It's National (fill-in-the-blank) Day!

G’day, friends! Summer is right around the corner and, as every kid will remind you, so is that ice cream truck. Now is the time to muster up the courage and ask your coworkers if you can move that recurring meeting at 4pm on Fridays to…any other time. Reclaim your summer Fridays!

Activity of the week

According to this Irish government-run website, Ireland is the first, and only, country in the world to have a national day of free creativity for children and young people under 18. The day is called Cruinniú na nÓg. (Please don’t ask how it’s pronounced.)

The inaugural Cruinniú na nÓg took place on June 23, 2018 and for the past number of years “young people and families have come together to enjoy, a wide range of creative activities including workshops and tutorials to recitals and readings in every city, town and village across the country.”

Using this recent Irish tradition as inspiration, this week’s activity is all about celebrating creativity by making up your own holiday with your kid. Let’s call it the “national fill-in-the-blank day” activity.

Step 1: Pick a theme or topic to celebrate with your kid. Themes or topics could include favorite foods, colors, books, clothes, characters, songs, etc. One example is “National Three Hats Day” or “National High Five Before Snacks Day”.

Step 2: Invent two or three easy-to-follow “traditions” for the day that celebrate the theme or topic. For the “National Three Hats Day” example, three simple traditions could be: 1) everyone makes one hat out of paper to wear that day, 2) everyone wears a hat inside out, and 3) everyone finds one thing that could be a hat for a finger.

Step 3: Pick one day to celebrate the holiday and put it on your calendar.

Step 4: Invite friends or family to celebrate the holiday with you. Tell them about the “traditions” of the holiday so they can celebrate with you.

Step 5: Celebrate the first of its kind holiday with friends and family!

If you’re feeling stuck when thinking of themes or traditions to create, just listen to the official music video for Cruinniú na nÓg 2024 that was released earlier this week. Surprising no one, these Irish kiddos go harder than they have any right to.

Book of the week

Speaking of hats…this week’s book of the week is Very Good Hats by Emma Straub.

Just like any Friday can be a summer Friday, anything can be a hat, if you want it to be. It just takes some imagination, or even a thinking cap, if you will 😁 Very Good Hats is a playful book that encourages its readers to see old things in new ways. After reading this book, you’ll start seeing hats everywhere. If you’re looking for a way to spur your kid’s creativity, this book will do just that.

Not for tots

Here are this week’s internet finds for the adults in the room. Happy rabbit holing!

  • How obscure is your taste in music? Log into Obscurify and connect your Spotify account to see how you rank against Spotify listeners around the world. Thanks to Obscurify, I now know I’m in the 77th percentile of music obscurity in the United States. What a relief to know I might have independent tastes of my own.

  • Did the last bullet require too much work? Maybe you don’t have a Spotify account. In either case, just jump in the digital car, turn on the radio, and pick a station from different cities around the world. You can drive through the streets of Beijing or speed past Lake Shore Drive in Chicago while listening to radio tunes like a local.

  • As an appetizer to the Kidult of the week section, take this elevator into space. No astronaut training required.

Kidult of the week

When you’re a toddler, you’re required to have at least one of five very specific passions: space, trucks, dress-up, dinosaurs, or exclusively eating fruit. Some passions follow you until you’re at an advanced age. For Edward Dwight, his early passion for space and space travel turned into a reality at the young age of 90 as he joined four other travelers on Blue Origin’s New Shepherd rocket launch on May 21st.

Edward Dwight, the man who six decades ago nearly became America's first Black astronaut, made his first trip into space at age 90 on Sunday.

That rocket launch was a long time coming for Edward. In the 1960s, Edward became America’s first Black astronaut candidate, but he was never selected for a mission. Between his selection in the 1960s and his trip with Blue Origin, Edward’s been busy.

Since retiring from the Air Force in the 1960s, Edward pursued his many other earth-bound callings. Once retired, Edward worked at I.B.M. as an engineer before deciding to open a barbecue restaurant in the Denver area. When that pursuit ran its course, Edward started a successful construction business since he enjoyed “built things with scrap metal." These career pivots ultimately led Edward to his current artistic practice as a renowned sculptor. To date, Edward has created over 129 sculptures and 18,000 gallery pieces. Those ventures kept Edward busy until he finally got his chance to see the full curvature of Earth last week.

So, what could possibly be next for this kidult? When interviewed about what’s on the horizon 🌎️, he said "I want to go into orbit. I want to go around the Earth and see the whole Earth. That's what I want to do now." It’s hard to imagine anything stopping Edward from doing just that.

Stat of the week

From their very inception, video games have often been viewed as negatively impacting the overall health of gamers, especially younger gamers. As more research is conducted with kids and teenagers who play video games, however, there is a large percentage of gamers who self-report positive impacts from having played video games (see chart above).

Moreover, select video game genres have provided teens a less stressful medium for self-expression. “From character customization to cosplay and content creation, video games have empowered gamers to explore, express and enhance their identity — nearly two thirds of gamers claim it’s easier to be themselves with a controller in their hands,” Fandom CMO Stephanie Fried said. (Variety)

Thinking about tomorrow, today

Between sleep training, potty training, stained furniture, and bouts of crying, it’s easy to forget that these are the good ol’ days. Before it all passes by, make it easy to remember what a normal day looked like before they grew up way too fast.

One day, when your kids are young, choose one random day when you are not planning anything special and take pictures from the moment you get up to the moment you go to sleep. Set an alarm to go off every 30-45 minutes that day and just take a picture of you, your kid, and your surroundings each time the alarm sounds.

Take a picture of your breakfast together in the kitchen, of you cleaning up the mess, of the bus stop or grocery trip, of the dog you always pet in your neighborhood, of the books you read your kid to sleep. Then email the pictures to yourself (or your kid’s email address if you’ve already made one) with a caption for each picture. You can make it into a book if you want.

So, years from now, when life has moved on, when you’re in a new town with a different routine, and when the kids are no longer kids, you can check that email you sent from that random day in your life years ago, that email from one of the good ol’ days.

Parenting-ish Headlines

We’ll google it for you

Did you google the word “mid” when reading the section above? Short for middling, anything mid is something that is low quality and generally mediocre. It is often used to insult someone or something as bad, boring, or inferior in some way, especially when other people regard that person or thing as excellent or high quality.

Translated to Millennial: mid = basic.

We all have a friend whose taste in partners is mid, but we don’t have the heart to tell them.

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