GoFatherhood®

When a great opportunity falls in my lap, I’m not one to say no, so when we were asked if we’d like to give the new video game Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two a whirl, my kids and I remembered how we’d spent many hours exploring the dark Disneyland doppleganger Wasteland in the first Epic Mickey adventure and said “you bet!” The game — for the Xbox 360 — arrived a few days before Thanksgiving, so the break was a perfect time to hook everything up and give it a try. Those of you new to my blog…

Continue reading Our Thanksgiving Included Epic Mickey 2

I’m still not sure how this happened, but my oldest girl somehow turned sixteen in the last few weeks. Sixteen. Where’d the time go? Actually, I think that the relative nature of time is best demonstrated by watching children grow up, because there are definitely moments when I have felt time creep along far too slowly even while I’m also aware of it rushing pell-mell. Even those infinitely long evenings of tension and dissent are but fleeting moments on the grand canvas of life… And so it came to pass that A- has turned 16 and is becoming a smart,…

Continue reading My Girl’s Sweet 16 Party is a Great Success!

I’ve written before about how I would sing to my children when they were little ones, how we’d lay in bed together and I’d whet their musical appetites for The Beatles and various other older music by going through my repertoire as a way to get them to calm down, slow down, and drift off. As they’ve gotten older, however, singing has taken a back seat to “going to bed like a big kid” which has typically meant that they read, then we light a candle and I say “good night” and walk out. More efficient but less sweet and…

Continue reading Singing My Kids to Sleep Last Night

We get all sorts of cool stuff from companies here at GoFatherhood central, and when Frigo asked us if we’d like a sampler pack of their various flavors of string cheese all my kids had to hear was the word “cheese” and they were enthusiastic. My whole family is, um, cheese positive, and my Dad even swears he could live a happy life if all he ever had to eat were cheese sandwiches. I’m a bit skeptical, but he does eat a lot of cheese sandwiches, so maybe it’s true. True to their word, Frigo sent us a big box…

Continue reading After deliberation, our favorite Frigo string cheese is…

This has to be one of the very worst email messages to receive from your child’s school, hands down: Dear Gr. 3 Parents — I am writing to inform everyone that one case of head lice was reported in the class today. I have attached our Lice Procedure doc. Everyone should check their child’s head for lice tonite if you can. Please let me know immediately if anyone else has this issue. The #6 procedure item allows us to do individual checks at home if only one case is discovered in the class, which is the case right now. I…

Continue reading Lice reported at school! Eewwwwww…..

Another Dad emailed me a long, complicated question about teens and Facebook and I thought it’d be good to share it here and to ask for your thoughts too, once you’ve read the situation.  Here’s the scoop: “Our 13 year-old daughter secretly created a Facebook account in January 2011. She likely had help from a friend, who we think taught her to create the account with a fake name, and to block relatives so we would not see anything.  She also used her basic Kindle (the e-Ink reader) to access Facebook because she does not have a phone and often…

Continue reading Teens and Stealth Facebook Accounts

A few weeks ago the team behind zpizza contacted me and offered to send a voucher so I could take the kids there and we could try out their pizza. Free pizza? And I have kids? A no brainer, and so they sent $20 in vouchers. Tonight, finally, I took my 12yo son G- and 8yo daughter K- to the local zpizza, tucked neatly between Firehouse Subs and Jamba Juice in what’s become franchise food row in the local shopping complex here in Boulder. We walked in to a dark but attractive restaurant that was almost empty around 6:30pm on…

Continue reading Our review of zpizza: Meh

I’ve been away from home for a few days, involved with a conference in Las Vegas. The glitz, the noise, the lights, the cigarette smoke, the sea of femme fatales, the usual Vegas scene. It’s easy to immerse yourself in the Vegas experience and forget about what’s going on at home, except for the fact that a surprising number of conversations eventually became discussions about our children. No more do we pull out our wallet and share photos, however, now it’s all digital, and smart phones make it a breeze to have the very best of your children’s photographs tucked…

Continue reading Travel and video calls. Not such a great idea?

Perhaps I’m the only one, but regardless of what kind of lunch my kids pack they seem to do a poor job of staying focused at lunch time and actually eating their food, so when I pick them up, it’s often to one or more entreaties of “I’m starving! can we get some food?” I mean, they get out at 3pm, it’s not like it’s half a day removed from when they should be sitting and eating the food we’ve supplied, right? What happens is that we often end up stopping by the local market and after a particularly memorable…

Continue reading The dilemma of post-school snacks

Like may children of divorce, my kids live in a world that’s split in two. Half of their lives they spend with me, and the other half they’re with their Mom. When we started this dual-house world, my ex and I sat down and tried to normalize our households, including bedtimes, expectations of chores, allowances, and similar. It kind of worked, but as the years have passed we have each moved into our own parenting spaces and I really have no idea what time the kids go to bed at her house and it’s clear we have different rules about…

Continue reading Younger Kids, Social Networks and Multiple Households, Oh My!