When asked what their favorite part of the trip was, they responded..
The hot tub.
At the hotel.
My kids light up the most when I am fully engaged with them, fully present, entertaining their ideas, and asking questions.
Their favorite family trip so far? When we traveled to Arkansas to mine for crystals. AKA, dig in the dirt all day. They saw it on a YouTube video. They asked to go. So we obliged. I had never been to Arkansas. It's beautiful.
We stayed at a resort, Diamonds Old West Cabins, with a huge playground outside the cabins, archery, and a bubble party every evening at 6 pm.
They still talk about that trip.
The "make your own waffle" station at the included breakfast was also a huge hit. The park and rides were satisfactory.
When pressed for a favorite activity within the park, it was "that time we ran all the way from Japan to Soarin', dodging people".
Things a screen and all the gadgets and fancy engineering in the world can never replace.
Exactly. The author didn't mention it but it's not just the bus ride, it's how they engaged with their daughter during that ride.
Remember the mania over the total eclipse in April in the US? I took my daughter on 250-mile roadtrip to see it. The drive took a few hours there, then 9 (!!) hours back because of horrendous traffic. It could've been a tantrum-filled disaster, but I committed to staying upbeat and fully engaged the entire time, and as a result it was a fun and memorable trip we still talk about today.
Oh and we didn't even get to see the eclipse ... 95% cloud coverage.
So yeah step 1 is creating time + space for things like this -- like taking a long bus ride -- but a crucial step 2 is leaning into it with presence and attention to your child.
also parents have gotten rid of BB guns and fireworks!
We also stopped by the Arkansas diamond mine and tried our hand at it. Way less fun, with a near zero chance of finding so much as a speck of a diamond.
The crystals were beautiful, and the kids could find them with ease. Tons of fun.
They each got their own pickaxe, which they loved.
They claimed they were already expert diggers because of all the hours they spent playing Minecraft. "We know how to dig, Dad."
I asked kids (7 or so yo) what was the favourite part?
He answered Singapore, because it was cold (aka air conditioning everywhere)
Coming from a city where it's a particularly bad joke, it's still a novelty, and it provides such a different perspective on the city than "where can I park within orbit of $specific_destination"
https://uncharted.io/@dominikgehl/exploring-the-stockholm-su...
Once I had to go to a DIY store on a weekend, and to free my wife from sitting with him, took him too. I knew we'd be fascinated, and indeed he was, studying everything for 2 hours.
Are these two sides of the same coin, and come from having just a smaller world, where small things can feel very big to a developing brain? Or as an adult with a fully-formed brain and access to the larger world, can we separate them and find that kind of unrestrained joy in the small stuff without also being swept away by small disappointments?
At a recent dentist visit the Lidocaine local anaesthetic was accidentally injected into a (small) artery. That's when I discovered that it's a mixture that includes adrenaline, which contracts peripheral blood vessels, preventing it from dispersing too fast. Unless.. it goes directly into an artery, sending it straight into circulation.
To this day I can't come up for a better explanation of what happened, other than it felt like someone had simply pressed a button in my brain labelled "panic".
The dentist explained what had happened, I fully understood everything, I'm not at all afraid of dentistry, and I'm not easily frightened. None of that mattered. The button had been pressed, and now I was panicking for no discernible cause. Just... naked panic. Panic, panic, panic.
I had to cancel the appointment and walk home, slowly, listening to calming music the whole way and trying not to sprint down the sidewalk to escape whatever I felt like was chasing after me.
Right after the traumatic event, the "ball" hit the "button" nearly continuously, but as the months and years progressed, it's gotten farther and farther apart.
Oof isn't this the truth. The tiniest things will drive my son into full meltdowns right now.
A kid might fall off their bike, get a minor scrape on their knee, and cry because while the pain is pretty minor, it might actually be the greatest pain they've ever experienced in their life.
As an adult, you're probably not experiencing a lot of new things, and the new things you're experiencing are likely variations of things you've already done.
Though uh...I've seen my wife's boobs thousands of times, yet my brain still reacts like it did the first time. >.>
There’s the external trigger and how it fits into their life experience. Something that may be a 6/10 fun for you may literally be the most fun the child has ever had because they have less life experience. Something that’s a 2/10 pain might be literally the most pain they ever remember experiencing.
Which plays into how much practice they have managing these emotions. You get better at dealing with pain and frustration with practice. But no amount of practicing dealing with a paper cut will ever prepare you for being stabbed. Curling a 5lb dumbbell every day won’t get you to curling 100lbs.
But this is also impacted by the options they have available to respond to these emotions. As an adult if you’re frustrated you have the practice, fully realized autonomy, and societal trust to make real changes to address the issues in front of you. You don’t need to deal with this entirely internally. As a child, often your options essentially boil down to “deal with it”. And even as they expand, it takes time to practice with the new options available to you.
So an adult will experience the emotions less heightened and they also have more practice and better tools for handling them. The child will experience a stronger emotion, have little practice in managing the emotion, and few other options to address the overall situation.
Which can easily get into a negative feedback loop. Something is frustrating. The emotion is strong and you don’t know what to do about it. That’s frustrating. You can’t fix the situation. That’s frustrating. Now you’re more frustrated, GOTO 10. Pretty soon the emotions have compounded into something overwhelming.
And a child, much like an adult that hits this point, is going to have a meltdown. I don’t think adults are much better equipped at handling themselves when they are experiencing overwhelming emotions, it’s just much more difficult for them to get there in the first place.
As an adult, I think you can absolutely learn to find more joy in the small things. We have to, by necessity, filter some of the small things out of our days so just being an adult doesn’t become overwhelming. Making a conscious effort to be present and aware can go a long way. This is, I think, what’s happening when people have these mundane experiences with children and find them magical—simply having the child there to point things out and force them to be aware can bring back a lot of that small joy. It will never rise to the same level as the child’s because you come into it with a greater range of experience and it often lacks the novelty, but it can be made into much more than it normally is for you. And you will certainly be dragged down much less by any negative parts of the experience.
Anyway, my two cents as someone that spends a lot of time thinking about this both in terms of managing my own emotions and happiness as well as being a dad… And someone that’s trying _very_ hard to procrastinate right now.
A couple of times I took the bus to the ferry, walked to the light rail, took that to the airport, flew, then picked up a rental car and drove in to work. Maybe the airport train too. Pretty much all the modes but a bike.
Took a few weeks to ride all the trams in Helsinki, and it got a bit boring towards the end as several tram routes terminated in the same location. But every tram we'd get on in the middle, ride to one end of the line and go out for a walk, then ride to the other end.
Recently I suggested we do it again, as the trams have been renumbered a little, and there are two new lines available but he's lost interest. Shame, but doing the original routes was a lot of fun and I still have the route map on my wall along with the star-stickers we placed on it to mark the route numbers we'd completed!
Funnily, when I was in Helsinki, I did ride couple of trams to the terminus. But in my brain, this was stored in another department, "urban research going to the fringe". Not "going out with the kid".
Trains and train stations on the other hand, even though I use them so regularly, are still super nice. I wouldn't say "exciting" but very nice.
That's why I'm so angry that the French government and railway company keep making trains and stations more and more like airports and airplanes.
Brilliant idea for a memorable 3rd Birthday!
A strategy is therefore to buy lots of cheap stuff and experiences, and let the kids have the option to choose. Then throw away the stuff they don’t care for.
If you buy expensive things, you tend to try to force that thing onto the kid, which can be counter productive.
Kept him occupied for the 16 hours.
I'm not concerned about this post specifically, but I feel that we should be more critical of things like this making it onto hn. I come to hn to mostly hear about tech, tech advances, startups, etc. I don't come here to read feel good (and admittedly, very cute) stories. They have their place, but I feel that place is not hn.
In this particular case, the spark it ignited in me and others was precisely that inquisitive nature - about eschewing the expected value in lifes activities and instead reaching for that inner genuine interest can turn many experienced upside down. Maybe in reaching too far, but that was my take away from it. If similar stories were reposted ad nauseum i doubt they would make the front page and thus for me at least i am unconcerned with its presence.
I can't exactly draw the line about what does belong on hn, but a question I sometimes ask myself is "Would I be rolling my eyes if I read similar content on Linkedin?" If so, I assume it shouldn't be on hn.
It is valuable content to read on HN how fellow geeks see other spheres of life.
Another collective blog I read turned into a flood of corporate "why work with us" or "how to patch KDE under FreeBSD", or "Zuckerberg just said X. This news was translated by XYZ personal brand consulting co.".
Tech blogs that I read, turned into either stream of USB gadgets, or into big tech geopolitics. "Google wants to flank Facebook with X, Nvidia won't let AMD do Y, Altman thinks Z, waters changed."
This post about kids and normal life is what makes HN different.
That being said, I enjoy reading (and writing) human stories as well! Plus, it's nice to read the many stories people are sharing in the comments of this post. It shows that our community isn't as cold/ruthless as some may think :)
Very cute story though, commend you for observing such truths in your parenting.
Even the Wall Street Journal has lighthearted “A-hed” articles, which have occupied valuable space on their front page for 83 years and counting.
90% of HN is off topic drivel, pointless ranting , overall tired and unoriginal, when it’s not flat out wrong. I include most of my contributions in these 90%. Genuinely interesting contributions are then few and far between amongst the 10% which actually desserve to exist. If it’s quality you seek, you can close your account right now and go do something useful with your time instead.
At least, this post is soulful and happy.
I don't think we ever bought anything although she must have fed us something. It's one of my favorite memories and I still love trains. I'm hoping to ride Via from Toronto to Vancouver in a cabin car someday soon!
as an example, see https://www.reddit.com/r/toronto/comments/ylxwxt/hudsons_bay...
just search for "Toronto Hudson's Bay Christmas Display Window"
Before then, Eaton's dept. store in the Eaton Centre, just north of the Queen St. Hudson's Bay store, may have had Christmas display windows as well.
Decades later it still left a positive impact on me.
I discovered they city park and ride scheme was the perfect solution. It's cheaper than parking in the city centre and unlimited bus rides to and from the centre on nice new double decker buses.
Or biking them in a bicycle trailer to the store/school.
Surfing is one I'm looking forward to myself, I've never done it either myself!
I don't think that was a bad outcome necessarily, because I picked foods that were super unhealthy and cater to thin dopamine hits. But I do think the reasoning (value vs. health) was off as it started instilling a sense of letting perceived/imagined value reign over personal instincts and inclinations.
Reading this felt like a call to be more present, pay more attention to the small things, do things for their own sake, etc.
Your daughter a cat, by any chance? It's just the same with cats. They don't give a shit about anything you buy them, sometimes not even food - if there's packing peanuts, packing paper or Amazon cardboard boxes, that is more important.
For example, on one occasion my mother and stepfather wanted a week together, and obtained it by taking the three of us for a full week stay at a big amusement park during a school holidays... and oh you better believe that I have an extremely joyous set of memories of spending all day every day unsupervised in a happy dream of endless roller coasters and water slides!
During my softmore year at UIUC in '94, I finally relented to his endless prodding to check out this www thing he was rambling about, and went to a presentation by the Mosaic team at a building down the street from me. Needless to say, that changed everything, and I've been coding ever since.
But I'm pretty sure it was in my DNA and it was only a matter of time before I admitted to myself that programming is actually fun as hell.
I'm sure you're proud of the paths your kids have taken, but hey, you never know. Maybe one day they'll also admit to themselves that dad's hobby was actually pretty damn cool and give it a go too.
That's why a poor loving father will always be worth much more than a wealthy absent father.
Also, taking the train to/from Chicago was up there too.
The Years Are Short (Gretchen Rubin)
Bigs things happen in the little moments, and you have to have those little moments for them to happen.
I've been to restaurants where two adults and two kids are sitting at a table. The adults looking at their phones and the kids watching something on tablets makes for poor chances of an interesting little moment to happen.
Before he was even 3 my son knew the menu at the local Indian place we went to weekly and he'd pick out which curry he wanted that day. He asks about the decorations and paintings on the wall of every restaurant we go to, and generally stays engaged with us throughout the entire meal.
Yes it is more work, but it also means he is learning patience and manners.
The very first sentence of this post is ungrammatical.
I’m middle aged but I remember building so many make believe things out of boxes. All I needed were markers, glue and paper. My parents couldn’t afford those mini cars so I built them myself. Out of boxes.
A big box could be a car. Or a fort. Or a castle. Or a boat.
