Steelykid!
drorzel | January 18, 2014Kate is off at Arisia this weekend, so I took the kids to Grandma and Grandpa's. Where we've had good fun sledding and playing with a variety of toys. I'll be driving home Sunday afternoon, and my parents will be bringing the kids back on Monday, which is the MLK holiday in the US, so a day off for people who aren't college faculty.
In honor of all this, I give you the unique musical stylings of SteelyKid and The Pip, performing their hit song "Oh My Gosh" live in Grandma and Grandpa's basement:
Hope your weekend was a tenth as much fun as theirs.
drorzel | January 16, 2014"Daddy, you know what? I bet you didn't know, but my school bus can fly."
"Really? I didn't know that."
"Yeah, there's a button up at the front with a picture of a flying bus, and if you press the button, the bus flies."
"That's amazing."
"Yeah, and guess what? The other day, the bus driver called me, and said '[SteelyKid] come up here, and press the button,' and I pressed the button, and the wings came out, and we went flying."
"Wow. Where did you fly to?"
"Um, to school. And then to the JCC."
"You didn't go anywhere else interesting in between, ith the flying bus?"
"Well, we flew to Grandma…
drorzel | January 11, 2014Friday night was a home game for Union's basketball teams, so I picked SteelyKid and the Pip up a little earlier than usual, and took them to the women's game (which starts right around the time day care ends and ends right around their usual bedtime). You might wonder what it's like taking the pair of them to a sporting event. Well, wonder no more:
It's pretty much that, for an hour and a half. There was also a stretch were they were throwing dice behind the elevator (the thing they run around in the video) like a couple of junior degenerates.
Now you know. And knowing is half the battle…
drorzel | January 3, 2014I got a new camera for Christmas, not because there's anything wrong with my DSLR, but because I wanted something that could do high-speed video. So I now have a Casio point-and-shoot camera that will record up to 1000 frames per second, woo-hoo!
To break it in, I got the kids to help out by re-creating a classic slow-mo physics trick: the slinky drop:
Note that when SteelyKid lets it go, the bottom doesn't really move until after the entire length of the spring has relaxed. You can clearly see this in the still frame that's the "featured image" at the top of the post.
And since The Pip has…
drorzel | December 25, 2013Merry Christmas if you celebrate it, happy Wednesday if you don't. That's about all there is to say, isn't it?
Warm holiday wishes from Chateau Steelypips.
drorzel | December 6, 2013I'm giving my talk about blogs as a tool for science outreach again on Monday, and need an updated version of the cute-kid picture screenshot I use in that. So here's a composite of the two kid pictures I posted a week or two ago, because it should all fit on screen, even on my laptop.
I probably should do something more directly productive, but I drove down to NYC yesterday to do an interview and meet up with some folks from the TED@NYC event back in October, and got stuck there because the attendants at the lot where I parked my car didn't warn me that they would lock the place up before I…
drorzel | November 30, 2013"Daddy, I wanna play with the robot dog!"
"It's not a dog, honey, it's an Imperial walker. An AT-AT. A fearsome armored assault transport used to overwhelm the Rebel defenses in the battle of Hoth."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"OK, fine, you can play with the robot dog."
We came down to my parents' for Thanksgiving this year, because both Kate and I are really busy with work at the moment, and didn't need the additional stress of planning and hosting a big dinner. On Friday morning, my dad went up into the attic and dug out the bags containing the vast collection of Star Wars toys my sister and I…
drorzel | November 23, 2013One of SteelyKid's classmates came over for a couple hours today. After a bit, they got into the Magic School Bus science kit she got for her birthday, and decided to invent "new kinds of water." The "featured image" above shows her reinventing stock images... And doing a better job of it than this clown. If you need an image to illustrate your chemistry story, shoot me an email-- our rates are very reasonable.
(The sludgy brown mixture in the tube is water with soap, cinnamon, and cracked pepper floating in it. If you shake it back and forth a bit, the pepper does float around in a kind of…
drorzel | November 10, 2013Because I know there are still a few people who come here for the cute-kid pictures, I give you the official SteelyKid portrait for the 2013-14 academic year. This is actually a photo of a photo, because that's the easiest way to convert the print they sent us to a digital format, and also because it gave me an excuse to play with GIMP a little. It's not the greatest reproduction, but it's good enough for blogging.
I'm not entirely sure what's up with her hair, here. There were a few days when she went in with a braid, and this might've been one. Or she might've asked somebody to put it up…
drorzel | October 26, 2013[Scene: In the car on the way from soccer to lunch at Five Guys. SteelyKid is in her car seat, studying the Halloween-themed temporary tattoos all over her arms.]
SteelyKid: Do bats fly right-side-up, or upside-down?
Daddy: From the bat's point of view, it's right side up more or less by definition. They do sleep upside down, though.
SK: Yeah, they're the only animals that spend their time upside down. Except sometimes monkeys. Monkeys can hang upside down from their tails, and sleep that way.
D: Well, they can certainly hang upside down sometimes. Sloths spend a lot of time hanging upside…
drorzel | October 24, 2013In the interest of household balance, I should note that while The Pip was home sick, SteelyKid had her first taekwondo class. She spent a week bugging us every day about wanting to go, and it falls entirely within the time of her after-school day care, so we said sure. Of course, on the actual day, she had to be basically pushed down there by her teachers, and sat most of the class out because she wasn't familiar with what they were supposed to be doing. She assures me she was watching carefully, though, and next week will do the moves with them. We'll see.
The important thing here is that…
drorzel | October 19, 2013It's been a rough week, so here's some cute-kid stuff. The "featured image" above is a giant picture from SteelyKid's after-school day care, where they're talking about bodies and bones. It's a tracing of her outline, filled in with her drawings of bones, joints, a grinning skull, a brain, blood vessels, a spine, and what I think are meant to be nerves. This is all up to date with the very latest kindergarten medical science. She's even written books about it:
SteelyKid's medical books
We wanted to get a good picture of her for the jacket copy, but alas, she's too busy doing archival…
drorzel | October 7, 2013I'm off to The City for TED@NYC on Tuesday, and while I might schedule something with the approximate text of my talk for Wednesday morning, more substantial blogging won't resume until Thursday. But I don't want to leave political post as the top thing on the blog, so here, have a cute kid picture.
This is SteelyKid at the Schenectady Curling Club, which had an open house this past weekend. Plan A was to go to the women's soccer game at Union instead, but I made the mistake of mentioning curling as a fallback in case of rain, and after half an hour of soccer, SteelyKid demanded "People…
drorzel | October 4, 2013SteelyKid's kindergarten teacher is big on incentives and prizes-- there are a number of reward bags that get sent home with kids who excel in some particular area. I'm not entirely sure what's in these, because SteelyKid hasn't gotten any yet.
This isn't because she misbehaves-- from all reports, she's very good-- but she's in a class with 21 other kids, and they've only been in school for a couple of weeks. Still, she regards this as a grave injustice, and I occasionally get aggrieved reports about the distribution of reward bags when I pick her up from after-school day care. I try to…
drorzel | October 4, 2013I almost killed the Pip last week. By accident, of course, but I do mean that literally. His day care was closed for the day, so I took him out to the store to avoid a freakout when Mommy left. I was heading into the store with him in one arm and a hot cup of tea in the other hand, chattering inanely to him as one does with a toddler, and tripped over the curb.
I took three huge stumbling steps that probably looked pretty comical on the security cameras, but somehow managed to avoid dropping him right on his head, falling on top of him, or scalding him with my hot caffeine. I went down really…
drorzel | September 2, 2013It's Labor Day in the US, and due to a weird quirk of scheduling, for once I didn't have to spend it at work. This is also the traditional end of the summer season, so SteelyKid and I went over to the JCC pool for one last dip and a final ice cream cone from the snack bar:
Last ice cream of pool season.
She's gotten really good at swimming this summer, and in protest against the end of the season, she's wearing her swim goggles around the house. They're tinted blue, and she's declared that they're laser goggles, part of her superhero gear. She's now doing a complicated obstacle course…
drorzel | August 31, 2013We won a family pass to the Empire State Aerosciences Museum just across the river in Glenville, and since soccer was canceled for the holiday weekend, I took the kids over there this morning. They had a couple of their collection of decommissioned military aircraft open, including the Huey helicopter SteelyKid is thinking about co-piloting in the "featured image" up above, and this Chinese-made MiG:
I think you push this button to get it started...
I didn't want August to slip away without one last set of cute-kid pictures, so there you go.
drorzel | August 25, 2013Early last year, we began marking SteelyKid's height off on a door frame in the library. She occasionally demands a re-measurement, and Saturday was one of those days. Which made me notice that we now have a substantial number of heights recorded, and you know what that means: it's time for a graph.
The "featured image" above shows the results, and I've stuck in a zero-day point using her length at birth. The solid line in the graph is a linear fit to the data, because nothing could possibly be wrong with that. According to the fit, we can project that she'll reach a height of 3.0 meters a…
drorzel | August 18, 2013The "featured image" above shows SteelyKid and The Pip checking out a couple of books at The Open Door during our weekly trip to the Schenectady Greenmarket. As cute as this is, though, the image can't do justice to the full scenario.
We were in the toy section looking for a birthday present for SteelyKid's BFF, and after she found a couple of things, she announced her intention to look at books in the cheap paperback racks right next to the toys. The Pip, for his part, waddled off to poke around the store looking for books featuring Elmo, or things that look like Elmo, or just odd bits of…
drorzel | August 16, 2013SteelyKid: I din't eat all my lunch today, because I didn't have time.
Daddy: Uh-huh.
SK: It's true! I'm not even lying.
D: Oh, I believe you didn't eat all your lunch, don't worry about that.
SK: Ask Santa Claus if you think I'm lying.
D: Santa Claus?
SK: Yeah. Santa Claus actually can't see everyone all the time, but he's always watching.
D: OK.
SK: He has his house in... in... in the center of the world. But he has to move it around all the time. So he can watch everyone.
D: I guess that makes sense.
SK: And you know what? He used to live right here. In our house.
D: Really?
SK: Yeah.…