Friday Thoughts - 12/15/2023

Here are my Thursday Thoughts, a short list of the most interesting things that I’ve read, heard, and/or watched over the past week.

Thursday Thoughts are back after a three month hiatus! I took time off from writing for my newborn daughter. So much change has happened since September that it’s hard to imagine. Sleep deprivation and loss of personal time are real challenges.

It’s been so long that I forgot to complete my workflow and upload the post through GitHub. So we have a Friday Thoughts this week!

tired dad by Stable Diffusion Dream Studio SDXL 1.0

What I Tried:

Match My Paint Color

Match My Paint Color is a simple but useful tool. It matches a paint color from one brand to the closest color in other brands.

I used it recently when I was too lazy to drive 30 minutes to Sherwin Williams. My leftover paint had gone bad and separated into solids and liquids. So, I matched my current trim color to a similar shade from Behr and picked it up at Home Depot. I couldn’t tell the difference after the paint had dried!

What I Read:

The Gardener and the Carpenter

This book is part parenting philosophy and part summary of recent developmental psychology studies. I enjoyed it wildly.

Alison Gopnik, a professor at UC Berkeley and grandmother, does a wonderful job weaving her studies with personal stories of her grandchildren. I enjoyed how she tackled the paradoxes of parenting. For example, children go from being totally dependent to totally independent.

The biggest takeaways for me lies in the title of the book. Parents should aim to be more like gardeners than carpenters. That is they should provide an environment for the children to grow like how a gardener prepares the gardening bed. But parents should avoid shaping their children in a particular way like a carpenter does with wood.

What My Friend Made:

KPopTeesStore

My friends recently created a store on Etsy selling Kpop t-shirts. I know almost nothing about the new wave of Kpop but these shirts look fresh. If you are into Kpop, please check them out!

Tags: #books #parenting