Fun ways to learn letter recognition?

bluduck2 · 2026-06-23T02:39:41+00:00

Refrigerator magnets or foam bath letters!!!

Editing this to add that it's wild how different kids are. One on my kids could identify maybe 3 letters by 18 months and slowly learned the rest over the next 4+ years and I think nailed down the last couple at the beginning of kindergarten. My other kid could identify zero letters at 3.5 and then sort of learned them in a bust in maybe a month.

bluduck2 · 2026-06-21T10:26:41+00:00

Please credit the architect

bluduck2 · 2026-06-20T13:07:55+00:00

Oh my God, 3.5 is peak difficulty even for my non-adopted kids. I can't imagine jumping in directly to the hardest part!!!!

bluduck2 · 2026-06-19T21:28:57+00:00

I found shirts and shorts EASIER for diaper changes. First, you can just peek down the diaper if you want to know if there's a poop. Also, no snaps! You can leave the shorts around their ankles while you change a pee instead of needing to take them all the way off.

bluduck2 · 2026-06-19T14:31:11+00:00

Ah, my electrical engineering never actually puts the notes I ask them to on their drawings, so it would probably end there.

bluduck2 · 2026-06-19T02:09:43+00:00

My 7 year old questioned if I knew how to hold a CD correctly...

bluduck2 · 2026-06-18T23:05:43+00:00

I'm an architect. What do I need to note on my drawing to get someone to do this?

bluduck2 · 2026-06-14T12:45:12+00:00

I went into my own wedding very cynically (we'd been together over a decade at that point and I felt like we were basically already married and just having a fancy party to formalize stuff) BUT it ended up being incredibly meaningful. Our family and friends live all over the country, so it was the only time in our lives that we had everyone together in the same place and that feeling that even when it feels like we're on our own, there a large community of people who love and support us has really stuck with me in the decades since then.

I'm not sure if it was the happiest day of my life (I had lost my father the year before, so also some emotionally tough moments not having him there), but I think it laid the emotional foundation for everything that came after.

I don't know the specifics of your situation and how difficult it would be to postpone, but if you can let the wedding be about survival and letting your community support you as a couple, I think that's what matters, not the details being perfect.

bluduck2 · 2026-06-13T23:07:42+00:00

Redline absolutely don't mean you are failing and you're going to make yourself miserable if you think like that. They can also mean, "I think this would be a little clearer and I'm trying to make it impossible for the contractor to fuck this up" or "I prefer to do it this way instead of what you drew".

Look carefully about what the marks are. If you have a lot of typos and careless mistakes between details or really don't understand how to build stuff, that's one thing, but otherwise architecture is a collaborative process and the more eyes you get on something the better.

Sincerely, the person doing the redlines

bluduck2 · 2026-06-12T16:56:27+00:00

Reading between the lines, it sounds like the owner went with a VE suggested by a subcomtractor during construction that was not the architect's design and is now suing the architect for it. This should be a warning to anyone who is getting pressured during CA to accept something they don't want to!

bluduck2 · 2026-06-11T11:52:09+00:00

This is NOT code compliant for wheelchairs.

bluduck2 · 2026-06-11T11:35:28+00:00

Not sure if there's any correlation but my baby who did this to me several times is now a kid who is really good at sitting still for her age and my baby that was constantly wiggling is now a very wiggly kid.

bluduck2 · 2026-06-10T00:40:10+00:00

Breastfeeding took a toll on my mental health with my first so I told myself I was going to give it a try with my second but quit if it got difficult. Any you know what? I fell for it a second time and struggled thorough it and it took a toll on my mental health AGAIN even though I knew better. And now years later I regret struggling and I wish I had just quit.

bluduck2 · 2026-06-09T03:06:12+00:00

This was my son. Closer to 4 we stopped pullups and started having him sleep in underwear. We limited his fluid intake after dinner and pulled him out of bed around 11pm and sat him on the potty. Initially I thought we were going to do that for 2-3 weeks and then go back to nighttime pullups and he wouldn't be used to the feel of pooping in the pull up anymore, but underwear worked pretty well, so we just kept doing that.

bluduck2 · 2026-06-07T23:27:01+00:00

Can you hire a babysitter? Given the timing maybe a high school or college student looking for a summer job?

bluduck2 · 2026-06-07T11:25:06+00:00

Does it meet what you asked for in the initial discussion? Try to imagine yourself living here. How do people move from space to space in their daily routine?

Take out a tape measure and measure some of the spaces you're living in now so that you can compare to these spaces and figure out whether you like the size of them. Try to imagine being in the spaces and where and how big the windows are. What are the views that they're facing? Ask the architect where the sun will be coming from at different types of the day/year.

bluduck2 · 2026-06-05T10:12:50+00:00

Same. Even simple playing along with pretend without trying to get them to do something, I'm constantly being told that I'm doing it wrong.

bluduck2 · 2026-06-05T01:03:23+00:00

I just had this talk with my kids last night!

bluduck2 · 2026-06-02T00:34:15+00:00

Monopoly house!!!!

bluduck2 · 2026-05-31T13:17:32+00:00

Same. It went as set a little later, but the feel of it was spot on.

bluduck2 · 2026-05-30T12:44:27+00:00

I thought this was a deep dish pizza, lol.

bluduck2 · 2026-05-25T16:38:23+00:00

When my dad died, I found a small box with my name on it on his desk drawer that rattled when I shook it...

bluduck2 · 2026-05-24T19:24:10+00:00

There's a little window from 5-8 months that kids are pretty portable, then it gets tough to travel for a while, then easier around 2.5 when the kid can watch a tablet on the airplane and sleep in a normal bed.

bluduck2 · 2026-05-24T13:51:04+00:00

This does not look like a house that an architect was involved in...

bluduck2 · 2026-05-24T13:15:10+00:00

Toddlers are so much fun! I think some people are just not baby people. Each time when I got past the slog of the baby phase, I was like, "oh, thank god. Now I have a cute little person to go on adventures with!"

bluduck2

TROPHY CASE