TXOKO

I wish to say only this:  there's no mistaking a real party, and that's what a TXOKO is.

Bikes

I refer here not to the vehicles but to the game.  The rules are simple, so much so that one can hardly claim to have invented it:  you may not touch the ground, you seek to force your opponent to do the same.  You can play a no-contact version and there is a certain elegance to the game when so played but it is altogether less fun without the crashes and the wrestling.  It is just about my favorite game in the world, and almost no one will ever play it with me.  Part of what made my recent trip to Amsterdam so wonderful was that someone did (the latter movie is much the shorter, for those of you pressed for time):





A close relative of this game, which we might call "biking through the crowded Vondelpark at speed on a heavily loaded bakfiets" is shown here (narration by Felix):

Day 2500

Remember how much 2000 sucked?  2500 was better, much, much better.

Sublime

It's rare, oh so rare, but it does happen:  fatherhood brings you a moment that is truly sublime.  For me it was just the other day, walking home from pizza with the boys, stopping to watch the ballerinas in the dance studio window, and, sigh, Felix starts singing "Young Girl."

Enjoy.

Counterintuitive

"A Surprising Risk for Toddlers on Playground Slides," headlines the New York Times.  Surprising to whom?  To the childless editors?  To parents who haven't yet remarked that the more you hover over your children the more likely they are to get bashed up?  The answer:  to adults who have failed to notice that their own bottoms do not fit well in kids' slides, much less their bottoms plus their kids' parts, some of which [SPOILER ALERT] tend to get broken on the way down.

I've been watching my kids throw themselves down slides--straight slides, curly slides, head first, butt first, top, bottom, what have you--since they were first able to scootch around a playground, and not just my kids, but hundreds of others, day after day, and I can't recall a single kid-alone-on-slide accident.  It seems the designers of these devices (at least the ones intended for small children) have thought some about what happens when a body accelerates down a declined surface and--get this--have specifically designed them to prevent that body from flying off the end, falling off the side, or generating excessive amounts of friction en route.  I am not surprised that some parents don't think of this when weighing the dangers of the device, but what does surprise me is how often a parent, having just observed one of my babies safely navigate a slide on his own, will compliment me on that baby's boldness and then, minutes later, insist on accompanying their own at-least-as-large-or-larger kid on that very same slide.

It seems to me that many of our protective instincts in general, and perhaps most especially when we function as parents, run counter to the goal of real safety.  It's a hard lesson to learn, but a harder one not to.