Copasetic Flow

Playground day was huge yesterday!  The nearby homeschooling chess club was cancelled, and so everyone turned up at the playground!  There were all ages of kids from two to ten to mid-teens, and of course 9 y.o. Daize, 7 y.o. Towser, and 5 y.o. Tawnse, (aliases all).  And before anyone asks, "Playground day ?"  Allow me to jump out ahead.  Yup, we have one playground day a week, and it was yesterday.  But, it’s a bit of a misnomer.  Playgrounds are more of a daily thing.  This morning?  The kids were at a different playground where the youngest of the group is taking a cooking class through Parks & Rec.  Buddies who live near that playground often turn up to play some more.  This afternoon, another set of buddies will turn up at math group at a nearby public library.  And so it goes throughout the week.  There’s one day a week we call playground day because it’s set aside for kids and parents to meet at a differe...

I often see the question, what do people do on long road trips to avoid too much screen time for kids?  First, a disclaimer.  I have no personal druthers about screentime one way or the other.  I think whatever works best for each family works best.  We, missed the screentime issue by simple circumstance.  When the kids came, we were poor grad students; too poor to afford screens.  Consequently, we’ve just never had them. So, what do we do on road trips without screens?  One of the answers is libraries!  (Actually an article in the New York Times a few days back, commenting on the rising popularity of libraries is what made me think of all this.)  On our latest cross-country road trip, our yearly two-week camping trip, we stopped at about a library a day.  They were delightful!  We go to read a little.  We used their free WiFi to keep up with communications as we went.    The kids read, they played with toys, they m...

We really only have one “rule” regarding our kids on the playground: We don't help. Whatever the kids are big enough to do by themselves, they’re allowed to do. If they want to climb to top of the tall slides, and go down, they can. If they need help to climb up, (because they’ve never done it before), they can’t. Not until they can do it by themselves. More times than not, this has led to a more relaxed dad, a more centered dad, a more, "Hunh, seeing as how you can't climb the ladder to the small platform you could plunge off of, you'll be OK." sort of dad.  Occasionally things do run in the opposite direction ala, "Who knew you could climb the 12 foot tall pyramid o' ropes mounted on a merry-go-round?"  In the latter cases, risk amelioration is achieved by Casually Hanging Out close to the Area Of Highest Concern', (e.g. directly under the kid giggling on top of said rope pyramid), tactfully concealing my inner-qualms. The system tends ...