Finn is sitting next to me on the couch playing Roblox on her shiny new iPad Mini. This is a gigantic upgrade from her grotty 4-year-old Kindle Fire, which used to be my old Fire. She’s getting into playing games with her friends online, and while this is making Jen and I very nervous, we’re also not going to completely lock her social life in the basement. She had a friend over on Wednesday who has a new iPhone X—yes, you read that right—and they tried to play Roblox together. Finn’s Kindle kept crashing and needing restarts, and Jen texted me and told me she was getting frustrated.
I’ve been bumping up against the limitations of the Kindle since we set it up for her; Amazon funnels parents into a paid model for parental oversight on your kid’s device, which I was too cheap for. I disabled a lot of the functionality and made it so that she couldn’t do any in-app purchases or browse the web, and that seemed to work OK for what she was doing. But the unit is old, and slow, and the battery is weak, and it was two-year-old technology four years ago, which means there were games within Roblox that wouldn’t run properly, and that app isn’t supported very well on Android from what I can tell. And all the kids are playing Fortnite, which it won’t run at all.
Her laptop actually turned out to be harder to manage. I set up a very strict internet whitelist to start with: Baltimore County Public Schools, PBS Kids, dictionary.com, National Geographic, and about four other sites of the same quality. But because any and all of the pages BCPS serves pulls scripts and content from other domains, all of these have to be whitelisted—over, and over, and over again. I had to make a second account for her with no firewall so she could do research online, and monitor what she was looking at.
Bless her heart, our daughter doesn’t have tantrums or whine or act like a baby about shit like this, but Jen is great at staying tuned to her frequencies and knows when things feel wrong. We decided that she should be able to reach out and play with her friends online without feeling embarrassed by her gear. There are a lot of seismic social shifts happening right now, and we want to make sure we’re not holding her back, while also not pushing her too far forward.
So we had a family talk over dinner, and after setting some ground rules we all came to a decision.
Jen and I weighed the options of different devices first; any phone is out of the question, as she’s not going to have one of those for several years—I don’t care what all of the crazy alarmist parents around us say, she doesn’t need to get in touch with me during recess in the fourth grade. I considered buying a new iPhone and giving her my old one with cell service disabled (it’s a 6, and beginning to show its age, but still functional), but there are a couple of modern games that won’t play on it. I considered an iPod Touch, but I figure she’d lose that pretty quickly. I looked at all of the models of iPad and finally settled on the Mini for its size, capacity, and price. It sits comfortably in the middle of each segment, and I figure it’s got enough room to expand into a schoolwork device as she gets into middle school. It’s big enough that it’s easy to see and hard to lose. But it’s also smaller than a full-size iPad.
I had to do a little sleuthing to figure out how to set it up for her correctly; at first I logged in with my account but quickly realized I’d have to undo that after I set her up with a Family Sharing account. She’s now got a subaccount keyed to her age, and she’s not able to purchase apps without her iPad sending me a confirmation alert. It’s set up with three hours max of screen time between 7AM and 9PM, and I’ve gotten pretty granular with the other settings. (I’m hesitating with the whitelist so I’ve set it to Block Adult Content, and we’ll see how that works).
Overall, I’m impressed with how Apple has thought some of this stuff through; out of the box it has a lot of the features I wanted without having to pay extra for—that’s part of the premium price, I suppose. The real test will be how she butts up against the parental controls I’ve set up, and if we have to modify any of them. But for now, she’s over the moon, and already talking about what case she’s going to buy for it.
Small victories can sometimes add up to a larger result, and that’s how I feel about the past weekend. I don’t feel like I got any one big thing done, but I made a lot of progress on several fronts. My FitBit tells me I walked 15,000 steps and 64 floors of stairs, and I sure do feel that in my legs today.
First, we had Christopher come in from New York on Friday night, which was great; he’s always fun to have staying with us and a great excuse to get out of the house and do interesting things. Unfortunately, Baltimore was boring this past weekend so we couldn’t take him to an awesome exhibit in D.C. or an art happening here in Baltimore, so we settled for K-Pop Disco Theater Barbecue on Friday night. Saturday was windy but sunny so I took advantage of that to pick up some supplies at Lowe’s to repair the garage lights and the greenhouse door.
Jen’s eye was hurting (she scratched her cornea on Friday) so she took a nap and Christopher, Finn and I drove to Second Chance to walk through the warehouse and poke around at the merchandise. I was there to look at doors to replace the one between the blue room and the new bathroom, and found a beautiful 12-panel French door in almost the right size as well as a full-light door in exactly the size. Jen was asleep so I punted until later. Then we hit Housewerks and poked through the odd merchandise there, stopping to admire a porcelain autopsy table parked outside.
That evening we drove into Baltimore for dinner at Peter’s, our old neighborhood haunt from my Canton days. Jen had read they suffered a fire last year but had reopened this spring, and we were lucky to get a parking spot around the corner and seated in half an hour (no mean feat for a popular restaurant with 18 tables). As usual, the service was excellent, the food was delicious, and we left sated and happy and went straight home to bed.
Sunday I continued working on the garage light (the light switch had gone bad), the greenhouse door (fitting a storm door handle to aluminum channel took some engineering) and then the greenhouse footer, while stopping to help Finn set up a jewelry stand out in front of the house. Mama and I were skeptical but she wound up selling two necklaces for $8. I think she’s on to something.
I took Finley out of school to go snowboarding yesterday, and we had a blast. It’s really late in the season, especially in the face of global warming, to be expecting good conditions, but we got lucky. The weather was in the 70s by the time we got to Whitetail, and we stripped off clothes when we got out of the car. The parking lot was lightly filled, the rental lanes were empty, and there were only two people working the counter. We got set up with boots, boards, and gear (I had to stop and buy Finn a new set of board gloves) and walked outside into bright sunshine to wait for our first lesson. We had a half an hour to kill so I walked her up the short hill in front of us and explained that the day was all about learning board control.
In 2016 she did fantastic getting up on her board and transitioning, but the speed scared her and the only way she could control that was by skidding out and dumping herself, which got painful and frustrating quickly. We started by keeping the board parallel to the slope and working on heel-toe control to halt the board, and then mixed that in with a little speed.
There were only a few people waiting with us for lessons, two women who worked at the resort and Finley, so by the time we were at the top of the bunny slope we paired off with Stephanie, a wonderful instructor who worked with Finn exclusively on board control and transitioning together. I wisely wore my backpack so by the end of the first run we’d stripped off our coats, stuffed them inside, and spent the rest of the day in long-sleeve T-shirts and snowpants. We were both still sweating. We did two runs with her and by the end of the second Finn was smiling broadly and laughing. We said goodbye to Stephanie and the first thing Finn asked was “when can we come back here again?”
We stopped for some lunch and sat outside in the sunshine for a little while before heading back out to the slope. Here we tried taking the Magic Carpet, essentially a conveyor belt for skis and boards which is a lot less confronting than the ski lift itself. Finn fell at the foot of the lift, and scooted around the corner as fast as she could. She got flustered immediately and most of her first run down the mountain was filled with frustration as she forgot everything we’d worked on—to the point where she kept dumping herself and asked if we could go home.
I talked her through what she was feeling and reminded her that she wasn’t doing any of what we’d learned, and then got her to do two short runs down the hill without falling. She refused to head back up the magic carpet, and the dumb 16-year-old in the booth chose that particular moment to ask me for our lift passes, which I’d stripped off and put back in the car. Annoyed, I went back and got them but couldn’t convince Finn to ride it again, so we walked back up the tiny bunny slope and worked on her braking technique until we were both tired and sweaty.
By this time the slopes were almost slushy and we were ready to call it a day, so we returned our boards, peeled off our snow pants and hit the bricks for home. There was barely anyone left in the parking lot. By Frederick she was asleep in the seat next to me, her head up against the door of the car, her cheeks, nose and forehead bright pink from the sun.
We took Finley out to get a long-overdue haircut on Saturday, which makes a huge difference. I really prefer her with a bob. It suits her face, and her hair looks healthy again. More importantly, I think she likes it as much as we do.
After the haircut we drove down to the LP City to go to pick up Jen’s father and take him to the Hollywood VFW Spring Dinner, featuring St. Mary’s stuffed ham, fried oysters, beans, and potatoes. It’s been a few years since we’ve been down there, and even more since we’ve been to the Hollywood dinner, but it was worth every delicious bite. I think Jen and I emptied one entire heating tray of oysters on our own.
I haven’t set a date to go up and begin cleaning out my parents’ basement yet, but I did find that LensRentals is offering all of the gear I’d need to properly digitize the family slides: the 40mm macro lens, slide digitizing kit, and a Nikon D500 would all be $288 for a 7 day rental as opposed to buying the digitizing kit for $150 and renting the rest. The D500 is seven years newer and has a higher resolution (if I wanted to be anal I’d go with a full-frame body, but whatever) which should be enough to get us the results we want.
All told we got about 5 inches. Finn is off from school today, accompanying me to my oncological checkin this morning. Right now we are sitting on the 10th floor of the Viragh building in downtown Baltimore waiting for my blood draw.
This is part of a LEGO kit we got Finn for Christmas. It’s a technical set that includes a motor drive, motion sensor, and secondary motor element. We built a tracked robot that is programmable through a tablet app to move in 360˚, make sounds, shoot a shoulder-mounted projectile, move its head, and recognize sound and movement. The whole thing was accessed through the app, including the build process. She and I had a blast putting the whole thing together at the dinner table.