I bought Zach Weinersmith‘s Bea Wolf for my kids (9 and 6, the elder of them already a fan of
Beowulf). It arrived today, but neither of them have had a chance to because I wouldn’t put it down.
My favourite bit is when Bea and her entourage arrive near Treeheart and the shield-bearer who greets them says “Your leader sparkles with power and also with sparkles.” The line’s
brilliant, clever, and accompanies the most badass illustration.
I’ll give it to my kids… eventually. But if you’re looking for a book recommendation in the meantime, this is it.
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My mum has made pets of one or both of dogs or cats for most of her life. She puts the difference between the two in a way that really resonates for me. To paraphrase her:
When you’re feeling down and you’ve had a shitty day and you just need to wallow in your despair for a little bit… a pet dog will try to cheer you up. It’ll jump up at you, bring
you toys, suggest that you go for a walk, try to pull your focus away from your misery and bring a smile to your face. A cat, though, will just come and sit and be melancholy with you.
Its demeanour just wordlessly says: “You’re feeling crap? Me too: I only slept 16 hours today. Let’s feel crap together.”
“I hate Mondays. Also any other day of the week with a ‘Y’ in it.”
So it surprised many when, earlier this year, our family was expanded with the addition of a puppy called Demmy. I guess we collectively figured that now we’d solved all the hard
problems and the complexities of our work, volunteering, parenting, relationships, money etc. and our lives were completely simple, plain sailing, and stress-free, all of the time… that
we now had the capacity to handle adding another tiny creature into our midst. Do you see the mistake in that logic? Maybe we should have, too.
The kids were, and continue to be, absolutely delighted, especially our eldest who’s been mad about dogs now for well over half her life.
It turns out that getting a puppy is a lot like having a toddler all over again. Your life adjusts around when they need
to sleep, eat, and poop. You need to put time, effort, and thought into how to make and keep your house safe both for and from them. And, of course, they bring with
them a black hole that eats disposable income.
Sure they’re cute when they’re asleep, but the rest of the time they’re probably destroying things, pooping, or both. #PuppyOrToddler?
They need to be supervised and entertained and educated (the latter of which may require some education yourself). They need to be socialised so they can interact nicely with others,
learn the boundaries of their little world, and behave appropriately (even when they’re noton camera).
At the end of elementary “puppy school”, we tried some agility course obstacles. Jumps were a success, even for Demmy’s little legs, but she’d far rather hang out inside a tunnel than
run through one.
Even as they grow, their impact is significant. You need to think more-deeply about how, when and where you travel, work out who’s responsible for ensuring they’re walked (or carried!) and fed (not eaten!) and watched. You’ve got to keep them safe and healthy and stimulated.
Thankfully they’re not as tiring to play with as children, but as with kids, the level of effort required is hard to anticipate until you
have one.
Whether you’re a human pup or a canine pup, there’s fun to be had in leaping out of long grass to pounce one another.
But do you know what else they have in common with kids? You can’t help learning to love them.
It doesn’t matter what stupid thing they’re illicitly putting in their mouth, how many times you have to clean up after them, how frustrating it is that they can’t understand what you
need from them in order to help them, or how much they whine about something that really isn’t that big a deal (again: #PuppyOrToddler?). It doesn’t even matter how much you’re “not a
dog person”, whatever that means. They become part of your family, and you fall in love with them.
Panting and too hot from a long run under the hot summer sun, but loving the opportunity to get out and enjoy the sights and smells of the world. #PuppyOrDan?
I’m not a “dog person”. But: while I ocassionally resent the trouble she causes, I still love our dog.
Continuing our reverse-order explore of some of these caches closest to our accommodation for the week. Little 5-year-old John found this one and came proudly out from its hiding place
with it in hand. TFTC.
We took a family trip up to Lichfield this weekend. I don’t know if I can give a “review” of a city-break as a whole, but if I can: I give you five stars, Lichfield.
It’s got a cathedral, which is quite pretty.
Maybe it’s just because we’ve none of us had a night away from The Green… pretty-much since we moved
in, last year. But there was something magical about doing things reminiscent of the “old normal”.
“I’m so excited! We get to stay… at a Premier Inn!” At first I rolled my eyes at this joyous line from our 4-year-old (I mean… it’s just a Premier Inn…), but it did feel good
to go somewhere and do something.
It’s not that like wasn’t plenty of mask-wearing and social distancing and hand sanitiser and everything that we’ve gotten used to now: there certainly was. The magic, though, came from
getting to do an expedition further away from home than we’re used to. And, perhaps, with that happening to coincide with glorious weather and fun times.
Socially-distanced balloon modelling turns out to work, not least because you can hand one of those long balloons to somebody without getting anywhere near them.
We spent an unimaginably hot summer’s day watching an outdoor interpretation of Peter and the Wolf, which
each of the little ones has learned about in reasonable depth, at some point or another, as part of the (fantastic) “Monkey Music” classes
of which they’re now both graduates.
So long as you weren’t staring at the painted circles on the grass – for corralling families apart from one another – you’d easily forget how unusual things are, right now.
And maybe it’s that they’ve been out-of-action for so long and are only just beginning to once again ramp up… or maybe I’ve just forgotten what the hospitality industry is like?… but
man, we felt well-looked after.
From the staff at the hotel who despite the clear challenges of running
their establishment under the necessary restrictions still went the extra mile to make the kids feel special to the restaurant we went to
that pulled out all the stops to give us all a great evening, I basically came out of the thing with the impression of Lichfield as a really nice place.
Take social distancing to the next level: do your urban geocaching at the crack of dawn.
I’m not saying that it was perfect. A combination of the intolerable heat (or else the desiccating effect of the air conditioner) and a mattress that sagged with two adults on it meant
that I didn’t sleep much on Saturday night (although that did mean I could get up at 5am forageocachingexpeditionaroundthecity before it got too hot later on). And an
hour and a half of driving to get to a place where you’re going to see a one-hour show feels long, especially in this age where I don’t really travel anywhere, ever.
But that’s not the point.
The buffet was closed, of course, but these kids were made for an “all you can eat” breakfast.
The point is that Lichfield made me happy, this weekend. And I don’t know how much of that is that it’s just a nice place and how much is that I’ve missed going anywhere or doing
anything, but either way, it lead to a delightful weekend.
When I was a kid of about 10, one of my favourite books was Usborne’s Spy’s Guidebook. (I also liked its sister the Detective’s Handbook, but the Spy’s
Guidebook always seemed a smidge cooler to me).
I imagine that a younger version of me would approve of our 7-year-old’s bookshelf, too.
So I was pleased when our eldest, now 7, took an interest in the book too. This morning, for example, she came to breakfast with an encrypted message for me (along with the relevant
page in the book that contained the cipher I’d need to decode it).
Decryption efforts were hampered by sender’s inability to get her letter “Z”s the right damn way around.
Later, as we used the experience to talk about some of the easier practical attacks against this simple substitution cipher (letter frequency analysis, and known-plaintext attacks… I
haven’t gotten on to the issue of its miniscule keyspace yet!), she asked me to make a pocket version of the code card as described in the book.
A three-bit key doesn’t make a simple substitution cipher significantly safer, but it does serve as a vehicle to teach elementary cryptanalysis!
While I was eating leftover curry for lunch with one hand and producing a nice printable, foldable pocket card for her (which you can download here if you like) with the other, I realised something. There are likely to be a lot more messages in my
future that are protected by this substitution cipher, so I might as well preempt them by implementing a computerised encoder/decoder right away.
If you’ve got kids of the right kind of age, I highly recommend picking up a copy of the Spy’s Guidebook (and possibly the Detective’s Handbook). Either use it as a
vehicle to talk about codes and maths, like I have… or let them believe it’s secure while you know you can break it, like we did with Enigma machines after WWII. Either way, they eventually learn a valuable lesson about cryptography.
Jack and the Beanstalk, as told by the kids via paper puppets. With thanks to Robin for direction, camera operation, editing and – I’m
guessing – creative consultancy.
Sara’s back! You might remember a couple of years ago she’d shared with us a comic on her first year in a polyamory! We’re happy to have her back with a slice of life and a frank n’ real
conversation about having kids in her Poly Triad relationship.
This sort of wholesome loving chat is just the thing we need for the start of 2021.
…
Start your year with a delightful comic about the author negotiating possible future children in a queer polyamorous triad, published via Oh Joy Sex Toy. Sara previously published a great polyamory-themed comic via OJST too, which is also worth a look.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the messages we send to our children about their role, and ours as adults, in keeping them safe from people who might victimise them. As a society,
our message has changed over the decades: others of my culture and generation will, like me, have seen the gradual evolution from “stranger danger” to “my body, my choice”. And it’s still evolving.
But as Kristin eloquently (and emotionally: I cried my eyes out!) explains, messages like these can subconsciously teach children that they alone are responsible for keeping
themselves from harm. And so when some of them inevitably fail, the shame of their victimisation – often already taboo – can be magnified by the guilt of their inability to prevent it.
And as anybody who’s been a parent or, indeed, a child knows that children aren’t inclined to talk about the things they feel guilty about.
And in the arms race of child exploitation, abusers will take advantage of that.
What I was hoping was to have a nice, concrete answer – or at least an opinion – to the question: how should we talk to children about their safety in a way that both tries to
keep them safe but ensures that they understand that they’re not to blame if they are victimised? This video doesn’t provide anything like that. Possibly there aren’t
easy answers. As humans, as parents, and as a society, we’re still learning.
I’m sure that the graveyard of over-optimism is littered with the corpses of parents who planned to help their children learn self-moderation by showing them the wonders of nature,
but who realized too late that fields of wheat don’t stand a chance against Rocket League. I’m hoping that we can agree that computer games are good, but other things are good too,
cf fields of wheat. I don’t want to have to sneak in my own gaming time after my son has gone to bed. I also don’t want to be a hypocrite; at least, I don’t want Oscar to know that
I’m a hypocrite. Maybe we can play together and use it as father-son bonding time. This might work until he’s ten and after he’s twenty-five.
…
Robert Heaton, of Programming Projects for Advanced Beginners fame and reverse-engineering device drivers that spy on you (which I’ve talked about
before), has also been blogging lately about his experience of Dadding, with the same dry/sarcastic tone you might be used to. This long post is a great example of the meandering
thoughts of a (techie) parent in these (interesting) times, and it’s good enough for that alone. But it’s the raw, genuine “honesty and dark thoughts” section towards the end of the
article that really makes it stand out.
This week, with help from Robin and JTA, I
built a TropicTemple Tall XXL climbing frame in the garden of our new house. Manufacturer Fatmoose provided us with a pallet-load of lumber and a sack of accessories,
delivered to our driveway, based on a design Ruth and I customised using their website, and we assembled it on-site over the course of around
three days. The video above is a timelapse taken from our kitchen window using a tablet I set up for that purpose, interspersed with close-up snippets of us assembling it and of the
children testing it out.
You can explore the play equipment in VR, if you like.
I’ve also built a Virtual Tour so you can explore the playframe using your computer, phone, or VR headset. Take a look!
A second quick geocache find while the 6 year-old and I took a stroll around the village, which – as of yesterday – became our home! Nice to see the lights here that’ll help protect her
during our “school runs”!
