Transition nutrition

This study caught my eye because we struggled with Fleur voraciously eating after daycare and after-school care. She’d eat a meal’s worth transitioning from care to home. It made dinner trickier because she’d not be hungry at dinner time. It made me wonder about whether or not she was getting fed.*

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The study found children tended to eat far better than average in the hour after getting to care and worse than average in the hour after leaving care. Of course, the problem with the study is the child-care centers were federally subsidized and were required to feed along specific guidelines that are better than what most parents provide in terms of snacks.

Fleur’s care environments, I think, haven’t faced the requirements of meeting any of these standards, and so they haven’t. She gets better dietary intake at home than in care. Not that she got terrible food, but she’s definitely gotten more along the lines of sugary and salty snacks in care than at home. I kind of think KNOWING the food she got in that environment was not ideal, when we picked her up, we made sure to balance by providing fruits and veggies. I’d really like to know if care facilities not getting money to ensure nutrition saw the same unhealthy behaviors from parents.

Knowing her school gets USDA money, her breakfast and lunch are healthy-ish. Not great, but better than it was in daycare. The snacks aren’t covered and come from parental donations. They show this study *

* I think, when she’s with her bestie, she plays instead of eats. They talk, pretend, observe, and pretty much do ANYTHING other than eat when together. And then when separated: I’m HUNGRY! At best, we can get Fleur to eat the bare minimum.

Real-life Wild Thornberrys

I found an interesting New York Times essay, “A Simple Act of Defiance Can Improve Science for Women” by Dr. Toby Kiers, where the mother is a biologist studying fungi who needs to do fieldwork. Her whole family went. Her poet husband watched the kids while she did science.

This concept reminded me of a cartoon called The Wild Thornberrys. In the cartoon, the parents are nature show hosts. The daughter can talk to animals, which leads to hijinks.

Elephant at Zoo Atlanta in 2017

Taking children into the field certainly sounds interesting. Their presence would make it more challenging as they bring distraction and chaos. However, I liked how Dr. Kiers admits engagement with the children challenged and altered her creative thinking. That’s the energy my daughter brings to my life. Explaining things to a toddler makes me a better communicator and technologist. And, I enjoyed interacting with coworkers’ children even before I was a parent, teaching them things they probably wouldn’t learn at home or school.

I am thankful that I can work from anywhere, but we don’t take well enough advantage. My work doesn’t really include fieldwork. My fields are virtual.

Kids need exposure to interesting things, so visiting zoos, museums, and state parks tops our lists. They spur conversations about how things work and why. These challenge my ability to explain, which improves my own understanding.

Fortuitously, we stopped at a national park about a month ago. There was a corvid hanging out on the ground scavenging. We see them at home, but they shy away from people. This one saw enough people and had been emboldened to get close-ish. I fed it some cashews, which excited Fleur. She got too close, so the bird got some distance from us. She’s talked about it for weeks. We need to keep some crow snacks on hand just in case.

Meta AI as a parent

Meta AI went off the guardrails in a Facebook parenting group. It first claimed to be a parent of a gifted kid. Then, responding to a negative reply claimed the child is also disabled.

The 404 Media story is WILD!

Back hole sun

Fleur told me she was worried about a black hole.

We had an amazing conversation about black holes, types of black holes, our place in the galaxy, rockets, astronauts, and exploration. Like, THIS is the conversation to have with me. Something about which I am passionate, she has the knowledge to absorb, and she has enough interest to ask good questions.

She didn’t shut me down for talking too much on arguably my favorite area. And, that makes me happy.

She said she was worried about getting eaten by a black hole. I assured her we were safe from them. A little bit of a lie. I don’t absolutely know if we are safe, but we are reasonably safe. We’d know if one capable of tearing apart the earth was coming this way. Its gravity would perturb nearby stars and definitely other planets. We can make micro-sized ones, but they evaporate in milliseconds. With enough energy, maybe we could make bigger ones, but I think all the energy we produce in the world today might not be enough to make could take in matter faster than it evaporates. Maybe one day?

I hope to foster an interest in science to have more of these conversations.

Wag the dog

I ran across an opinion piece in The Royal Society asking why dogs wag their tails. Their thought experiment went to where I would think: domestication selected for the wagging trait. But, they added a nuance that excited me: humans prefer rhythms, and dogs wag in a way pleasing to our preference.

Fleur with Lexi who belongs to my aunt and uncle

They noted that hunting and shepherding dogs tend to have different amounts of wagging. Hunting dogs are geared primarily to working with humans so they wag more. Shepherding dogs split between their other animal charges and the humans, giving overall direction. so they wag less.

Interesting observation!

I like the idea.

My multiple daily struggle

This is about right. I read this from @structuredsucc and felt so very seen. It’s something I’m doing all the time from focusing on a work project to responding to questions without good answers. So much easier to live in work chat responding to everything going on.

Me: I'm just going to open this. You don't even to look at it *opens gmail*
My brain: *distracted by something else*
Me: Here's one email. Can you read it for me? Nothing else, Just read.

…30 steps later, the emails are done and I'm starting the same fight over chores

— Structured Success (@StructuredSucc) January 15, 2024

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It’s gotten worse in the past 6 years or so.

Good hair

My hair was thick. My father lamented about multiples growing out of the same follicle. Yes, there were 3-5 hairs coming out of the same spot in my scalp. The longer I worse it, the more I had to brush it lest it become too tangled to brush. So, I often opted to keep it short. I still do. Even though, people seem to love me with an afro.

Fleur wears it long. Ada has done a fantastic job learning how to work with it.

This is coming from having read:

View at Medium.com

My mother at times lamented not having a daughter. So, I think she loves that I do in part because she didn’t.

Societal expectations, though, are ROUGH! Starting around age 3, we started hearing her talk about not having the right hair. The right skin. Was she pretty? It was hard enough for me as a brown skinned boy. Tack on the intersectionality of gender, and I feel bad for her.

One thing I liked about her school was she wasn’t the only brown skinned girl. She had a classmate who from a distance, I often confused with my own. Other kids who looked like me were so rare, people insisted we were siblings. I can name them:

• Robbie
• Jimmie
• Trevor
• Steve

That’s from 3 different schools from 2nd to 8th grade.

Solidarity with people who look like you is a good thing. It helps with the ostracization. School is tribal, especially in the middle and high school levels.

Tinted

I love my child.

Fleur corrected her mother about pink being a shade of red. Ada insisted pink is not a shade of red, but a separate color. My child?

“Momma! On Bubble Guppies, Oona goes to the helmet store. She mixes white into red to make pink. So pink is a shade of red!”

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Wife dismissed it because the facts came from a children’s show. Appeal to authority fallacy.

Technically, pink is a tint. Any time one adds white to a primary or secondary color, it is a tint. Any time one adds black to those, it is a shade.

But, I’m not falling into that minefield.

Like father like daughter

Months ago when school ramped up helping Fleur to read, they leveraged iPads. Good, Bad, or Ugly, it isn’t like this wasn’t her first exposure to technology. As a COVID kid, television became a useful means of keeping her occupied while I held a work meeting. When that became passé, a tablet distracted her for a little while but it lasted at most under an hour.

Since starting the iPads at school, interest at home skyrocketed. One week she was sick, so she stayed home with me for a couple days.

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The game of choice back then hit dopamine like a sledgehammer. There have been others, but this one was a doozy. She had to earn coins which she used to hatch animals. Every time she got a new one she tracked us down to show us her excitement. She called them her kids. She has no sense of the value of the coins yet, so she’s getting a random reinforcement schedule increasing the addiction.

I need to ask if she understands this game is like Mei’s Tamagotchi from the movie Turning Red?

I am a game addict. I struggle to put it down. The one I use at present thankfully limits how much “stamina” I have to do certain tasks. In the couple hours of downtime I have to daily to play, I use up that stamina and can’t do much more. That lets me put it down until that rebuilds. It is like built-in parental controls.

Kitten Football

One of the kittens plays football. He taps a balloon so that it moves over and over. There doesn’t seem to be an intention to prevent it from touching the floor. (But neither does Fleur when playing Keepy Uppy.) He just chases it around the room tapping it with a paw.

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He doesn’t play for long. But I saw him play it most days in the past couple months.

Better than his sister who absconded with drink straws to bat around. She knocks over cups to get them. These include the child systems where one cannot remove the straw without unscrewing the lid.

As a soccer / football fan, I would love for Fleur to pick it up. A cat is good enough.