Saturday’s Activities Include: middle schooler returns to cinema unscathed

T. went back for more Ralph. I find that Ralph Breaks the Internet has a remarkable number of lessons embedded in it for explaining everything from how payment works (just yelling numbers is NOT paying the bill) to how to think of a person who is acting like a bad friend. Like The Loud House, if you know the material a kid is obsessed with, you can deploy it as shared building blocks for making sense of the larger world.

I engaged in a whole lot of trip planning and some post mortem on previous trips. That was difficult but totally worthy. Also, I now have more respect for seating arrangements than I ever have before.

I took T. to martial arts while R. took A. to the dentist for one of the early steps towards getting a palate spreader. I had one, and one of her cousin’s had one — this is clearly a genetic thing. Someday, maybe in my lifetime, I bet we’ll know exactly where on the genome that thing lies. We ate at Vic’s, and chatted with another kid from martial arts and his mom. That was nice. Usually, I see the dad at Vic’s with the kid, but he’s got a horrible sinus infection apparently. Later, R. took T. to basketball.

There was a lot of unpackaging and setting up of stuff from T.’s wish list. So now we have a space heater in the basement and T. has a printer / photocopier and the kids are now playing games on Nintendo Switch.