Steelykid!

I keep falling down on my duty to provide cute-kid content, here; I also keep forgetting to post something about a nerdy bit of our morning routine. So, let's maximize the bird-to-stone ratio, and do them at the same time. The Pip can be a Morning Dude at times, but SteelyKid is never very happy to get up. So on weekday mornings, we've developed a routine to ease the two of them into the day: SteelyKid has a radio alarm, and then I go in and gently shake her out of bed. I usually carry her downstairs to the couch, where she burrows into the cushions a bit; The Pip mostly comes downstairs…

Our big home renovation has added a level of chaos to everything that's gotten in the way of my doing more regular cute-kid updates. And even more routine tasks, like photographing the giant pile of kid art that we had to move out of the dining room. Clearing stuff up for the next big stage of the renovation-- cabinets arrive tomorrow-- led me to this stuff, though, so I finally took pictures of a whole bunch of good stuff. (On the spiffy new tile floor in the kitchen, because the light was good there...) The kids's school sends home portfolios of what they've done in art class for the year,…

So, when last I posted an update on kid stuff, we were about to embark for a week in Mexico with family. As you would expect, I have a huge pile of pictures from this, but most of the cute-kid shots feature the kids with their cousins from Illinois, and I try to avoid posting photos of other people's children. We had a good time, for the most part. The highlight for the kids was probably a "Swim with Dolphins" excursion. SteelyKid did one of these on last year's Disney cruise, but now The Pip is both old enough, and enjoys swimming. Technically, he wasn't tall enough (by maybe an inch) to do…

I've skipped a few weeks of cute-kid updates, largely because I was at DAMOP for a week, and then catching on stuff I missed while I was at DAMOP for a week. The principal activity during this stretch has been SteelyKid's softball, with a mad flurry of games at the end of the season to make up for all the rained-out games. This has been sort of stressful, but it also led to the greatest Google Photos animation ever, so... Anyway, softball was fun, providing the opportunity for me to take no end of photos with my telephoto lens, some of which are pretty good. SteelyKid was way into running the…

We took a rare long weekend to go to a family party for Memorial Day at my parents' (Kate and the kids always get the day off, but I usually have to teach; this year, I'm doing a team-taught class, and the other person was willing to cover my Monday spot), thus the lack of a weekly update post. The delay, however, allows for some quality nerd-parenting content, so it's a win all around... SteelyKid's third-grade class has been doing long-ish projects approximately monthly through the year, and the May project was to design and make a board game based on a book. SteelyKid picked the Bone…

The big development of this week is that construction started on the Great Chateau Steelypips Renovation of 2017. We're extending one part of the back of the house about ten feet to gain a bedroom on the second floor, and gut-renovating the kitchen, dining room, and mud room. This is a massive undertaking, with a massive price tag (more than we paid for the house in 2002), and is going to be massively disruptive later this summer. Right now, it's very exciting, because we have an excavator and giant piles of dirt in our back yard: The Pip looking at the excavator used to dig the foundation…

At SteelyKid's softball game today, the Pip provided an ideal cute-kid photo to use as a springboard to some SCIENCE! Or at least, a graph... Anyway, here's the Little Dude showing off how tall he's gotten: The Pip under Kate's coat. OK, really he's hiding under Kate's raincoat (after two beautiful sunny days in a row, we're back to dreary rain today), but as a side effect of that process he's demonstrating that he's pretty tall. But exactly how tall? We're having an addition put on the back of Chateau Steelypips, and our kitchen gutted and rebuilt, so we've been moving a lot of stuff…

For a long time now, I've had a Sunday routine with the kids, where we go to the Schenectady Greenmarket and then to the Open Door (which is right next to the outdoor market, and a couple blocks from the indoor location), then to lunch at Panera, and usually grocery shopping. We have a standing deal that they get one book per week free, but if they want toys or a second book, it comes out of their allowance. SteelyKid very consistently finds something to read, but The Pip was recently in a mode where he only wanted to read Pokemon books, and the Open Door doesn't carry those, so he would sulk…

One of the things parents of multiple kids often talk about is how they don't end up doing the same things with second children that they did with their first. For example, I carried the weekly Appa-for-scale photos on with SteelyKid for a couple of years, but didn't last anywhere near that long with The Pip. Another thing I did with SteelyKid was to report fairly regularly here on cute stories she told me, and that kind of thing, which I've largely been failing to do with The Pip. the fact that I've fallen out of doing any kind of kid-blogging at all doesn't really make this any better...…

And now, the photo-a-day project straggles in to the finish line, with a final five photos dominated by the kids: 362/366: Kid Art I A set of figures drawn by The Pip at day care over the summer. 363/366: Kid Art II Awesome owl drawing by SteelyKid. One of the official end of summer activities is cleaning off the "art shelf" in the bookcase in the dining room, where we pile the various projects the kids bring home from school and day care. I sort these, and take photos of the best, for historical documentation purposes, and these are two of my favorites from the lot. The four round-…

I've got a big backlog of photo-a-day pictures, but finding time to edit and post them is a major challenge. I've got nearly all the editing done, now, so I'll start putting blocks of stuff up when I have time (generally very early in the morning, as I'm awake before everyone else in Chateau Steelypips). Since we've long since stopped even pretending that these are date-specific, I'll just collect together groups by vague themes: Panorama-rama At some point this summer I started playing around with stitching together bunches of shots to make panoramic photos. Some of this involves playing…

It's been over a month since I did a photo-a-day post, largely because I haven't been taking many pictures for a variety of reasons. I do still mean to get a year's worth of good photos done, but the "daily" part has completely disintegrated at this point. As a way of getting somewhat back on track, I've edited up the best of the shots I took in the loooong break since the last batch I posted. This spans all the way up to the present, and a few are just cell-phone snaps, but it's better than nothing. since these aren't really associated with particular days, I'll group them thematically…

A delayed photo dump this week, because I was solo-parenting last week while Kate was traveling for work, and then I took the sillyheads down to Long Island to visit my grandmother while Kate was at Readercon. Recovering from all that took a lot of time, plus there was a bunch of computer wrangling in there. But, on the bright side, you get several cute-kid photos in this set... And here's a bonus image, which captures something of the flavor of travel with the sillyheads: Selfie in the car with the kids engrossed in their tablets. (That was stopped at a light, not actively driving, so don…

A while back, I went down to Vroman's Nose in Middleburgh to go for a hike, and found a sign saying that peregrine falcons are known to nest on the cliffs. Since the peregrine falcon is SteelyKid's absolute favorite bird, and the subject of her school research project, this seemed like a good location for a family hike, so I took the kids down there yesterday. And even though that was really only one day out of a whole week, I got a bunch of really good photos from it, so it will supply all the material for this week's photo dump. 300/366: Panorama Panorama of farmland from the top of Vroman…

Another week, another batch of photos. This is coming on Friday rather than the weekend because I'm going to be incommunicado for most of the next week, and have some free time now. 284/366: LIGO, Eat Your Heart Out Gravity wave clouds above our house. Sure, LIGO detected gravitational waves from a second pair of merging black holes, but I found me some gravity waves. (The pattern was much more pronounced 5-10 minutes before this was taken, but I was in the car driving when SteelyKid pointed it out.) 285/366: SteelyKid with her hand-written report on the peregrine falcon. SteelyKid's…

Shortened "week" this week, because I did the last photo dump on Tuesday. 80% of these are also from a single day, this Friday, when I decided to call a Mental Health Day and get away from stuff that was annoying me by driving down to Scoharie County to hike up Vroman's Nose. 279/366: Road Rt. 30 from the top of Vroman's Nose. Vroman's Nose is a huge rock outcrop in the middle of a valley, with a moderately steep trail going up through woods to a dramatic cliff with views over the valley. These are very cool when you're there, but the camera really dilutes the impact of those kind of…

Last in a series of themed collections of pictures. These ones are showcasing my rudimentary GIMP skills, pasting together multiple pictures into composites. 276/366: Sky-Bison for Scale One of the earliest happenings in the three-week period I'm dumping photos from was SteelyKid getting strep throat again. She spent a Friday at home, and I took the opportunity to introduce her to Avatar: The Last Airbender on DVD. They're now a few episodes into the third season, so that was a big hit. This reignited an interest in our stuffed Appa toy, which I used to use for scale in baby-blogging photos,…

Once again, I've let a very long time pass without posting photos. It's been a crazy stretch for us, starting with SteelyKid getting yet another case of strep throat, then DAMOP, then a trip to my parents' for Memorial Day weekend, then trying to recover from the previous. As with the last few, I'l group these into themed collections, this one devoted to the kids and my parents' dog. We'll do this in order from oldest to youngest, so: Bodie 257/366: Two Sticks Bodie is a good dog. He has TWO sticks. Fun fact: my parents' yellow lab, Bodie, was born within a day of SteelyKid. I think he's…

Getting caught up to today, a bunch of pictures from the past week (250/366 was the photo of Emmy's memorial shrub): 251/366: Wagons Ho! SteelyKid and The Pip taking turns pulling each other in their wagon. Last weekend we had gorgeous spring weather, so the kids were playing outside a bunch. They ended up getting out the wooden wagon SteelyKid got for her birthday some years back, and giving each other rides. This inevitably resulted in me being asked to tow them around the neighborhood, but they did return the favor... SteelyKid and The Pip pulling me on a wagon. (Photo by Kate.) They…

As promised/threatened in the previous post, here's a big collection of shots from our cruise vacation featuring the sillyheads. 243/366: Bunk Beds: SteelyKid and The Pip like the bunk beds in the stateroom. The sleeping arrangements in the stateroom were pretty slick. We had a double bed that was there all the time, and during the day a sitting area with a couch. While we were at dinner, the housekeeping staff came in and flipped the couch over to become a bed, then lowered a top bunk from a hatch in the ceiling. The kids have never slept in bunk beds before, so this was considered highly…