Almighty Dad | A stay at home dad blog

    
US News has come out with their list of best colleges and universities – again, and the list looks pretty much the same as it looks every year.  Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, MIT, blah, blah, blah … .  Yes, we all know some Universities stand out above the rest.  And we also know that if you have the money and grades to attend one of the top, say 10, schools you’ll have some prestige going into a job interview after graduation.  Most of us, though, didn’t go[…]

     
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends weaning a child from the bottle at 15 months.  That doesn’t seem too unreasonable considering most babies are ready to eat solid foods at 4 to 6 months and most doctors recommend transitioning from a bottle to a cup at 12 months.  In fact, the AAP states that kids at 12 month don’t require nighttime feeding at all.  But, need and want are two separate things.  A lot of kids use their bottles (and the contents) for comfort.  That’s why,[…]

    
Let me begin this by simply saying I find the following two movies interesting for the fact that they are personal stories of autism from people who, instead of accepting a diagnosis, have publicly asked uncommon questions about a disease that is still misunderstood by professionals who admit they don’t have all the answers yet who oftentimes ridicule families who think outside the box.  I don’t agree or disagree with any opinion, medically licensed or not.  My opinion is that I admire people who refuse to give[…]

     
Getting engaged is nothing more than a resolution between two people to get married.  You can’t very well show up at the church one day without agreeing with your partner on a date and time, right?  So that’s what an engagement is – you agree that marriage is something you both want to do, and you set a date and time to get it done.  It’s in everybody’s best interest, at the time of engagement, to be as clear as possible.  Don’t obfuscate the point with trivialities like[…]

    
Mely has really outdone herself this week.  We’ve been using Neil and Alan as weekly coloring Guinea pigs.  So far, at least for boys, I think we’ve concluded that dolls and stuffed animals do not win popularity contests.  However, our parenting audience is, I assume, equally divided between those with boys and girls, and we’re guessing at the stuff we think girls will like.  If we’re getting it wrong, let us know and tell us what your girls would prefer to color.  And, more generally, if your kid[…]

  
Do you know why bottled tea drinks are so tasty?  Simple — sugar and the addition of as little tea as it takes to still call the drink tea.  That’s right, it’s mostly tap water with some flavoring and a label proclaiming how healthy for you it is.  It’s the wording on bottle labels that lead us to the conclusion that we’re drinking an unadulterated antioxidant super drink. The reality is that we’re drinking flavored water and sugar (and a sip or two of tea).  A Washington Times article out[…]

  
If you use, or are interested in using Hooked on Phonics then I’ve written about its effectiveness on several occasions.  You can check them out here (How I Homeschool, Anybody Can do it With Hooked on Phonics!, Hooked on Phonics Products (video), Reading Progress: 5 year old Alan, Hooked on Phonics: Master Reader (with videos),  Hooked on Phonics: Retooled Experience, Hooked on Phonics Update).  But today, as my youngest son is nearing the end of his Hooked on Phonics: Master Reader adventure, I reflected on how[…]

  

“Men seek retreats for themselves – in the country, by the sea, in the hills – and you yourself are particularly prone to this yearning.  But all this is quite unphilosophic, when it is open to you, at any time you want, to retreat into yourself.  No retreat offers someone more quiet and relaxation than that into his own mind, especially if he can dip into thoughts there which put him at immediate and complete ease:  and by ease I simply mean a well-ordered life.  So[…]

   
Poetry, for me, isn’t something I go out of my way to read.  It’s enigmatic where I prefer bluntness – prose.  I don’t like to guess at the meaning of phrases.  My favorite author is Ernest Hemingway whose writing is famously direct.  However, my resistance to it notwithstanding, poetry is something with which we should all spend time.  It helps open our minds in the same way looking at a Monet blurs our preconceived notions of how we think the world looks.  It’s like the medicine you[…]

 
What’s the matter with in-laws?  Mine like me, and my mom, mom, and dad really like Mely, too (mom, mom isn’t a typo.  Read about that here).   The only whiff of a problem I ever had with an in-law was 6 years ago when my father in-law called me a girl.  He’s a great guy, and things have since been smoothed over, but he suffers from the typical Mexican affliction of machismo and couldn’t come to terms with the fact that Mely was out working and I[…]