Doodaddy

Fairy Doors Redux: Evil Undead Edition

doodaddy — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 18:07:03 +0000

I have a good friend who’s locally famous (internationally, if you count the blog) for his fairy doors. And I have a five-year old obsessed with the macabre and roadkill and skeletons, especially around Halloween. So when I try to get my five-year old to change her ways by showing her pictures of my friend’s [...]

Poop and the San Francisco Unified School District

doodaddy — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 20:05:09 +0000

It’s astonishing how quickly I’ve come to define parenting in terms of things I’ve missed. Like: my kids have never pooped in the bathtub. Now isn’t that an adventure squandered? Claudia isn’t three yet, so maybe I’m counting my poop-free chickens a trifle prematurely. But she’s an open book when it comes to bodily functions, [...]

Bribe and Switch

doodaddy — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 21:47:42 +0000

After preschool drop-off is supposed to be naptime for toddlers, but we’ve got neighbors coming for dinner and we desperately need at least a single grape or stick of broccoli or something to show that we do, in fact, eat vitamins here. But sleepy Claudia generates her own gravity, and that’s hard to fight — [...]

Friday the 13th is So Well Named

doodaddy — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 10:02:37 +0000

Like all insomniacs, I blame my occasional bouts of sleeplessness on something. Tonight the culprit is the Outside Lands Festival. Sitting up in bed at 3-something-a-frikkin’-m, I’ll imagine how stressful the traffic is going to be tomorrow when I try to cross town over the biggest Golden Gate Park festival of the year to get [...]

The Preschooler Security Agency

doodaddy — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 22:43:19 +0000

Fern had a little cut on her toe yesterday, and somewhere in the periphery of my toddler-addled brain I heard her friends — over for a playdate — plan to put a bandage on it. "How cute," I thought, as I continued to play with little Claudia. "They’re going to find her a Band-Aid." It [...]

My Daughter the Pornographer

doodaddy — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 08:08:01 +0000

“Dad, I drew you a picture!” has started to strike fear into my heart. To wit: I can’t honestly say if I’m more disturbed by all the woman’s pubic hair (anatomically correct, after all) or the Cyclopean uni-boob, which may only be anatomically correct for Fern’s imaginary alien race. As they say, it’s all normal, [...]

The Undrunk Glass

doodaddy — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 21:32:41 +0000

We don’t do a lot of juice around here, but Fern’s friend was getting some at our playdate today so I let her have some, too. Of course, I used that “kid juice” you can get, which is marketed as “Low! Sugar!” but essentially amounts to a tiny bit of apple juice cut into water. [...]

A Little Bit Broken

doodaddy — Wed, 19 May 2010 18:52:05 +0000

We’re supposed to be in the middle of our long, foggy summer by now but the rain won’t stop. And whether it’s down to that or the fact that my coffee maker isn’t working, I don’t know, but things are a bit melancholy around here today. Fern is a playdate junkie. Every night before bed, [...]

I’m not very careful with kids

doodaddy — Tue, 18 May 2010 22:08:30 +0000

Pretty much every day, I take one of the most precious items in my life — my baby daughter — and toss her bodily up into the skylight. Y’know? Fern got a massive batch of splinters on her heel the other day, from playing barefoot on a wooden play structure. Three baths, a soak, and [...]

We Need More Male Teachers

doodaddy — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:31:55 +0000

I’m teaching one day a week at Fern’s nursery school — it’s a co-op, so once a week I bring in some activity I’ve invented, or, more often, something I used to teach to my older kids when I was still doing outdoor education. Actually, usually I find the activities on the Internet. But I [...]