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Attachment Parenting How do you explain sex and "Free Condoms!" to your kids?   Rather an amusing situation happened over the weekend: I was in the touristy downtown area of Boulder with G- (8) and K- (4) having a good time wandering around. We'd just stepped out of Ben & Jerry's after enjoying some delicious ice cream and G- spotted someone across the pedestrian mall with a basket and a sign that said free condoms It didn't take more than a second or two for him to ask "Daddy, what's a condom?" Ah, well... Hmm.... The Secret Joy of a Proper Child Residence Arrangement   Without doing any research or checking with anyone, when Linda and I separated, we decided on a quite complicated two-household arrangement that maximized the solo time each child had with each parent. We did check after a month or two with a local psychiatrist and her comment was basically "wow, if you can do this, it's good for the kids, but I think it's going to prove difficult." Our arrangement, on a typical week, was: Monday: G- with me, A- and K- with Mom, Tuesday G- and K- with me, A- with Mom, Wednesday, A- with me, Thursday A- and K- with me, Friday A- and G- with me, Saturday no-one with me, and Sunday everyone with me. As a reminder, A- is 11, G- is 8 and K- is 4. For those of you familiar with divorce and dual-household setups, what's wrong with this arrangement, over and above that each parent only has a single night where they're without children? How do single dads (and working mothers) cope with summer holiday?   I feel a bit trapped right now. Linda and I are changing our parenting time arrangements so that all the kids are with her some days and then they're all with me on other days. If you've read parenting post divorce type books, we're probably going to be moving to a 2-5-5-2 arrangement. Prior to this we had a more complicated 2-2-2-1 sort of arrangement, staggered, so that each child had solo time with each of us every week. Too many darn transitions, though, so we're moving to a more normal, more common arrangement. The question that looms before me now, however, is: what happens during the summer? As regular readers know, we have an 11yo girl, an 8yo boy and a 4yo girl and even during the school year, it's very tough when I have all three because the 4yo gets out of school at 12:30, so I end up with half-days of work unless I can arrange play dates or other afternoon activities for her. Worth noting is that our two houses are just barely more than a mile apart, so there's no distance or travel involved and the kids can easily keep all the same friends and social activities in either residence. But summer vacation, stretching out a long twelve weeks, suddenly seems overwhelming to me because the days that I have the kids, I'm now thinking I will have to not work at all, effectively axing my available work hours by 50%, with a commensurate hit on my income. Fun, random photographs from our Hawaiian Holiday   First off, I will apologize that I'm not going to post any pictures of my kids here. I know that most daddy bloggers and mommy bloggers have a different perspective on things, but I don't have pics of my kids online because it's important to me that I put in all possible effort to protect their privacy. That's also why I don't refer to them by name but rather by using the admittedly Victorian convention of first initial + dash, as in D-. Anyway, that doesn't change that we had a great time in Hawaii last month and are ready to go back (particularly since tonight we're supposed to see 3-5" of snow tonight here in Colorado). So let's jump in. What I'm going to do here is show a picture then have a commentary about it immediately following. The pics are big, enjoy! Overheard: exactly the wrong way to tutor someone   I am hanging out at one of my favorite haunts, The Cup, in downtown Boulder, Colorado, sharing a table with a couple of guys who are working, laptop adjacent to laptop. From what I can glean, one of the guys is a tutor with a local group of some sort, while the other guy is either a senior in high school or a freshman at CU. Yup, a buddy just stopped by and the tutor said "I'm tutoring, catch ya later" to his friend. So I'm right about their working relationship here. What strikes me though is that there's precious little learning or teaching going on here and that this relationship is much more characterized by the tutor dictating concepts to the student. AudibleKids: Fun new site for kid's audio books   I dunno about you, but my kids really enjoy listening to books on tape / audio books, and so I was pretty excited to see that Amazon.com's new acquisition Audible.com has launched a site specifically focused on children's material called AudibleKids. What's interesting is that the material is broken down both into categories (Animal Stories, Biographies & History, Classics & Poetry, Fables, Fairy Tales & Myths, Fiction, Mysteries, Nonfiction, Parenting & Teaching, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Study Guides & Foreign Language) and by age and school grade. Now maybe it's just me, but do we want kids listening to parenting audio books? :-) When did shopping online become such a drag?   Hmmm... should I admit that I like shopping? Well, shopping online, but even the local neighborhood mall is a comfortable space and one I enjoy visiting, probably because my teen years were spent in "The Valley" (yes, that valley, the San Fernando Valley in Southern California, home of "valley girls", etc :-) Shopping seems like a fun social experience mostly, a chance to people watch and see a much wider variety of folks than I usually encounter on my day to day adventures in homogeneous Boulder. It's also a nice place to go for a walk if the weather outside is frightful, though that's less of a legit excuse as we're in the spring moving into summer! I've also enjoyed shopping online, more because of the great variety of selection than anything else. But in the last few years... Singing my children to sleep....   It's a routine we've been in for over a decade now, me singing my children to sleep. From when they were wee ones to now, when my oldest is 11, they enjoy listening to me sing and it helps them easily drift off to dreamland. What's curious, however, is what they most like me to sing: The Beatles. Maybe it's because I'm a boomer myself and so I am quite familiar with all their lyrics, but I also think that I have the same tonal range as Paul McCartney, so the songs are easy for me to sing. I mix it up a bit with Elvis, James Taylor and even Jim Croce, but given a choice, we seem to migrate back to Lennon and McCartney. And the song they most prefer? Inventing kinder, gentler games for the kids   We were playing a family favorite, Pirates of the Caribbean Life, the other evening, and I noticed an interesting phenomenon that's so common I usually don't even notice it: my kids modify game rules to make games more friendly and cooperative. In Pirates of the Caribbean Life, there's a "RAID" square you can land on, which then lets you attack another player and, if the spins are in your favor, steal their ship or otherwise steal money from 'em. It is, after all, a pirate-themed game, so you should expect some level of hostility and aggression. Not with my kids, though. Tourists and product stickers...   At the risk of sounding like a cranky guy, I have to say that I am completely baffled by people who buy consumer electronics and then don't peel off the product feature stickers. You know what I'm talking about, they used to only be on "display" or "demo" units at the store, but now for some reason we all get to enjoy stickers all over our TVs, DVD players, stereos, computers, and cameras that tell you about their megapixel capabilities, their format compatibility, standards compliance, partner brand logos, and on and on. It's annoying that companies now routinely put these stickers on our products at the factory (sometimes with alarming results: when I was researching LCDTV systems I really liked a particular Phillips unit, except for the customer complaints that they couldn't get the stickers off the TV screen itself without damaging the TV!) but it's downright weird how many people leave the stickers on once they start using the product. Finding the balance between "honoring their voice" and avoiding chaos   So our story begins with me going over to Linda's house to get K-, our 4yo, who I had agreed to have over at my place for the night. Originally all three kids were going to be with Linda, but she's been telling me how overwhelmed she's been lately so I thought taking the little one could be helpful. I'm also cognizant that I'm going to be totally unplugged for three nights at a conference and unable to help out at all this coming week. When I got to Linda's house, K- was home with A-, our 11yo, and Linda was off running errands. When I walked in, I could see that K- was engaged, and it wasn't too much of a surprise when she told me that she didn't want to come with me. She was happy to see me, as she always is, but after a little while I said we needed to start getting ready to go so we could have a nice dinner and play a game at my place, she burst into tears. Next thing I knew, she'd called Linda and was hysterically saying she wanted to stay there, not go with me. The anniversary of my daughter's conception...   A few days ago was the anniversary of the night we conceived A-, our first child, who is now 11 years old. I can remember everything about the evening, where Linda and I ate and were staying, our laughter-filled visit to Victoria's Secret and what we bought there, all of it a crystal clear memory that's unusual for me. Twelve years later, I am quite in love with the little nipper, she's the proverbial apple of my eye, along with my other two terrific children. Damn, I just have really fabulous kids, as was driven home to me by playing "big person" Monopoly with my 8yo this evening before bed and laughing again and again as we wheeled and dealed on property exchanges and rent payments. Nonetheless, I think back to what was going on when she was conceived and how much has happened and changed since then and have to say that there's a touch of melancholy, a sadness over what could have been, perhaps, rather than what is... Q&A with Spain Dad: Daddy Blogs and The Issue of Privacy   Though I have been writing this parenting blog / daddy blog for years, I have to say that I don't really feel like part of the daddy blog community. In fact, I only read 2-3 dad blogs at this point. That's why I was so delighted when Kelly Crull, who blogs as Spain Dad, reached out and sent me a lovely email to initiate a friendship between us. But Kelly blogs about his family in a way that I can't imagine, particularly in regards to how much private information he posts, so I asked him if he'd consent to being interviewed on my blog. This posting is the result. Dave Taylor: How did you get started blogging, Kelly? Kelly: I first published online in 1994. Since then, I've been writing in one form or another on the web. I've always been a firm believer that good stories are more important than the medium you use to tell them. As more people read online, it makes sense for me to tell my stories there. However, I didn't start blogging until 2004. I started with kellycrull.com, a blog about my first years in Spain, and later Spain Dad, a baby blog, which I started writing as soon as my wife and I found out she was pregnant--even before we told our family or friends. I was reluctant to start blogging initially because, as I said, I'm a firm believer in good stories. It wasn't until I ran across blogs like The Attachment Parenting Blog or Dooce or Waiter Rant that I saw how to blog and be thoughtful. Call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer to read blogs that have been written with care, even if that means the authors post less often. DT: You disclose quite a bit of personal information on your blog. What’s your view on privacy in this regard? Single rooms and single parents: travel logistics in hotels   Since I haven't yet won the lottery, I can't afford to get two adjoining rooms each time we travel, and more and more I'm finding that it's a real drag to share a room with little ones. Not because of the chaos, not because they wake me up - all of that is [begrudgingly] okay - but because of what to do after they've fallen asleep. Like poison in a well: of kids and bad moods   Just when you think that we're autonomous and able to determine our own emotional response to situations, you realize that we can be affected - and sometimes profoundly affected - by the moods of those around us. You know what I mean, where you're in a good mood and happy until you bump into a friend who is down in the dumps, moody or angry. Then your bubble bursts and the bad mood infects you. This doesn't always happen, to be fair, but it's more common than I'd wish. Fortunately, I've found that the more I can be conscious of this mood transference effect, the less it actually affects me. But children, well, that's something entirely different...