We used to be better parents

/ Shane / 2 Comments

I have recently become more and more eccentric in my parenting. The more crazy articles I read, the more things start to make sense to me. It occurs to me that things really were better, back in the good old days. As a society, we used to be better at parenting.

It wasn’t something that was necessarily done on purpose. It was more just a consequence of the way people’s lives were back then. Say what you want about today’s world, but we increasingly have more (material possessions, food, what have you), while doing less (less in the sense that I work at a desk job and don’t produce my own food or fix my own house, etc.). This is generally considered a good thing, but perhaps there are unintended consequences.

So this comes down to two major areas: choosing less, and giving your kids more work.

Choosing Less

The idea here is that you want to keep your kids busy, but not by over-scheduling them. Natural busyness, not a series of activities. I firmly believe that kids need time to do nothing. They need time with their parents, time to explore, time to play on their own, time to read and be quiet, and time to be bored, all of it structured by more routine. It means forgetting time-outs (which used to be our go to in times of crisis), less explaining and bargaining (this one is particularly hard for me), and less choices.

This article really resonates with me, and inspires me to try to be a better parent. We’re always busy, going from one trip to the next, debating music class vs. swimming lessons vs. dance classes. We schedule days and times to go to the park. We do it because we think our kids will enjoy these things, and they do! But it’s stressing me out, what’s it doing to the kids?

Giving Your Kids More Work

When I was growing up, my mom worked us hard, and I didn’t like it. But now I’m a hard worker. Coincidence?

The articles explain the why and the how. The thing is, our kids love to do play “work”, or even do real work. They love to do dishes, put their babies to bed, help unload the dishwasher, or set the table. They pretend in the play kitchen, and they always love to help cook (which is something I actually used to do more of, and haven’t been lately, shame on me). They love these things! Evie will actually cry if you set the table without her. I don’t think this is that unusual; I think kids like to pretend to do the things they see adults doing. Kids like to imitate work, and that is good for them. So why do we try to curb this natural impulse?

Well, the reason why is because it’s hard. It requires an immense amount of patience. I guess the key is to not look at it as getting things done, because you’ll just get frustrated that it’s taking too long or not being done correctly. This is where I tend to get frustrated. It’s easier just to say, “I’ll do it myself.” But when you look at the big picture, isn’t a little frustration worth it if it teaches your children life lessons?

I’m not ready to move out to a farm and live off the land just yet, but I’m getting there. I’m not totally Amish. But then again, I don’t have a texting plan, so how far off am I really?

Quote Monday tries to be nice (and fails)

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Sara: “Sometimes I can’t stand you. I mean all the time, but I just said ‘sometimes’ to be nice.”

::The music table played London Bridge is Falling Down, Hey Diddle Diddle, and then a mystery song::
Evie: “Oh! I know what it is! Saskia Hamilton!”

Me: “Don’t be cute.”
Evie: “I’m not cute! Er…you’re not cute!” – It’s not often that you actually hear someone say, “er…”

Sara: “Why do they think they can just park on the grass?”
Me: “Well, they probably saw someone else doing it so…”
Sara: “BUT THEY HAVE A PRIUS!!”

Google+ Extensions

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Now that I’ve been using Google+ for a while, I’ve found the need for a few add-ins to make things work a little better. I should note that these are actually add-ins for Chrome, not directly for Google+, so they will only work for you if you use Chrome (and if you don’t, then I don’t have much sympathy for you anyway). I’ve been using these for a while now, and I will vouch for each of them.

Start G+ – This extension is essential! This one consolidates my Facebook and Twitter accounts with my G+ account. I can make a post in G+ and have it automatically go to Twitter and Facebook. I can see all three of my feeds in one stream. I don’t actually like having my Facebook stream combined with the other two, so I turned that option off. At this point it is still easier for me to view Facebook via Facebook, so that’s a personal choice for me. But I basically never used Twitter at all, and now I am, because it’s conveniently co-located with a service that I like. The downside is that people who follow me in more than one place have to deal with repeat messages, but I already had my blog going out to all of those places, so there was already a lot of overlap.

+PhotoZoom – When you hover over an image, it pops up full size. I thought this one sounded stupid, but everyone kept recommending it, so I tried it. It’s amazing! I’m so used to it now that I try doing it in Facebook all the time. Some examples of when I use it are: when I get a notification that someone changed their profile picture, the thumbnail is so tiny you usually can’t figure out what it is a picture of, but it’s not necessarily worth clicking on the image to see it bigger. By the same token, when someone puts up pictures, sometimes the thumbnails are good enough for most of the pictures, but you want to see one a little closer. So you can just mouse over it, and you don’t have to be taken out of the whole flow of your stream to see it.

Useability Boost for Google Plus – This is a really minor one, but it just tweaks the CSS a little bit of the G+ page. The main thing it does is change the background from white to gray, and add a little space in between posts. This might not sound like much, but it makes it so much easier to read. I tried turning it back off once, and I had to put it right back on.

+Comment – This was a way to collapse comments. When I went to get a link to where to download it, it seemed to be gone from the app store. Upton further review, it seems that it was not needed anymore, because Google+ folded that functionality into the base program. So, good on you Google. Looks like I can uninstall this one.

The one thing I’m really missing is something to automatically push my blog posts out to Google+. Right now it automatically goes to Twitter via WordPress and Facebook via Networked Blogs. But there doesn’t seem to be any equivalent yet to push things out to G+. So I am manually pasting the link in every day, which is kind of tedious.

Anybody know of anything to do this? Any other extensions you like?

Have Bikes, Will Travel

/ Shane / 2 Comments

While we were on vacation, we ended up as the unintentional owners of a pair of bicycles.

We were shopping for a camp chair for Oliver, and we found ourselves next to a Goodwill. We decided to go inside and look around, but before we even got inside we saw two bikes sitting outside with a sign that said, “I’m for sale!”

There was a brand new mountain bike for $15. The tires were a little flat, but it looked like it had just been sitting in someone’s garage and never used. There was also a well-used racing bike for $10. Although it had obviously seen a lot of use, it looked like it was pretty well taken care of and only needed a new seat. So $25 total for a pair of pretty good looking bikes. We didn’t have any bikes (though we already had helmets from our trip to Mackinac), so we figured, “What the heck?” The icing on the cake is when we put air in the mountain bike tires and they held! So we didn’t even need to replace the inter-tubes.

We were pretty jazzed about our purchase, but the question now is, what do we do with them?

Surprisingly, we just don’t have much of an opportunity to use them. I say surprisingly because Sara walks all over the neighborhood, so you’d think this would be a godsend. But the kids complicate this quite a bit. Evie might be able to keep up if it was a short trip, but what do we do with Oliver? It’s just not worth the purchase (or the storage!) of some kind of trailer or anything. Even to ride the bike recreationally, we’d be talking about one of us going for a ride while the other stayed with the kids. Not all that appealing for either of us!

I’m sure we’ll be able to get more use out of them when the kids are older. You don’t pass up a deal like 2 bikes for $25! In the meantime, any suggestions on what we do with the bikes?

Robots continue to make great strides toward conquering the human race

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Alright, this video is pretty awesome, and also pretty frightening at the same time. Basically, three types of robots work together (a concept apparently known as a “swarminoid”) to find a book and retrieve it.

Tell me you can’t envision these things taking over the world?? There is something particularly creepy about the eyebots and the way they move.

On the other hand, I love how much information they communicate just by some color changing lights. You can tell when they find the book, you can see the information traveling from robot to robot, just by a change of color.

You can see a little more information here.