Most of the posts on my blog are about my yearly goals (120 posts), physical challenges I take on (20 posts), my career (5-6) or topics I’m learning about at the time (minimalism, measurement, productivity, etc.). Very little to date has been about parenting (I count three posts; 1, 2 and 3). This is somewhat by intention – I was hesitant to write about a topic I didn’t know much about and where I wasn’t objectively good. Now, that I have an aggregated 30 years of parenting under my belt (thats how it works, right?), I perhaps have something to share. Every month I have part of a day reserved to take one of my children out on a date. This is one-on-one time I spend with them doing something that they want to do. Quality time. I have four children, so each child gets three dates a year and
On November, 2017 I ran the Gobble Gobble Kids Dash with my two oldest boys. Here is the race report. Synopsis This was the first official race my three year old ran – he got his own bib & everything. My two year old was technically too young to register, but we let him run some of the race with us as well. This is part of me exposing them to the sport of running and what it has to offer. My kids have been watching me be a runner as long as they can remember (my two year old asks ‘are you going running daddy’ whenever I put a synthetic shirt on) and going in the stroller for just about as long (this past summer they even got to participate in their first race, riding in the stroller), but this was their first time where they got to be the runner
Being the aspiring minimalists we are, my wife and I brought our first child home to our small apartment that had very few baby toys in it – everything fit in/on a toy box that sat on our bay window seat. Over the three years that followed, despite our best intentions, our house has accumulated many more toys. Though they are individually great – the trouble with toys, as is the trouble with most things, is that their value does not scale linearly. More toys does not equal more fun or more learning. There are diminishing returns. Eventually even negative returns where more toys results only in more mess, stress and frustration. A knee-jerk reaction might be to get rid of most everything – to go full minimalist. While that reaction will provide some benefits, we feel it would be throwing the baby out with the bath water. We are attempting to get the best of both worlds via a
Somewhere between wiping snotty noses and changing another overflowing diaper I look at my middle child, trying to squirm away from me, and tell him I’m doing this to help him. He isn’t really participating in the conversation. He should be grateful. I think to myself that some day in the future he should thank me for all of these things I’m doing for him. Then, the blunt hit of seeing the obvious, I remember that I was a child. That someone changed my overflowing diapers and dealt with my temper tantrums. Although I’ve thanked her and made cards for Mother’s Day, the gratitude somehow becomes more real after experiencing the other side. Then the realization goes deeper. I see that in the same way I did not fully appreciate the things done for me then, there are certainly things I don’t yet appreciate that are done for me now. I have experienced, through
One of my favorite mental pastimes is reducing complex concepts into algorithms or metrics. One recent item I’ve been thinking about is how to measure maturity – specifically as related to the concept of child rearing & personal development. The topic is simple – there is a clear difference between a mature adult and a child. There is also a notable difference between adults; one that ‘really has it together’ and another that is ‘immature for their age’. The complex part is defining and measuring that in a consistent way. How would you quantify mature? How would you program a computer to recognize it? What is most interesting to me is to find a way measure maturity development and then use that measurement to set goals for how I raise my children. Benchmarks to help me see if I’m doing a good job introducing them to new challenges. Tools to facilitate conversations I
Between July 2011 and August 2015 I lived in a ~400sqft studio apartment in San Francisco. I moved in a bachelor but by the time I moved out, I was one member of a four person family. Here are some things I learned along the way. Lesson 1) Rent control has strange side effects San Francisco has a rent control policy that prohibits most landlords from raising rent more than ~1% per year. The goal is to help fight against families getting displaced. When my wife and I got married and she moved in, we considered moving. Our budget had increased some, but our purchasing power had dropped. We could change neighborhoods, but we’d be sacrificing in apartment quality. We decided to stay. A year and a half later, we welcomed our first son into the world. At that point rent in the city had risen by over 50%. We were dropping to one income so my wife could be