In honor of the arrival of my new niece, I thought I’d go back in time to when N first arrived at the hospital. Having a baby when there’s another one already at home is a lot more complicated. Instead of just staying in the hospital until discharge time, I shuttled back and forth to […]
Read MoreA while back, J and I hit on the idea of using eye contact to get and hold C’s attention. He learned the trick quite well. Whenever he really (really, really) wants something he makes sure to somehow make eye contact. Sometimes that means getting in front of us. Sometimes, he grabs a pant leg. […]
Read MoreA few months after C was walking, we took him to Sea World to see the Clydesdales. He took one look at them and said "Cows!" J corrected him, "no. Those are horses. Horses." The second time she said ‘horses’, she said it very slowly so he could learn how to pronounce it. He wasn’t […]
Read MoreN just turned 1 last month. His “words” are pretty much limited to one and two syllable sounds that are quite open to interpretation (except for “Daddy”, which he says quite clearly). Fortunately, he still has his sign language. To kick off this past vacation, we went out to dinner with my sister and her […]
Read MoreThere will be a temporary interruption in Daddy Tales this week. I’ll resume on 8/8. Sorry for the outage! A big part of our nightly routine with the kids is reading bedtime stories. We started doing this very early on – even before C was old enough to talk. The point back then was to […]
Read MoreThis past weekend, I found myself with the kids at a play area in the mall. A play area is basically a large area with a soft floor and a whole bunch of nonmoving kids’ toys: giant plastic airplaines for them to climb on, small slides, and so forth. It’s surrounded by barriers the kids […]
Read MoreIn our kitchen, we have a plastic kid’s table. It’s a single piece of plastic molded into the shape of a little picnic table with benches on either side. Amazing the things you can find at garage sales! In any case, one of our big challenges with N has been that he loves to climb […]
Read MoreThere’s a dark little secret about new babies that most non-parents don’t know about: meconium. Meconium is a black tarry substance that is what newborns produce as part of their poo. Pardon the word poo, but I don’t know what else to call it. Changing a meconium diaper is a real hassle. The stuff really […]
Read MoreThere’s something about teaching kids bad habits that is incredibly funny. I realize that every time I mention doing such things, all the moms reading this cringe, but I can’t help it. Anyway, a couple weeks back I found myself engaged in my rather dubious pastime. This time I was teaching N how to poke […]
Read MoreA few weeks back, our whole family went to the art museum to see an exhibition of Curious George paintings. The paintings were neat, but didn’t hold C’s interest as long as they held J’s – so I took him wandering through the rest of the museum. It wasn’t long before we stumbled upon a […]
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