Tag: kids

Welp, I guess it’s time to really become an AEW fan

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The night before Thanksgiving, mythical wife and I were talking about how it might be nice for the girls to wake up and watch some of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade; they might be entertaining by the giant floats, maybe they’ll see some characters they recognize like Bluey or Pikachu, and the real motive from mythical wife was that HUNTR/X from K-Pop Demon Hunters was performing but the reality is that my kids love the film as well.  A cursory search showed that we could watch it on Peacock, which was good because we did have a Peacock login.

That is, until the following morning when I booted up the projector and opened up Peacock, there was the lock icon on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.  Seriously?  A paywall for this?

But then I noticed that pretty much everything else had the lock icon on it.  Feeling a sense of dread, I clicked on the WWE tab, and sure enough, all of the wrestling content that I pretty much use Peacock exclusively for, all locked.  I double-checked the login to make sure that I was still logged in, and we were.  I logged out and logged back in, and couldn’t even make it to the menus I was in previously, because I was met with the plan options, and it’s apparent that Peacock had kiboshed the free tier that I was on previously, and it quickly dawned on me that short of RAW on Netflix which has been more mediocre than Kentucky Fried Chicken, I was now incapable of watching any WWE programming.

Thankfully for the morning of Thanksgiving, I could find some free livestreams of the parade on YouTube, so the kids could still see floats and characters, but it definitely left a sour taste in my mouth and started churning some gears in writing out this post in my head.

When the WWE sold and TKO came into existence, yeah, they made a whole lot of shitty business decisions that really fucked over a lot of wrestling fans.  But most of all that shit seemed to pertain to the live experience and I’ve long since cared about live events, and said that as long as they don’t fuck with my viewing experience, I’d be okay.

But then the E sold all their premium live events to ESPN, which held them hostage behind a tier-2 paywall that I didn’t have access to, so now I couldn’t see any of the big shows anymore, which definitely sucks.  But Peacock still would get all of the NXT shows which I always thought were usually better in the first place, plus they still had an extensive library of original content, so I would make do with just using RAW to keep abreast on the product.

And now Peacock has turned full heel and restructured their tiers to ensure that people like me no longer had a means to access WWE and NXT content, so again, my only remaining means of watching WWE product is now solely Netflix, and RAW hasn’t really been particularly good since it debuted and Hulk Hogan was still alive and got booed the fuck out of Los Angeles.

So, like the subject of this post says, I guess it’s time to go full tryhard fan mode into AEW, seeing as how I can still access their product reliably between HBO Max, where they run both their television and PPV products.  Or perhaps I can log in through a tv provider and get the AMC app and see if they’ll allow me to watch TNA.  Shit, I have a Roku, I could feasibly get NWA Powerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr for free there too.

But fuck if I’m going to pay even more money for 2-3 different streaming platforms just to watch WWE.

As I’ve said multiple times, the streaming wars have gotten so out of hand, that we’re rapidly approaching the precipice where the ensuing result is going to be a company to emerge from the ashes, where they’ll consolidate ALL networks through a singular service, for a single price, but all programming will be supported by advertising. 

And it will be called . . . cable2.

Dad Brog (#158): I’m not ready for anything prefaced by “adult”

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m in the middle of one of those weekends where I’ve sparsely had any time for myself; even more so than usual.  The kids are still in this weird adjustment period of daylight savings as well as simply adapting to their general schedules, and this particular morning, they were up at 7 am, not long after I had gotten up to begin my day, and I was completely unprepared as far as having breakfast ready, but it didn’t matter that my kids were ready to begin their day.

Instead of a 60-90 minute quiet time reprieve in the middle of the day, this was a day in which there were two concurrent birthday parties happening at the same time, so mythical wife and I decided to divide and conquer and take each kid to a different party, in different parts of town.  I watched #2 plow through three slices of pizza, a ridiculously gargantuan slice of cake, and a bowl of dipping dots, all while playing a bunch of really shitty games at Chuck-E-Cheese where kids are lucky to get maybe 15 seconds of game time before the credits expire and I can’t imagine paying actual money for gaming time with such absurdly unfavorable math, and I felt fortunate to be on a timed party free-play.

Needless to say, with the kids down, instead of relaxing, I found myself playing catch-up on things that I didn’t get to do on a typical Saturday, which meant hopping on the treadmill to get some exercise, while simultaneously doing my daily Duolingo that I typically prefer to do early in the morning before everyone else is really up.  And then I decided to go run some errands while some stores were still open, all for the sake of not having to them during Sunday, when I would inevitably have to have a kid in tow while trying to do them, and by the time I’m sitting here it’s past ten, and I don’t feel like I have adequate time to really watch something from my endless list of crap that I want to watch, so I bring myself to sit here to write in my brog that nobody knows exists.

But hey, at least I got to go be on top of the drop of Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus, and watched the first two episodes on Friday night, and the show was as good as I would have hoped it would be, so that’s something remotely positive amidst feeling buried by life and looking out the metaphorical window of the world to see the United States completely at peace with itself forcibly starving its own citizens but this post wasn’t meant to be political as much as I just wanted to take that dig in lieu of making a dedicated post about how fucked America is.

However, getting to the point of this post, the biggest occurrence to happen over this weekend was undoubtedly the fact that #1 lost her first tooth, and I’m just not ready for this at all.  Because when it comes to teeth, most everyone knows that the vernacular for them are baby teeth, and when they fall out, they’re supplanted by your adult teeth, and I am so not fucking ready to hear the word “adult” at all, associated with my five-year old child.

It’s crazy, it was just like a few weeks ago in which #1 pointed out to mythical wife and I that she had a wiggly tooth, and we were both having the same reaction about how, wtf has all this time flown by to where our kid is now having her baby teeth starting to fall out.  A cursory internet search confirms that five is a fairly common age for the first teeth to begin falling out, and I have memories of my own childhood of when I had my first loose tooth, where my dad tied a piece of floss around it before yanking it out, and the vague memory of feeling like I’d been punched in the mouth, with a similar result of there being a lot of blood.

But as unfortunate as it was that I couldn’t be there when it happened, there wasn’t really much blood when #1’s first tooth came out.  I had literally just taken her to the dentist just says prior, and I saw the X-rays showing the adult teeth rapidly growing underneath and how to anticipate the first tooth to come out soon, and it was still a harrowing moment seeing those photographs of all these adult teeth starting to grow beneath the baby ones, and again I’m struggling to hear the word adult at all when it comes to my kid, because she’s still just five freaking years old.

Inevitably, like the Korean blood in her body demands, questions about the Tooth Fairy and the whole concept of getting money for teeth came up pretty immediately, and now I’ve got to start ponying up cash to put under her pillow and hope to not wake her along the way.  Plus there’s the whole question of just how much money to give for a tooth; when I was a kid, it was $2 a tooth, but my parents quashed the whole mythos of the Tooth Fairy real quick and just gave me cashmoney on the spot after an extraction.

It’s going to be a tricky next few years, given the fact that I have two kids of close age who will be inevitably be periodically dropping teef throughout the next 8-9 years, and me having to keep up with needing adequate cash to fund all these damn teef and keep up with inflation.

But heaven help me that there are anything at all in my little girls’ bodies that are considered adult, even if they’re pretty much right on schedule when it comes to the first teeth falling out.  They’re always going to be babies to me.

Daylight Savings blows, 2025 edition

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

At around 5:20 am, I heard #1 outside my bedroom door, panicking in the dark about how she couldn’t find her sister.  The fact that my child was out of her room in the pitch black of the morning was enough to get me to pop out of my bed, but upon hearing that my other child was allegedly missing immediately put me into a state of panic myself.

Worse off, for some reason there was a light on in my sunroom, which I knew wasn’t the case when I went to bed because I’m neurotic and always make sure all lights are off prior to going upstairs; I would later discover that there was a power surge during the night, and since that room’s lights are controlled via remote control, it light switch is usually in the on position permanently, and stuff like power surges or outages usually result in lights coming on upon reconnection.  However, I didn’t know this, and it immediately put the fear of god into me that #2 was in some sort of danger.

I walked #1 back into their (we let them sleep in the same room on weekends sometimes, on the unfolded futon) room to have her wait for me while I would investigate downstairs, but upon entering the room, there’s #2 snuggled up like a little taquito on the futon already, still sleeping.  Relieved, I set #1 back onto the futon as well, covered her, gave her a kiss on the head, reminded her that it was the middle of the night and hope she bought it, and implored her to go back to sleep; she didn’t need to know her circadian rhythm was correct at thinking it should be 6:20 am, when she’s normally up for school on weekdays, because obviously I really wanted to get some more fucking sleep.

Nope, by 5:30 am, I can hear activity on the baby monitor, both girls are now awake, and it’s only a matter of seconds before I hear doors opening and shutting, and #1 is marching back into my bedroom, with moments later, #2 freaking out in the darkness of the hallway, wondering where everyone is.  I bring them both into the master, and get them into our bed, in between mama and dada, hoping they might actually go the fuck back to sleep for a little bit longer.

Naturally, that doesn’t happen, and by 5:40, I give up, get out of bed, usher the kids downstairs, and concede that the day is now beginning.

The thing is, I actually had a tentative plan about this morning, because I figured there would be some monkey business with the time change, and the chances of me having breakfast ready for awakening kids wasn’t going to be high, which was that we were definitely, going to go to Waffle House because who doesn’t love Waffle House?

It’s just I was not anticipating them to be getting up within the 5 o’clock hour, but here we were.

It actually wasn’t that terrible, I got them dressed and we were at Waffle House by like 6:30 adjusted time, and I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that we were not the only customers there.  They were definitely the only kids there, and a part of me was hoping to have seen some other parents under similar circumstances having the same plan that I did, but alas, it was just me who was carting my kids out at this ungodly bullshit adjusted time.

But the point remains, daylight savings remains the antichrist, and it’s abundantly clear that the people in the BC years who came up with the idea were a bunch of selfish fucks who either did not have children, or had the privilege or were bad parents enough to not take into consideration the effects of the time change on parents who did have children.  And I hate them for all eternity and hope their descendants are wholly unimpressive pleebs who have nagging gastrointestinal issues.

I like to imagine that if the originators of daylight savings actually had any children, that they were obligated to actually care for, ranging from ages 0-7 years of age, they would think twice about the whole concept of rolling clocks back and fucking with their circadian rhythms and suddenly having to deal with them at ridiculously early AM hours, while people under most other circumstances would still be getting to sleep, regardless of what hour it actually was.

And as I’ve said before, I didn’t care much for it prior to children, but now that I do have kids, I fucking loathe it, and I like to think I’m pretty serious about sticking to my claim that I’d vote for absolutely anyone who prioritized the abolishment of this bullshit antiquated concept, including, those Somali pirates.

The complaining will likely happen yearly, until either this bullshit program is killed off, or my kids get to the age where they want to sleep in, and therefore my entire house can actually benefit from the rollback instead of bemoaning it.  Not going to bet on the former, though.

Dad Brog (#157): the shittiest morning possible

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Full disclosure, I don’t write this with any sort of anger or festering rage about the morning that I had, but more with astonishment that such a morning could have been had that I have no other option than to write about it, primarily to one day be able to recall this to embarrass the ever-living snot out of my child.

But long story short, one of my kids absolutely pooped all over themselves this morning while sleeping, and naturally it was me who discovered it, me who had to deal with it, and me who had to clean everything up.

For real though, I wasn’t mad about it at all, because something like this happening, the first question was, and should be, is everything okay?  The answer was quickly discovered to be yes, but it was rather a child who was too afraid of monsters in the dark to get out of bed to take care of their bowels, probably compounded on top of being in a state of deep sleep, and instead just soiled their bed and slept in it.

Regardless, given the fact that on any given morning, cleaning up a ton of poop isn’t typically a part of the routine, I had to pivot and quickly resign myself to the fact that the morning was going to be delayed, and that the recovery of my child was priority.  I took them into my walk-in shower to use the flexible showerhead to give them a nice warm cleansing, got them dressed and started with breakfast before I had to go back upstairs to really survey the damage and get to work.

White people, would be quick to declare the sheets and comforter a complete loss at this point, but me, not being white, and knowing that I can rescue these things on account of the fact that I’m not a pussy and afraid to get children’s poop on my hands, took the soiled sheets also into the walk-in shower and gave them some good scrubs, and pretty much salvaged them.  I still need to give them a through spin through the washing machine, but by the day’s end, they should be ready to be back on my kid’s bed as if there was no Armageddon in the first place.

I coached my child that they should never be afraid to call out for me on the monitor in the middle of the night if they have to go potty, and that under no circumstances will I ever be mad at them for waking me up in the middle of the night to take care of business.  Quite the contrary, I would be super stoked and happy, and I mimicked the groggy, but rejoiceful reaction I would give them should they ever take my up on the offer, and hopefully they will in the future to avoid such similar mornings.

But good lord almighty, what a nightmare scenario of a morning to encounter.  I still feel like I can smell it in my brain to this very moment.  Truly a literal, top-3 shittiest mornings of all-time in my parenting career; and honestly I’m hard pressed to even recall two other poop nightmare mornings to round out a top-3, which means this might really have been the shittiest morning of all time, by default.

I look forward to this post circling back eventually on my On This Day plug-in, so I can troll remind them of the bullshit they put me through when they were but literal babies when they’re older, so they can really appreciate the kind of dad that I’m trying to be.

Dad Brog (#156): I am a better parent than you

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

…at the park, at least.

With the weather getting nicer (read: not balls sticking to your leg hot anymore), I’ve really wanted to capitalize and let my kids play outside more, before it starts getting to be too chilly for outdoor play.  That said, usually on weekends where there’s really nothing on the agenda, I’ll take my kids to one of the numerous parks in my area where they can run around and play on a playground, burn some energy, and interact with other kids.

It’s not at all surprising, but it’s still a little disappointing for me to see, but whenever we go to most any park, it’s almost always the same scene; kids running around and being kids, and their parents usually posted up on a park bench, aimlessly looking at their phones.

Obviously I get it, and sometimes there’s little else I’d rather be doing than doing the same thing and indulging in mindless content and memes and games as opposed to having to be on in dad-mode as if I’m not already in dad-mode for the other 90% of my life when I’m not working.  And I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t occasionally look at my phone myself when at the park with my kids, or if I’m lucky enough to be there with another trusted adult, indulging a little bit myself.

However the thing is that my phone is absolutely not the primary thing I’m paying attention to while at the park at my kids, because my kids are what I’m paying the most attention to while at the park.  Making sure they stay safe, making sure they’re getting along well with other kids or each other, and making sure nobody else’s little shits are bullying my kids.  And of course, I’ll play with my kids as well, whether they want me to chase them and play tag, push them on swings, or if they want my assistance at doing some of the things that they’re apprehensive about, like monkey bars, rope bridges, or climbing higher things.

Not that any of my fellow parents who have resigned themselves to phone zombie status would even notice, but it’s like I kind of make a point to be more active, more present and more focused on my children, because even at 5 and 4 years old, I already feel like time has zipped by, my kids are enormous, and the next time I blink, they’ll be teenagers too cool to be with their parents, and will outwardly resent and hate everything I do despite remembering they still love me.  I love watching their faces when they come down a slide, or hearing their laughter when they’re playing with each other or other kids, because I know this isn’t forever.

And I’ll even indulge other parents’ kids, if they’re playing with mine, and I’m typically happy to engage them in tag, or push them on swings or see-saws or merry-go-rounds.  Occasionally I’ll look up to see if other parents are cool with such, only to see them face-buried in their phones, completely checked out and handed off, which I find to be kind of sad.

Yeah, this does make me feel like I have a right to say that I’m a better parent than those who don’t do close to what I do, and are completely at peace with handing their kids off to the park so they can get some phone time in.  Your kids will be grown in the blink of an eye too, and if you don’t have any memories of casually playing outside with your own kids, then that’s your regret to hold and lament about, not mine. 

I typically save my phone time to when we’re at home, and I’m letting my kids get some screen time in; this is usually the time in which I indulge in my phone, while they’re watching Little Einsteins or Superkitties for the 250th time.  But when I’m outside with my kids, it’s important to me to be vigilant and be active and be participating in the things that they’re doing, and yes I do judge all the other parents who don’t and feel bad for the disingenuous memories that they’ll have for the future where they won’t be able to remember the sheer jubilation or excitement on their kids’ faces when they’re having fun, because they didn’t see them.

It’s never too late to become better.

Shitty game alert for parents #2: Crazy 8’s by GamesHub

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know how my family came upon this game, but when my kids brought it out and asked if they could play, my knee-jerk reaction was, oh cool, this seems like a pretty age-appropriate game that my kids can probably get.  But after about 15 minutes and the game not ending, my mind started formulating this post, and pondering that if I really wanted to commit, I could probably create a lengthy series of questionable toys/games being made, for the kids of today.

The premise of Crazy 8’s is kind of like a really junior-fied version of Uno; the cards have colors and numbers, and the objective of the game is to empty out your hand before everyone else.  8’s act as the wild cards that the player who plays it can dictate what number or color comes next.  There is no calling for Uno, nor are their any malicious Draw Twos or Fours, but the way the game is, there may as well be Draw Twelve, due to the systemic flaws of this game in general.

In all fairness, it’s not really so much a shitty game as it is just poorly balanced and becomes a nigh impossible game to win under certain conditions, especially when playing against a five- and four-year-olds who want to try and bend the rules as soon as their attention span begins to wane.

Basically, there is an extremely disproportionate amount of yellow and greens versus all the other colors; 12 yellows, eight greens, four reds, blues, pinks and four eights.  The number 10 cards effectively add four yellows and blues due to them being two digits of different colors, but the point remains that there are way too many yellows and greens, and not enough of any other color.

As games progress, and everyone gets a gist of the rules, inevitably player 1 has no reds or pinks after another player 2 plays an 8 and asks for one of them, so player 1 keeps picking cards until they can find a red or a pink or an eight, but because there’s so few number of cards in general, player 2 or 3 is already sitting on all the reds and pinks, so player 1 ends up with a boatload of yellows or greens, and the game turns into this perpetual stalemate of changing up the colors with eights, nobody having the swapped color, and then another eight being played on top of it, and asking for a color that nobody else has.

My kids and I have played five games of this, two of which I won, #2 won once, and the other two my kids losing interest because they wouldn’t ever end.  My kids became wise enough to the game’s system to know that I probably had all the green cards, and every time I played an eight and declared the next card to be green, they’d just draw out enough cards to get another eight, and switch it back to pink, and then the cycle would just repeat until we realized it was a push.

Even expanding on the rules and trying to incorporate accessories like party hats or glasses as a variable to switch things up fell flat, because there just aren’t enough cards or variables to make it a viable expansion.

Either way, this is a game that has some potential, but the lowest of ceilings of quality before any players with brains basically break it due to critical systemic flaws.

So, shitty game alert it has, and I would advise all other parents not to spend any money on this, and even consider covertly regifting it if acquired as a gift.

Dad Brog (#155): the 2025 Famiry Disney Cruise

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m a day removed from having gotten off of the Disney Treasure, and hoo boy do I really feel my age these days.  For the first time in all of the cruises that I’ve done before, did I feel a little motion sick on a cruise before, but thankfully that was very short lived, and I was able to sleep it off and remain normal throughout the duration of the trip.  Driving back home all the way directly from Port Canaveral, I found my back hurting pretty badly to the point where I had to take some ibuprofen, thus making it the first time that I’ve needed painkillers, just to make a long distance drive, something I’ve done countless times in my life previously.

And unsurprising, the sea legs sensation of feeling boat rocking on solid land is hitting hard, and it’s mostly when I’m standing still or trying to remain as motionless as possible does the rocking sensation kick in, and I anticipate this will be the case for the next week or so, as it has been for me on previous cruises.

But anyway, big ass famiry trip in the bag, and do I have a lot of thoughts about it.  As curmudgeon as it may sound to say, I don’t necessarily refer to this entirely as a vacation, because the truth of the matter is that wrangling my two kids, on a boat, is still a colossal amount of effort that leads to a lot of aggravation at times, and I’d be lying if I didn’t get fried and pissed off at undesirable behaviors throughout the week long journey through the Caribbean on an egregiously overpriced boat.

#2 hijacked almost every single evening of the trip, mostly on account of fatigue and a lack of napping, but it usually amounted to her refusing to eat, behaving like a little shit at dinner, and then me needing to walk her out of the restaurants or carry her from point A to point B, and thusly being unable to really enjoy large chunks of time.  I don’t love her any less, but that’s about as succinct of a description of what happened throughout the course of this trip.

Oh, and I’m sure she’ll never live this down, she also barfed on the very literal center of the boat; in the grand hall of the main concourse, right at the center of the stage, where they had a photographer taking pictures of guests.  Immortalized, and definitely one of those stories that we as parents will always be able to recollect whenever we want to embarrass her in the future.

Still though, there’s little I won’t do for my kids and famiry, and despite the fact that I was probably burning out more than I was at any state remotely close to relaxation, there were still numerous pockets of happiness that makes it all worth it, and when the day is over, I want my kids to experience things and see things and visit places, and in those regards, it’s easy to say that the trip was a success. 

My children stepped foot onto the soil of other countries, experienced things that aren’t easily available to us elsewhere, and they got to experience a boatload of things that made them smile, rejoice or just be plain happy to see a bunch of Disney characters.  As a famiry, we went swimming with stingrays and sea stars, ate a ton of decadent foods, and enjoyed beaches, pools and a whole lot of fucking sunshine.

Some other observations about the trip were that this was apparently a tremendously busy cruise on account of two major factors:

  • It was the fall break for numerous school districts in the country, with a large quantity of them being from Georgia; I’m not even joking if I said that probably 2-3 fifths of the cruising populous were from Georgia, with quite a bunch of them being from my county specifically. The shore excursion we went on, our boat was literally over half from my exact zip code, as we were all on the same fall break.  Mythical wife even had one of her own students’ family assigned two tables away from us, so we saw them literally every single night.
  • This particular cruise was a Halloween at Seas cruise, which meant that there was a specific evening dedicated to Halloween, complete with characters all donning Halloween costumes, décor changing to be Halloween themed, and most importantly for the littles, trick or treating on the ship.

However, let’s stay on that latter bullet, because I feel like that was a big contributor to what I did not necessarily enjoy about my cruise experience as a whole.

Continue reading “Dad Brog (#155): the 2025 Famiry Disney Cruise” →