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Diapers & Coffee

“I’m feeding you Spider-Man. He’s crunchy.”

I quoted One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish during bedtime the other night: “Today is gone. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.”

V responded, “My book said, ‘Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.’ That was in my book.” It was her first “referenced acknowledged.” I’m so proud.

V and I were about to cross the street from one grocery store to another when we passed a driveway where there were some workers cutting some metal or something. It was loud and sparks were flying. They were a safe distance away, but as I looked away for a moment V tripped and reached up to me to pick her up. It took me a second to realize that the tears weren’t only in reaction to the fall but to what the workers were doing.

I carried her across the street, and as I opened the store door she asked, “Shall we hide from the little pieces of fire?”

Post by @splunsford
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Cameron Roth on Threads:

My 3 year old is throwing a tantrum in bed because “I forgot how to sleep”

My response:

Our 2-year-old’s new thing is “I can’t walk. My legs don’t work.”

Megan: “V, are you poopy?”

V: “No.”

I start checking her diaper.

V: “Daddy no check diaper.”

M: “What will Daddy find if he checks your diaper?”

V: “…poop.”

rebeccapurple

I came across this almost-nine-year-old post yesterday, linked to from an innocuous article about CSS color formats. It’s a response to the proposal that a named color be added to the CSS spec as a tribute to the writer’s daughter.

This morning that tab was still open, and I clicked through to the Rebecca category on his blog and started reading through the archive of posts he’s written in the years since. I fell apart almost immediately. I couldn’t help but see the face of my little girl as I read the words of another dad who’d lost his on her sixth birthday.

I can’t begin to imagine what it would feel like if something happened to my daughter—the unspeakable pain that Eric and Kathryn Meyer have lived through. It’s the pain foreshadowed by Hamilton and Burr singing “I’ll make the world safe and sound for you” to children they would each lose in their lifetimes (spoilers for American history). I hope Megan and I never have to live through that, but in a world where the unthinkable happens far too often, it’s a specter that’s never far enough away.


When I set up Diapers & Coffee I used a template as a starting point and just left the colors as they were, including whatever shade of purple it used for links on hover. It seemed appropriate—for this blog especially—to update my CSS and make it rebeccapurple.

Me, while brushing teeth: “Please put your tongue away so I can get to your teeth.”

Bird’s-eye-view of a track layout including 6 forks and an overpass, with V sitting in the middle, looking down at a train in her hands.

We just got an expansion set to add to our wooden train tracks collection—not because V was feeling a lack of train tracks, but because her dad, the engineer, was running out of layouts to build with the pieces we had.

“V, do you need to go potty?”

“No.”

“Well, you should probably try.”

“I sound like my dad.”

I got curly fries with lunch today. It was nice to get them without having to worry about a toddler wanting my fries and refusing to eat her own food—even if it’s something she’d really like if it weren’t competing with fries. I never used to have to worry about that.