Like Father, Like Daughter

Confession time: I sucked my thumb when I was a kid.

Nothing alarming about that. Lots of kids do.

I had a blankie that went everywhere with me, and held it in my hand when I was sucking my thumb, rubbing the corner on my upper lip.

A bit more odd, but still okay.

I stopped when I was around 12.

Yeah... That's unusual.

Ada hasn't gotten attached to any of her blankies yet, but recently, very recently, she's started falling asleep with her thumb in her mouth. It's very cute.

That's my daughter.

 

Bonding

It's Remembrance Day in Canada, so I have the day off. I thought I'd get to catch up on some posts, but I'm having a bit of writers block. I actually wrote the previous post yesterday, but wanted to wait until today to get some nice, bright, natural light photos of the Quantum board and components to include. That's my excuse for missing a day, and I'm going to stand by it.

Ada is asleep in her crib in the bedroom, and has been for a while now. I think it helped that I got up early and got her up too. I woke at 7am, which is my usual midweek wake-up time, but rolled over and napped a while longer before getting up and changing Ada and keeping her up. This is actually a great time for her to be asleep. As I write this, it's 11:45am, and in my experience, that's when the babies in daycare sleep too, so ideally, I'd like her to get into a similar routine.

Saturdays are when I get to spend the most time with Ada. We get up early in the morning, shower, diaper change, and a bit of breakfast before heading out the door. We meet up with a friend and his son on the corner and all head over to the local Family Place center together.

Family Place on a Saturday morning is specifically for fathers and their young kids. The center runs six days a week, but the week days are filled with mothers or caregivers. It's great to be able to have Ada around other children, and chat to the other dads. We haven't missed a week since it started up again in October, and look forward to going every week.

When Family Place wraps up at 11:30, Ada and I head home with a trip into the toy store on the way. By now, Ada is usually asleep, so we get home, and I leave her in her carseat, carry it up stairs, and plonk her down on the bed until she comes around.

The rest of the day is sometimes going shopping in downtown, sometimes playing at home, sometimes watching YouTube, and sometimes having friends over to hang out and chill.

Evening is dinner, relaxing, more playtime and giggles before bedtime.

I cherish my time with Ada at this age. I miss her and Claire a lot during the week at work, and while the evenings are great, they're also short, and I'm often wrecked tired. She's growing up so fast, more every day.

These moments are precious and fleeting. It's hard to think I might miss anything. But I'll try not too. It's the least I can do.

Addendum: This post was started on Wednesday morning, but didn't finish until Thursday night. Somee of the earlier times mentioned have no relation to when I actually posted it, despite high hopes at the time.

 

Quantum

For every board game that gets a massive print run, tonnes of hype and a huge release only to be utterly forgotten about twelve months later, there must be dozens of other games that are more worthy of your attention that the publisher can only afford a small print run, gets no fanfare on its launch, but has a rabid fanbase in the following months and years.

First released in 2013, Quantum is by designer Eric Zimmerman and published by FunForge. I first heard about it shortly after it's original release, as loads of people were talking about it online but, honestly, it didn't look interesting to me.

Quantum is a space game with six-sided dice representing your ships. The objective of the game is to colonise a number of planets by flying ships to a planet and dropping a tiny cube on it bringing you one step closer to galactic domination. You can only have one cube of your colour on any planet, so you're forced to travel outwards and get into territory disputes with other players.

It all sounds very dry and unexciting, especially without cool miniature ships to look at while you're playing. But it isn't. It's incredibly tight, exciting and fast, and every game I've played so far has ended with a wicked cool maneuver by the winning player as the final action.

Each die represents a different ship that can be any one of six class of vessel at any time. But that number also tells you its movement value, and even more, it's attack value. In Quantum, lower combat total wins fights, and combat is decided by rolling an attack dice and adding your attacking ship value, comparing that to the defenders defence roll added to her defending ship value. So the slow moving Battlestation represented by the One pip is the best at combat, while the zippy Scout on Six is terrible if it gets in a fight.

Quantum is all about strategy, but at a fun and easy to grasp level. I was never good at strategy games, either in board or video games. I usually got overwhelmed by options and never felt competent, especially in games against other players. But Quantum is so clean, I never felt that lost. Plus, it feels great when the newest player at the table wins because they just quietly sneak a cool victory while the others are attacking each other.

The new edition has beautiful frosted dice that feel great in you hand, and vibrant tiny colony cubes that look far too edible to be safe. The tiles are made of chunky card, the player boards are clean and well laid out, and the rule book is... well, one of my friends asked if he should be wearing gloves while holding it, it was so nice to feel. The pages aren't cardstock, but they are thicker and nicer than just plain paper.

If I have one complaint, it's that they could have included the single tile expansion in this edition. The Void is a tile with no planet, just nine spaces to move through. It's got rules for gaining Research quickly. It was released as a promo card for conventions and events, but then sold on BoardGameGeek.com. It would have been nice to include the tile, rules, and suggested layouts for using it in the new edition of the game, especially as there is plenty of room to include one more tile. As it is, I got the tile through BGG for $6 including shipping, but even then, it didn't include suggested maps, just the tile in an envelope. I posted an image of the information card that originally came with the tile here, just for future reference.

But, honestly, that's hardly a complaint. Quantum is fantastic fun, and I'm delighted to include it in my collection. It's so simple to teach it makes a great, slightly more meaty, introduction to board games for relatively new gamers, while still complex and deeply engaging for more experienced players. I have yet to win a game myself, even when teaching it to an entire new-to-the-game group, but I love every game I've played, and I've never feflt completely outclassed. Highly recommended if you're looking for something with strategy and depth, without the complexity of a miniatures wargame.

Mini Games

I've been enjoying playing a couple of cerebral puzzle games on my tablet recently, mostly on my way to or from work on the bus.

I grabbed a cool shadow manipulation game called Shadowmatic, which I played a lot of until I got completely stumped. It was frustrating when I could see the shape I was supposed to make, but just hadn't twisted the objects to just the right degree. Still loads of fun, and absolutely beautiful to look at.

Rop is another puzzle game about positioning nodes and attached ropes to create set shapes. It starts off very easy, but gets difficult after a while. Or, it did for me. Claire is more spacially aware than me, and cruised through the whole thing.

And finally, the madness that is AlphaBear. This is a game where you're given a bunch of letters and you have to form words out of them, sometimes under a time limit, building bears as you go along. It's cute, fast and I'm terrible at spelling. It's free to play, with some microtransactions, but so far, all that has meant is that I'm forced to play in small bursts and let my credits recharge over time, which actually suits me well.

These make up the vast, vast majority of my gaming recently. Perfect in short bursts, or in one hand while entertaining a baby with the other.

7 Days

So far, so good. Technically, I missed Friday, but posted double on Saturday. I had a long day at work and wanted to spend the evening with my wonderful daughter and wife.

Also, my blog's clock is set to Irish time still. I haven't had the heart to change it, so some posts appear to be from the day after I actually post them according to Vancouver time. I'm only going to really worry about this on November 30th, when I'll make sure the post goes up on that date according to the clock to keep everything together in November.

Friday evening was also spent watching The Fast and The Furious, which was... Interesting. Claire knew nothing about it, so she was confused and mystified for most of the feature. I enjoyed it, but spent a bunch of it playing AlphaBear on my iPad, and just looking up during the racing and action scenes. I think I got all the best parts.

This coming week is going to be busy as well, as I'm working long days every day, apart from Wednesday, which is Rememberance Day here, and a public holiday. It'll be an interesting challenge to maintain some level of posting, even if it is short and rambling, like this one!

Baby Tipping Part One

Everyone has their own tips and tricks and suggestions for you when you have, or are about to have, a baby, and they're more than happy to share them. Here's a few things I've learned since becoming a father.

Nothing anyone tells you will be exactly what you need for your baby, my own tips included. What you need to do is take all those things and find what you can use from them. Adapt them to your baby, because they may be just a few days old, but they'll have their own personality and desires, and they'll make them known to you somehow!

Feeding time can be a restful, peaceful time with mummy and baby, a moment of intimate bonding. Unfortunately, it also involves a lot of moments of vomitting. As most parents know, babies spit up. A lot. What we certainly did not know is that it is totally normal for babies to have one big spit-up every day. And in my experience, I mean big! For the first few months, Ada had instances when she has spit-up far more than I could believe a tiny tummy can hold. When it happens, don't panic. It's frightening, but it's normal. Remember, as long as your baby is peeing and pooping, they're doing fine when it comes to feeding.

And even if your baby isn't pooping, they're probably still okay! Ada could go five or six days without a single bowel movement, and I got so worried I askedd our GP during one of our visits. She assured me it was okay and told me that I should start worrying around the ten or eleven day mark. That's strange to me, because in my experience working in infant daycare programs, babies poop a lot.

 

Oh, one more thing about baby poop (If you're not a parent, or soon-to-be parent, you're already horrified, so why stop now?). If your baby is breast fed, it doesn't smell when they're young. Beast milk only has what baby bodies need, so very little waste is created, so nothing to make it smell bad! As you start adding solids into their diet from around 6 months, it can start to smell, but even then, until they're mostly eating solids, it's not as bad as you expect it to be.

Babies are amazing, and there's so much I've learned from Ada already, even after studying this stuff for three years, and working with them for much longer. Part Two coming soon.

Related
Baby Tipping Part Two (Soon)

First

I first trained in basic first aid when I was, I dunno, 16, 17? Subsequently, I spent nine years as a lifeguard, continuing my training and increasing my knowledge of first aid, right up to holding an Occupational First Aid certificate for quite a while. I've held some form of first aid qualification continuosly for about twenty years now.

But in all that time, I never really made use of it. I mean, I patched up scratches and bruises, of course, and once, I had to help someone that scalded their arm with a steam burn, putting water directly onto hot coals. Nothing serious. I've never administered CPR, or had to use an AED in real life. I've never even had to help someone choking.

Until very, very recently.

We had already fed Ada her dinner, but I was eating mine a bit later than her. Usually, we all eat together, but it just didn't work out that evening. Ada eats while sitting in her own chair at the table, so that she gets used to sitting and eating a meaal toggether with us. However, she was finished her meal, so I just sat her on my lap while I was eating, giving her little bits of my meal to try.

Ada only recently started eating solid foods, and has tried a bunch of things, including rice, avocado, chicken, pork, egg, peas and carrots, among a lot of others. The one big dislike so far, in fact, the only dislike so far, is crabmeat from a California roll. Her whole body shudders and she spits it out every time.

I had given her a little chicken, and there was a soft chunk of, I think, pineapple. It was well cooked and very soft and squishy. I picked it up and popped it in her mouth. She chewed on it thoughtfully, and looked up at me. I watched her experience the flavours like only an infant can and went back to eating my own dinner.

Claire asked me something.

I turned away to answer her.

A wheeze. Ada was suddenly waving her arms. I looked down at her and she had a look of panic on her face. Her arms were flapping, and she was making a quiet coughing sound, tears were in her eyes and she was just staring at me.

I picked her up, turned her over, my right hand holding her chin, her body lying along my right arm, her bum higher than her head and gave one slap on the back. She immediately started crying loudly.

I flipped her back around and gave her a big hug. Claire took her and held her close, and within a minute she was calm and happy.

At no point did either of us panic. I don't think my heartrate even changed until after the fact. It certainly helped that I could hear Ada coughing, so I knew that it wasn't a total blockage. It helped that she as already in my arms, not strapped into her highchair. It helped that I knew axactly what was in her mouth moments before, how small and soft it was.

First Aid is an important skill that everyone should have. I honestly think it should be a subject in school, a skill taught to every child, even if just on a basic level.

Almost twenty years of having it and not needing it, but I'm really glad I had it that one moment I did need it.