My kids, I think, experienced Election Day as a holiday. Amelia cast her ballot for putting binder clips into the estimation jar instead of magnets.
We voted in person, in shifts, and each of us brought one kid along to watch the process. Amelia wrote a reflection afterward for school.
We read some books about voting and watched the election episode of My Little Pony and Amelia received the eventual news of the race being called for Biden with what I’d call “would you like to go to the playground?”-level enthusiasm.
It’s been a very strange week. The elation of Saturday, the weird hangover-esque comedown on Sunday, and the growing unease as I’ve wondered just how worried we’re supposed to be about shit like “there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.” And, as always, the simultaneous exhaustion/relief of serving dinner and chatting at length about whether fairies are classified as insects and pressing play on the next episode of Mira, Royal Detective while keeping the anxious conversations hushed in the kitchen.
Whatever the next few weeks and months hold, though, I will never, ever, ever get over the Four Seasons Total Landscaping. That, I will cherish forever.
If you like reading Extra Credit, would you consider sharing it somewhere, or with someone? Parenting can be hard and isolating even in non-pandemic times, and lately…..well, you know. It helps to connect!
Care & Feeding
My wife is by her own account a complete klutz. She’s frequently bumping into, tripping over, or falling on all kinds of things. To be honest, with the exception of a few broken family heirlooms, I’ve always found this to be a bit endearing. But now that we have a small baby, I’m concerned by this clumsiness. Recently she sat down hard on a nursing pillow the baby had just been sleeping on. I had picked the baby up, but my wife hadn’t even noticed the pillow was there. She’s bumped the baby’s head a few times while walking past. We’re both pretty healthy. and I don’t have any reason to think there’s anything medically wrong with her, but she’s unaccustomed to caution.
This week, I stepped in to answer questions in Slate’s parenting advice column, Care & Feeding! Will this clumsy wife hurt her baby? I answered that, plus questions about an overly physical ten-year-old, a tenth grader struggling to accept their ADHD/anxiety diagnosis, and two-year-old bedtimes.
Recommendations
We observe Friday movie night faithfully in our home, and we’ve been waffling over buying a home projector for months. But after Amelia spoke so wistfully about her distant memories of going to the movie theater, the deal was done, and we purchased the VANKYO Leisure 3W Mini Projector for $100 on Amazon. I CANNOT BELIEVE WE WAITED SO LONG! IT MADE MOVIE NIGHT SO MUCH BETTER AND MORE FUN!
We laid a bunch of pillows and blankets on the floor, hung up two $3 white shower curtains from Target in our playroom, hooked up our AppleTV to the projector, and LIVED THE LUXURY of a DIY home theater with gigantic, clear projection. We will be using this device every single Friday for the rest of our lives.
And our debut movie for New & Improved Movie Night was Netflix’s new Over the Moon. Anything brand new or different is so welcome these days, and this was super cute.
Chrissy Teigen wrote a painful, honest, lovely reflection on her recent experience of losing her baby at twenty weeks pregnant. I cried reading it.
Last week, I linked to a long piece in The Atlantic about the downfall of niche sports as a golden ticket to Ivy League admission for wealthy high schoolers. Since then, they’ve corrected and then fully retracted the article due to “serious concerns about its accuracy and about the credibility of its author.” The critique by the Washington Post’s media critic prior to the retraction, and the retraction itself, is nearly as interesting as the original article!
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