The Pip
drorzel | November 25, 2015We're visiting my parents for Thanksgiving, and one of the highliughts of any trip to visit Grandma and Grandpa is that they have Nerf swords for the kids:
SteelyKid and The Pip in their traditional Nerf sword battle.
This raged for a good while before dinner. Hopefully, they'll sleep well tonight...
drorzel | November 23, 2015The Pip is nute about superheros at the moment, primarily the Justice League, and particularly Batman. He's got quite the pile of toys around this theme, making for a decent photo subject:
The Pip's collection of superhero toys.
Technically, these aren't all Bat-Toys-- you can see a Spiderman Lego set in there (from some alternate universe in which Peter Parker got Tony Stark to buy him a Spider-Copter) and also a few Transformers. But Batman holds down a pretty solid plurality in the toy population.
The Bat-Boat that's front and center in this shot (which ended up in the bathtub shortly…
drorzel | November 22, 2015I try not to have this be the cute-kid-photo-of-the-day, but really, how could I not use this shot:
SteelyKid and The Pip discussing the finer points of Lego superhero stickers.
The Pip was not a huge fan of the antibiotics that came with his strep-throat diagnosis, so we bought a sticker book as a bribe reward for taking his medicine. Yesterday afternoon, in one of the brief quiet periods of a busy day, SteelyKid sat down with him and they had an intense conversation about the identities and powers of the various heroes and villains represented in the sticker pages.
Which is too cute not…
drorzel | November 18, 2015the Pip officially has strep throat, and thus had to stay home today, but the antibiotics he started yesterday (over his very strenuous objections) have worked wonders, so his energy level was pretty much back to normal. Which means that we spent a while out in the back yard raking up a big pile of leaves, whereupon:
The Pip mid-leap into the leaf pile in the back yard of Chateau Steelypips.
This is a small fraction of the leaf pile we used to be able to get, before we had the big maples that used to be on the south side of the yard taken out. It's not even everything we can get now, as…
drorzel | November 14, 2015This is a pure document-my-day shot, not one of my random attempts at artsy effects. One of The Pip's birthday presents was a big vinyl wall decal from Chic Walls, a gift from Aunt Erin in California. These are a little complicated to install, and SteelyKid being sick messed up the whole week, but I finally got around to putting it up Friday:
The Pip's new Gotham City wall decal.
So, our superhero-crazy Little Dude now has Gotham City on his wall. He's all fired up about this.
And that's it from Friday; I'm still fighting a cold of my own, so between this and some video shooting for a…
drorzel | November 12, 2015Another day with a staged-for-talk-prep photo:
My desk, with social media on both computers.
I needed a picture of social-media apps on computer screens for an upcoming talk, so I took one. After first tweeting a cute-kid photo:
Cute-kid photo because I want to take a picture of Twitter to use in a talk. pic.twitter.com/QIYHTda0vL
— Chad Orzel (@orzelc) November 12, 2015
Yeah, it's shameless. But look at them, they're adorable! And the reminder of their adorableness was really needed today, because it's been an incredibly frustrating week, kid-wise.
I should note that I do not actually…
drorzel | November 8, 2015The day was dominated by the previously mentioned birthday party for The Pip, so it only makes sense to have the photo of the day be an action shot from said party:
The Pip shaking a parachute with balls on it at his birthday party.
This is from the games portion of the party, which included shaking a parachute loaded up with plastic balls so they flew all over the place. Which is the sort of thing that plays very well with the four-year-old crowd.
And now, having celebrated in style and substantially increased the supply of superhero-themed toys in Chateau Steelypips, it's time for bed.
drorzel | November 8, 2015The Pip's birthday was yesterday, but we're having his birthday party today, because that's when the indoor playground was available. He had two requests for his birthday: that we have a party at Tumbling Tykes, and that one friend in particular be invited. So, well, we're having his party at Tumbling Tykes, and his buddy D. will be there. along with 9-10 other friends from day care.
This post is mostly an excuse to post this graphic of the invitation, because I'm proud of my rudimentary design skillz:
The Pip's having a birthday party.
And also to say that this is about all you're getting…
drorzel | November 7, 2015Four years ago today, The Pip was born. That's hard to believe, in both directions at different times. There are days when it seems like just yesterday that he was a tiny helpless thing, and other days when he seems to have been a hyper Little Dude for aeons.
I took a bunch of pictures of him today, but it's sort of hard to choose one for the photo of the day. I went with this one as the "featured image" above:
The Pip with his big new book of superhero stories.
because it's a good clear picture of him, and a fairly characteristic facial expression. Also, he's holding a big collection of…
drorzel | November 1, 2015Another busy day, so you get another kind of lazy shot. But, hey, everybody wants to know how the kids did trick-or-treating, right? So here's The Pip's share of the Halloween haul:
The Pip's Halloween candy.
I weighed both his plastic pumpkin full of candy and the Tupperware container that SteelyKid's stuff is in, and they each came out between 1.1 and 1.2 kg. So, a bit over 1kg each (after taking out the weight of the containers)-- not bad for an hour's work.
The funny part is that The Pip has turned into an exceptionally picky eater, and won't eat... any of this, really. He was super…
drorzel | October 31, 2015I took some shots of nature stuff on this morning's dog walk, and a few good action shots at the last soccer game of the season. But honestly, the only thing anybody wants to see today is Halloween costumes, so here are the kids:
The Pip as Batman, SteelyKid as a ninja.
Cleverly, they both selected costumes that are predominantly black; we augmented these with glow-stick bracelets and flashlights while actually trick-or-treating, for improved visibility.
Putting these together required a good deal more GIMP work than I anticipated, because the raw shots for the two are at slightly…
drorzel | October 18, 2015Every Sunday, I take the kids down to the Schenectady Greenmarket, which from May-October is held outdoors, on the streets around City Hall. This puts it right next to our local independent bookstore, The Open Door, which is kind of popular with the kids:
SteelyKid and The Pip running into our local independent bookstore.
We have a standing agreement that they can each get one book every week, and SteelyKid can use her allowance to buy a toy if she chooses. We're amassing quite the collection of picture books, and The Pip will buy absolutely anything with superhero branding-- this week, he…
drorzel | October 14, 2015One side effect of this photo-a-day business that I probably should've anticipated is that I spend a lot of time now looking at stuff and saying "That's make a good photo..." Which is annoying when I'm out and don't have the camera with me, so I've started throwing it in the car when I go out to run errands.
This paid off this morning, when I took The Pip to day care, and was greeted by this:
Rainbow over the entrance to the JCC this morning.
That's his day care sitting right at the end of a rainbow. Which is a lovely metaphor for either the value of having access to excellent pre-school,…
drorzel | October 10, 2015Friday was yet another heavy kid-wrangling day, as the Pip had a minor surgical procedure in the early morning, which required general anaesthesia. This was done before 9am, but we had to keep him home from school for the day to watch for ill effects. Of which there were none, so he and I went out to the local science museum for a bit, to break up the cartoon-watching that was the other primary activity of the day.
I've posted a bunch of cute-kid photos already, though, so here's one that's just science museum stuff:
Smoke tornado at MiSci.
That's the artificial tornado exhibit-- a…
drorzel | October 4, 2015Saturdays are the busiest days around Chateau Steelypips, with both SteelyKid and The Pip having soccer in the morning (in two different places), then lunch, then some sort of activity for the afternoon. Yesterday, this was a party for one of SteelyKid's friends. And last night, there was a Movie Night at SteelyKid's BFF's house, where the kids all watched a cartoon and the adults hung around reveling in adult conversation.
All of which means that I managed to go the entire day without taking any photos. Not even a cell-phone snapshot (I'm assistant coaching SteelyKid's soccer team, but the…
drorzel | September 29, 2015The JCC day care was closed again today, so I spent the day out and about with The Pip while SteelyKid was at school. While I did take the DSLR along, none of the pictures I got were all that great, so you get a cell-phone snapshot that's mostly interesting because of the subject matter:
The Pip playing air hockey.
One of the two stops on our big outing of the day was the bouncy-bounce place in a local mall, which also has a bunch of awful game machines. And a kid-height air hockey table, which The Pip and I made heavy use of for a while. It's all physics, after all...
Day care re-opens…
drorzel | September 29, 2015The images from my new camera are huge-- 6000x4000 pixels-- so when I post them here, I need to re-scale them (in theory WordPress can do that automatically, but it's never worked right on the rare occasions that I've tried). Since I'm opening the pictures in GIMP anyway, I generally do a little cropping and color-correcting. When I'm taking photos of the kids, it's often hard to get them framed really well for the initial shot (they insist on moving and doing cute stuff...), so the cropping is sometimes very significant.
One of the rules for composing photos that even a doofus like me knows…
drorzel | September 28, 2015The JCC day care is closed today and tomorrow for the start of Sukkot, so as a result, I spent most of the day home with The Pip (SteelyKid went off to school as usual). Which means I got a whole bunch of photos of him playing at home and at a couple of local parks.
The best for photo-of-the-day purposes was this one of him looking out from behind a wooden bench at one of the parks:
The Pip grinning from behind a bench.
I like the way the bench and the concrete pavers behind it are basically monochrome, making his face and hair really stand out. Probably would be even more striking with…
drorzel | September 15, 2015I don't want to turn this into "Photo of the Kids of the Day," but I spent most of today with The Pip, because his day care was closed for Rosh Hashanah. And while I took a bunch of artsy shots of trees and stuff, I really like the way this one came out:
The Pip climbing up a twisty slide.
He's very determined, and also pleased with himself for being able to climb up the twisty slide at Schenectady's Central Park playground.
Fun as it was to spend time with the Little Dude, I'll be very happy when the JCC is open again...
drorzel | September 12, 2015SteelyKid spent a good chunk of the afternoon playing at a friend's house, so most of the photographic activity of the day involved The Pip energetically playing with various toys. This included a good while spent in the back yard with a Stomp Rocket:
The Pip attempts to send a Stomp Rocket into orbit.
In this shot, he's leaped with great force onto the rubber bulb of the launcher, sending the rocket up over his head. Kate is playing the Mission Control role.
This is cropped from a wider shot, part of a series of rapid-shutter images of the launch, zoomed out to get the whole flight. I…