Tag: Fatherhood

  • ODDS and ENDS: I Hate Fractions, Breakfast Memories, and I Have a Problem…

    ODDS and ENDS: I Hate Fractions, Breakfast Memories, and I Have a Problem…

    (Three is a magic number…)

    Fractions suck. They have sucked since I was first introduced to them back in 5th grade, and to this day, they are still sucking away. I know that their suckage has continued because my daughter came home with math homework that was nothing but stupid word problem fraction questions. “It takes 1 3/4 cups of flour to make a batch of cookies. Dave wants to make 4 1/8 batches of cookies. If Dave has 8 2/3 cups of flour, how much flour will he have left over after he bakes his cookies?” Honestly, who gives a shit. Why aren’t they teaching kids to convert the fractions to decimals, because the world runs on decimals. Lucky for the kid, she didn’t inherit her father’s useless mathematical mind, and at least can handle it better that I did.

    This morning, as I was waking up the kid, and getting breakfast started, a memory shock-shot into my head. I returned to being four or five years old, sitting at the kitchen table eating Franken Berry cereal, watching my mother in her old yellow robe whisk and glide around the kitchen make school lunches for my brothers. There was a radio on top of the refrigerator that was playing “Fun, Fun, Fun.” I was trying to follow the lyric, but was confused. “What’s a T-bird?” I asked my mom. “It’s a car,” she said. “Why does the dad take it away?” “She got in trouble.” This was all confusing to me.

    I’m addicted to my phone, and it’s becoming a problem. Sure, a little of it has to do with doom scrolling because of all the news of late. Yet, I know that I am spending too much time on my phone. I lost a half hour just now, looking a videos of people signing about how awful musical theatre is. Like, I need to wrap up my writing this morning, and get to my chores… but I had to see if there were any new ICE videos. Now I feel like I am behind, and the day is slipping away. I have to put it down. I have to stop. I have to do better and more constructive things with my time. Like come up with a good button to end this piece…

  • Earworm Wednesday: Bowie

    It’s Mary Hopkin’s singing those “Doo Doo Doo’s” that locks it into my head.

    The song also reminds me of the time when I was driving around Northern California with my then five-year-old daughter, and she thought this was the coolest song, and made me play it over and over in the car.

  • The Bored Days of Summer (Unedited)

    We got three days into Summer Vacation, and the kid announced that she was bored.

    “There’s nothing to do”

    “No one to talk to”

    “Nothing to watch”

    “Nothing to read”

    “Nothing to listen to”

    I think you get the idea.

    Not surprised to hear her say this. All kids get bored when they have too much time on their hands. When the get too much freedom, it becomes repressive. As I am the stay at home dad, I get the brunt of the kid’s complaints, and she looks to me to solve this problem of hers.

    My first reaction was to tell her that it’s not my job to eliminate her boredom.

    But as soon as I said that, it dawned on me that it really is my job to end her boredom. Look, if I don’t get involved then she will want to zombie out on the iPad, and that is the worst thing that could happen.

    I’m not saying that she won’t get on the iPad this Summer, but I want to limit that as much as possible.

    Now, I don’t want to create mindless things for her to do, such as dumping a bunch of chores on her. There is no joy or magical memories that come from that. No, what I want to do is encourage healthy habits while also spending time together. (She will help me paint the livingroom this Summer, so she does have one huge chore, but we’ve been talking about that for months now.) I want her to stay active, so we are going to go running, and work on her soccer skills. I also want to keep her reading up, so we need to set time aside for that. She’s brought up that she wants to go to a museum, so that will take care of the art side of things. And I want to encourage her to think about the food she wants to learn how to make, and then we can work on recipe testing.

    IN the end, what I know to be true is that you only get to have so many Summers as a kid. When the days are hot but not too hot, and the Summer feels like it stretches on forever. In two or three years, I really won’t see her over the Summer, as she’ll be involved in something, or will be hanging out with her friends. Until then, I want to make sure she has some memories of enjoying time with her dad. Doing stupid stuff while trying to avoid being bored.

  • Helping My Kid with Math Homework

    I don’t know about you, but when I found out that I was going to become a father, I had visions of all kinds of stuff I would do with my kid – like teaching them how to drive, or tucking them into bed, or dropping them off at college. But never in a million years did I ever contemplate in those early days how much time I would spend helping my kid with math homework.

    And to set the record straight from the beginning, my kid is really good at math. Like, it just makes sense to her, and she finds it fun. I am very proud of her.

    Me? I suck at math. I mean, I’m not awful at it, but there is a point where I am very proficient at all things math, and then there is this line, usually involving fractions, that I no longer have a mastery of mathematics, and start getting nervous that I don’t know what I am doing. I first encountered this feeling in 5th grade when everyone in my class seemed to understand how to multiply fractions, and… I didn’t. And it’s not that I felt dumb, it’s that I felt lost, like I didn’t know which way to go to find a solution. It’s a very unsettling feeling.

    I was able to dance around math in junior high, and high school, kept a B average but I had to work at it. Never took a calculus class, though now I wish I would have. I did the very unwise thing in college that I was warned not to do, which was save my final math class for final senior semester. Luckily, my university had a math class for arts majors – it was “Intro to Statistics.” I got a B.

    So, when the kid comes to me for help, there is a little wave of panic that wiggles through me, but I know I am just having a flashback to 5th grade. I am lucky that 4th grade math is completely in my wheelhouse, so in front of my kid, I still appear that I have a mastery on the subject. Though I might not be the best at explaining everything, I do at least come up with the correct answer.

    I know to enjoy this 4th grade year, because when she gets to 5th grade, I will be closing in on that line.

  • ODDS and ENDS: Recovery, Tottenham’s Next Season, and This Year

    (The future is in your lap…)

    Today is the first day that I feel 100% normal. Yesterday was like 95%, and I think that had to do with the side effects of the medication I was on. Yeah, Covid sucks, and I am glad that I had avoided it for four years. I am also aware that I had a very mild case, as I would say that it felt more like I had a bad cold than anything else. Also, the being exhausted all the time made me feel like I have lost a week of my life; I just couldn’t stop sleeping, which wasn’t as pleasurable as I had hoped. I just felt lazy. Now that I am back, I have the desire to exceptionally over exert myself to compensate for my “time off.”

    Tottenham Hotspur will not play in the Champions League next season, but they will qualify for the one of the two other European football tournaments. With Spurs final game against already relegated Sheffield, odds are that Tottenham are Europa League bound. This is an improvement over last season, but I can’t shake the feeling that the team choked during the second half of the season. Ah… next season. And there is a European Cup this Summer!

    Does it feel like this year has flown by for anyone else? Swear to God, it feels like we were just wrapping up New Years like a month ago. I know that I wrote a blog about how we had planned our Summer already, and just the other day, the kid’s school sent out the academic calendar for 24/25, and it’s like Fall is basically here already. I got an email last week about getting ready for the Great Pumpkin Blaze for Halloween. But with all of this, it dawned on me that kid will leave for college in 9 years, which means we are halfway through our time with her. Nine years of being a parent has flown by, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but I wish it would slow down just a little bit. Perhaps I am to blame, as I forget that most of what I busy myself with really doesn’t matter.