Life with kids

Liquid nitrogen and burning ships, that’s life with my kids.
Friday, I helped chaperone a field trip to the local science museum (DaVinci Science Center) for my daughter’s class. She found the demonstration of adding liquid nitrogen to boiling water fascinating. (Sadly, I didn’t get any pictures of the resulting cloud.) She and her friends also made slime, experimented with levers, played in a submarine, crawled through a dark tunnel, and learned all sorts of cool and gross facts about animals. I mostly got tired legs, but it was great to see the excitement on their faces. (Of course, my daughter didn’t want to leave at the end of the day.

Then a few times over the weekend (and again tonight), I played a co-op board game with my son. Dead Men Tell No Tales is a very fun game that we haven’t managed to win yet. Our current working hypothesis is that three is the optimal number of players: one each to deal with deckhands, fire, and treasure, but not so many that half the trapdoors are out before anyone even gets a second turn. It sounds complicated, and it is, a little, but it’s a fun challenge where we keep thinking that just a slight modification of our tactics will produce the desired result.

So today, I’m grateful for time with my kids. What are you grateful for today?

Originally published at Erin M. Hartshorn. You can comment here or there.