Category: Kids

Martin Luther King Day is more than just another day off from work. His widow Coretta Scott King goes through the meaning of the day and what it means. She says that:

Every King Holiday has been a national “teach-in” on the values of nonviolence, including unconditional love, tolerance, forgiveness and reconciliation, which are so desperately-needed to unify America…. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is not only for celebration and remembrance, education and tribute, but above all a day of service.

So on this Martin Luther King day, my family and I participated in the Time of Good Day of Service. We visited an elderly homebound woman as part of the Dorot program. Dorot is a great organization that partners professionals and volunteers to enhance the lives of the elderly. They do a number of programs but the ones that are most relevant to us are the visits to the elderly around holidays. This is a great way for the kids to learn about charity — and there are relatively few charitable events that kids can participate in.

In this year where people are becoming more divided, it’s great to go and meet a stranger, learn from them and take part in our shared humanity.

BTW, this is an incredible video of two a capella groups, one Jewish and one African American, singing Shed a Little Light in honor of MLK day.

 

We live in a 30 story building. In the summer the kids can run and play outside but in the winter they need to get their exercise inside the building.

So we started to climb the stairs inside our building. The building is 30 floors high so getting to the top is a nice workout. When Blake was about 3, he would climb to the top of the building with excitement. We even started learning numbers. We learned that there is no number 13 in our building — or is there? But as the boys got older they want to do something more exciting so we created a game called “stair war.”

The rules for stair war are the same as the card game of war but every time there’s a war you go up that number of flights of stairs. This makes climbing the stairs a bit more interesting. The game has a number of interesting properties:

1. Each time there’s a war you go up on average 7 flights assuming you go up ten flights for J, Q, K, A
2. One out of every 13 plays, on overage, is a war. There are 169 ways that cards can lay between hands 13 x 13. But only 13 of them are wars.
3. On average that’s about half a flight on average for each card flipped you go up 7 flights every 13 plays.
4. But there’s a lot of uncertainty which adds to the excitement. You don’t know when the war is going to happen!

Blake is 8 now so we can play more interesting games. Our new favorite is now Chemistry Fluxx (sample game) on the stairs. We play a game of Chemistry Fluxx and then go up 10 flights of stairs — repeat until exhausted. Chemistry Fluxx is part of the Fluxx series, a card game where the rules and goals of the game are always in “Fluxx.” Watch the sample game and you’ll get a good idea of how it works. We speed up the game by changing the initial rules to something to draw 2 / play 2 to speed things up. Also, Chemistry Fluxx teaches them a few chemistry facts while you play!

In my apartment building, like many others, there’s no 13th floor. The floors go right from 12 to 14.

I’ve always been very envious of artists that decorate their spaces. I remember visiting Industrial Light and Magic and seeing all the different statues that were on top of peoples desks. In The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch shows how he painted his childhood bedroom — even including painting an elevator on the wall. It used to make me sad that I would never be able to decorate the walls like that and really make it my own. But then I discovered a solution … magnets!

Originally I thought it would be really cool to use magnetic paint on the wall. But then I learned that magnetic paint is good for putting flexible magnetic images on the wall, but not for hanging anything up. So I thought, “How can I make my house into a magnetic bulletin board?” Then I realized how much of my house is made of metal.

The radiator is made of metal…

… as is the front door is made of metal which is a collection of pictures and maps …

Note at the top of the door is some remnants of our sign from the women’s march including Blake’s wonderful artwork of Donald Trump in the middle of the “O.”

Our window frames are made of metal…

… as are the many of the joints where the joints in the wall where the drywall comes together…

… so we can post awards right at wall corners…

… and school assignments.

On the fridge we built some really cool things using  Magnaformers. We also use them to build some cool Platonic solids, Archimedean solids and Johnson solids (not pictured).

We use little superstrong neodymium magnets with clips to make sure that things stick.