Steelykid!
drorzel | August 8, 2013Long-time readers will remember that I used to do weekly kid-blogging, posting pictures of SteelyKid with a reference animal, Appa the sky-bison from the Avatar cartoon. I stopped a couple of years ago, because SteelyKid started being reluctant to pose for the pictures every week.
I got her to pose for a few yesterday, though, so we can see what a difference 260 weeks makes. Here's the first really good Appa-for-scale picture, one week after she was born:
SteelyKid and Appa at age one week, back in 2008.
And here they are on her fifth birthday (also the "featured image" for this post…
drorzel | August 7, 2013SteelyKid was born five years ago today. I'd try to be clever and schedule this for exactly five years to the minute of her time of birth, but I've mercifully forgotten exactly when the delivery was, only that it was early in the morning after a very, very long night. Here's what she looked like then:
SteelyKid, five years ago today.
Here's what she looks like now, with her little brother for scale (also the "featured image" for this post):
SteelyKid and The Pip.
Or, if you prefer something a little more active, here she is engaged in the study of optics.
SteelyKid investigating…
drorzel | August 3, 2013SteelyKid turns five next Wednesday (F/X: "FIVE! YEARS!" like an incredulous Jeremy Piven in Grosse Point Blank), but we're having her party today. This is a distinction we've worked hard to get across, and I expect to hear her explain to other kids and their parents about 39 times today ("It's not my birthday today, it's my birthday party today...").
We're expecting something like a dozen five-year-olds plus parents and assorted siblings at Chateau Steelypips. We've laid in a good deal of food and drink, and cake, balloons, and bouncy-bounce are on the way. But if you don't hear from me…
drorzel | July 27, 2013A lot of heavy blogging this week, so here's a cute kid picture (as the featured image; click through if you're reading via RSS). This is SteelyKid and The Pip at play this morning, when they were back and forth across the yard a dozen times to pick up rocks from our gravel path and throw them into the pond (just behind them in this picture). They're such sad and solemn children.
SteelyKid seems to only get more social as time apsses-- at soccer this morning, her coach asked rhetorically why they stretch before playing, and got a five-minute spiel about getting hurt and being safe and this…
drorzel | July 19, 2013The kids and conferences issue, discussed here a while ago has continued to spark discussion, with a Tenure She Wrote piece on how to increase gender diversity among conference speakers and a Physics Focus blog post on a mother who wound up taking her toddler to a meeting. There are some good points in both, though the Tenure She Wrote poster seems to be in a field whose conferences run on a different model than that used for most meetings I go to.
The Physics Focus post was particularly interesting to me, though, because I spent last weekend as the portable conference day-care while Kate…
drorzel | July 5, 2013The picture above shows the new sign on SteelyKid's door. She had to ask us how to spell the words-- she's not five for another month, yet-- but she is now the proud owner of a hand-lettered "DO NOT ENTER" sign for her bedroom. About half a dozen years earlier than I was hoping for...
I made good progress on the draft chapter of the moment this morning, which means that I'm allowed to blog today, per the terms of my agreement with myself. But this is kind of a lost day, anyway, so while I am going to write a post explaining some cool physics, I'll schedule it for Monday instead of posting it…
drorzel | July 4, 2013It's Independence Day here in the US, so here are some patriotic kid photos for you.
"Wait a minute," you say, "That featured image doesn't have any flags or fireworks or gilled meat products! How is that patriotic?"
"Ah," I reply,"It was taken at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC last weekend." Game. Set. Match.
Here are a couple of other pictures from that visit:
The Pip is impressed with skeletons of ancient megafauna.
SteelyKid racing a triceratops skeleton.
And since I've already had to bite back a couple of "Oh, go fuck yourself" responses to political tweets, I'm…
drorzel | June 20, 2013SteelyKid's preschool "graduation" was today, and in addition to a certificate with her name on it, she got a CD of her class's favorite songs and a composite picture of her class. I'd include an image, but it wouldn't reproduce well, and anyway, I try not to post pictures of other people's kids. What I will do, however, is a rundown of what it says about Kids these Days, since the picture is made up of shots of the individual kids each holding a sign declaring what they want to be when they grow up.
The class featured six boys and seven girls, so here are the results by gender, boys first…
drorzel | May 26, 2013Kate's off at Wiscon this weekend, so I came down to my parents' with the kids, rather than be outnumbered at home. We packed everybody into the car Saturday and drove to Ithaca to go to the Sciencenter, which the kids absolutely loved. In the "featured image" above, you see The Pip playing with the giant bubble maker (which we did for about fifteen minutes...), and SteelyKid emulating a recent Mythbusters by building a wooden house on a shake table to simulate an earthquake (with my grandmother). Other highlights included petting a snake, feeding balls through pneumatic tubes, and building…
drorzel | May 19, 2013During our weekly trip to the Schenectady Greenmarket, we took refuge from the rain in the Open door bookstore, where a short while later I saw the following scenes at opposite ends of the kids-book aisle (also the "Featured Image" for this post, but I'll reproduce it to save the RSS folks from having to click through):
SteelyKid and The Pip, both reading.
So, clearly, they take after me and Kate...
(We ended up buying the "How to Make Paper Airplanes" book SteelyKid is looking at, because paper airplanes are awesome. The music-playing book about an orchestra that The Pip is looking at…
drorzel | May 12, 2013SteelyKid has a new prize possession: a training-wheel bike!
You can't quite hear what she says at the end of this, when she stops the bike, but it's "That should be a full video!" She knows her fan base.
On the way back, she wiped out (the first bad crash on the new bike) and has been much more cautious since. But she's practicing a lot (around the neighborhood, in the Field House, around the neighborhood again...), and will hopefully gain confidence.
Here's hoping your weekend brought you something a tenth as much fun...
drorzel | May 8, 2013An astute observation from SteelyKid, as part of her jumping game:
With bonus photobombing by The Pip toward the end.
drorzel | May 1, 2013SteelyKid takes a bunch of enrichment classes at her day care, none of which are explicitly science. I was, however, thrilled to discover that they were doing actual science in her computer class though. The "Featured Image" at the top of this post (sorry, RSS readers, you'll need to click through) is a cell-phone picture of the worksheet she brought home the other day. Apparently, they made a computer-controlled Lego robot to kick a ball, and measured its performance, as recorded in the table in the picture (keep in mind, she's 4.75 years old, so some letters and numbers occasionally undergo…
drorzel | April 24, 2013The playground outside SteedlyKid's day care, amazingly in this litigious age, has a merry-go-round, a rotating disc with a really good bearing. The kids can really get the thing flying, which is kind of terrifying at times. But on the bright side, it's an excellent venue for the physics of angular momentum:
In the embedded video, SteelyKid runs in and starts the merry-go-round spinning, then jumps aboard and goes around one full rotation before moving to the center for a few rotations, and then starting to move back out.
This isn't exactly what I was hoping for-- amazingly, a four-and-two-…
drorzel | April 18, 2013In the car, on the way from day care to campus to watch a softball game
DADDY: So, what did you do at school today?
STEELYKID: Daddy, I'm a superhero. They call me Strong Ninja Girl. Strong World-Saving Ninja Girl.
DADDY: Because you save the world?
STEELYKID: Right. And M____ is World-Saving Rainbow Girl. And O____ is Silly Super Boy.
DADDY: Silly Super Boy?
STEELYKID: Yeah, because he just goes {Silly voice} "Bah, bah, bah, bah, bah" and distracts the bad guys. Then M___ and I sneak up behind them, and say "Hey! Bad guys! We can turn you into good guys!" And then we do that, and we save the…
drorzel | March 26, 2013The Pip is getting really into books these days, and SteelyKid has been into them for a good while now (she's four-and-a-half, after all...). At some point last week, she asked about my writing, so I got down a copy of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog and showed her her name in the dedication, which she was tickled by (she now refers to it as "my book"). Encouraged by this, I read a bit to them both-- the dog dialogue from the first chapter, which started life as this old blog post-- doing the silly dog voice. SteelyKid giggled in the right places, more or less, and The Pip listened very…
drorzel | March 22, 2013OK, here's my idea: We put a leash on Emmy and we put her up on top of this rock that's on top of all these other rocks. Then she jumps down into these petals. so she'll be safe. And you pull on the leash so she jumps down a little faster.
I'm down here on the bottom. This is my arm, holding this petal. And this is my face. I'm holding the petal for Emmy to jump down into the petals, so she'll be safe.
The plan for tomorrow
The Story of How Do Grasshoppers Run Away?
Once upon a time there was a grasshopper, and a grasshopper friend. They went to a lake to get a drink, and one of the…
drorzel | March 19, 2013OK, Daddy, guess what? Here's my idea. We get a stick of wood and we put a timer on it, then we get a big rock and put it on the end. We have to put feet on the big rock, so it can stand on the stick.
Then when the rain comes down, down, down, we push really hard on the stick. We have to do a really big push, then the rock will go up in the air and come down, and the mountain will grow. Then we measure how much weight it took, and how much damage it did when it hit the ground. With the timer. Which isn't a timer, it's a scale.
That's what we're going to do tomorrow!
SteelyKid's plan for…
drorzel | March 8, 2013WordPress's upload is broken, so here's a link to the photo: SteelyKid and The Pip.
February was... not a good month, in a lot of ways. Let's leave it at that. One of the unfortunate consequences of this was that I went just about the entire month without even taking any pictures of the kids, let along posting any of them here. this was, obviously, a shocking dereliction of duty both as a parent and a blogger.
So, as partial compensation, here's a composite of two pictures (which I'll use as both the "featured image" and insert below, so those reading via RSS can see it without clicking…
drorzel | February 6, 2013[Scene: Dinner at Chateau SteelyPips. DADDY is starting to say something about his day at work, when STEELYKID interrupts.]
STEELYKID: If you eat too many hot dogs, you'll turn into a hot dog!
DADDY: That would be pretty silly. Luckily, you're eating chicken for dinner. Eat your chicken.
STEELYKID: There's a magic hot dog, and if you eat that, you turn into a hot dog. And if you don't eat it, then you won't turn into a hot dog.
MOMMY: That's good, because you wouldn't want people turning into hot dogs for no reason.
STEELYKID: Yeah, that would be silly.
DADDY: So, where is this magic hot dog…