Category: Parenting
My First Pixel Art
My daughter and I spent Saturday editing sprites to make our own Pokemon. Her idea, I just helped her use the pencil and select tool in Photoshop.*
Above is a Pikachu with Keldeo’s tail…actually they all have Keldeo’s tail. The yellow Reshiram is our centerpiece.
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*and some Match Color for fun.
Can’t Tell Them What They Don’t Know
Having far surpassed my early formative years, I look back at the advice I was given in a different light. I now find myself sometimes in the role of advice giver1 and I try to be a good role model for those that come after me.
There are a few times in your life when you can tell someone about an experience you’ve had in hopes of giving them some insight into their own future.
The three that I can think of off the top of my head are as follows:
- A teenager about life in general – specifically about being yourself and love/relationships
- A first-time expecting parent on what raising a child is like
- A person starting at a new company
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As girls became less of a weird fascination and more of a “Hello there” <insert Flynn Rider voice> interest, my father would often repeat the following nugget of advice.
“They’re (women) are just as afraid and nervous about talking to you as you are of them. Go talk to them. The worst that could happen is they say no.”
Looking back, this is some of the best advice I’ve ever been given. I wish2 I would have learned to put aside my fears of talking to people – especially people I liked – and just go and say hello. Not just in romantic relationships either, but for all situations where a simple hello would have gotten me much farther than awkward shoe-gazing.
Case in point. Last summer I got to meet a designer and all around excellent guy at a conference where he presented. I, a grown adult, was sweating bullets as I approached him after his speech. I introduced myself and said that I was jealous of the city from which he hails and that I’d love to visit it again someday. He said thanks and invited me to contact him if he was ever in town. This summer I hope to do exactly that.
Had I not made such a simple effort I would have regretted it much more than any possible ‘no’ of embarrassment. I need to do this more often.
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The feeling of watching over your daughter as she sleeps can be explained in great detail, but it isn’t until you experience it for yourself that the impact can be felt. There’s a feeling that no tale can invoke and all attempts to are shallow and pale. But I shall try.
Adventure
I will never tell her she’s doing it wrong.
I love getting emails like this one:
No, I’m not being sarcastic. You see, this email came from an iPad/iPhone game called Pocket Frogs. In this game you breed and nurture tiny frogs. You can feed them and race with them with the goal to create new generations of offspring with new combinations of colors and designs. To encourage new users the developers have a messaging feature baked in. You can message your friends to let them know about the app in hopes they’ll download it.
So why do I love emails like this? Because they’re from my daughter. At the ripe old age of five, she’s discovered how to use the in-game messaging – she taps on the frog, then the “Share”, then “Email” and sends a message to my name, stored in her Grandmother’s iPad.
So while I’m staring at code, sitting in a meeting or editing video for 8 hours a day, my daughter sometimes thinks about sending her newest frog to her old man. I’ll never tell her she’s doing it wrong.