While far from obsessive, Béla can identify more weaponry, automatic and ancient, than I care to myself. He has on occasions owned archery sets but they’ve been short-lived. He grew up with few to no toy guns and anything he used as a “gun” (like a shoe), and followed up by pantomiming shooting a live…

Her first homeschool birthday was turning NINE. Béla, of course, made her cake. It is the recipe used to make painter Claude Monet’s favorite birthday cake. (Really.) And that bright green — is not food coloring. It’s spinach. She has now earned the discretion to only have media approved by her put online. Here she…

These are a Tudor-era biscuit known as Jumbles — a relatively quick an easy bake for Béla this Monday. I think he’d be doing more cooking and not all so much baking if it were not for the virus, but not being able to go on trips to fish markets and whatnot have slowed down…

Friday was a pretty average day, although the bad weather created such surge pricing on Uber that it hardly seemed worth it to spend our $200 in gift cards from the holidays if we had to spend thirty bucks to get to Target. We’d hoped to get at least that trip done today, as we…

Best laid plans and all. We had some onilne things scheduled for later in the day — a percussion master class through Settlement, and a Theater of War production centered on Hercules. We ended up doing neither of these things. Once signing up for the master class for Béla, we found there was a dress…

He did so great! He had to watch them every second. This was to practice his Genoese sponge for Claudia’s birthday cake.

While I do not want to give away the plot of the story Claudia is writing for the NJCL Creative Writing contest, she mentioned Victorian orphans. I said they were also sometimes called “foundlings”. She was incandescent. “That’s such a good word.” she said. “For like a society or a race. Foundlings.” My daughter feels…

This has something to do with the piece she’s working on for the writing competition. We got hoagies and Tuck ordered us surprise cookies from Insomnia. We watched the original My Bloody Valentine, and the kids had been waiting to put on the SNL with Dan Levy — I got so emotional. Eugene Levy was…

This morning within the same five-minute period Claudia told me that: — I needed to brush up on contemporary slang (her contemporaries’, about whom I had to break it to her were not my focus group for popularity) — She had promised the gods that she would make a “large sacrifice” on her thirteenth birthday….

My kids had all the Studio Ghibli DVDs as tots (mostly given as gifts) because that was trendy then and ostensibly better than sticking your kid in front of a Disney movie. It did not work here. Claudia particularly hated Totoro, and especially the soot sprites. Two days ago the first all-CGI film from Studio…

This perfectly embodies how I feel about my birthday this year. I did not have a lot of expectations, as Tuck and I just got all our Mitchell and and Webb DVDs and replaced the food processor — very much a necessary expense for Béla, who was twisting our arms to choose our birthday cakes…