Friday Hodgepodge
Friday, May 20, 2022
Four Kid-Related Things...
... Which Are Also Four Random Wins From the Positive Focus Logs
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1. My son, who is almost nine, has been a picky eater all his life. Although he is branching out, albeit very slowly, having takeout at home used to present a conundrum for us: Let him pick the restaurant at the risk of boring the rest of us -- or not, with him having to eat his usual default sandwich or something he's not really going to enjoy?
That's suboptimal on the evening, and neither is any good long-term -- either for encouraging him to branch out or for helping him learn to deal with having a limited palate, if that's what the future holds for him.
One day, I was going to have to run a couple of small errands on the way to picking up Mexican. Realizing that Panera, a place he likes, was basically on the way, I realized we could order him something for me to pick up on the way home. The timing worked out very well, too, so we now have good a way for him to get something he likes on dine-out night when he doesn't like the place the rest of us want.
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| Aerial view of Vilano Beach, northeast of St. Augustine. (Image by Lance Asper, via Unsplash, license.) |
The cruise, in Matanzas Bay, was part history lesson about the oldest city in America and part wildlife-spotting, with dolphins being the highlight. The bay -- whose modern Spanish name refers to a religiously-motivated slaughter of French settlers by the Spanish -- happily lived up to its original French name, which meant River of Dolphins.
Travel Tip for Locals: We live near Jacksonville, but took State Route A1A between Ponte Vedra Beach and St. Augustine. This was scenic and probably also less stressful than I-95 or Phillips Highway would have been during rush hour.
3. Although I love soccer, it has not caught on with my son, and after he completed his season, we agreed to give him a break from it, to try other sports. (He doesn't seem to care for sports played with balls in general.)
The silver lining, as I learned from the mother of the most talented player on the team, is that we won't have all the expenses associated with him being on a traveling team.
I'm not giving up hope that we can someday bond over soccer -- I didn't start playing until I was about twelve. -- but you can't force something like that, and I'm backing off.
4. My daughter, taking a cue from me using Alexa as a cooking timer, has really taken to timers and alarms. This I learned one morning during writing time, when I heard her alarm going off at 6:00 a.m. She enjoys anime, and likes to watch a bit before getting ready for school, prompted by another alarm.
If her food is too hot for her at home, she sometimes sets a five-minute timer to let it cool off.
She is also pretty organized for someone her age: I have not had to prompt her to do homework, even for longer-range projects a single time this school year. She just does it.
-- CAV
2 comments:
Yo, Gus, you write, "The bay -- whose modern Spanish name refers to a religiously-motivated slaughter of French settlers by the Spanish -- happily lived up to its original French name, which meant River of Dolphins."
That reminds me tangentially of an interesting place name. Mount Diablo (in the East Bay) is a solitary mountain that was of primary importance in 19th century surveying of the American West, and people in the area like to joke about having Devil's Mountain in our backyard. However, when my wife and I went to the top, which was well worth it, we found a National Park signboard with the true story of the name--it's from a different but related meaning of monte in Spanish, "thicket, the bush" (I gather that the sense of "mountainous terrain" was extended to "wasteland" in Spanish, and that sense was specialized to "thicket"), and it was named originally for a thicket where a group of Indians who escaped from a mission hid out from Spanish soldiers; they snuck away under cover of darkness and decamped to places further east, and the soldiers who tried to find them referred to it as simply a "devilish thicket." The name of the mountain was a misunderstanding by later settlers, both Spanish and Anglo.
Interestingly, the tour guide attributed the name of the bay to Amerindians, but I came up empty trying to verify that. It is possible the French adopted the original name, but with the ridiculous numbers of dolphins swimming around, it's hard to imagine the river not basically naming itself something like that.
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