I think I made a core memory with my daughter last night
preservetheson
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rodrigodelrio
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01maverick10
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dfaithfulservant
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@berk60 Get that girl a telescope! There are a lot of garbage ones out there, so make sure you do some research. Ed Ting on YT would be a good place to start.
Also, look for local, large telescopes with public viewing hours. The Doane Observatory in Chicago is one example, but I'm sure there are others.
Also, look for local, large telescopes with public viewing hours. The Doane Observatory in Chicago is one example, but I'm sure there are others.
@berk60 Hell yeah, that's where all mine came from. I just graduated highschool a couple weeks ago with all but two credits needed for my two year associates degree in the sciences, been doing college full time for three years through highschool, and I'm going on to do mechanical engineering and astronautical engineering, hopefully double PhDs and definitely not getting two just so I can make people call me me Dr Dr.
And ya know what all of it traces back to? Two memories, getting woken up at the crack of dawn to watch the last ever space shuttle launch with my dad, and feeling seriously pissed off and sad that I only get to see one launch and it's not colonizing shit. And then a couple years later watching the first successful landing of a Falcon9 booster on a drone ship live with my dad.
Those two memories, totaling maybe an hour of footage and four to six hours of my life put me on the career path im on today. I also can slightly blame kerbal space program (get it, play it extensively because it's awesome, and then give it to your kid, its awesome and fun and it taught me rocket science to a fairly large degree, not the math part, but the useful parts) for my decisions. And staying up late at night until like 11:00pm or 12:00am watching bad sci - fi and science channel documentaries with my grandma while she was rocking my baby brother to keep him asleep.
But just that feeling of getting up out of bed when I knew i wouldn't be able to sleep and wandering out there and just kinda nodding at eachother and curling up in the chair watching cool space and science and technology documentaries made me feel happy. And the feeling of getting up early in the morning to watch a launch still fills me with child like wonder and excitement, though I do need far more coffee nowadays to do it. And I get to be the one waking up my whole family at 6:00am to watch a starship test flight rather than my dad doing it. Its come full circle.
But yeah, those moments are very special, and the more often you latch on to them and make sure that they can happen the better. You can't really force those moments, but what you can do is look out for them, those moments of childlike wonder even compared to the normal wonder and curiosity your child feels, and when you see that starting to happen you don't encourage it exactly, you gotta join in on the moment. To me at least the common factor was always the jarring, in a positive way, realization that this wasn't my dad or my mom or grandma doing something for me or making me do, but "oh wait, wow, we're just enjoying this thing together and sharing it". It's not that I'm being patented right now, it's my parent genuinely sharing those feelings with me, they aren't excited for me right now, they're excited with me, they aren't giving this thing to me, they're mutually sharing it with me.
The common factor in all those moments was that I was doing something with my dad where we were both genuinely enjoying that thing, it wasn't me enjoying watching it and my dad enjoying me enjoying it. It was my dad enjoying it, and me enjoying it, both together that was so important.
The easiest example being wandering out to watch those documentaries with my grandma. It wasn't her watching me watching something. It was literally just me coming out half asleep and watching the same thing she turned on for herself when she was alone. It was just two people being tired watching the TV together.
.
And I think the most important thing overall is to as much as possible talk to your kid like a tiny, really uneducated adult. Don't use baby voice or kid language, don't talk down to them, talk to them. Make them feel like you enjoy talking to them because you enjoy talking to them, not because their your kid. Yes, they should feel like you enjoy being their dad, but they shouldn't feel like that's the only reason. They should feel like you'd actually enjoy talking to them if they were a random adult at the bus stop you've never met before and probably never will again.
And even for me, any time I talk to kids I have the most success talking to them like they're adults. Even very young, like 4 or 5 at most, they're super hyper and fidgety and playing and I can usually make them happy by playing with em, and talking like I would while I'm doing stuff with anyone else. I mean I literally spoke for almost an hour about how the sun works and what solar flares are and effing radiation shielding on spacecraft with an effing 4 year old. And he actually got most of it and loved it, sure I did have to start at one topic like solar flares, then explain 99.9% of the rest of the stuff leading up to that, magnetic fields, magnets, the sun, plasma, atoms, molecules, light, space, orbit, gravity, and just kept trying to explain solar flares and every time I said something he didn't know about I'd explain that, and if i said something he didn't know while explaining that concept I'd go down another layer and explain it until I got to the things he already knew and just keep on talking.
Hell, talk to them about the news, or your job, and go into the details of your work like you're talking to your coworker not a kid.
Sorry i wrote so much, but I think I just thought about a bunch of foundational moments all together in a way I never have before. I'm gonna go tell my grandma she's awesome for letting me stay up late watching science channel documentaries with me.
And ya know what all of it traces back to? Two memories, getting woken up at the crack of dawn to watch the last ever space shuttle launch with my dad, and feeling seriously pissed off and sad that I only get to see one launch and it's not colonizing shit. And then a couple years later watching the first successful landing of a Falcon9 booster on a drone ship live with my dad.
Those two memories, totaling maybe an hour of footage and four to six hours of my life put me on the career path im on today. I also can slightly blame kerbal space program (get it, play it extensively because it's awesome, and then give it to your kid, its awesome and fun and it taught me rocket science to a fairly large degree, not the math part, but the useful parts) for my decisions. And staying up late at night until like 11:00pm or 12:00am watching bad sci - fi and science channel documentaries with my grandma while she was rocking my baby brother to keep him asleep.
But just that feeling of getting up out of bed when I knew i wouldn't be able to sleep and wandering out there and just kinda nodding at eachother and curling up in the chair watching cool space and science and technology documentaries made me feel happy. And the feeling of getting up early in the morning to watch a launch still fills me with child like wonder and excitement, though I do need far more coffee nowadays to do it. And I get to be the one waking up my whole family at 6:00am to watch a starship test flight rather than my dad doing it. Its come full circle.
But yeah, those moments are very special, and the more often you latch on to them and make sure that they can happen the better. You can't really force those moments, but what you can do is look out for them, those moments of childlike wonder even compared to the normal wonder and curiosity your child feels, and when you see that starting to happen you don't encourage it exactly, you gotta join in on the moment. To me at least the common factor was always the jarring, in a positive way, realization that this wasn't my dad or my mom or grandma doing something for me or making me do, but "oh wait, wow, we're just enjoying this thing together and sharing it". It's not that I'm being patented right now, it's my parent genuinely sharing those feelings with me, they aren't excited for me right now, they're excited with me, they aren't giving this thing to me, they're mutually sharing it with me.
The common factor in all those moments was that I was doing something with my dad where we were both genuinely enjoying that thing, it wasn't me enjoying watching it and my dad enjoying me enjoying it. It was my dad enjoying it, and me enjoying it, both together that was so important.
The easiest example being wandering out to watch those documentaries with my grandma. It wasn't her watching me watching something. It was literally just me coming out half asleep and watching the same thing she turned on for herself when she was alone. It was just two people being tired watching the TV together.
.
And I think the most important thing overall is to as much as possible talk to your kid like a tiny, really uneducated adult. Don't use baby voice or kid language, don't talk down to them, talk to them. Make them feel like you enjoy talking to them because you enjoy talking to them, not because their your kid. Yes, they should feel like you enjoy being their dad, but they shouldn't feel like that's the only reason. They should feel like you'd actually enjoy talking to them if they were a random adult at the bus stop you've never met before and probably never will again.
And even for me, any time I talk to kids I have the most success talking to them like they're adults. Even very young, like 4 or 5 at most, they're super hyper and fidgety and playing and I can usually make them happy by playing with em, and talking like I would while I'm doing stuff with anyone else. I mean I literally spoke for almost an hour about how the sun works and what solar flares are and effing radiation shielding on spacecraft with an effing 4 year old. And he actually got most of it and loved it, sure I did have to start at one topic like solar flares, then explain 99.9% of the rest of the stuff leading up to that, magnetic fields, magnets, the sun, plasma, atoms, molecules, light, space, orbit, gravity, and just kept trying to explain solar flares and every time I said something he didn't know about I'd explain that, and if i said something he didn't know while explaining that concept I'd go down another layer and explain it until I got to the things he already knew and just keep on talking.
Hell, talk to them about the news, or your job, and go into the details of your work like you're talking to your coworker not a kid.
Sorry i wrote so much, but I think I just thought about a bunch of foundational moments all together in a way I never have before. I'm gonna go tell my grandma she's awesome for letting me stay up late watching science channel documentaries with me.
joyofthelord7
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proper Daddy Time !!katrina2017
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johnknox87
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@berk60 My ex-wife and I were super strict about bed time. When we split up, I would let the girls stay up later in the summer. One night they saw fireflies and said “dad those bugs are lighting up, what are those things”. My oldest was 6 and had never stayed up in the summer to see fireflies. The next night we stayed up and stargazed. Now it’s one of our fav things to do, sit under the stars and pull out the app to learn about it!