Parenting

Our house is getting a new phone.

It’s called a Tin Can. If you spend a lot of time mingling with the kindergarten set, these things are white hot right now. Go to any playground in America and you’re bound to hear parents chatting about them.

There’s not a parent I know who isn’t worried about kids and technology.

That’s why the Tin Can exists. If it weren’t for the underlying fear we have of internet safety, it would be a laughable invention, like Elon Musk “inventing” public buses, or Adam Neumann coming up with the concept of roommates.

What job did you want to have when you were a kid?

For me, the answer was “inventor.”

I wanted to build robots and cool spy gadgets. I couldn’t really understand why nobody had thought of making a car that could fly yet, but I figured I could handle that easily once I reached adulthood, or at least 13. My greatest triumph in science class came in 8th grade, when I had to build a mousetrap demonstrating the use of simple machines. The minimum was 5; mine had 60+.

As of today, our second daughter has been alive on this planet for five weeks. I’ve been on parental leave that whole time, and it has really flown by. Having a kid at the end of the year is really disorienting, since time already feels more compressed than usual with all the holidays packed into the final quarter of the American calendar.

But it’s also a bit boring, since most of our time has been spent at home, overseeing the baby’s three main activities (sleeping, eating, pooping). Today, against my better judgment (meaning that of my wife), I ventured with our baby out into the Great Unknown to shop for a new e-bike at REI.