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You'll recall that the Batpup has been recognising car logos, which is pretty impressive for a three-and-a-half-year-old. I thought of a game we can play on longish car trips to replace the Rainbow Game¹: Car Bingo. You print out one bingo card for each player, then someone calls out car models as they pass and the game works like ordinary bingo, only with automotive graphic design instead of legs-eleven and two-fat-ladies.

Quick and dirty web development: it's not just for grownups!


¹ They've largely grown out of the Rainbow Game, but it goes like this: first, find a red car. Then an orange one. And so on down the expanded version of the spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, dark blue, purple, black, silver, white and brown. We usually only start when we see an orange car going past, because they're so rare; purple is tricky, because so many dark blue cars pretend to be purple until you see them up close, and brown is very rare indeed, which is why tan and beige are considered acceptable substitutes. It's nicely suspenseful without being competitive, which works well with our munchkins. I find myself playing it when I'm out walking...

Been thinking about this one for a while. This is a post -- a rant, maybe -- about parenting, so I'm prepared for the very real possibility that I'll be offending some of my readership. Therefore, let me start by laying my cards on the table: I think you're all appallingly bad parents, every one of you, and your children are hideously deformed meat beasts... except for a few of you, who are excellent and have stunningly gorgeous Small People. But the rest? Osamas bin Laden infested with tiny Gollums, the lot of 'em. So feel free to be offended; it's your right.

Now, with that disclaimer out of the way, on with the rant.

A friend of mine posted a while back that she strongly dislikes parents who don't spank their children. My first reaction was probably unprintable, although it had Darwinian aspects to it, ie "feel free to do whatever you like to disadvantage your kids; it'll give mine a leg up in the coming Apocalypse". But then I remembered how I used to titter at the freakazoid hippy parents I knew in my ill-spent and frequently-wallopped youth, the ones who couldn't bear to so much as raise their squeaky voices as their snotty offspring ran roughshod over them. Not giving your kids a good thumping every now and then, it seemed pretty clear to my ten-year-old mind, was a good way to produce feral lunatics; BAD idea. And after all, I got my share of whacks with the cane, the belt or the back of my Dad's hand, and I'm no worse off for it (apart from the twitching and the nightmares and the brain damage, but I lived in Albury in the 1970s so I know what to blame for those). Seriously: it wasn't a problem for me, then.

But opinions change. For example, I used to think the Windows 95 UI looked pretty schmick, and now... not so much. We don't hit our kids -- well, not when we're in our right minds -- and we feel strongly that it would be the Wrong Thing to do so under any circumstances. Even an ear tweak is right out, thought admittedly I had to have that explained in very loud and unambiguous monosyllables after the first and last time I delivered one to the Elder Daughter of DOOOM, because it hadn't occurred to me that it might be a problem. But I know better now. Anyway.

I had to think for a long time about why hitting is bad, especially considering that a fair amount of shouting is par for the course around here when the EDoD is being the Entitlement Queen of Hell and I'm tired and shagged out after a long day's Javascripting. And the best I can come up with is this:

I don't hit my children for exactly the same reason I don't hit my wife.

That's pretty much it.

I've mentioned before that I dislike using the word "children" in reference to my own family members, even though it never bothered me to be called a child back when I was one. Ageism is the last great legal discrimination, sticking around when even Atheists are starting to demand equal rites, and I'm acutely aware of how much of it my 11-going-on-22-year-old daughter has to put up with. Adults will quite happily ignore her when she speaks to them, even when her grammar and vocabulary are clearly superior to theirs (which is about two thirds of the time, even in "elitist" Canberra) and there are a whole bunch of things she is physically and emotionally capable of that the law or convention says she can't do, like travelling on a plane alone or making her own purchases without parental supervision. She's a vassal, basically, and it irritates her, and by osmosis me too.

So the ideal I work from is that she deserves the same rights and respect that I'd afford an adult. Admittedly, she's more like a drunk and disorderly adult at times, because at age 11 she's not always completely rational or informed, but coming back to that point I made above: I wouldn't hit my wife, even if she were drunk and irrational, so why should I hit my daughter? It's a change in viewpoint, a different way of looking at the world. Once you see it like that, you need some fairly heavy-duty self-deception to continue waling away at your kids. Slap your kids for disobedience? Fine, then do it your spouse too. Otherwise, not so much.

The difficulty is that kids who get spanked are more easily controlled, and since we treat our Small People with respect they don't always technically earn, there are times when they get the better end of the deal and we get the worse. That means we have to compensate: we spend much more time reasoning with the EDoD and the Batpup than we would if we could just hurt them to make them compliant. Often, this doesn't work, and it's a rare week when I don't feel like introducing Ms EDoD to Mr Fist. But I don't. It would be wrong.

Along with that, there's the emotional component: I want to hit her, when I'm angry at her, because it would feel good. That is so utterly the wrong reason that I'm not even going to dignify it with more paragraph.

Life is made trickier by her absurdly high intelligence, but considerably easier by her emotional intelligence: she has approximately the same ability to compose herself and reign in her emotions as I has developed by about age 25; she is quite, quite remarkable, and I wish I could film her doing it because you'd be astonished, even those rare ones of you with the good quality munchkins. If she and I are arguing, it usually turns out that she's right and I'm wrong, so I have learned stupid amounts of humility. But when she's wrong and she realises it, she's better than me (and most people I know) at switching her ego into neutral and, if not quite admitting it, certainly removing the self-righteousness from her emotional makeup and letting herself calm right down.

So what we have is neither the cowed, defeated, often-spanked extreme, nor the undisciplined hippy egomaniac opposite extreme, but something else, right off the continuum: an Elder Daughter who responds (eventually) to reason, will not allow her emotions to override her brain for too long, and who is better equipped for adulthood than I was when I was twice her age. And her younger brother and sister, growing up with the benefit of our hindsight and experimentation, will no doubt be even more stable and well-prepared. This, I think, makes the occasional screaming fits worth it, and means I'm not going to be splashing out and buying any extra bullwhips and cats-o'-nine-tails any time soon.

So: non-spanking parent, and proud of it. Other parents are entitled to their own views, but I know we're right about this one.

The BatPup and the EDoD are going to get insane quantities of loot tomorrow.

I've been fairly slack, concentrating on frivolous frippery like floors instead of trawling the shops for pressies, but I did put together one present I'm proud of. The BatPup has lately started noticing the logos on cars -- Toyota's stylised T shape, Holden's lion, Mitsubishi's triple diamond, and so on -- so since I work right near a bunch of car yards in Woden, I popped around and asked them if they had any stickers, fridge magnets and the like with the logos on them. Some of them were very generous: the spotty lad from Commonwealth Motors gave me a sticker, a poster and a balloon; the bloke from Toyota had a keyring, as did one from Ford; and the guy from the scooter shop gave me an actual Vespa logo taken from an actual Vespa; and more besides. So the BatPup will have a collection of knick-knacks to play with, which should pique her interest and help make "spot the make and model" the driving game of 2009. Meanwhile, I couldn't think of anything for the EDoD, but I'm sure I will by Hogswatchnight, so that's OK. And anyhow, the Beloved has been her usual inhumanly legendary self, so they'll have more stuff than they'll know what to do with tomorrow. They won't feel hard done by.

Meanwhile, my back and neck are killing me for some reason, so I shall pop some more Nurofen and go beddy-byes. I'm up to January 11 in my LJ tagging now, so I should have it all done before much longer, but not now. Must sleep.

The BatPup got it into her head that she wanted to go to "a Evil Feast", which we took to mean a medieval one. (If we were wrong and she really wanted to have dinner with Pol Pot, Robert Mugabe and Dick Cheney, well... dang.) So we went along to the Baronial Day and the Pot Luck Feast yesterday, with... mixed results.

Initially, it was highly painful. The Elder Daughter of DOOOM was particularly DOOOMy, having just returned from two weeks in the bucolic hamlet of Lower Lumbago with my parents, during which time she was doted upon in a typically grandparently fashion so that by the time she returned it was clear that she was the Entitlement Consort to the winner of the Entitlement Crown Tourney, had been declared Entitlement Crown Princess and was looking forward to her Entitlement Coronation any moment now. But a quick trip to a bakery for breadular comestibles helped all three of us get our heads together, and things improved dramatically after that.

Over the course of the evening, I found a good balance between using the EDoD as a babysitter and simply letting her swan off doing her own thing. She was happy with the mix too, and in the end spent plenty more time than I expected looking after the BatPup as well as Master Pertand Handsome's^[1] two gorgeous daughters. This enabled me to get something to eat and spend some time chatting with people. I tried to convince the monkeys to eat as well, but not even bread and roast chook caught their attention. Fortunately, the bakery trip and a bit of yoghurt kept them from collapse.

I now have the stirrings of a plan for a future Evil Feast Kit: supplies to enable more relaxed feast-and-tourney attendance with my manic monkeys:

Food Stuff

Yoghurts, which both daughters seem to like and be willing to eat even when there's fun to be had

Orange juice

Cheese

Bread

Butter for bread

A bread knife!

Base Camp Materials

Picnic rugs

Face wipes

Spare underthings for the BatPup, who is well on the way to toilet-trainedness give or take some occasional accidents

A groundsheet for sleeping on

A BatPup-sized blanket -- she can quite happily sleep just about anywhere that's dark and not too cold, regardless of noise

Really, that's about it. The monkeys can get sufficient nourishment even if the feast itself is not to their liking, and if the BatPup wants to go to sleep the groundsheet and a blankie will do nicely.

Time to update the feasting kit, methinks...

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[1] Names changed to protect the guilty, although not very much.

Took the BatPup and went along to the Arts & Sciences evening at the Baron & Baroness's place tonight.

The Baron told me some more of his strongly-held opinions on the unsuitability of Linux for ordinary users, and I began to see the pattern: he's had a run of bad luck with drivers and so feels that only Windows is going to work without pain.  I managed to impress him with the Add/Remove Programs feature and Aptitude/Synaptic, because his biggest experience with Linux was with Fedora, which either lacked or didn't sufficiently advertise such features, leading him to believe that installing any software at all required a familiarity with makefiles and command lines.  Showing him how easy it was to install and configure some software may have convinced him that Ubuntu, at least, is not a complete dead loss.  However, unlike most people I know, he's had uniformly good experiences with Windows, and even with Outlook and Exchange, so he'll never be converted now.  The damage is done, poor poor boy...

Meanwhile, I gave our Rapier Marshal a tutorial on WordPress, and she did her first blog entry.  She was pleasantly surprised at how easy it is, once you've fixed your password, so I expect she'll get to work pretty quickly and use it as intended.  This is a Good Thing, since writing reports is a chore and anything that makes it easier must be worth it.

Also, helped the bookings officer for the upcoming College War add a booking form to the College site.  It's only a simple fill-in-the-form-and-it-emails-the-bookings-officer sort of thing, but it's better than nothing.

Meanwhile, the BatPup played with people and charmed their socks off, from the looks of things.

A good night, but it's now late and I need my ugly sleep.

So we're sitting watching an episode of Kipper The Dog, the Batpup and I, as we do each evening. It's The River Trip, in which Kipper, Tiger and Jake go for a boat ride and Tiger's chronic incompetence at knot-tying almost leads to catastrophe (except nothing bad ever happens in Kipper's world, so it's all OK).  So we get to the bit where Tiger is boasting of his mad sk1llz at knottery, and the BatPup turns to me and, in her best Narrator voice, intones: What will happen next!?

Maybe you had to be there.  I cackled immoderately, anyhow.  I knew when she started filking songs at the age of 18 months that this monkey was going to be a bard and a teller of tales, and nothing's convinced me otherwise yet.

Went to see the EDoD riding her recalcitrant pony in circles at the pony club get-together, then had a moderately edible lunch at the new cafe. Afternoon was spent fixing things that needed fixing, lamenting the impossibility of finding time and resources to fix other things that needed fixing, and getting each of the three munchkins to go to sleep.

Sleep methods employed:

The Boy Wonder: cuddles, a phone playing soothing, spooky music, and darkness. The Boy likes going to sleep with music, usually classical. I set a transistor radio to ABC-FM and duct-taped the dial so it can't be fiddled with, and it frequently does the trick when nothing else will to get him off to dreamland.

The BatPup: Mummy Milk didn't quite work, but a couple of Three Batpups stories got her most of the way there and Empty Garden, The Minstrel Boy and My Old Friend The Blues finished her off.

The Elder Daughter of DOOOM: feeling very disconnected and emotional (oy, vey) but concentrated Daddy and Mummy time and the spare mattress up in our bedroom did the trick, so she finally drifted off to sleep not long ago.

We need to try drugs, I think. Strong ones.

Now I'm going to try to get teffania's minions up and running with Gratian, then I'm off to sleep.

We seem to have settled into a new pattern. I come home from work and play with my assorted munchkins until dinner time. After dinner, the Beloved brings the Boy Wonder upstairs to boob him to sleep, and I take the BatPup off to her room and we watch an episode of Kipper and have "stories and songs". The stories almost always involve The Three BatPups, her absolute favourite storytelling engine. I'm running out of songs to sing, but fortunately she has a few new favourites, of which number one is undoubtedly Elton John's Empty Garden; if we're watching songs on YouTube instead, she's also inordinately fond of Gotye's Heart's A Mess, mainly for the animation. After she falls asleep, around 9ish, I come out to discover that the Beloved has fallen asleep with the boy, so I spend some quality time with the Elder Daughter of DOOOM (Doctor Who and Futurama are usually involved) and then I have the evening to myself. Being largely braindead by this stage - around ten PM - I usually just do the washing up instead. Then I go to bed.

As ruts go, it's not too bad. I hope the Boy Wonder will reprise his earlier trick of going to sleep unattended sooner or later though, because conversation with one's Beloved is an underrated thing...

In other news: I found my old database of the original flurf.net website, pre-2007, and I'm writing some code, in Lisp of course, to read it and translate it. When that's working, I'll stick the backdated blog entries here and on my blog site, but that's a low-priority task. Much higher priority is translating my PHP/PDF code for Mr Death into LaTeX; that's coming along nicely.

Right, enough. Bed time.

Behold, the fast-moving BatPup, helping to prepare the pit of eternal chaosfamily room for Brunch:



Useful creature, that one.

Did not get up and go to the Dawn Service today. This was in keeping with the pattern for the week, in that we did not get up and go to the Torch Relay Breakfast yesterday. Instead, we slept. Well, that is to say, I slept. My Beloved took the Boy Wonder and the BatPup downstairs and kept them entertained at about oh-fuck-hundred hours and let me sleep until the sound of murder and mayhem woke me at about 9.30. Have I mentioned how much I love my Beloved lately? Lots. Lots and lots. As they say in Lisp, '#1=(LOTS AND . #1#).

I attempted to repay this inestimable debt by taking the three munchkins off to the park. By some fluke of nature, I have here a photo of the Elder Daughter of DOOOM and the BatPup in the same frame! The Boy Wonder, being in the wrap at the time and strapped to the front of the photographer, could not be included. This appears to be some kind of conspiracy, because it is frankly impossible to photograph the three of them at once without one of them grimacing evilly, one covering herself in paint and/or mud, and one falling over and drooling on the scenery. And they run away to throw gravel at each other before you can take more than a couple of shots.

The rest of the day was spent dealing with assorted insane munchkins and trying to get other stuff done. It appears to be impossible for both of us to achieve anything simultaneously: in this case, the Beloved was working out her plans for the usefulification of our useless front yard, so I did the munchkin wrangling. The Boy Wonder slept for a little while here and there, but the BatPup didn't. The EDoD isn't a mad fan of babysitting, so she's pretty much irrelevant in these calculations (although I believe she helped out with the gardening today). As a result, there I was, bouncing babies and playing with toddlers and getting nothing actually done.

Ah well, could be worse. There could be zero achievement and no cuddles. I'm not too unhappy with taking it in turns to be drooled on, I guess.

The BatPup sees that the strap for my laptop bag isn't attached, so she attaches it.

BatPup: There, is all fixed!

Daddy: You're good at fixing things!  You're a good geek!

BatPup: And I a good fixer!

Daddy: Do you know what a geek is?  A geek is someone who fixes things.

BatPup: And a goose is a birdie!


Can't argue with that, I guess.

Parenthood is not all roses.  One of the downsides is that you don't get to give the buggers back if you've got something better to do.  Case in point: last night, I took the BatPup with me to the Newcomer's Feast.  That she was having fun is indisputable; the problem is that she was having fun playing on the playground equipment two hundred metres from the feast hall, and having no fun at all in the hall itself.  Since I was there to spend time with people, maybe sing some songs and generally socialise, this was a Non Optimal Scenario.  Around an hour into the feast I had to take her home because she was so sleepy -- but she still stayed awake until after 11, so I didn't get anything else done that night.

This afternoon I took The Beloved's advice and spent some quality time with her.  I sat on a rare clean patch of carpet with a BatPup on my lap and a basket of books by my side, and just read to her for about half an hour.  Later she went happily off to sleep, without any of the histrionics of last night.

This happy ending has a twist.  She woke up again and came downstairs about dinner time.  As it happens, the time off from constant pupsitting had let us do some useful stuff, so I was feeling much less stressed about having my spare time eaten.  And the earlier Daddy/Daughter bonding bore fruit: she was chirpy, cheerful and amazingly affectionate.  While I was making the beds upstairs, she was chatting away, reading books to herself and being affectionate and lovely.  Any time I asked her to move from one bed to another, she would hop up without delay and say "Of course! Sorry!" with the cheerfullest smile.  It's nearly 11 and she's still awake, but that's OK, because she's lovely.

I try to be a good Daddy, but sometimes it's my daughters who remind me how.  Now: pardon me, I have to switch this computer off and go read my daughter to sleep.  I anticipate it will take all of ten minutes.

Tomorrow is the BatPup's third birthday party.  The house is an enormous mess.  The Beloved has huge piles of cooking to do.  I am therefore not posting anything on LJ.  Not a sausage.  Not even this -- the fact that you think you're reading this merely indicates that your drugs have stopped working and you're now hallucinating.  It's not an uncommon problem.  You're safe as long as penguin you don't start imagining trilby random words in the middle of rambunctiousness sentences.

Picture if you will: a family, playing I Spy at the dinner table. It's the colours version, because the BatPup isn't quite up to letters yet. So the mother of the family says, "I spy with my little eye, something taupe." Much discussion ensues, since none of (the rest of?) us know what taupe actually is. Finally, She Who Must Be Some Kind Of Loony looks it up on Wikipedia, and discovers a disturbingly complete article on the topic. She reads out selections of this magnum opus. We discover that we have been harbouring, unwittingly, a taupe sofa in our very living room.

Then it's the BatPup's turn. She says, "I spy with my little eye, something... taupe!" And her giggles are infectious. Ten minutes later she's still saying it, and we're still cracking up.

Eh. You had to be there.

Oh, and the taupe thing the Beloved was spying to start all this off? "Fish trousers." She decided to play Surrealist I Spy without notice. So now you know.

The BatPup helped the Beloved make dinner last night - tofu balls in tomato gloop with spaghetti - and was very proud of herself: rightly so, since it was delicious. So after dinner she had to express her gratitude: "Thank you, Mummy and myself!"

Clearly we are modelling only the politest of behaviour in this one.

It appears that the solution to the sleepless BatPup problem is simple: stop trying so hard. In more detail:

• It doesn't matter all that much if she's had a long nap, a short nap, an interrupted nap or no nap at all during the day; there's a magic sweet spot of sleepiness, before which she's wide awake and after which she's too wired to sleep, and it's pretty random.
• The sweet spot is detectable. There's a gray area between happy chirpy joyfulness (her natural state) and hideous bite-heads-off-chickens satanic vileness. If you get her calm and relaxed during the grey area, the nasty phase won't happen because she'll be asleep.
• Most of the time, until she hits the nasty phase, she's pretty relaxed about "no": tell her "one story, one song and then I'm going to sit here with my computer and you can go to sleep", and she will. She did tonight!
• None of this happens to a Humphrey B Bear 7pm deadline. She'll sleep when she's sleepy, and not before.
• The more you stress about it, the more she'll pick up on it (bloody telepaths... mutter mutter gripe) and the less she'll be inclined toward loyal obedience.

All of which is a long way of saying: she's gonna sleep when she wants to sleep, and trying to force her to change her ways is like wrestling with a pig.

Most of parenting is about tailoring your expectations to match what your kids were going to do anyway.

The BatPup has just announced that she is going to stay awake all night.

She's been tricky to put to sleep, pretty much since the Boy Wonder arrived. Conventional wisdom is that she's feeling much less looked-after now that there's someone else to take up Mummy and Daddy's time. So bed time typically works like this: after dinner and a bath or shower, it's time for stories and songs with Daddy. The Three Batpups feature very strongly in this, but for some reason she's dissatisfied with all the songs she used to like me singing, so I've had to teach myself a whole new bunch, which is a bit of a stretch. There will usually be several stories and several songs before she either falls asleep or calls on Mummy for some boobie milk. Most of the time she drifts off to sleep mid-song, but every so often she won't go to sleep for anything. This looks like one of those nights.

So the Beloved is lying with her on the bed, and they're looking through her flip book to find interesting stories. She's very chirpy and affectionate and not at all sleepy at 10.24pm, so it looks like it will be a long night. I'm stealing a few minutes to write this, because I'd hate to blow my perfect record (in this time zone at any rate), but I expect I'll be back to entertaining her shortly.

This, by the way, is why I'm not getting nearly enough extracurricular stuff done. I had hoped to get the documentation for Gratian working tonight and tomorrow night, but it will take a little longer now. Sorry, syridian and teffania!

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I discovered that I still have six or seven days of leave saved up, even despite taking "paternity leave" when the Boy Wonder arrived. I worked at home today because of a bit of farnarkling at work involving furniture rearrangement and a long-overdue window pane repair. As it happens the repairwankers didn't show up today so there'll be more disruption tomorrow, but at least it'll be over by lunchtime. I almost considered taking the day off tomorrow, but the Beloved wisely suggested I save it and use all the leave in one big and lovely wodge some other time.

So... any suggestions as to how to spend a paid week of decadent leisure with my family? Remember: home schooling means we don't need to wait for the holidays...

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Right: BatPup is being strangled to death by her mother, so maybe I'd better step in and hold her down to muffle the screams.

I took the EDoD and the BatPup to the open day of a local organic produce grower this afternoon. Here's the BatPup posing with a mutant lettuce:



( More after the cut; warning: more piccies than usual! )

The BatPup has a cold, and I think she's shared it with me, which is why I took the day off. With luck, my usually Wolverine-like immune system will catch it in time. Anyhow, here's a photo of Patient Zero with some of my collection of friends.

A BatPup on her sickbed, surrounded by friends