Dads Parent Too

“Why DO children vomit in the middle of the night?” It’s a question I couldn’t help puzzling over as I scraped vomit from bedding into a basement sink.  I mean, vomit happens during the daytime, sure.  And children sometimes make it to the bathroom, a waiting bowl, a SickSack(TM), or sometimes you decide you didn’t love that sweater as much as you thought.   I wondered if I had become desensitized to “daytime vomit” from my days of caring for an infant.  As if all that vomit had blurred into one, unending, forgettable, and insignificant cleanup, and the only episodes that stand out any more are when you hear: “my pants are wet!”, and the usual wet-pant-urine-check quickly evolves into a handful of sticky-mashed-potato-horror!  And it isn’t just the laundry, it’s carefully checking each item/child in the bed for vomit, hoping that the currently-not-vomiting-sibling stays asleep, while you peel everything off the bed, and eventually holding that confirmed...

DAD TIP: “ Science Idea Box ” at the “WOW in the World Podcast” Shop.  It has 60 easy-to-do experiments on 30 wooden, double-sided chips.  This one was for “Mak[ing] a habitat for an insect” #tinkercast

How do we protect our children from danger and abuse?  On some level, no amount of precaution or protection will guarantee our children will never be hurt.  Having children is a risk, as Elizabeth Stone put it: “Making the decision to have a child is momentous.  It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body”. As parents, we have to makes decisions  along the continuum between safety/security and danger/experience.  An extreme emphasis on safety stunts growth and development, i.e. helicopter parenting leads to emotionally stunted children.  While an extreme emphasis on experience with a high risk threshold can lead to injury or death.  Every parent has to decide what is best for their children, but one skill that will serve children throughout their lives while they navigate their own limits with risk and openness to experiences is “CONSENT”. Luckily, it is something that be easily learned though play.  As pare...

“Be silly.  Be honest.  Be kind.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson This quote has become my mantra.  Life is too short to be worried about status, to keep up appearances, or put on airs.  BE SILLY.  Embrace the mistakes, be willing to improve, and laugh at yourself when appropriate.  BE HONEST.  Any mistake will be made exponentially worse with lies, deception, and/or secrecy.  BE KIND.  Because we will all need the benefit of the doubt in the future, we will all need to rely on the kindness of strangers at some point, and it’s a beautiful way to live. Lake is obsessed with bird feathers.  When we were taking these family photos, she found this seagull feather, and she wouldn’t put it down.  We have learned from past experience that all of our rational discussions about the possibility of communicable diseases, the likelihood of bacterial growth from dead animals, and the danger of rubbing the soft feather around your eyes (yes, t...

I am not sure about you other parents out there, but morning/night routines have been a STRUGGLE! Mallory found this  “Kid’s Routine Chart”  by InspiredProse on Etsy, and it worked like magic last night and this morning.  My 6-year-old, Lake, was super excited to do the routines herself and check off the boxes.  So far, it has worked one night and one day, and it might not work tomorrow, or ever again, but for at least one morning and one night, it has been MAGICAL! #notanad #justafan

When my spouse ordered an Echo Dot for Lake, I thought it was a bad idea.  I was worried it was going to turn into another technology that would suck my child’s brains out like a tablet.  But I was pleasantly surprised with how much she likes audio books and how it encourages correct pronunciation (a non-trivial matter when your child needs speech therapy). #amazon #amazonechodot2 #dadsreadtoo #dadsparenttoo #dadswhoparent

JER: What does it mean to be a "man"?  What does it mean to be a "woman"?  What attributes do you associate with being "masculine", "feminine", or in between?  This topic is important to me personally, because I spent the majority of my life confused why I didn't relate to most other men (I discussed that here:  "Not Transgender, but not Don Juan or Hulk Hogan either" ). How do I create a space for my children to figure out what it means to be "girls", "women", "feminine", "masculine", in between, or something else?  After a lot of thought, this is the explanation I expect to give to my daughters when they ask about it (perhaps when they are around 8, who knows). "Biological sex' is experienced by the majority of the population as what genitalia a person has at birth, where most males have a penis, most females have a vagina (like you), and there are some (a proportionally sma...