He has the bluetooth speakers so we can hear his AH-SWOME (that’s right, ah-swome) EDM mix AND his fitness app reminders to start a new set.

Oh! OH! LET ME PLAY THIS GAME!

I know I’m pushing 40 with a five-year-old, but it’s always so jarring when I see “A look back, twenty years later” about pieces of my early adulthood. It’s even worse when it’s commemorating something’s 25th anniversary. I’m looking at you, Pearl Jam’s Ten.

I’m also a nasal mask side sleeper.

My inner gym bro is muttering about how that’s not enough protein, but my inner gym bro would live off of mainlined whey powder shakes and salmon sashimi if I’d let him.

I would also like to be asked about spaceflight!

Move over Roy and Silo.

So much better. The early years sucked, and she will never be a big sister, but she is my world. She’s brilliant and funny and engaged with her world. We’re great.

I still have nightmares about the conference I had after my then two-year-old failed her first active shooter drill. They hid in a closet and closed the door, and she freaked out and began screaming.

Mr. Atom comes home with the occasional old dude genitalia story. The best was when two old guys were examining the (“elephantine!”) balls of a third guy trying to decide if his huge testicles were full of cancer or just because he was a bad ass.

Kid Electron insists on a Moana sing-along on the ride to school every morning. I’m still not sick of it.

I bowed out of talking to younger activisits when I was lectured for using the word “hammock,” because it’s appropriative and people of European descent should never, EVER use it, because it came out of cultural genocide.

AMEN.

Mr. Atom thinks I’m kidding when I say Kid Electron’s getting an IUD at the onset of puberty.

Girls in my class had babies from the summer before eighth grade onward. And now I’m finding out that one of the grandbabies — and mind you, we haven’t hit forty yet — is going to be Kid Electron’s classmate in kindergarten. Her grandma, one of the girls who tormented me in middle school, is so mad that she has to…

Read book five and get back to me.

The Expanse is wall-to-wall POC. Well, the novels are. I cannot vouch for the SyFy adaptation.

Dear god, I’d pay good money to sit next to Tiffany on a cross country flight and listen to her trash her dad.

I’ve seen it happen, though it was at least 25 years ago. Neighboring gate, some guy was a dick to a United gate agent, so she called preboarding, first class, and rows. When she got to his, she called out “Row 12 through 19 and Row 20 seats A, B, D, E, and F.” Made the guy wait until she had gone through all of the…

That only works until they’re tossed into a school environment with kids whose parents don’t follow that philosophy, which is how Kid Electron learned about Peppa Pig and Shopkins.