Tag: parenting

Aside

Sarah and I recently made our way through the first Barnaby Grimes book: Curse Of The Night Wolf. We quite enjoyed it and will probably seek out others, by the way. However, I had to do some deep background explanations on the concept of the various quack medicinal tonics of the time period, as Sarah isn’t really up on her historical snake oil salesmen. I was able to do it, with some helpful reference to Pete’s Dragon, but it took some explaining. When I saw this vintage ad for Melachol, my immediate thought was to show it to her as an illustration of the concept. Fortunately my parenting brain did kick in before I did that, and suggested to me that I might be better off not having to explain “functional impotence”, “irregularities of menstruation”, or “perverted secretions” at this time. (Actually, I’m not sure I could explain that last one.)

It’s Really Not Plausible

I find it highly unlikely that something this cute could share a significant portion of genes with me. (Of course, if you talk with her for a while, and find out that she’s full to the brim with the good crazy, then you might start to believe she’s actually my kid, all appearances to the contrary…) Read more →

Aside

When Trish suggested the name Sarah for our kid, I was happy to go along. I had four reasons, two public ones and two ulterior ones. The public ones were liking the name and being amused at the notion of using a biblical name, especially one with the meaning “princess”. One ulterior motive was all about Thin Lizzy. One was about gypsies and Kali. Maybe some July I should take Sarah to Sainte Anne de Beaupre for the Romani gathering…

Friday Night Links

Collected from here and there about the networks, for your amusement or edification, I would really like to believe the story of Denny & Peach is a vignette that accurately captures a bit of the wonder of the world. But even if it’s a fiction, it’s a lovely little one. Also, SWORD CANE! Same thing with this “big catch” story.… Read more →

Links On A Saturday Night

Between this whole house-selling/house-buying thing, and the relatively insane week I’ve had at work, I have been neglecting the blog. Let’s catch up on a few things that have popped up in the meantime. I may have mentioned here before that I enjoyed Farmer’s Riverworld books (for getting me into Burton, among other things), and I certainly have mentioned my… Read more →

Another major life moment

In addition to all that “moving to Ontario soon” drama outlined below, there’s a whole other life milestone that got passed today: my daughter went to school for the first time. We got up a little early this morning and had a pancake breakfast, and then we all went down to where Sarah would meet her school bus. She got… Read more →

Natal Day Link Post

Holiday Monday has kept me too busy to properly blog, so you get a bit of a tab-closing list instead. I’m not sure that it covers anything new, but the piece from More Intelligent Life (the quarterly from the Economist) about authors and drinking was a fun read anyway. I’ve seen some stories about tough people in the news, but… Read more →

Not just a sappy Dad post

There you see Sarah receiving her first belt at her taekwondo class. The final part of her belt test involved kicking through a board. I expected it to be some kind of styrofoam or balsa or something–she’s only four years old after all. But no, it was a pine plank, and a decently thick one. Witness: I’m insanely proud of… Read more →

Possibly I Am Just Sappy

Very rarely does one of those “ten photos, each with a paragraph of text” photo features in one of the major papers make me tear up–I want to say never, but my memory is not the wondrous thing it once was“Tho’ much is taken, much abides” so that might be a bit of a reach. It’s moot anyway, since this… Read more →

Worth 2000 Words

A recent cleaning and reorganization process resulted in our more-or-less reclaiming the upstairs family room from our daughter. Not that we’ve kicked her out of there, but we’ve removed a bunch of her stuff from the room, making it seem less exclusively hers. A consequence of this is that we had room to add a new chair. So we went… Read more →

Bachelor Lifestyle

My family is away this weekend, visiting more of our extended family. I couldn’t go with them, for a combination of reasons. One of the consequences of this is that I am getting to do some things I haven’t done in more than 4 years. Yesterday, I woke up at 8AM, rolled over and went back to sleep until 10AM,… Read more →

Christmas Spirit (sincere)

I should note that while I maintain a little bit of hipster irony about the whole Christmas thing (for instance, this made me laugh right out loud) there are some other people in my household who are completely into it. And, since I am completely unable to say no to them, I have found myself singing carols and taking part… Read more →

Recent Family Outings

In an attempt to somewhat balance the “what a terrible parent” image I presented earlier this week, here’s a short account of some of what we’ve done over the last couple of weekends. This past weekend featured a family trip to the movies to see one of the two HRM showings of the new(ish) Cirque de Soleil film, Delirium. Sarah… Read more →

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada
This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.