Tag: IPC
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Hot new laptop features
I’m obsessed with this “laptop” our 7 year old made: I asked him what the different features were. Check out these specs: He just whipped this together on a whim while listening to a Yoto. Kids, man. Time, space, and materials for the win.
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Color commentary
I was at the library last weekend with my two boys and we were playing a board game with pieces of all different colors. My 7 year old son picked a purple piece, and another boy who was a little older than him and at the same table as us said, “Why did you pick…
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Paging The Falconer
Yesterday I took the boys to a community cleanup event tied in with Earth Day and one of the exhibitors was a local raptor conservation group that brought live birds. Two key takeaways: 1. The turkey vulture was ugly AF but had an insane wingspan. The falconers were also impressed by all the turkey vulture…
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Fancy Earth Day
Occasionally the 7 year old will for fun write a word or phrase in “fancy” letters as a way to give it a special emphasis. I can’t think of something more deserving of such an honor than good ol’ Planet Earth: Long may Earth (and the bonus Moon Earth) remain in all of our hearts…
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My sons’ media of the moment
A spinoff of an ongoing series A Real Bug’s Life. This National Geographic miniseries on Disney+ uses macrophotography to capture tiny insects in dramatized settings, supplemented by Awkwafina’s affable narration. Monsters, Inc. Before ever even seeing the movie, the two year old got absolutely transfixed by a figurine of Mike Wazowski (or as he calls…
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Recent Views
More photography here. A trace fossil of a leaf in winter: Are those lights in the sky UFOs? Mufasa? Reflections of the lamppost light from my camera? We’ll never know: A brief respite between snowball fights: One of their favorite chores is cleaning the windows: The entrance overhang at a nearby library is very edgy:…
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Papa with his quotes
These days our two year old has taken to saying, “What you say, papa?” To which I reply: “I say that what you say… is what I say.” Which is, of course, from the iconic ’90s masterpiece Newsies. This is just one of countless examples of me dropping quotes and cultural references my boys (and…
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The ‘Hi mama’ archives
Part of our six year old’s bedtime routine is dictating a text for me to send to my wife while he’s brushing his teeth. See if you can detect a pattern in some recent messages: If these don’t epitomize six-year-old boys, I don’t know what does.
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Dadgeball!
The hit game this autumn among my six year old’s playground friend group was one-way dodgeball, where another dad and I tried to nail them with a regular-sized dodgeball and one of those small rubber balls that come with the Little Tikes basketball sets. We’ll call this game… Dadgeball. Let me tell you: there are…
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My sons’ media of the moment
A spinoff of an ongoing series A Minecraft Movie. We watched this a few weeks ago as a special treat and the Minecraft-obsessed six year old was completely locked in. (To be clear, he’s never played the actual game but has absorbed a lot about it from books and his friends.) Books. The two year…
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Head stop
We were heading out the door to meet some friends at a playground and our six year old was rarin’ to go. While my wife was still gathering things, he wanted to go outside and wait in the driveway until we were ready to depart. “It’s a head stop, papa,” he said. “Like a head…
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I got a problem with ‘little kids, little problems’
Continuing my unofficial series on problematic parenting clichés, there’s one I’ve heard a few times recently and must address: “Little kids, little problems. Big kids, big problems.” Setting the condescension aside, the idea is that all the challenging aspects of parenting babies and young children—e.g. diaper changes, loss of sleep, tantrums, potting training, keeping them…
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A creative childhood? It’s about time
Ross Barkin ponders what kids of today lack compared to their 20th century predecessors: When I consider the geniuses of that era—or any, really, before the last ten years or so—I think of time. Talented children, until the incursion of the smartphone and immersive videos games, had much of it. One big reason for this:…
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Recent Views
More photography here. We did a gymnastics party for our now 6 year old’s birthday, which his little brother definitely also enjoyed: 2025 America in one star-spangled shot at our local library — gloomy and fractured, with stark contrasts and a cloudy forecast: Happened to catch this sunsetting light casting shadows from two different windows…
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My kid did Paint that
While working from home the other day I had my work laptop out at the dining table with my six year old nearby. Since I’m usually hidden away in my home office, this quickly piqued his curiosity. I let him type out a short email I had to send, then opened up Paint and showed…
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The Birthday Bowl
Happy 6th birthday to our firstborn! We celebrated by going out to breakfast and then bringing him bowling for the first time. He got second place with a bumper-assisted 85, while I snuck into first place with a well-timed strike at 95. While it had been about a decade since I’ve played, I also have…