Avery had her last day of preschool yesterday. Water Day is the traditional last-day party, and already so ingrained that she started asking me about it on the first day of school. (When I told her teacher this, she began reconsidering the plan to make next year’s last day “Movie Day.”)
We’ve had a great three years in this program. Avery’s learned a lot, made good friends, and — maybe most importantly — learned how to get along without me for a few hours a day. One of my only regrets about leaving Las Cruces is that Miles won’t get to know these teachers as well as his sister has.
(Source: mattbors.com, via itswalky)
Taking place in England the owners of the yard slowly kept adding sections to the contraption so when the squirrel learned one section and got the nuts, they’d add another section. It took over 2 weeks to get to the final product you see in the video.
(via itswalky)
“Hey, Dad, what’s this pink thing sticking out of the ground?”
“I have no idea. Do you want to get your shovel and dig it out?”
“Yeah!”
(two minutes pass)
“Dad! Come look!”
“This cup is from when I was two! Back when I still liked Sesame Street. Kucha must have buried it.”
“It’s totally empty. Should we wash it and put it back in the rotation?”
“Yeah! Because we don’t want to waste a sippy cup.”
We’ve been taking a lot of crap for leaving Las Cruces — about how Albuquerque is so much more dangerous, how it’s no place to raise children.
And then this happens right around the corner from my house.
It’s a horrific tragedy, one nobody could have foreseen. I didn’t know the family, but I’ve passed the house a hundred times and seen the dog, which had barked at me but never attacked. What’s the snapping point? This could easily have been my toddler. I could have been the one shot trying to fend off the dog.
Shit happens, and it can happen no matter where you are. But I see this as just another sign it’s the right thing for us to leave now.
- David Wong,
on political partisanship
“Everyone you know looks the same and acts the same,” I explained. “They may dress differently from each other or belong to different crowds, but they’re all the same. Hipsters, brainiacs, jocks, so-called ‘geeks’ — they’re all so caught up with not being left out that they’re changing who they are to fit in with whoever it is that will accept them.
“When you show up and you’re not like that, it scares them,” I continued. “They don’t know what to do with you, because they have no idea what it’s like to think for themselves. So they try to make YOU feel like the loser, because there’s more of them doing what they’re doing than there are of you. In such a small group of small minds, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.
“To them, you are weird,” I said. “But weird is good. No, screw that — weird is great! Being weird to someone just proves that you are being you, which is the most important thing you can ever be. There’s nothing wrong with you. There’s something wrong with them. They can’t understand what it’s like to be themselves, much less what it’s like to be you.”
