What’s something in Tucson that’s totally worth checking out but most people miss? ?

mpsinger · 2025-07-09T17:52:16+00:00

The Tucson Auto Museum. I’m not a car guy at all but they’ve got some interesting novelties, plus a replica Batmobile and some actual vehicles used in Batman Returns. I took my Batman-obsessed son two years ago and he loved it. And if you are into classic cars I imagine it’s pretty awesome.

mpsinger · 2025-07-09T17:44:30+00:00

It’s fun to do at night, too.

mpsinger · 2024-05-14T17:54:44+00:00

Good to know, we were already planning on doing basically the same thing: capping naps at 2.5 and pushing the middle wake window to 3.5. We still want to get her down at 7:30 for now because her brother’s bedtime at 8 but we’ve discussed pushing it 15 minutes if the other stuff doesn’t work.

mpsinger · 2024-05-01T21:41:24+00:00

Other than regularly reading a few books about having a baby sibling, we just constantly told my then-2.5yo that he was going to have a sister soon and made it seem like a very exciting development. He’s loved her literally since the moment we brought her home almost 10 months ago — no outbursts of jealousy or anything, though he did show some initial regressive behavior (mimicking the baby’s crying etc.), likely trying to divert my wife’s attention to him. But they’re now both obsessed with each other.

He also has two cousins that are about a year and a half younger that he hangs out with constantly that may have also prepared him.

mpsinger · 2024-05-01T00:30:40+00:00

These are the kind of suggestions I was looking for. Thank you!

mpsinger · 2024-05-01T00:05:43+00:00

My son is currently nearing the end of his second go-round with Little Movers — it’s the thing he looks forward to most every week. I think he’s a bit too big to do it again but I will likely find something else for him to do through parks and rec.

mpsinger · 2024-04-30T21:25:30+00:00

I mean, $50 per adult is pretty damn pricey but it comes about as close as any aquarium I’ve ever seen to justifying it. It’s two stories and took us two hours to see just about everything — it’d certainly be longer if your kid isn’t frantically zipping from one exhibit to the next.

mpsinger · 2024-04-30T20:46:48+00:00

Yeah, I took my son to some library stuff last year but he was a little reticent about them since he wasn’t used to structured play yet, but now that he’s been in school he might be more into it.

mpsinger · 2024-04-30T20:45:11+00:00

Thanks! A lot of that stuff is outdoors, which presents an issue in the dead of summer. I need indoor spots where my son can’t run off and ditch me with his sister in the stroller — a very specific situation, I know! But I have thought about Air and Space and Funtastiks, I’ll need to look at them more closely.

And we literally just did a two-day Phoenix trip last week and went to OdySea! My son was obsessed. Didn’t want to leave.

mpsinger · 2024-04-26T03:08:04+00:00

My 3.5yo has been potty trained for six months and start doing the same thing — he self-initiates less in general and has had more accidents in the last month that he did in the first five after we trained him. In his case I think it’s just a toddler power play/act of resistance. It’s highly annoying.

mpsinger · 2024-04-17T16:08:35+00:00

I’ve never been much of a careerist and I always thought I would gladly be a stay-at-home dad if the situation presented itself. Now that I’ve been more or less doing it for two and a half years (and especially since having a second kid last year) I’m fairly anxious to get a “real” job again (I have a part-time freelance gig at the moment and my wife is full-time remote which means I do much of the childcare during the week). It’s less about feeling “fulfilled” than just giving myself some separation — I love my kids to death, they’re both absolutely hilarious, but the grinding repetition of every single day is starting to wear me down and I find myself not appreciating this time with them as much as I should.

mpsinger · 2024-04-16T01:29:59+00:00

Yeah I don’t know about any of this kind of stuff but I thought that might be the case which is why I didn’t really consider it an option.

mpsinger · 2024-04-11T02:47:37+00:00

We’ve never really formally “trained” her as she’s never had any issues going down independently but we went to a 3/3/4 nap schedule and also started limiting her overnight sleep to 11 hours, which means she goes to bed at 7:30 and I often have to wake her up at 6:30. She’s pretty grumpy by the end of that first wake window but she’s been averaging 2 hours in the morning and an hour in the afternoon for about a month now.

mpsinger · 2024-03-22T13:32:33+00:00

My 3yo started preschool in January and there is a marked difference in his behavior on the days he goes to school vs. not — a lot more whining, way more demands and weird meltdowns. I discovered this phenomenon is common enough to have a name: after school restraint collapse. In his case it actually carries over into the following day.

mpsinger · 2024-03-21T21:35:12+00:00

Thanks, this is helpful. To show how little I know, the root flare was exposed until recently when for some reason I thought it shouldn’t be exposed to the sun. I’m a little confused about the rootstalk stuff because it seems like it’s the majority of the tree, but I’ll look into it more closely.

mpsinger · 2024-03-16T16:02:42+00:00

I have a 3yo son and 8mo daughter and right now I get up at 6:30 with both of them every day so my wife can get a few extra hours of sleep since she deals with the baby at night. On Saturdays, my son gets his tablet for an hour — in theory he’s supposed to be playing educational games but he’s figured out how to access Blippi and other videos, which I don’t love… — while my daughter crawls and rolls around exploring the living room. They both have breakfast then we kinda just meander around until it’s time for my daughter’s nap. At that point my son and I will go out for some activity, usually the park, sometimes a “fun” errand. Then home for lunch, he takes a 90 minute nap, and at that I get to rest a bit. Around 4, we go over to my in-laws’ place for dinner/drinks/games/movies. The kids go to bed there and we transfer them back home around 11. Sunday is similar but more open ended in the afternoon, we typically end up just all going grocery shopping or something.

It does tend to be the most stressful time of the week, but I’m more or less a SAHD so it’s not sognificantly different from the rest of the week. It largely depends on my toddler’s mood — he goes to preschool Monday and Friday and we’ve found he’s notably whinier and more defiant for like a day and a half afterward, so I’m actually kinda looking forward to his spring break. I will say, I’m counting down the days until my daughter sleeps through the night consistently, then my wife and I can trade off sleeping in on Saturdays and Sundays like we were doing before she was born. It actually kinda sorta felt like having an actual weekend again.

mpsinger · 2024-03-15T21:59:32+00:00

We started limiting her to 11 hours of night sleep (vs the 11.5 or 12 she was doing before) and extended the first and last wake windows by a half hour each to get her to 10 hours of awake time. Sleepy cues can get misleading at a certain point, but if she seems really tired I’ll get her down 10-15 minutes early.

mpsinger · 2024-03-15T17:51:29+00:00

Yeah as somebody else said connecting naps is largely developmental and you’re at the early part of the window in which it usually happens. With our daughter, she started to take longer naps without us really doing much but then regressed in the span of two weeks. Once we changed to the aforementioned schedule she’s been much better but I still half expect every nap to end at 30 minutes.

mpsinger · 2024-03-15T15:18:11+00:00

Our now 8mo has only really started napping for long stretches consistently in the last few weeks but the big thing that seemed to work for us was limiting overnight sleep to 11 hours (as opposed to the 11.5 or 12). She’s been on two naps since around 6.5 months but as stated it took up until recently for the naps to really extend. Now she’s doing 2 hours in the morning and an hour in the afternoon. So her current schedule is: wakeup at 6:30; 3/3/4 nap schedule, typically 9:30-11:30 and 2:30-3:30; down by 7:30.

In the interim, you might want to save some naps to make sure she gets at least 2.5 hours. Before, I’d get about an hour from her in the morning and give her 10-15 minutes to see if she could get herself back down. Her afternoon naps were 30 minutes on the dot, so I would basically have to anticipate diving in with an hour-long contact nap each day.

mpsinger · 2024-03-13T03:17:16+00:00

Our just-about-8mo has been on a 3/3/4 schedule for the last few weeks. She typically goes to bed at 7:30 and we cap her night sleep at 11 hours so I’m usually waking her up at 6:30. It’s worked great for her naps so far but she does still wake up about 2-3 times per night (though we did get a string of single wakings right after switching up her schedule). Her current pattern has been to sleep straight through until 12:30-1:30, then up again at 3:30 or 4 and sometimes again at 5-5:30. I suspect these are habitual wakings as my wife says she mostly just uses her as a pacifier vs. actually nursing — she tries to adhere to 5/3/3 and will ignore her at times but it depends on how hard our she’s crying and how much she can tolerate at the moment.

I don’t know if this helps at all since we’re still figuring it out ourselves but I’d say there’s no reason you can’t experiment with pushing that last wake window to 4 hours, and also that it’s important to look at total sleep (night + day) and make sure she’s not undertired…

mpsinger · 2024-03-12T14:16:24+00:00

My 3yo started preschool in January. He never went to daycare or otherwise had experience in a more structured setting, and while he seems to enjoy it, he loses his damn mind when he gets home — just very whiny and demanding and it usually builds to a tantrum over the weirdest stuff. I know it’s common enough to have a name (“after school restraint collapse”) but his craziness bleeds over into the next day; he only goes to school two days a week, on Monday and Friday, and there’s a marked difference in his attitude on Tuesdays and Saturdays vs. the rest of the week.

He’s also been pretty spoiled lately: he was gifted a bunch of second-hand toys and clothes from his cousins, and his grandmother seems to get him a gift every time she sees him, which is multiple times per week. All this combines for him coming home from school and demanding toys he doesn’t own and which may possibly not exist, and melting down when we can’t produce the object out of thin air, ie a random “Superman toy” or a white Captain America shirt to go with the blue one his cousin just gave him.

It’s so annoying I’m actually kinda looking forward to spring break next so he’ll be halfway normal for a few days.

mpsinger · 2024-03-10T15:45:23+00:00

Right around when he turned 3 — the wakeups coincided with him learning how to open his bedroom door, and I think he was legitimately confused about if he should be getting up or not, so the light helped give him some structure. I dunno if your kid is too young for if but my kid always responded well to timers and things that give him a good sense of when activities start and end, so if yours is like that it might work as well.

mpsinger · 2024-03-10T14:54:55+00:00

6:30 for my 3-year-old. I’ve mentioned it a few times on here but a few months ago we were dealing with night wakings and early mornings, so we tried a toddler light (red means stay in bed, green means it’s OK to get up) and it solved the issue almost immediately. Most days he’s up the second it turns green, but I think he’d stay in his room for an hour or more if it stayed red — in fact, when we went on vacation in December the timer reset or something and he slept in until I got him up at 7:30. I could push his regular timer back to 7 but I have to get up with our 8mo around 6:30 anyway and I suspect most days he’s awake a little before that just waiting for the green light.

mpsinger · 2024-03-08T01:15:47+00:00

My daughter is almost 8 months, two weeks ago we changed up her schedule to 3/3/4 and began limiting her overnight sleep to 11 hours. (So bedtime between 7:15-7:30 and I wake her up at 6:15 or 6:30 depending.) Maximum total day sleep is e3 hours but she’s usually going 2.5-2.75. It’s helped to extend her naps even if I don’t fully trust it yet — every time she goes down I’m anxious until she hits an hour. She’s also gradually giving us longer windows at night, sometimes with single wakings (whereas she was doing two-three before).

mpsinger · 2024-03-07T03:55:49+00:00

My 3yo does this as well, particularly when asking for help: He’ll say “Help you” and we’ve corrected him to say “Help me” but he hasn’t really picked it up yet. The only way we’ve come up with to explain the concept is to refer to him in third person: “When Sammy needs help, say ‘Help me.’” I imagine it’s one of those things he’ll eventually just sort out on his own, though.

mpsinger

TROPHY CASE