Frankensquid

Hallowe'en.

She's too old to want to go trick-or-treating as a princess.

Too young to want to dress as a goth.

Too cheerful to want to be the grim reaper.

Too independent to want to be a celebrity.

So she's something she came up with by herself.

She's Frankensquid.

She's the cross-section of unabashed joy, creativity, and independence.

She is her own creation.

May it forever be thus.

Ends and Beginnings

How we mark the stages of our children's lives subtly changes in the span of just a few years. Early on, it's the things she starts to do: her first day of school, her first soccer game, her first violin lesson. Before long, it becomes the things she stops doing: the day camp she's too old to attend, the grade school she moves on from.

Marking ends as opposed to beginnings is a profound change for a parent. It makes you concentrate on things past, regret missed opportunities, and even heighten your own sense of mortality.

But parenting is not about the parent. Even if I am significantly "past", she is all "future" right now. Setting her on her course is what parenting is about.

Memories, Lighter than Air

We went to a hot air balloon launch earlier this month. We counted 73 in the sky: some launching, some landing, some dropping a payload on a target, with only the occasional noise of a propane-fueled burner breaking the silence.

I can say that my daughter was with me, that we compared flight patterns of the racing balloons in rapid (and slightly scary) descent with flight patterns of our own 24’ solar airship, that we looked at the effect of windspeeds at different elevations and talked about the recovery pattern of our last model rocket launch that went up to 1,000 feet.

I can say all that, but deep down I know it wasn’t about my daughter.

The last time I went to this balloon launch, Gerry Ford was in the White House. It was nice to remember what it was like to be a kid again, if only for a few moments.

She's growing up fast. I hope she's racking up a lot of good memories of her childhood.

STS and SST

In the 1970s, two unique craft took to the skies. The SuperSonic Transport, called Concorde, and the Shuttle Transport System, called the Space Shuttle.

SST and STS.

Each is regarded as the pinnacle of engineering in its respective field. Both are now out of service. With their retirements, human spaceflight and air travel have technologically receded.

Each program had serious shortcomings. Complexity when simplicity will do is never desirable. Putting humans at risk in space to do a job that robots can do perfectly well is not good policy. A small, high maintenance aircraft that costs its passengers disproportionately more to fly than the time it saves is not going to be economically viable.

Photo credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls July 8, 2011

It doesn't matter. They were halos of a sort, vivid testimony to how far humanity has come. Imperfect halos, to be sure, as their occasional disasters and frequent maintenance issues made clear how much further we have to go. But halos none the less. Cro-Magnon wasn't going to get anything into space or faster than the speed of sound one time, let alone many times. We are each of us lucky to be alive during a time when we have the capability of doing such things.

With their retirement, we've lost a bit of the halo: America without a manned space flight program, humanity having mothballed its penultimate engineering accomplishments. We still do amazing things - the International Space Station and Boeing's Dreamliner are incredible feats of engineering in their own right. But they're not the STS and the SST.

As an adult, it's hard to come to grips with this moment of devolution in applied physics. It's harder still to explain it to a 9 year old, especially when some of the drivers for this particular devolution are human shortcomings of a different sort, such as profligate spending and inconsistent policies. But there it is.

We had the opportunity to watch Atlantis launch from the Kennedy Space Center to start the journey of STS-135. I hope my daughter is at the KSC to see the launch of the next generation of manned space exploration, whenever that is, to see humanity restore this particular halo.

Fun for who?

It's not uncommon for parents to ask their children "did you have fun?" after just about everything they do.

I wonder if we ask that so often because we're concerned our kids won't be engaged in something that they don't find entertaining, or because adult lives are so devoid of joy we need to experience it vicariously.

Sustainable Excellence

Young kids get signed up for a lot of different things - swimming, ice hockey, dance, soccer, music, choir & so on - all at the same time. If you can avoid over-programming, there is something to be said for variety of lacing up the skates one day, and sliding on the ballerina slippers the next. It helps a child find where their interest and skills lie. They learn the rules of different games, which makes them better spectators. And a lot of it is just plain fun.

But before long - and it seems like it starts a lot earlier in life now - a young person has to decide whether they're serious about something or not. There are travel teams but no house leagues for older kids. The work involved is more complex, which means more daily practice time and more time with coaches to develop skills. In a relatively short period of time, a little time commitment to several things becomes a big time commitment to just a few.

Of course, it's a highly competitive world: mechanical skills needs to develop much sooner and advance more rapidly. Or so we're told. But the fact is the vast majority of these kids ain't going on to professional careers in arts or athletics. Few are going to get scholarships, meaning most won't stick with any of this beyond high school. So if life expectancy is north of 70 years, why are we pushing them to specialize when they're little more than 10% through?

Cynically, I suspect no small amount of this has to do with the extra-curricular providers shaking out more revenue. The kids don't just take a music lesson, they join an orchestra and sign up for a music theory class. They don't just have a soccer practice and game, they have weekly clinics. Revenue per participant goes up, with only a minor uptick in the cost of selling, providing and collecting for these additional services. Take it to the bank, baby.

Now, there is a big difference between running round a pitch every Saturday and being a soccer player, or pulling a bow across some strings and being a violinist. It's important for a child to not only recognize the difference between good and great, but to appreciate what one must do to become great at something. But at a young age, they're only just beginning to learn what a commitment to excellence means. They're too young to make a life commitment to something. And it's pointless to take an outsized performance at a young age too seriously: how many people dominate a position in sport all through their lives?

Mechanical skills are important - poor execution leads to frustration or embarassment and will drive somebody away from wanting to do something. But sustainable excellence requires more than just skills: it takes timing, commitment, maturity, passion and joy. Helping a child find what they're passionate about, something from which they can derive great joy, puts them on a path of self-sustainable discovery. Does greater skill lead to greater joy? Probably not as much as joy motivates somebody to become more skilled.

A child for a while, a father forever

I'll be her father forever. She'll always be my daughter, but she'll be a child for only a few more years.

Happy birthday, kiddo.