—1—
I somehow misplaced a letter from our bank that listed my 16-year-old's PIN for his debit card. When I finally found it, I wasn't sure where the 16-year-old was at the moment so I just yelled into the other room, "I found your PIN number!" in the hope that he would hear me.
Without looking up, his 8-year-old brother reading a book on the couch responded: "The 'N' stands for number."
Fine, whatever. Just remember who taught who how to use a spoon.
—2—
For years the teenagers have carved pumpkins at a church Halloween party, so we never did it at home with the younger kids. Quite frankly, I was avoiding it. Whenever we tried it in the past, the kids were too little to handle knives and wouldn't touch the seeds so Phillip and I were basically doing all the scooping and the carving, and the kids would just get bored and wander away leaving us with a big mess to clean up.
However, my 8-year-old mentioned a couple of times that he really wanted to carve pumpkins this year, so when I drove by a place giving away free pumpkins last week I picked one up for each kid.
Turns out it's WAY easier now that they're older. The 8- and 10-year-olds did practically everything on their own, I just got to watch them and roast the leftover pumpkin seeds.
Here is my favorite jack-o-lantern, designed by the 16-year-old after a character from a video game called Plants vs. Zombies:
The older and more crumpled he gets, the better it looks in my opinion. |
The 12-year-old designed the cutest frog you ever did see:
So I won't be scared to carve pumpkins with the kids again next year. I'll look forward to it because I know it's enjoyable now, and they'll even help clean up when we're finished!
—3—
I saw this fake security camera at the dollar store:
As hilarious as it is brilliant. |
I love that it does absolutely nothing, but in order to give suspicious people the illusion that it does something, you need to add batteries to power the red light on the front.
—4—
Phillip and I are starting to feel like two ships passing in the night, so we did some brainstorming about how we can spend more time together. Adding traditional date nights isn't an option because (1) one or both of us need to be home to drive kids to activities every night, and (2) we're too exhausted to add in another thing even if we could.
We decided that twice a week, we're going together to pick the 8-year-old up from gymnastics instead of taking turns doing it. The gym is 30 minutes away, so that's a whole hour round trip.
On Monday we mostly talked business and scheduling for the household, and on Wednesday we just had a conversation like two people who enjoy spending time together and it was probably the longest conversation we've had in a year.
—5—
This text came to my phone from an unknown number.
If I work 10-20 minutes a day for 50 weeks a year, that's a salary of $75,000-$450,000. In other words, what an awesome opportunity! I've already sent Daria literally all of my personal information. I can't wait to get started.
—6—
In reading news, I finished The Day the World Came to Town (a heartwarming true story that happened during 9/11) and started Parenting with Love and Logic (I read a ton of parenting books but for all the times I've heard this one recommended I've never read it).
After finishing the first three chapters of Love and Logic, I think I can sum up the book as "Don't make your kids wear a coat if you want them to learn to make good decisions."
Which is good advice and totally true, but I would add one thing. Still ask them to shove it in their backpack, just to show their teacher that she doesn't need to send a note home asking if you're aware of the no-cost winter gear for student families collected during the school's annual coat drive. (ASK ME HOW I KNOW.) Maybe that's the "logic" part of Love and Logic and I still haven't gotten to that chapter.
—7—
At work, Phillip is in charge of making sure that his company is fully utilizing AI in what they do. As a result, he's always thinking about new ways to use it, even when he's at home.
So when it was his turn to plan the Family Home Evening lesson, it surprised exactly no one when he decided to give it using AI.
First, he picked a session of general conference and asked AI to summarize each talk. Then, he fed the summary paragraphs into an AI image generator. He asked it to show the pictures at random, and the kids tried to guess which talk went with each picture.
Some of the pictures were as weird as most AI-generated pictures tend to be, but others turned out interesting like this one:
Supposedly illustrates this talk. |
In any case, using A.I. was a pretty cool idea that kept the kids engaged and interested. I'm going to have to remember this the next time I give a youth lesson at church.
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