The Pip
drorzel | September 4, 2015It's Labor Day weekend here in the US, so we've come down to my parents' for an end-of-summer weekend. The kids are, of course, thrilled to be visiting Grandma and Grandpa's house where they can bask in the warmth of... Transformers cartoons on Grandma and Grandpa's Netflix subscription.
(I'd say "Kids these days," but if I'm totally honest, I would have to admit that getting to watch WPIX was a highlight of visits to my grandmother on Long Island back when I was their age...)
Anyway, a lot of the pictures I end up taking look basically like this: quick snapshots of the kids doing whatever.…
drorzel | August 28, 2015SteelyKid starts second grade next week, and her summer project was to read Julius, the Baby of the World and make a poster with baby pictures of herself. This, of course, led to looking at a lot of old photos of SteelyKid, including many of the Baby Blogging shots I took back in the day with Appa for scale.
And now, of course, both kids are way bigger than Appa, so they wanted some up-to-date scale photos. Which, of course, I had to share with the Internet. So, behold, the attack of the giant children:
SteelyKid and the Pip are HUGE!
Standing photo so you can see Appa for proper scaling…
drorzel | June 21, 2015Act I:
STEELYKID and THE PIP: Happy Father's Day, Daddy!
DADDY: Aww, that's sweet. So, what are you going to make me for breakfast?
STEELYKID and THE PIP: What?
DADDY: It's father's day, right? So you guys should be cooking breakfast for me.
STEELYKID and THE PIP: No!!!!
THE PIP: We can't cook breakfast for you. We're not tall enough to bake stuff. And, also, we're not allowed to cook.
DADDY: Well, I'm your father, so I can give you permission to cook breakfast.
STEELYKID: Yeah, but we don't know how to cook.
THE PIP: Yeah, so you have to cook pancakes for us!
DADDY: Oh, all right. I guess I…
drorzel | April 12, 2015The Pip is in a big superhero phase at the moment, and all of his games revolve around being a superhero of some sort. He has also basically memorized a couple of 30-page Justice League books, after demanding them over and over at bedtime. As I did with SteelyKid, I make a game out of reading the wrong words from time to time, and as a result, he can now "read" at least two books all the way through, as you can see from this cell-phone video shot at bedtime:
His superhero pretend games have the bizarre inventiveness you expect from a pre-schooler, mixing and matching from all the various…
drorzel | April 4, 2015I was thinking about writing something about the 2015 Hugo Award nominations train wreck, but you know what? Life's too short. So here's a couple of cute-kid photos from this morning's trip to the Children's Museum of Science and Technology over in Troy. They have these awesome construction toys, consisting of wooden rods with holes through them, and long bolts, washers, and wing nuts to connect them, and we spent most of our time in the building room.
On the left, you see The Pip, having picked up one of the screwdrivers that go with the set, and wearing his "fixing goggles." Because eye…
drorzel | March 10, 2015Today is my grandmother's 90th birthday: born on this date in 1925 in the Bronx, the seventh of eight kids. She moved out to Long Island circa WWII, and has lived there ever since. Many of my favorite childhood memories involve visiting her in Mineola. Back in the 70's, she used to host me and two of my cousins (one a couple years older than me, the other a year or two younger) for a week or so in the summer, to give our parents a break; as a parent of two kids about the age we were at that time, I find this kind of incredible now...
Anyway, she's still going strong at 90, and recently…
drorzel | February 3, 2015It didn't make the news, because skittish media types are mostly based in New York City and thus don't care about anything north of Westchester County, but we had a big snow storm yesterday. It started snowing Sunday night, though, and kept up through pretty much dinnertime Monday. Both the local schools and the snow-day day-care program we signed the kids up for were shut down, with good reason- I had to go to campus for my 10:30 am class, and that two-mile drive was pretty nerve-wracking.
Since the kids were home for the day, we did a bit of playing outside, even though the temperatures…
drorzel | January 26, 2015Tonight's bedtime stories included two books involving flying characters: Foo, the Flying Frog of Washtub Pond (in which the title character gets blown into the sky by a gust of wind), and The Magic Brush. The latter is a dead-grandparent book, but ends with a cheerful picture of the kids reunited with their grandfather in their imagination, riding a flying horse. The Pip didn't pick up on the death bit, luckily for me.
"Look at them, Daddy, they're flying!"
"Yep. They're on a flying horse."
"But why are they flying?"
"Why? Well, because flying would be a lot of fun."
"I wish I could fly."
"…
drorzel | December 26, 2014
Ernest, the purple aardvark
Had a long and hairy nose
And if you ever saw it,
You would really say "Boy I bet you could eat some ants with that thing..."
All of the ants in Tasmania
Use to run away when they saw him
Because if they ran to slowly,
[Loud slurping noise] Ernest ate them up.
Then one foggy Christmas Eve,
Santa came to say,
"Ernest, we have a terrible infestation of termites at the North Pole,
Can you come eat them up while I deliver toys to good boys and girls?"
Then how the elves they loved him,
And they knitted him warm nose cozies
Because aardvarks normally live in tropical…
drorzel | December 25, 2014Once again, it's Christmas for those who celebrate it, and a really boring Thursday on the Internet for those who don't. In keeping with tradition, we've taken the kids to Grandma and Grandpa's house in Scenic Whitney Point, NY for a few days.
This will coincide with a big drop-off in social media use on my part, for a number of reasons; I've got one more post scheduled for the day after tomorrow, and that's probably it for 2014 blogging. I'll be ringing in the New Year in Charleston, SC at the Renaissance Weekend event there, and while that promises to be a good deal of fun, they've got very…
drorzel | December 12, 2014One of the questions from a caller when I was on the "Think" show was about how to keep kids interested in science. As I said, the issue isn't so much creating in interest as working to not squelch the interest that's already there. Taking kids to cool places like zoos and science museums is a great way to do that, and just generally encouraging them to ask questions and try things out.
But if you'd like some more specific gift ideas, here's a selection of science-y things that SteelyKid and The Pip enjoy that you might try out on other kids of your acquaintance:
-- Magna-Tiles These. Are.…
drorzel | November 26, 2014The Pip's current phrase of choice is "How do you build...?" We get asked this several times a day.
"Daddy, how do you build a glass?"
"Well, you get the right kind of sand, and you get it really hot, so hot it melts. Then you make it into the shape of a glass, and let it cool down. Then it's a glass."
----
"Daddy, how do you build a building like that one?"
"Well, you get a bunch of bricks, and stack them up to make the building you want."
"How do you build a brick?"
"Well, you get a bunch of the right kind of mud, and mix it all together. Then you make it into a rectangle, and get it really…
drorzel | November 7, 2014Exactly three years ago today, The Pip arrived, in a manner that will allow him to kill Macbeth should that become necessary. This is the age where kids first become aware of the concept of birthdays, so he's just a tiny bit excited about this.
He's a fast-developing Little Dude, chattering more and more every day. And using big words-- in the car the other morning, I pointed out that he could fit his whole hand in the pockets of the pants he was wearing, which he proceeded to do. "I want to show Mommy this, when we get home," he said. "Meanwhile, I can do it by myself!" He's getting into…
drorzel | October 18, 2014It's been a brutally busy couple of weeks here, what with reading folders for the job searches we have going on, trying to keep on top of my class, and multiple day-care closings for the Jewish holidays. But the kids are still very cute, as you can see from the above caricatures of The Pip as Pooh and SteelyKid as a Lego construction worker. These were done by Rich Conley who does caricatures at LT's Grill in Niskayuna on Tuesday nights, which probably explains what we're doing for dinner for Tuesdays in perpetuity...
We're off to Scenic Whitney Point for a bit (after kid soccer, that is),…
drorzel | September 26, 2014The JCC is closed today for Rosh Hashanah-- and best wishes for a happy new year to those who celebrate it-- so I'm spending the morning with The Pip before Kate comes home to take the afternoon shift while I teach my class. SteelyKid is in school today as usual, so don't tell her, but the Little Dude and I went down to the river to enjoy a beautiful fall day, with trees just starting to turn colors, as you can see in the featured image above.
The highlights for The Pip, though, were the chance to throw rocks in the water, and drum on the pilings along the sides of Lock 7:
The Pip is an…
drorzel | June 15, 2014Today is Father's Day in the US, so I got a bunch of little gifts from the kids. The Pip's was just a construction-paper card mostly made by his teachers, with a bit of scribble on it. SteelyKid's, though, included a fill-in-the-blank booklet that she wrote on and drew pictures to go with.
Some of the pictures are extremely detailed and colorful, such as this one where she describes a conversation we have Every. Single. Night.:
SteelyKid's extremely detailed depiction of a conversation we have every night.
(SteelyKid is a terrible eater, and it's a struggle to get her to eat anything. She'…
drorzel | June 8, 2014Made it home Friday evening after another bout of airline nonsense-- they had replaced the plane for my flight into Albany with a smaller aircraft, so my email boarding pass assigned me to a nonexistent seat. Which had been corrected in their computer, but was never communicated to me, or to several other passengers who found themselves holding boarding passes from online that had the same seat assignments as passengers who had printed them at the airport. To be fair to Delta, this was the only glitch out of four flights, but it was a doozy.
Anyway, DAMOP was a lot of fun, but exhausting. So…
drorzel | May 19, 2014Kate's arguing a case in Connecticut today, so I was solo-parenting last night and this morning. which means that while I did manage to watch Cosmos last night, and have some thoughts about it, I don't have the time or energy to write them up this morning. As explanation, I offer this video from dinner last night, in which SteelyKid and The Pip explore subtle issues of plant biology:
As you might guess, it's very trying to deal with such sullen and mopey children all the time...
This was also on the heels of a classmate's birthday party with SteelyKid on Saturday, which was preceded by two…
drorzel | April 20, 2014The kids spent last week at Grandma and Grandpa's, as school was closed for Passover/Easter (best wishes for each of those holidays to those who celebrate them), and Kate and I went down there for the weekend. During which trip we went up on top of the flood control dam in town, and flew a kite, as you can see in the "featured image" above, or the copy of it below:
SteelyKid, flying a kite.
SteelyKid had a great time flying the kite, and played out so much string that you can barely make out the kite in the photo, even after a bit of image processing to enhance it.
And, for balance, here's…
drorzel | March 24, 2014This week is Union's spring break, and like basically everything associated with Union's academic calendar, it's too short. I have to turn in my Winter term grades today, and next Monday is the start of my Spring term class.
I also find myself in a place right now were every little thing is pissing me off, which is a terrible place to start the Spring term. And since social media functions largely as an aggravation engine right at the moment, that means I need to step back for a bit. So, don't expect much of anything here or on Twitter for the next week at least. We'll probably still do…