Steelykid!
drorzel | May 2, 2016As mentioned in passing a little while ago, we spent last week on a Disney cruise in the Caribbean, with the kids and my parents. We had sort of wondered for a while what those trips are like, and since the first reaction of most parents I've mentioned it to has been "Oh, we've thought about that-- let us know how it is," I figure it's worth a blog post to say a bit about the trip, which the kids enjoyed just a little bit:
SteelyKid swimming with a dolphin, The Pip on a waterslide.
The ship we were on was the Disney Magic, which is the smallest of the Disney ships, and had something like…
drorzel | April 17, 2016As promised in the last catch-up post, a set of pictures less devoted to cute-kid shots.
213/366: Zone Defense
The superhero-themed "zones" of our house, as defined by the Pip.
The Pip has been making one of his preschool teachers draw superheroes for him. At some point, he cut these out with scissors (or possibly made Kate cut them out), and hung them up in different rooms. So the living room is now the Captain America Zone, the kitchen is the Flash Zone, and the library is the Spider-Man Zone. I'm not sure what exactly that means, but it's a thing.
214/366: Red In Tooth And Claw
A hawk…
drorzel | April 14, 2016A bunch of stuff happened that knocked me out of the habit of editing and posting photos-- computer issues, travel, catching up on work missed because of travel, and a couple of bouts with a stomach bug the kids brought home. I have been taking pictures, though, and will make an attempt to catch up. Given the huge delay, though, I'm going to drop the pretense of doing one photo a day, and do the right number, but grouped more thematically.
This span included Easter, which meant a lot of family time, which means photos of the kids doing stuff. So here's a big group of those.
The Sillyheads…
drorzel | March 10, 2016I seem to have fallen into a thing where I take pictures more frequently than I edit and post them. I blame the kids-- SteelyKid got sick on Sunday (her third bout with strep in the last five months), and The Pip has decided to get a jump on Daylight Savings by waking up an hour early every day this week. Those both wiped out a lot of time I otherwise would've used for photo processing and blogging.
Anyway, this past Saturday was the big Odyssey of the Mind tournament for SteelyKid and her team. I obviously have a bunch of photos of this; just as obviously they mostly include other people's…
drorzel | March 6, 2016Thursday was a travel day, the less said about which the better. So, while I do have a couple of cell-phone snaps from the day, I'm just going to ignore it, and give you two better photos from Friday and Saturday. These go nicely together, as you can see in the composite that's the "featured image" for this post.
182/366: Dunking Dude:
The Pip hanging on the rim at the Girl Scout carnival.
Friday night, the local Girl Scouts had a "nickel carnival" as a fundraiser for... something or another. SteelyKid is a scout, and Kate's helping lead her Brownie troop, so they had to go, and I brought…
drorzel | February 28, 2016I've included at least two photos of the Nott Memorial in this series, so I'm a little hesitant to do another. But here's an angle on it that doesn't show up as much:
SteelyKid and The Pip looking down from the third floor railing inside the Nott Memorial,
We went over to campus yesterday looking for a bigger open space in which to fly SteelyKid's RC helicopter, which turned into something of a quixotic quest-- most of the big open spaces I had access to had students in them studying. But this did get us inside the Nott, where the kids enjoyed the view from the third floor down into the…
drorzel | February 25, 2016As I've mentioned a few times, SteelyKid is part of an Odyssey of the Mind team through her school, working on a problem to build a structure from balsa wood and glue that will hold as much weight as possible. They've been hard at work the last several weeks, and completed a test structure last night, shown here just prior to testing:
SteelyKid's OM team's balsa wood structure, ready for testing.
This ended up supporting about 53 pounds before it collapsed, which means it could've held up at least one of the team members. Not too shabby. The kids were very fired up for the crushing process…
drorzel | February 22, 2016Another long photo-a-day gap, because the last week was crazy in a bunch of ways. The weather has slewed wildly between winter and spring; Kate had to go to The City to argue a case leaving me solo-parenting the sillyheads; and I've been fighting the onset of a rotten cold. That last has involved a bunch of frantic work in anticipation of not being able to do much for a couple of days at some point, and today that caught up to me and I decided it was an official recovery day. Which gave me time to sort and GIMP the various pictures I took.
167/366: Brief Winter
We got a bit of an ice storm…
drorzel | February 15, 2016This weekend's photos were mostly of the kids, and mostly had other people's kids in them, as they did a double play-date on Saturday afternoon. I'm going to lump two days together, because they're really just repeating previous themes. Here are the kids eating dinner at the Union women's basketball game Friday night:
SteelyKid and The Pip eating dinner at a basketball game.
(They went absolutely bonkers after this-- it's hard to describe how hyped up they were Friday.)
And here's yet another fort:
SteelyKid watching tv from inside the tunnel fort she built on the couch.
This one was…
drorzel | February 13, 2016SteelyKid was sent home on Wednesday with strep throat, and so needed to be home thursday as well. she was very disappointed to be missing school, as her class was preparing for a Valentine's Day party on Friday. I picked up a bunch of work for her, including a heart-shaped paper pouch to hold the cards the kids would exchange.
You wouldn't've known she was officially sick on Thursday-- her energy level was basically at normal. She powered through a bunch of homework, and then set to decoarting the pouch with hearts and happy stick figures in a rainbow of colors. And also a fishtank:
Detail…
drorzel | February 8, 2016Since our recent trip to Vermont, SteelyKid has been obsessed with building blanket forts. These have mostly been in the living room, leading to a bit of angst at the end of the day when we need the blankets back. So i did a little reorganizing in the basement, and dug some sheets out of storage, allowing the construction of a longer-duration fort.
The blanket fort du jour in the basement of Chateau Steelypips.
This covers the basement comprehensively enough that it's probably a little hard to appreciate how much stuff is inside. The critical thing, though, is that SteelyKid is satisfied…
drorzel | February 7, 2016We spent most of Saturday at a taekwondo tournament-- the AAU Adirondack Championship, or some permutation of those words. This was held in the gym over at Hudson Valley Community College, and was fairly big:
The taekwondo tournmanet from way up in the bleachers.
It was, however, 99% waiting around. They did black-belt sparring in the morning, and said that staging for the colored belts would be at 1pm, so we were there at noon. But they did the forms competition before the Olymopic sparring (SteelyKid's event), so it was 3:45 before they called her group to be sorted into age and weight…
drorzel | January 31, 2016I've been neglecting the photo-a-day thing for the last week-and-a-bit, but for a good reason: I had a deadline of, well, today, to finish a chapter I was asked to contribute to an academic book. And while I fully realize that actually hitting that deadline is not typical academic behavior, I have A Thing about that, and was going to make damn sure I finished by the end of the month, as I had promised. So a lot of stuff got neglected, to the point where there were a few days in that stretch where I didn't take any pictures at all.
So, you get another catch-up post. I owe nine photos, but I…
drorzel | January 21, 2016As mentioned last week, SteelyKid is doing Odyssey of the Mind this year, and her team has elected to build a balsa wood structure. The goal for these is to support the maximum possible weight, and the first step of the testing is to put a "crusher board" on top. This is a couple of 18" square sheets of plywood glued together with a hole through the middle for the safety pipe that runs up the center of the structure to keep everything aligned.
Since one part of the team had a test structure ready at the end of the last meeting, I wanted to have something we could use to see if it would hold…
drorzel | January 21, 2016When I arrived to pick SteelyKid up the other night, she and her friends were light-saber fighting with long balloons, which is fairly typical of that bunch. While I gathered her stuff up, though, she stopped and twisted her balloon into an animal shape:
SteelyKid's balloon dog, and The Pip's clay volcano.
She got a "How to Make Balloon Animals" kit a few years ago, but she doesn't often do anything with it. So I was pretty impressed that she did this completely from memory. (Of course, I'm easily impressed when it comes to my own kids doing stuff...)
The balloon dog (we'll call it a dog…
drorzel | January 19, 2016This past weekend, Kate went to Arisia, and in order to get a change of scenery and a bit of adult backup, I took the kids up to visit friends in northern Vermont. They have two boys, the younger of whom is just a few months older than SteelyKid, and I was pretty sure the kids would hit it off. I turned out to be right about that, as SteelyKid and C. spent hours engrossed in the construction of an elaborate pillow fort:
SteelyKid is really happy to be making a pillow fort.
This is a very early stage of the construction, from Friday night. They continued working on it all weekend, and at…
drorzel | January 14, 2016Back in the fall, a note came home with SteelyKid about an organizational meeting for an Odyssey of the Mind team for her elementary school. My father coached this for several years back in the 80's, and one of my sister's teams went to the World championships (held in Cole Field House at the University of Maryland, of all places, which put an odd spin on going there for basketball games when I was in grad school....), and of course, I'm all in favor of creative problem-solving. So we went, and I ended up as one of the coaches of the team.
The kids, to the surprise of the other coaches, voted…
drorzel | January 14, 2016This one's a bit of a cheat, but the only pictures I got Tuesday that turned out well had other people's kids in them, and I won't post those. So here, instead, is a picture from over the weekend, mostly because I want to tell the cute-kid story that goes with it.
On Sundays, I take the kids to the Schenectady Greenmarket, then to lunch at Panera, then to the grocery store, which gets our various errands taken care of and gives Kate a little quiet time. Depending on how they behave, I sometimes require a bit of quiet time of my own after this, and this past Sunday was One of Those Days. So, I…
drorzel | January 10, 2016I try not to have this be Cute Kid Photo of the Day, but really, when these are the subjects, how can I avoid it?
SteelyKid blowing a bubble toward The Pip, at MiSci.
This is from yesterday's morning excursion to MiSci, where they have added a soap bubble area. This, of course, led to the kids battling with each other by blowing huge bubbles across the table and each popping the other's bubbles. Here's the early stage of a bubble offensive by SteelyKid, shortly to be popped by The Pip.
Another highlight of the visit was the "put yourself inside a bubble" thing, which is a perennial…
drorzel | January 4, 2016One of our Christmas presents for the kids was a slackline kit, which they wanted set up pretty much the instant I got home. So I put it up over the weekend, and on consecutive days got these pictures:
The slackline strung between two trees in the back yard.
SteelyKid's feet bouncing above the slackline.
(I of course also have a bunch of photos where you can see the kids' entire bodies, but for the umpteenth time, I'm trying not to have this be the Cute Kid Photo of the Day...)
Those two seem like they go together, and that catches us up through Sunday. I will try to get back to regular…