier than these with about four mouse clicks…maybe using only their FEET.

How about the spam whack-a-mole machine? Did we pick that one up at a Chuck-E-Cheese that went out of business? Why not an exhibit where kids have to design their own filter and then have hundreds and then thousands of pretend words hammer at it, complete with L33T spelling variations to demonstrate the vigilance required, and how easily a system can be totally swamped with spam? Let kids try to keep up adding new variations to their filter. It would be so much more interactive, so much more realistic, and most importantly, NOT OF THE STONE AGE. Kids are not stupid. Remember that the kids playing with this stuff probably have email addresses of their own. They’ve likely been on computers or online since they were toddlers in one way or another. Give them more value.

Let’s talk about the roller coaster build simulator. It’s pretty simplistic, but the kids dig it because after they build their own roller coaster, they can take their little barcode over and sit down in what is essentially a hard bench in front of a large tv and “ride” their roller coaster. Great! Except for the part where IT DOESN’T WORK. Two of the kids spent fifteen minutes building their coaster, and tweaking their designs only to walk over, stick their barcode in the reader and be told there was no file found. Total. Letdown.

You know what *is* neat though? The big software driven marble labyrinth where you tilt a large flat computer screen from four sides to move the marble through the maze. Oh wait…that didn’t work either. The marble was stuck in one corner.

These place needs a total reboot. Apple? Google? Ebay? Everyone? All you folks here in the valley that pave the way for the rest of the world, how can you guys let this place represent the valley in which we all live and WORK?? This is totally embarrassing. I am calling on you to get your marketing people down to The Tech and see what you can sponsor. If we want to let the museum continue to morph into a glorified lobby for the IMAX theater, great, but it’s ridiculous and sad that with all the real innovation in the valley, THIS is what we are presenting to the rest of the world.

We can do better. To quote @aaronh , “There isn’t a single thing here more impressive than the free apps on my iPhone.” He couldn’t be more right.

I don’t want to abandon this place, but I can’t abide membership renewal if this is the way it stays.

One Stone, Two Millenium Falcons…er, birds.

EDubya — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:11:25 +0000

Fantastic new toy (D40) arrived on Friday. Thanks, Dad! I only got to rattle off a few test shots so far, but it has been a distinct pleasure, let me tell you. I had just gotten finished sharing some photos with the kids from powerpig. He’s got a great collection of photos of Lego and Star Wars figures in all kinds of action by themselves and with some cooperative chipmunks. If you haven’t checked them out, you really must. He also sells prints and tshirts. Buy. Buy. Buy.

The kids wanted a few shots of their own with their Galactic Heroes toys. Two birds. One stone. I got my test shots and they got their “ode to powerpig“.

There’s a couple more here.

Search is On.

EDubya — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 05:07:29 +0000

Our kids have fairly limited reign on the internet. That’s what happens when your parents spend entirely too much time on the interwebs, especially if one of them does what I do for a living. They get to play a little Club Penguin. They go to MiniClip. They go to Amazon.

When Small is looking around on Amazon, he is invariably searching for items to fill out his Christmas list, no matter what time of year it is. I usually get a little heads up on what he’s looking for because he asks for the spelling of the words that are confounding him.

“Mama, how do you spell ‘chemistry set’?” Now, *that’s* what I want to hear. He wants something with learning potential.

“Mama, how do you spell ‘thermal camera’?” I blame The Othersiders for this. It’s still semi educational, even though he wants it for ghost hunting purposes, right?

This is the search I found on the lingering Amazon tab in my browser tonight.

Mistakenly finding himself in the Kindle section of the site is probably the only thing that kept him from actual paint guns. He might actually believe they don’t sell them. We’ll let him think that for now.

Baby Medium

EDubya — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:47:33 +0000

Baby Girl

Originally uploaded by EdubyaD

Having one of those days/weeks/months thick with nostalgia. I had a dream a few months ago where I was playing with Large and Medium, only they were their four and two year old selves. I was back in time with them and it was fantastic. I could hold and squeeze them. It was that much sweeter, knowing now, only too well, how that time with them is so very fleeting.

It has all gone by too fast.

I wish I could have those days back. I feel like I would appreciate that time so much more now that I’m not so short on sleep. Seriously, I went something like five years never sleeping more than three hours in a row. That’s when I gave up wearing a watch. All it did was remind me how little time I had to sleep. So many days I woke up so tired that my first thought was, “Okay, twelve hours until I can go back to bed.”

I wish I could run in a perpetual loop between babyhood and the point where they start to figure out all the grown up worries in the world, sometime before their first real heartbreak, when they still think anything is possible.

Maybe I’ve been listening to too much Ben Folds.

Maybe when they have their own kids, I’ll come over and make sure they get enough sleep. They can soak it all up and they won’t have to dream about going back.

TOTALLY NEW WAVE 80′S TEENAGERS™

EDubya — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:58:29 +0000

On the day when the ban on the sale of clove cigarettes in the U.S. goes into effect, I return to the scene of the crime where I first encountered them. As a TOTALLY NEW WAVE 80′S TEENAGER™, I was fascinated by the smell of them, maybe for the similarity to the smell of my grandfather’s pipe. (Sorry Mom and Dad if you are reading this.) Back then we heard incredible tales of their effect on other TOTALLY NEW WAVE 80′S TEENAGERS™.

“Oh, yeah…he used to smoke so many cloves that his lungs were bleeding. BLEEDING!!”

As the impressionable youth that I was, that was pretty much all I needed to hear. I wouldn’t be making a habit of cloves any more than I would have made a habit of eating a pack of pop rocks and then chugging a Coke.

“Mikey from the Life commercials did that and his stomach exploded and he died. DIED!!”

All this happened at Club X, the TOTALLY NEW WAVE 80′S TEENAGER™ equivalent of a nightclub which was held at the very same rented roller rink where we now go to the kids’ school sponsored Skate Night once a year. My how the times have changed, my friend. Tonight, instead of watching milling herds of Bauhaus loving goths sway and smoke cloves, we watched Small, Medium and Large skate the night away, red-faced and sweaty under the flashing lights. Nothing else there has changed. I stand by my less than kind yelp review of the place that I wrote up last year. It is kind of a dive as far as kid destinations go, but they have fun regardless and that’s really what it is all about. There are not too many kid activities where you can delight in their excitement and simultaneously mourn your lost youth (and cloves) as a TOTALLY NEW WAVE 80′S TEENAGER™.

Eye (and pencil) of the Beholder

EDubya — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 03:33:42 +0000

Just when you are feeling frumpy and boring and gross, Small sweeps in to draw your portrait, all dolled up and having fun at a block party. He doesn’t care if I am not wearing mascara. He thinks I’m pretty anyway.

New Yorkers Don’t Like Blueberries

EDubya — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 19:30:54 +0000

Light On

Originally uploaded by EdubyaD

The day I moved to Manhattan, I discovered I was pregnant. Checked into a hotel and awaiting the arrival of our belongings, I found out the daughter I never believed I would have was brewing. I also discovered what it was like to be puked on by my two year old with an ill-timed flu, while having breakfast in the Carlyle. Twice. One of those discoveries was better.

My daughter is a New Yorker. She was born at Mount Sinai Hospital the following April. Born on Fifth Avenue. It doesn’t get much more official. We scooped her up and moved back to the west coast 10 days after she was born, but if you ask her, she’s a New Yorker. That fact accounts for any differences she perceives between herself and her California born and bred bookend brothers.

If there is a game she doesn’t like or a food she can’t tolerate, it is due to her status…New Yorker. “New Yorkers don’t like blueberries, so I don’t like blueberries.” There you have it. She personifies the stereotypes of the city. She is headstrong. She is in charge. She is the center of the universe that she lives in. She is the catalyst. Her energy is intoxicating. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

My girl will forever bind me to that city. I will love it always, if only because it is where I met her all those years ago. Today, that is a little bit heartbreaking. This is the day eight years ago, on an otherwise beautiful Tuesday morning, we all became New Yorkers. While standing in my flip-flops in my California backyard and watching the last of the planes overhead as they flew back from every direction to be grounded, I joined my daughter as a New Yorker.