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Were at a great aunts house and the kids were watching Sponge Bob on Nickelodeon for the first time. It cuts to commercial, and my oldest goes out to find my aunt, to tell her something is wrong with the TV. They come back and she's checking thr TV and said "Yeah its on Sponge Bob". That's when I realized what her issue was and I had to explain that my kid has no idea what commercials are LOL. My aunt got a real kick out of it.

I've been playing the game Fumes with my kids, they really like it. It's a car combat game in early access made to look like a PS1 game. I'd been playing it with a controller, but keyboard and mouse works great too. My kids are a little young but I let one have the mouse and do the shooting whilst I was driving.

Every car always needs to have the monster truck suspension and be as big as possible, and they always want to change the colour. I was playing with Kid A and he immediately says, "I want red car" so I make it red, then he wants blue, then green, then white. I picked the whitest colour but he wasn't happy, so I picked him up in front of the TV so he could point at the colour he wanted, it was brown.

That was fine, but then he got upset because he didn't like my loadout, he didn't want to missile batteries on the car. So he was having a mini tantrum whilst holding the mouse when he was supposed to aim. My keyboard has a built-in trackpad so that's alright, I managed to drive and aim at the same time alright.

I know people in here are pretty techy, so let me tell you a cheap laptop or PC with Bazzite or Batocera is a great option. It Just Works and you don't notice the difference over any other console or computer.

We were finally able to secure COVID boosters for the little Fishes. Took way too much effort. In a better world boosters would be perfunctory and public health would be one of the highest priorities of society. No one I called for the past two weeks knew where when/if they were going to get the formulation for under 12 kids, but now our local health department has them. I got my flu and COVID shots yesterday. It’s a good thing my partner got hers last weekend because I’m on the struggle bus right now. At least I’ll be better by next weekend to help take care of the kids.

Did a beach day over the weekend. It didn’t go as hoped but I also knew it had the potential to be a let down. That’s because I ignored what I and parents who live near a beach know: you can’t have a high little kid-to-parent ratio at the beach. I went ahead and took all 3 to the beach by myself, and that was a mistake. Got pretty stressed walking them along a busy road. Then at the beach, just a lot of little behavior issues. Had to stop one from trying to run into the water, then another kid would start throwing sand up in the air near others, etc. We were at least able to recover some with a really nice time at a small pizza place after.

There was an aircraft carrier and some other big navy boats out on the horizon, which led to a good kid-friendly discussion of imperialism with my oldest (I’m just trying to inculcate her against the rabid troop worship around us, mainly)

I need to spend another $7 to get free shipping with Powells. Any books your kids like that you’d recommend? (In that older toddler / younger kid range)?

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That much sugar must be dangerous!

My kid is a picky eater but he ate both the lasagna and soup I made and I am proud of us both. I am going to try cooking bigger meals more often. It just feels so hard to do.

We put out the bounce house today and all the neighbor kids came and played. My husband had a bunch of huge boxes leftover from a project he was doing and all the kids built forts and played. It was so nice.

Went to the renfaire (Renaissance Faire) this weekend for closing weekend with the kids and some friends, and it was a good time! The kids had a lot of fun! They had trick-or-treating which was a blast. Some of the characters were walking around with special trinkets for kids. Our oldest got a cute little golden potion bottle (it's smaller then a grape) from one of them. Definitely doing that again next year.

Also I got the oldest a bow and arrow set from the faire, the arrows have big soft round ends on them so they're pretty safe to shoot. Well she spent all afternoon outside getting good at nocking, drawing, and shooting that bow. She's obsessed.