Tag parenting

Out of Touch Buffer

  1. Enjoy a new artis­tic endeavor.
  2. I want to share this with peo­ple who also love good things!
  3. Wait, what if every­one knows about this already? I am out of touch, after all.
  4. Google.
  5. Share with con­fi­dence OR smile and back-fill missed con­ver­sa­tion references.

Personalization and Co-opted Affection

I’ve had my Nexus One (the cur­rent google­phone) for a cou­ple of months now, and it's been enjoy­able. I bought it know­ing that it’d be a use­ful toy.

Pleasant Chaos

Check work email, check per­sonal email. My seven-month-old daugh­ter has a death grip on my thumbs as I teach her to walk and I'm scold­ing the twenty-two-month daugh­ter for pur­pose­fully putting a book on the floor in our path. (Can't step on books, instant time­out) The tone of my voice switches seam­lessly between encour­age­ment and parent-authoritarian. Drink­ing sec­ond full mug of cof­fee before 7:30 in the morn­ing. Got five hours of sleep last night, often inter­rupted by youngest daugh­ter scream­ing due to a head cold. Off to get and fax more finan­cial doc­u­ments for the mort­gage lender and con­tinue the hoop-jumping process, so far I'm 167 for 167. Check work email, check per­sonal email. Get­ting ready to sit in on a ninety-minute talk pre­sented by a col­league at work. Ninety min­utes feels like a com­i­cally long amount of time. Help­ing a friend with some pro­gram­ming advice. Exer­cised yes­ter­day morn­ing, so today's the off day. Lose five min­utes before I real­ize that I acci­den­tally looked at Google Reader and have been read­ing about a new smart­phone I won't buy. Wish­ing that time would stop so that I could catch up at work. My apart­ment is full of packed and half-packed mov­ing boxes. Have to remem­ber to move them away from the win­dows so that the older daugh­ter doesn't climb them to get a dif­fer­ent van­tage point for the win­dows. Although I applaud the goal, the boxes aren't sta­ble. Get­ting ready for work–have so much going on that I have to run down my daily check­list before get­ting out the door: deodor­ant, oral hygiene. So uncom­fort­able when I for­get. Check work email, check per­sonal email. Later, I'll try to remem­ber if I ate this morn­ing. If not, 11am ramen at work. Put on my win­ter gear to get ready for the cold com­mute and lis­ten to my younger daugh­ter bab­bling "da da da" and my older daugh­ter answer­ing "yeah! da da da!" and point­ing at me. On the bus ride to work I'm going to read five more pages of the book that my best friend lent me, enjoy them, and look for­ward to read­ing five more another time.

2010 is pretty much going as expected.

I'm happy.

And I'm out the door.

Understanding New Parents

A few years ago, I ended up on the wrong side of this response:

"Wait, I love my kids! STOP TALKING ABOUT KILLING MY KIDS!"

I found this a lit­tle con­fus­ing, as we weren't talk­ing about killing any­one. How­ever, I've since become a par­ent, and I can offer an expla­na­tion and translation.