Tag: dad

Dad Brog (#172): The Lego difficulty spike is real

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Growing up, among my favorite toys were Legos.  Frankly, that fandom hasn’t changed, considering the small collection of nostalgia Lego sets that I’ve purchased within the last few years that I’ll never actually put together but protect with fervor at the thought of not having them because it’s better to have and not need than to want and not be able to get and maybe one day when I have a nice big room of dedicated me-space, I’ll be able to set up a table and actually put these sets together but anyway.

Much to my delight, my children have grown to like Legos in their own right, and over the last two years or so, we’ve been occasionally putting Lego sets together and they get decent entertainment out of both the building as well as playing with the finished products.  Sure, they’re expensive as F these days as the cost of official Lego products have inflated as much as petroleum throughout the passage of time, and it is interesting to see the alternate yet compatible brands that are out there now, much as Tyco were the off-brand of my childhood that got mixed into the brick piles, but Mega Bloks and some cheap bootlegs from Daiso have been good ways to subsidize entertaining my children, and once disassembled, nobody has any clue and for the remainder of this post I will continue to refer to all bricks as simply Legos, much like the term for sodas have a generalized term.

Over the last few Lego projects with my kids, there’s always a finite amount of time in which the kids’ focus wavers and eventually breaks, and lately it’s typically gone from, let’s build together with dad to, distractions from the other kid making it hard to focus on continuing, to ultimately zero participation with dad is it finished yet?

What doesn’t help is the seemingly massive difficulty spike in build complexity with today’s general Lego sets, and it doesn’t seem nearly as basic as my own childhood, going from Duplos into set #6954 Blacktron: Renegade although perhaps that’s a bad example but I wanted to make that nostalgic deep cut.  But the point remains that there’s a pretty wide difficulty curve in Legos in general that seems to be a stark contrast to the gradual increase in builds from when I was growing up.

Like, in my elder child’s room, she has two bins full of Duplo blocks, and on almost a daily basis, she builds the most expansive castles and structures that she, and I are so proud of her imagination skills at creating such things.  But come downstairs, and we’ve got all the Lego kits we’ve been amassing over the last two years, and regardless of the suggested age written on each box, I just figure it’s more important to get them based on the concepts and properties that the kids like, seeing as how their dad is an adult Lego enthusiast with decades of experience putting these things together.

Except the thing is, and which is probably the chief reason why Legos are harder now than they were when I was a kid, is the fact that just about every Lego kit now has 400% more small and intricate pieces than the kits I grew up with.  I don’t know what terminology the  Lego community uses to describe Legos today, but for lack of a better term, the amount of pieces that are sized beneath 2×4 and even 2×2 peg pieces AKA a whole shitload of tiny pieces, is tremendous; creating scenarios where they get lost, easy to miss,* resulting in an increased probability of build failure.

*and easy to end up stepping on, which many know that nothing is a greater pain in the galaxy than barefoot stepping on Lego bricks

Furthermore, as impressively creative as lots of today’s Lego builds are nowadays, many end up with suspect connection points, weak joints and integrity ill-suited for elementary school aged kids who want to play and imagine and simulate, instead of dorky adult builders who want to build and display and not actually play with them.

All this being said, my kids and I will put together various Lego kits, only for them to be played with for 5-10 minutes, immediately forgotten until a corresponding kit is created, added to the world of completed kits, and maybe another 5-10 minutes of play is created.

In between play time, small components break off, go missing, mixed together, and it becomes impossible to put things back together.  Thankfully, I have the experienced wherewithal to not toss any instruction booklets in the rare event anyone actually wants to reassemble anything, but as we get more sets, and more sets get built and fall apart, inevitably things get to the point where they have to be fully disassembled, and all bricks get put into the dreaded Lego Bin, where everything is tossed into a communal tub in the name of space conservation.

And it was in the latest episode of dad waits until the kids are in bed to start breaking down idle and incomplete and broken up kits and putting them into The Lego Bin did I really realize just how intricate and full of small tiny pieces that today’s kits all seem to be comprised of, and how I feel like this really impacts the overall replay-ability of Legos in general, with kids probably favoring to get brand new kits instead of playing with communal piles of micro-parts, and writing that out, perhaps that’s the goal of Lego corporate to begin which makes those cocksuckers evil geniuses.

Either way, I’m glad my kids like building with Legos, but the shade of adulthood continues to look at things from my childhood in their modern incarnations with skepticism of accusatory greed and intentions to bilk consumers before providing a source of entertainment and happiness.

Plus I’m just getting tired of stepping on all these goddamn bricks, which isn’t so much Lego’s fault for scattering them on my floors, but at the same time it is, that they keep making sets that have nothing but 1×1 and 2×1 micro-bricks that are real easy for young children to misplace and end up scattered.

Dad Brog (#171): Someone made me breakfast for a change

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment
Toof fairy goin’ broke these days lately

For the first time in forever.  I guess years of passive remarks about how nobody ever makes me breakfast has sunk in to at least one member of my household, and my six-year old daughter took it upon herself to demand that she make me breakfast one morning.

And in spite of her grand aspirations, wanting to make something straight out of a Disney feast, I reminded her that often times the best food are the ones that are simple, use fewer components and are just made with love, and she took that to heart, when bringing all the things she wanted to use to a cutting board, separated from me since she wanted it to be a surprise.

It was Nutella spread on two end pieces of a loaf of bread, with blueberries in between.  The blueberries were not rinsed, giving me a moment of pause of concern, given the current news of listeria bacteria prevalent in today’s vegetables, and my child seems to have noticed that I’m the only one who ever really eats the heels of the bread, mostly on account of my staunch refusal to waste food. 

My breakfast sandwich was served with a few cubes of watermelon on the side, and a literal cherry on top.

It was the most delicious breakfast that I’ve ever had. :*)

Dad Brog (#170): year five of forever, the sequel

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today, my younger child turns five years old, and as is often the case, I wonder just where in the world has the time gone.  I can still remember the time before children where the biggest stresses and anxieties were planning a wedding after dealing with the increased responsibilities at work after a promotion after moving into a new house.

As cliched as it sounds, the last few years of parenthood have been a blur, probably amplified by the fact that I had two kids in short succession, and as much as it sounds like everything all one melded memory, I do remember most all of the individual details of everything that has transpired.

It’s funny because by default I usually just refer to my kids as a year apart, but there’s always this odd six month gap in between when my oldest has her birthday and the youngest is numerically two years apart, that always feels like an eternity where I have to mentally do the math that such is the case, and then #2’s birthday hits and it’s all like where has the time goneeee?

In any case, my youngest is now five, and back to being a year apart from her sister.  My beautiful, precious younger child, whom mythical wife likes to refer to being, the spicy child, her clone, her mini-me, in the sense that she tends to have adopted more of her personality traits contrary to my own, and quite the opposite of her sister whom many say is more like me, personality-wise.

Yes and no, because #2 does fiercely enjoy her independence, which isn’t to say that her mother, mythical wife does not, but there are aspects of her behavior when I see her meandering off on her own that I can see that reminds me of, myself.  As a second child myself, whether she or anyone wants to admit to it, there are always going to be some things that I really can relate to, that those who are not, won’t.

Like for example, mythical wife often accuses me of being harder on #2 than I am on #1, and I don’t entirely disagree, but it’s mostly because she’s more defiant and independent which often comes off as being obtuse and uncompliant to reasonable asks, and I apparently do not deal well with when my kids aren’t listening to me, especially when I’m asking for simple things.

Therein lies one of the constant struggles of parenting multiple kids, is constantly reminding one’s self that no two kids are ever going to be alike, and to be capable of being fluid enough to switch gears depending on the configuration of present children.

In spite of the very-white, all-rook-same-ing statement I occasionally get, asking if my kids are twins, in my eyes, my girls couldn’t possibly be any more different from one another.  They look nothing alike to me, especially since one has really curly hair while the other does not, and their personalities are also very different.

But regardless if my youngest occasionally gives me a harder time than my older child, I don’t love her any less than with every fiber of my being.  It’s the fact that she’s more like her mother in some personality facets that makes her perfect, and much like her mom, she might drive me crazy at times, but when the day is over and things settle down and get quiet, all I feel for her is love and the want for nothing but to be the best dad I can for her, even if I am wildly imperfect.

So from one second child to another, my spicy daughter, the wish for her to have the happiest of birthdays, and the want for her to know that she is loved, treasured, and most definitely cared for, and as long as I draw breath, I want little else other than for her to be happy and live a good life.

I love you, forever.

Dad Brog (#169): the future brogger

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My youngest’s birthday is coming up very soon, and we let her open a gift early, because boredom is the greatest opponent for all parents and the girls were driving us bananas over a lazy Sunday.  To the credit of my children, they love Legos as much as I did when I was a kid, and I really enjoy putting together kits with my own kids; except when they squabble and fight over who gets to do what, things start to get out of order, and ultimately one will start spite-stealing pieces and sabotaging the progress of the other.

I had to tell #1 to stop sandbagging her sister’s build, because this was a birthday gift for her, and that she did get to have priority over its build.  In response to this, #1 began moping that today is a bad day and that I am sad. 

Then she began stating that she was going to write in her diary that today was a bad day and that she was sad, and mythical wife and I were a little perplexed at where she learned the concept of diary keeping from in the first place.

Moments later, she wandered into the kitchen, and I could hear her get a sheet of paper, the pop of a lid coming off of a marker, and the sound of scribbling as if she were writing something down.  As much as her choice of words were being overly dramatic, I was proud to hear that she was sounding out words and clearly writing something instead of just scribbling the the doodles that manifest in her head, as much as I love every piece of art she draws.

A few minutes later, she brings the “diary” entry shown above to us, and it says:

Dear diary I had a bad day my sister did not share I am sad about that

Needless to say, mythical wife and I were quite amused at the excessive melodrama generated by our six-year old.  I mean she is half-Korean, and if there’s one thing Koreans are good at doing is, is being dramatic.

But naturally, my mind immediately went in the direction that this was basically the formative seed of what would eventually turn out to be future brogging.  It starts with marker on letter paper, eventually it will manifest into keyboard and monitor, and given the rapid advancement of technology, the tech of the future will probably just be able to read her thoughts and manifest words directly onto her future brog where hopefully she’ll have more than zero readers.

But it all starts somewhere. 

Even if it’s from a bad day that she is sad about.

Dad Brog (#168): an odd period of calm

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Even though it’s still summer break for mythical wife and kids, I’ve still been waking up at the same sequence of alarms used throughout the school year, with the first going off at a horrific time that leads with a 5.

Part of it has to do with still dealing with some lingering jetlag from returning from Asia; I’ve been hitting hard walls of fatigue at around 1 pm daily, and by 10 pm, I’m yawning uncontrollably, but I’m fighting it to one, keep myself on track for the kids’ nightly bathroom breaks, and to hopefully get back to my old bed habits.

But also because waking up at the ass-crack of dawn gives me a few hours in the morning of quiet peace; it’s not different from the time in which I regularly awoke during the school year, except now I don’t have to wake any kids up, so that time in which I had been making and serving breakfast for #1, taking a break to Duolingo before #2’s wake-up time, and then repeating with #2 before I headed off to work, I’ve just been keeping entirely to myself, doing my Duolingo with a morning cup of coffee, and then I’ve got this chunk of time of really nothing to do lately before I feel the need to start breakfast, and I’ve actually been utilizing it to do some writing over the last week or so.

Parenting has taught me that no routine lasts forever, and I should be grateful for this oddly un-parenting-like period of calm, and I’ve actually caught up with some of the topics I wanted to write about to where the only thing left to write about is the period of calm itself.

Even work has been uncharacteristically calm, also almost spookily, because my company has had a lot of turnover this fiscal year, and all of the internal clients in which my position supports went gangbusters on frontloading the year to where we’re almost at a point of doing nothing but pre-planning for 2027, barely at the halfway point in 2026.  Frankly, I don’t like how calm it is at the office, because I’ve witnessed more layoffs at this employer over the last two years than I did at six years at my prior, which makes me feel like we’re like a WWE/TKO ecosystem of employment instability, and my biggest daily anxiety is wondering if my name is ever going to show up on the bean-counters’ ledgers as being viewed as expendable and placed on the chopping block.

This is the world we live in, or at least I live in, where calm and quiet is met with paranoia and concern for the future.  What I wouldn’t give to be independently wealthy and to not have to worry about this kind of bullshit.

Next school year, both girls will be in elementary school, and will effectively be on the same schedule, which means instead of needing to be on dad-mode effectively twice a morning before I go to work, I’ll only have to do it once, and then I’ll suddenly have nothing to do until it’s time to go to work.

Going back to sleep isn’t an option, because to me, it just doesn’t seem like it’s enough time to let myself fall back asleep only to be jarred awake by another alarm, before needing to go through the trouble of waking back up again before heading into the office.  More realistically, I can see myself heading out to the office earlier, with the possibility of hitting the gym before general working hours begin because I anticipate it being calm and empty, but then that will remove the 60-75 min reprieve I give myself in the middle of the day to workout, which means I’ll ultimately net work more on a daily basis but this is about as first-world problem as they come.

Or, I can keep that time to give myself like a calm hour at home, and do basically what I’ve been doing this past week, and dick around on my phone and laptop in relative peace, possibly write, and then head to the office, closer to my usual routine.

Who really knows, although I think I already know how I’m going to treat the scenario when it arrives.  But the point remains that gaining any measure of peace, quiet and calm is always jarring and feels awkward, because parenting conditions me to be on edge and anticipating kid-related things at all times, so when things do get to actually slow down, it almost feels alien and wrong.

Dad Brog (#167): Father’s Day 2026

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Year five of forever

Full disclosure, this photograph was taken about a full month before Father’s Day.  This post is being written in advance, by nearly a full month before Father’s Day.  Seeing as how would be abroad on actual Father’s Day, I decided to knock this out a little early, so that it would not be looming over my head as a critical must-do, as my departure date drew nearer, so it was in my best interests to take it early, so I wouldn’t have to rush the photo taking, editing, printing, and writing out the corresponding post.

Plus it’s one of the few things I look forward to more than anything in the world, so why not treat myself for a change, especially with the cesspool of S+ difficulty I deal with in my everyday life generally.

Honestly, I still sometimes look at my kids and I can’t believe that I’m a dad.  My girls are six and four, so I’ve been a dad for a little while now, but sometimes it still feels surreal that I have contributed towards the creation of lives, and my offspring are already both going to be in elementary school together, start of the next school year.

Even when they were tiny little nuggets of babies, it was hard to fathom what the future would look like, and how these kids would eventually be walking and talking, going to school and having their brains metaphorically exploding with all the knowledge and experience they’d be coming into over the passage of time.

Now, we have conversations regularly, they’re always asking questions, and they can walk, talk, run, jump, and they love to play games and do puzzles and draw pictures and build with Legos.  As the current school year came to a close, both brought home little booklets that showed a glimpse of time lapse of their handwriting and their drawing acumen throughout the course of the school year, and it’s amazing to see just how much both of them had progressed.

They’ll always be my babies, but make no mistake, they’re two grown kids that have intelligence, personalities, capabilities and talents already.  And I still can’t believe that I had a hand in making them.

One thing I’ve noticed more recently is the fact that my girls have slowly been phasing out “dada” and been more frequently referring to me as just “dad.”  It hasn’t been a full-on swap just yet, and dada still comes out from them both, although more from #2 than #1, but it has not gone unnoticed by me that I’ve been hearing a lot more dad instead of dada.

The thing is, I never coached or deterred them from use of one name or the other, it has been happening completely organically to my knowledge.  But seeing as how both kids, their first words were dada, it unsurprisingly makes me feel a little melancholy to know that they’re gradually phasing it out of their go-to vernacular.

Continue reading “Dad Brog (#167): Father’s Day 2026” →

Dad Brog (#166): Back in mah’ day

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes as a treat, I take my kids to Waffle House for breakfast.  Or when I’m completely out of ideas of breakfasts for them, I throw my hands in the air and think F it, Waffle House.  Anyway, so I’m at Waffle House, my kids are going to down on a chocolate chip waffle, and out of the corner of my eye, I see a boy, probably somewhere between 11-13 years old.

He’s by himself, and he’s wearing a bicycle helmet.  A few minutes later, I see one of the very-Waffle House servers handing him a plastic to-go bag, that couldn’t have had more than a single person’s food in it, he takes it, walks out of the restaurant, hops onto an e-bike, and rode off, presumably going home or wherever.

Now before this gets too ‘back in my day’-ish, this wasn’t uncommon behavior for me, or any kids that age when we were that age, it’s just that most of the time, we were on foot, because most of our bicycles back then didn’t have adequate storage capabilities outside of dorky wicker baskets that sat at the front of your handles, and the fact that most restaurants weren’t nearly as reliant on take-out service as they are today.  Kids in the 11-13 age ranges back when I was there, were more than likely going to the nearest fast-food burger joint, and if they were taking anything to go, it was in a paper sack.

However, what this line of thinking grew curious about was the fact that the kid got on a e-bike, and after 3-4 pedals to get the bike starting, it was full-motor from there on, and before he could leave my sight, he was no longer pedaling.  E-bikes have basically become actual motorized forms of transportation for those under the age of 16 and legally unable to operate a four-wheel consumer-class vehicle.

I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing yet, but above all else, it is just one of those things that really paints the picture of how big the chasm is between kids of now, to when I was a kid, and especially to those in the generations that preceded my own.  Who knows, maybe having access and experienced with actual motorized vehicles that are expensive, and require maintenance will help build a better sense of ownership and responsibility in the kids of tomorrow.  Or, it’s the first step to heading down the path of Wall-E, where kids no longer have to walk, or even pedal their own bicycles anymore, and they’re destined to become fat immobile blobs of humanity after eating one too many Waffle House takeout meals.

Sometimes my sister and I lament about the differences of the generations, when comparing our kids to our own childhoods.  How kids today simply don’t know how to be bored and fend for themselves in a lot of applications, and how they have access to stuff like e-bikes, motorized scooters, apps to order takeout and services that can deliver all sorts of things same-day and immediately.

Much like our own predecessors lament, I suppose it’s kind of like a rite of passage for when every adult looks at the generation after them and opines, they don’t understand how good they have things.

Whenever I visit my brother, he takes me on bicycle rides, since that is something he’s grown quite passionate about since he moved to his current locale.  It’s something I always enjoy doing with him, and as the old adage goes, you really do never forget how to ride a bike.  But because he has more regular experience than I do, and for lack of an alternative, he lets me ride his e-bike while he takes his regular bicycle.

Shit weighs a ton, and is definitely not the typical bicycle that you dismount while it’s still in motion, leap off and let it come to a crashing halt on its side in the yard of the asshole neighbor, but it’s still a bicycle that anyone who’s ever ridden one can get the hang of in ten seconds.

Motor assistance is a really weird feeling at first, but I definitely see the appeal of it, and I liked having it available whenever I felt like I was really falling behind my brother, but for the most part, I was determined to pedal as often as I could.  I’d always get paranoid whenever the battery dropped from 94% to 93% and I’d be driven to try and pedal some juice back into the battery, but the point remains is that just because I had it, I didn’t really want to use it until I felt like I had to.

When I go on outdoor runs, I’ve been seeing clusters of mostly teens, now that especially school’s out down in Georgia, riding on either e-bikes or e-scooters; and the common denominator is that almost none of them are actually powering them with their legs, and just riding them around like personal vehicles.  I mean it’s cool that they’re able to get from point A to point B with less physical exertion, but not only is it eliminating any potential exercise for them, but it’s like that line from Cars: cars didn’t drive on it to make great time, they drove on it to have a great time.

Some of the best conversations I’ve had with childhood friends have often come on these leisurely, casual journeys, from one house to another, or the woods, the creek or the train tracks.

But before I wrap up this drivel, I’m curious about the people who take their motorized shit onto trails like the Silver Comet Trail, where I like to do my long-distance runs, when trying to accomplish the diminishing number of virtual runs that I sign up for.  It’s always an annoyance having to share with tryhard aggressive e-bikers, but it makes me wonder, if people motor their way for 25+ miles, do they really feel accomplished as those cyclists who actually pedaled the entire distance?

Not that I care, but that’s a curiosity that I wrap this up with.