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[Kids] are the best of times, the worst of times

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Posts

  • DaMoonRulzDaMoonRulz Mare ImbriumRegistered User regular
    Anyone here planning on renting Trolls World Tour?

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  • Banzai5150Banzai5150 Registered User regular
    DaMoonRulz wrote: »
    Anyone here planning on renting Trolls World Tour?

    Waiting till the 21st to buy it digitally.

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  • BrodyBrody The Watch The First ShoreRegistered User regular
    Sapling has a lamb lovey that she slept with for a long time, then rotated through a cast of: generic bunny, Mickey and Minnie, Daisey, Pooh, Eeyore, and a kitten that she calls piseag (kitchen in Scottish (the wife's been doing duolingo)). She doesn't actually sleep with them anymore, but they still have to be in the crib.

    "I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."

    The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson

    Steam: Korvalain
  • MulysaSemproniusMulysaSempronius but also susie nyRegistered User regular
    Schools officially closed for the rest of the school year. I figured something like that would happen, but held out some hope that they'd have some school this year, as school usually runs until late June.
    My kids are not doing ok.

    If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing
  • AldoAldo Hippo Hooray Registered User regular
    Schools officially closed for the rest of the school year. I figured something like that would happen, but held out some hope that they'd have some school this year, as school usually runs until late June.
    My kids are not doing ok.

    Your kids (and all other kids) are giving up a lot to help fight Covid19. They may not realize the full extent of it, but they're amazing.

  • SharpyVIISharpyVII Registered User regular
    So my ten month old seems to only want to eat solids whilst in his walker walking around the house??

    Up until a week ago he would sit in his chair on the floor with us and eat with no problems.

  • MichaelLCMichaelLC In what furnace was thy brain? ChicagoRegistered User regular
    DaMoonRulz wrote: »
    Anyone here planning on renting Trolls World Tour?

    We did last night through Xfinity. $20 for rental.

  • lonelyahavalonelyahava Call me Ahava ~~She/Her~~ Move to New ZealandRegistered User regular
    Cross posting from the Living like Introverts thread
    Kia Ora, Whanau!

    I know we have some rugby fans, or even just people that are fans of the All Blacks, or are fascinated by other indigenous cultures. Or have seen Moana far too many times to really count.

    Are you stuck at home with children who have far too much energy and no good outlet? Do you want them to learn something different, perhaps start to pick up another language? Or get them doing something other than singing "You're Welcome"?

    Please allow me to introduce you to Matua Whaitiri, an instructor for Kapa Haka from around the Porirua area in New Zealand. Matua Whaitiri (or Maori Thor as he introduces himself as) was very sad that he could not teach his students during this time of rahui. So, he took his Kapa haka lessons online.

    He streams live from facebook every monday morning, and the videos are also uploaded onto Youtube.

    I present to you here the first pilot episode for his show, there are now 11 episodes up on his youtube, please enjoy!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArGm7_TDBUI

  • MNC DoverMNC Dover Full-time Voice Actor Kirkland, WARegistered User regular
    What’s something you do that you know you shouldn’t and blame it on having kids. For me, it’s buying cookies from the store.

    Uh, yeah, they’re for the kids....that’s the ticket!

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  • mrpakumrpaku Registered User regular
    Definitely cookies, treats or snacks that they're unfamiliar with...feel like I'm doing them a disservice if they get to adulthood not knowing their favorite Little Debbie dessert, or their favorite soda, or their favorite salty gas station garbage snack. And of course, if it turns out they don't like Zebra Cakes for some reason, me and their momma are right here to solve that problem. I also let Little Man try coffee, justifying that I myself took two cups a day starting in second grade and he was very curious (he *hated* it, fortunately). We also try to expose them to as much good food as possible, too! It's just far, far, far more difficult to do so

    Feel the same about exposing them to as much music as possible. They usually get to choose what's playing on the radio in the car, even if it's something off one of my not-exactly-family-friendly stations. It's real cute until Little Man or Middle Guy feel entitled to cut off one of my *own* song picks because "I don't want to get it caught in my head", or "It's bad and I hate it". We do music nights some nights where we all go around and take turns picking out music on my phone/the TV on YouTube after dinner. Little Man's starting to develop his own taste a bit, picking up a little love for punk and metal, and I've been letting him throw songs on there that have swears even though I probably shouldn't, because I always hated people trying to censor my stuff at his age.

    Brief Easter aside- Some new vocabulary from Middle Guy, "Peeps" will hereafter be referred to as "Mushroom Birds", and "Chocolate Bunnies" are "Grandfather" (due to all the wrinkles!)

  • BrodyBrody The Watch The First ShoreRegistered User regular
    So, Sapling has taken to responding to me curtailing an activity of her with "That is unacceptable." Last night, while I was changing her for bed time, she was reaching up and trying to tug on things hanging in her closet, so I blocked her hand, and she told me "That is unacceptable," speechless for a second, I looked down at her and said "I am the adult, I chose what is acceptable or not", so she responded "I am the adult." It was very adorable while being simultaneously slightly infuriating.

    "I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."

    The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson

    Steam: Korvalain
  • MegaMan001MegaMan001 CRNA Rochester, MNRegistered User regular
    "Frankly, you look ridiculous." Is what I have tried to use to stop or slow down tantrums.

    I am in the business of saving lives.
  • lonelyahavalonelyahava Call me Ahava ~~She/Her~~ Move to New ZealandRegistered User regular
    see, I would have replied "so is what you're doing"

    but i'm getting the sass right back now.

    it's not fun.

  • BrodyBrody The Watch The First ShoreRegistered User regular
    see, I would have replied "so is what you're doing"

    but i'm getting the sass right back now.

    it's not fun.

    Yeah, at 2 and a half (and honestly for a while now) she's pretty sassy. She does this thing when you ask her to do something that she doesn't want to do where she sighs heavily and sort of turns her face downwards, but with her eyes up towards you. I can hear it from another room and know exactly the face she's making, and its really hard not to laugh every time.

    "I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."

    The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson

    Steam: Korvalain
  • m!ttensm!ttens he/himRegistered User regular
    MegaMan001 wrote: »
    "Frankly, you look ridiculous." Is what I have tried to use to stop or slow down tantrums.

    I'm not being ridiculous, and don't call me Shirley Frank!

  • djmitchelladjmitchella Registered User regular
    So, this year's easter egg hunt. (2018 here, 2019 here, previous years somewhere even further back).

    As usual, the first step is finding jigsaw pieces hidden in various places (bundled up because there's 120 of them, so to keep track of where we'd hidden them we have to make it a bit sane)
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    Once they'd found them all, they have to solve the puzzle:
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    Which then reveals this image:
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    which they have to work out is a picture of this stack of sandwich boxes in a cupboard:
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    they managed that okay:
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    Tucked in between the sandwich boxes was a riddle:
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    Solving the riddle points them at the freezer, where there is an ice cube tray with individual words frozen into cubes (face down):
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    In theory at this point we were expecting them to have to melt the ice cubes to get the words out:
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    but in practise they could read them backwards as the words hadn't sunk far enough in:
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    so they fairly easily worked out that the words were:
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    which reorders to "GO TO THE FRONT PORCH AND LOOK UNDER THE MAT". Under the mat was a bag containing the next sets of puzzles:
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    Those puzzles consisted of a crossword which needed solving, and then the highlighted letters were an anagram that needed solving (answer behind spoiler in case you want to try it yourself):
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    A sudoku, which contained highlighted numbers:
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    (I was impressed that with this and the crossword, they only solved the bits they needed to solve)

    a map (redacted), which pointed them at a tree in the park at the end of our street: (yes, social distancing, but there was no communal easter egg hunt this year and for that matter nobody else out at all at that time on sunday morning):
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    and tucked in the hole was an easter basket:
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    (just about reachable):
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    and in the basket were some eggs filled with coloured jello:
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    which they could then use in combination with the crossword and sudoku to work out the actual next clue:
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    (the book is a running joke here, we found it in a Little Free Library. If you don't have this particular edition at home, the relevant word is:)
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    Next step is working out that 'plate' refers to the piles of plates, where the next stage was:
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    That contained two custom Fighting Fantasy character sheets:
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    which they then had to use to find the treasure in a dungeon:
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    the dungeon, strangely, very much was the same sort of layout as our house:
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    and once they'd defeated the various monsters there, they found their way to a treasure chest hidden under a bed:
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    (observe the fierce death dog mentioned above):
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    inside that box was one more riddle:
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    which led them to the cupboard in the living room, which is also where we store tissues and other various household stuff
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    and there they found the final baskets of chocolates:
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  • kimekime Queen of Blades Registered User regular
    Your Easter hunts are one of the things I look forward to most from this thread every year :D

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  • lonelyahavalonelyahava Call me Ahava ~~She/Her~~ Move to New ZealandRegistered User regular
    i love them

    I get exhausted trying to think of all the planning.

    but I love reading them.

  • honoverehonovere Registered User regular
    We started weaning with the little girl and it's doing a number on all of our night's sleep. Seems like her belly has some problems adjusting.

  • Banzai5150Banzai5150 Registered User regular
    I still LOVE @djmitchella and his Easter hunts! Great fun to read about and realize I'm not creative, nor have enough stamina to plan and make something that elaborate. But Kate is only 4, so I won't say never.

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  • MNC DoverMNC Dover Full-time Voice Actor Kirkland, WARegistered User regular
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    While this is cute, it hurts my soul that my kids feel the need to wear masks to protect themselves from the virus. They deserve a normal childhood. I guess I'm lucky that this is happening while they're still young, so hopefully things will get better for them after it's over.

    Need a voice actor? Hire me at bengrayVO.com
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  • RanlinRanlin Oh gosh Registered User regular
    Unfortunately there's a real good chance this sort of thing will be part of the new normal, it's been an expected symptom of climate change.

    Hopefully with future events we'll be better prepared, though.

  • MulysaSemproniusMulysaSempronius but also susie nyRegistered User regular
    I've been mostly looking after my youngest solo the past few weeks. I.. haven't been the best at coming up with activities for him. A couple days were tv days, even. Most activities have been things he's come up with. Of course I set it up and help, but I've been a bit.. passive. Usually it's because he's a handful and a half, and he has regressed a bit as he hasn't been able to have his full special education help (teacher can only do so much with zoom)
    I was proud of myself today. No shows until late afternoon. In the morning I pulled out his dinosaur yoga book, and we did some of it. Then he wanted to dress up like a dinosaur, so we made costumes. They were the worst, and we didn't look like dinosaurs at all. But he had a lot of fun. And when we showed his sister, she came over to make a costume, too. And they ate lunch and played together for hours. Normally, she's next door with Dad while he wfh, as she is good at self- direction. But she wanted to come play with us today.
    Now to do this.. at least half of next week.

    If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing
  • KalnaurKalnaur I See Rain . . . Centralia, WARegistered User regular
    So, my son has been sleeping late for a few weeks (lack of school and progression into late spring will do that), and whenever he wakes up I go and get him. My wife has a few boxes of various cloth-stuff for sewing currently inhabiting our bedroom, and he likes to dig into these; one has bits of older clothes and projects that can be recycled. So this morning I got upstairs to discover that in the intervening minutes it took me to get upstairs, he had opened the box, extracted the rather voluminous sleeve for a set of robes made of grey stretch velvet, and proceeded to put it on like one might a shirt, making it look a bit like he was wearing a sort of odd looking poncho of sorts, but with no area for arms to come out.

    I make art things! deviantART: Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
  • SharpyVIISharpyVII Registered User regular
    This morning my wife called me in to the nursery to look at his poo as he'd done his first proper solid poop.

    Parenthood!!

  • Banzai5150Banzai5150 Registered User regular
    I must make apologies to all my sons teachers after this is over. Dealing with him and his ADHD while trying to teach him his courses online is exhausting. We’re 4 weeks in and having to help him redo almost everything he’s done has been tedious. He has barely done anything, that which he has done has been either incomplete or wrong.

    It’s my fault for trusting him when he said he’d done the work. So I’ve learned that lesson. Now each day we try to keep up with the lessons plus do a lesson or two he’s not done in previous weeks. I’m fucked if I know what to do about his Art collage that was do last week and that he only sketched out. Art is foreign to me.

    /rant off

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  • FiggyFiggy Fighter of the night man Champion of the sunRegistered User regular
    My wife is a high school teacher. Now imagine having 90 of them. About 1/3rd have some kind of customized education plan for a learning/behavioural/etc. difficulty. And the situation you describe about lying about doing their work? So many of them do this, and then when the teacher calls home the parent is often hostile to the teacher over it.

    XBL : Figment3 · SteamID : Figment
  • ElvenshaeElvenshae Registered User regular
    @Banzai5150

    :bro:

  • AldoAldo Hippo Hooray Registered User regular
    Over here we've just lost touch with a few hundred kids who attend innercity schools. They're just gone and teachers are worried. Schools in Rotterdam and Amsterdam told a newspaper that at the current rate 70-ish% of some classes will have to be held back for a year. Teachers also warned that it is neigh impossible to teach new stuff to kids, they've mostly been rehearsing whatever stuff they left off at before lockdown.

    They proposed a few solutions:
    1. no summer vacation, just start the school year whenever we're allowed to.
    2. reopen schools for at-risk children, that way they can observe social distancing.
    3. reopen schools for all kids, but reduce class size to 1/3 of what it usually is and rotate kids in and out of school throughout the week.

    There are so many pros and cons to all solutions it is mindboggling. I am very curious, Little King is supposed to go to school for the first time on September 1. He's going to a neat suburban school.

    Meanwhile the government wants to allow schools to reopen after the May holidays. In that case every school will have to figure out what they want to do. It is such a "we don't fucking know either" situation.

  • Banzai5150Banzai5150 Registered User regular
    edited April 2020
    Figgy wrote: »
    My wife is a high school teacher. Now imagine having 90 of them. About 1/3rd have some kind of customized education plan for a learning/behavioural/etc. difficulty. And the situation you describe about lying about doing their work? So many of them do this, and then when the teacher calls home the parent is often hostile to the teacher over it.

    I may shoot the messenger, but I always thank them for the information, when I’m caught off guard that he’s been lying again. Case in point, WHY are you not completing your Art assignments in class? I could never get a good answer. Come to find out, halfway through the semester, he’s been on his Phone during class. Needless to say he lost phone privileges. I was annoyed, not at the teacher, but at finding out so late, that he was doing this, so I may have sounded heated towards the teacher, but I did thank them for letting me know. I wish I had more contact with his teachers, though I know they are already busy with a billion kids and I can’t expect them to give me daily updates on whether he’s behaving or not. Soooooo.... Long winded response wrapped up. I totally forgot to talk to his teachers about a modified course due to his ADHD. We were supposed to have a meeting about a IEP right before this all hit. He had a 50something in Middle School, and I think it needs to be carried over.

    E: Tell your wife, though she doesn’t teach my kid, I appreciate her for all the work she does for the kids.

    Banzai5150 on
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  • ElbasunuElbasunu Registered User regular
    Anybody have chromebook suggestions for 1st graders?

    Wife is tired of my son having to use her laptop for school stuff, and we figured he should probably have something that's just his to work with. These storage sizes seem sooooo small but I guess that doesn't matter?

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  • El SkidEl Skid The frozen white northRegistered User regular
    Elbasunu wrote: »
    Anybody have chromebook suggestions for 1st graders?

    Wife is tired of my son having to use her laptop for school stuff, and we figured he should probably have something that's just his to work with. These storage sizes seem sooooo small but I guess that doesn't matter?

    We're in the exact same boat for our 4th grader... Kid is on my wife's personal computer all the time heh.

  • AldoAldo Hippo Hooray Registered User regular
    Elbasunu wrote: »
    Anybody have chromebook suggestions for 1st graders?

    Wife is tired of my son having to use her laptop for school stuff, and we figured he should probably have something that's just his to work with. These storage sizes seem sooooo small but I guess that doesn't matter?
    Internal storage is a lot less of an issue than X years ago. the OS is smaller, a lot of software runs "in the cloud", files are saved on Google Drive. For regular school work it is fine. It won't see much use besides school work/watching YouTube, but that's kind of the point isn't it?

    For more storage space the Chromebooks have USB and SD Card slots, right? Easy enough to plug in a 1TB card or USB stick should the need arise.

  • FiggyFiggy Fighter of the night man Champion of the sunRegistered User regular
    Chromebooks usually have a single USB port, and given it's for a kid you probably don't want a USB key in there that can snap off.

    MicroSD cards are where it's at for expanding Chromebook storage. Just keep in mind, in case you're not familiar with the device type, it's basically an Android phone in a small laptop format.

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  • Captain InertiaCaptain Inertia Registered User regular
    My sweet child has discovered the humor of farts

  • PeenPeen Registered User regular
    We've gotten very into watching Battlebots during this period of extended family togetherness and I found out that a company called HexBug makes little remote control bots that you can swap out the weapons on and so we stimulated the economy a little bit and got each of our girls one (and me one also because duh) and they are very good. They might break in a few days, who knows, but for now they're pretty fun. As you'll see, there's a little bit of a learning curve.

    https://youtu.be/LkDeBrDcx3E

  • RanlinRanlin Oh gosh Registered User regular
    My sweet child has discovered the humor of farts

    I'll always remember my kid's first joke she told me. She was squatting down next to me while we were playing something together when she suddenly popped up, looked back and forth and goes "Papa! I hear something...." looks back and forth again "I hear something!" then farts and starts giggling.

  • SeptusSeptus Registered User regular
    I'm feeling a little dark the more I think that there could be long-term lockdowns through the end of the year or early 2021, with perhaps at most a slight break in July/August. It's getting real hard to think of not only experiencing this much isolation, but also work and watch my 2 year old, and see how much he really wants to play with kids and can't. There's one neighborhood boy who's about 9, and a couple of times a week he's out and about in the afternoon and wants to talk, and Oliver just so badly wants to join in, and I'm basically constantly playing goalie trying to keep them 6 feet apart.

    Is anyone else getting desperate enough that they're trying to think of how they could pick a pandemic-buddy family, and only expose to them, for the sake of everyone's sanity? I can't tell if it's really an irresponsible thought or not, it seems like such a small concession, but we don't have any natural fits for it, we're not quite as close as I would like with parents of age-appropriate children to not make it seem uncomfortable.

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  • djmitchelladjmitchella Registered User regular
    Septus wrote: »
    Is anyone else getting desperate enough that they're trying to think of how they could pick a pandemic-buddy family, and only expose to them, for the sake of everyone's sanity? I can't tell if it's really an irresponsible thought or not, it seems like such a small concession, but we don't have any natural fits for it, we're not quite as close as I would like with parents of age-appropriate children to not make it seem uncomfortable.

    That was a suggestion from the chief medical officer up here in Alberta (though this was a month ago, I'm not sure if it's still on the cards nowadays. and there's some pretty significant conditions for it to work properly. We have friends who were doing this with their neighbors as their kids already liked to play together; but then one of the neighbors went off to help someone else assemble some bookshelves, and so that was the end of that)
    "I know many Albertans are now at home with kids or are working from home. These are big changes for everyone. And you may start to feel closed in families may need to find creative ways to keep children occupied," she said during Wednesday's update.

    One of her suggestions was partnering with a "cohort family," a group of close friends whom you are certain have self-isolated themselves, have not recently travelled and do not pose any risk of being infected with COVID-19.

    Hinshaw says that such a group would only work if those families remain committed to the agreement of self-isolating themselves with one another.

    "By doing this, the two families would only be exposed to each other, limiting close contacts, children have would have opportunities to play in a controlled environment, and parents would have opportunities to connect."

  • lonelyahavalonelyahava Call me Ahava ~~She/Her~~ Move to New ZealandRegistered User regular
    Ellie has hit peak 4 year old.

    All bodily functions are HILARIOUS.

    And everybody gets farted on. Or poop. Or weeeeeeeeeeeee.

    and it's HYSTERICAL, you see.

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