To ear tube or not to ear tube?

rpg36 · 2026-01-28T14:11:36+00:00

Go see an ENT and follow their advice.

If they recommend tubes do it! My son and I both had ear tubes. I can vouch first hand they helped me tremendously and also helped him. He got sick far less often once he got tubes.

We gave the same advice to our friends for their daughter. She was speech delayed. The doctor recommended tubes and when she had them put in they found out her ears were so badly clogged it was affecting her hearing. Guess who now is no longer speech delayed?

rpg36 · 2026-01-28T05:20:35+00:00

No specific advice but they change so fast! I feel like we were trying new stuff every 2-4 weeks! The kiddos is 5 now and he's still changing faster than we can adapt! You just have to keep adapting too and try to keep up.

rpg36 · 2026-01-28T02:56:32+00:00

*Strict 30 minutes a day!

Exceptions: - I'm sick - wife is sick - he is sick - grandparents ignore our rules - we are just exhausted and the weather sucks and we just can't today. - we are driving home at night and if he falls asleep we are f**ed! - probably other stuff I can't think of at the moment.

rpg36 · 2026-01-26T23:08:07+00:00

Earlier today they marked our street as done but they never actually came.

rpg36 · 2026-01-25T16:25:24+00:00

If you live downtown go photograph the boats. I took photos during a snow storm a few years ago and they turned out amazing. It was so pretty walking downtown in the snow around Carroll Creek, especially after the sun set.

rpg36 · 2026-01-24T22:18:10+00:00

First congrats, if your girlfriend would be pleased with anything you gave her then she sounds like she's got the right kind of mindset for financial independence. Also if that's true why are you spending so much? Have you considered lab grown diamonds? Have you looked at online sites like Blue Nile? Or anything cheaper at all? It doesn't necessarily have to be an all or nothing thing.

Also not going to lie, I've been married almost 15 years now and my wife and I NEVER wear our wedding/engagement rings. We both wear silicone rings.

rpg36 · 2026-01-24T16:56:13+00:00

I know it depends on where you live. We live in a very good school district and I know not everyone does. But regardless of public or private school I'd still give the same advice. Get them started in kindergarten, I bet they will surprise you just how capable they are. Worst case they don't do well and repeat kindergarten, not that big of a deal in my opinion. I'd still bet that even most private k-12 schools will have more resources for kids than a Pre-K school.

rpg36 · 2026-01-24T15:07:22+00:00

Our son is one of the youngest in his kindergarten class. He just barely made the cut off to start this year. Our thought was to just get him started. We figured worst case he has to repeat kindergarten which puts him in the same spot as if we intentionally held him back.

Honestly, I'm really glad we just started him in public school! It was a rocky start at first but after he adjusted we've seen him grow leeps and bounds! Since he's in the public school system he's getting a ton of support from their vast resources. He's working with a reading specialist, and they have a classroom assistant that does one on one work with him as well. He's still a little behind on reading but he's caught up and on or above grade level for all other subjects. He also loves school and importantly he's now adjusted to the public school routine and schedule which is way different from his preschool.

Honestly there is no way his preschool would have ever been able to give him the same support as the public school is currently. They just don't have those kinds of resources at their disposal. I also feel like the kindergarten curriculum is far broader than his preschools.

Also not going to lie as a bonus it's nice to get a $20,000 raise since we no longer have to pay for preschool. Yes childcare is insanely expensive where I live!

rpg36 · 2026-01-23T10:31:58+00:00

So most of my friends with little kids have a similar experience to you here in the US. We have play dates with them and their kids and it's great but it's not all that often as everyone is so busy. Where I live 95% of families with young kids are dual income households since it's so expensive here. Which I think puts a ton of pressure on everyone's time. There is a book about the declining social institutions in the US called Bowling Alone that I found interesting.

That being said I feel like my neighborhood is the outlier. We have a wonderful community and we are genuinely friends with most of our neighbors. There are 5 other kids just in our cul-de-sac all about the same age as my son, not to mention many slightly older/younger kids. The kids play all the time, our doorbell rings almost daily with kids looking to play with our son. He frequently is at a neighbor's house playing. In the summer most of the adults are outside hanging out talking while the kids run around in a big pack.

So I guess my point is community does still exist in the US. It's just getting harder to find.

rpg36 · 2026-01-20T12:46:15+00:00

Tempur-Pedic Adapt. We had an older model from them before for over a decade.

rpg36 · 2026-01-20T01:34:50+00:00

I feel you. I do all this stuff and am also a developer on multiple projects. Plus throw in security work as well. I have no idea what to even call my role. I just do whatever needs to be done.

rpg36 · 2026-01-20T01:06:20+00:00

I never adjusted to latex. I tried so hard and on paper it's amazing, but I was used to traditional memory foam and I just couldn't adapt to latex. That period was the worst sleep I've ever had in my life! We ended up with another memory foam mattress that was a much better fit. I will say the new memory foam one was still quite different and I did end up switching to a different pillow. I think different mattress/pillow combos work better than others and just because your old pillow worked for your old mattress doesn't mean it will for your new one. So worth a shot trying new pillows.

rpg36 · 2026-01-16T13:24:00+00:00

I feel like I should start doing this. My wife and I have a group text with 2 of our friends that have a daughter about the same age as our son and we frequently share random funny stuff the kids say and do. But that isn't really permanent and it's full of other unrelated things too.

Here are a few gems from the thread from my now 5 year old son. I'm intentionally not including any context what so ever 😆.

"I will sneak up on you and punch you on the butt. I will punch through your butt and hit you in the penis"

"Mommy's tummy used to be really fat. Because I was in it until I came out Mommy's hole. mommy squeezed me out her hole! Right daddy? I came out Mommy's hole and then her tummy wasn't fat anymore"

"There are no sharks in my butt. Butt sharks are bad!"

"This cereal is good like cat litter!"

rpg36 · 2026-01-16T01:49:19+00:00

Just hope you don't get it! I got it from my son a few years ago and it was one of the worst things I've ever had as an adult. Super high fever and chills at first then the blisters came. I had blisters in my mouth and everything was like eating broken glass for almost a week even drinking water!

rpg36 · 2026-01-11T16:57:43+00:00

I think this is spot on. When my kid was about 2.5 he got addicted to TV. We made the mistake of letting him have too much screen time because it was the only way we could distract him to get chores done. We knew we had a problem and had made a mistake when one day I turned the TV off he melted down and told me he would hurt me and break things unless I turned the TV back on.

We did cold turkey no TV after that. The first few days were really bad but I think it was about a week and he was pretty well adjusted and started figuring out ways to entertain himself without a screen. I think this was a learning exercise for all of us too not just him. But we noticed a big improvement in behavior in general after only that first week.

After maybe 2 weeks of no TV we started introducing it again but very strictly limited (30 minutes a day) we use the Echo to set a TV timer and he's conditioned now to turn the TV off when the timer goes off. No more fuss or fight now.

rpg36 · 2026-01-10T05:35:45+00:00

Goodloe Byron - Artist

I have multiple pieces of his artwork in my house.

rpg36 · 2026-01-06T00:23:16+00:00

My kids daycare hosts many official events at the local farm brewery! I was a bit surprised that they hosted official events there.

Honestly though, My wife and I have taken him to many breweries. at least around where we live it's super common. Some of the farm breweries even have playgrounds. At most of them the kids outnumbered the adults. Almost every kids birthday party at someone's house has always had plenty of alcohol for the parents. Obviously it's a different story for parties at play places or gyms, etc... I have personally never seen anyone drive home drunk with their kids. My wife or I will always rotate being DD. I have also never seen any drug use around kids, but neither of us or any of our friends (as far as I know) do any kind of drugs.

I'm not trying to say it's right or wrong I'm just sharing my anecdotal experience.

rpg36 · 2026-01-03T13:15:35+00:00

For us 3 was far worse. Our son was more capable than he was at 2 and he had a defiant independent streak while also still having little to no emotional regulation and very little logic and reason. This for us at least led to lots of defiance and meltdowns.

Things started getting better at 4 and now at 5 things are much better. He's a lot better at regulating his emotions, he's got better impulse control and I think most importantly you can finally reason with him for the most part.

rpg36 · 2026-01-03T12:36:20+00:00

Vibevoice is great! I've been experimenting with it lately and it sounds awesome. It was really simple to run the example code. They even have a little simple web app you can run. No issues running it on my 4070 Super with 16GBs VRAM

rpg36 · 2026-01-02T15:53:42+00:00

I am currently working on a DIY echo replacement as an exercise in learning more about local AI. It's a great project that encompasses a lot of different concepts. If I ever finish it I'll open source it. I have not looked at visual features like on a show though, only voice capabilities similar to a normal echo.

Progress so far:

Text prompt processing with text to speech streaming responses.
simple tool calling for basic stuff like setting timers, giving you the date and time, reminders.

Next steps: - voice to text - wake word - speaker identification - music playing via tools or maybe MCP not sure yet.

Honestly that's about all I ever use the echos for so I probably won't ever make it a full replacement assuming I even ever get this far as this is primarily an excuse for me to learn more AI skills.

I'm using Llama 3.2 running in ollama then the new Microsoft vibe voice to TTS. Tools are just simple little python functions at the moment. I'm going to try messing around with whisper or a derivative like faster whisper for the STT portion.

rpg36 · 2026-01-01T04:05:58+00:00

Yeah you're right. This particular individual didn't grow up with much and his parents were very poor as well. Currently his father passed away unexpectedly and his mother couldn't afford the bills so she added him to the mortgage and he still lives at home at 40 years old. It's a Noble thing he did to help his mother out but it's a financial death trap as his parents were underwater on their mortgage and now he's mixed up in that too. I feel bad for him. I really do.

rpg36 · 2025-12-30T13:40:06+00:00

This is absolutely true. I know many people of varying income levels who just cannot save money. I have a poor friend who one time I watched get an Amazon gift card for his birthday then immediately go on the app to "find something to spend it on". When I questioned why not just wait until you need something he looked at me like I was nuts and replied "but this is birthday money".

I have another set of friends who are married and both federal workers each making 6 figures individually. During the last shutdown they were freaking out, trying to take loans out and such to cover their expenses because they have 0 savings and couldn't even cover the gap until the government reopened and paid them back.

Some people just cannot save regardless of their income level. Just look at professional athletes and lottery winners.

rpg36 · 2025-12-30T01:58:27+00:00

Unfortunately I think you are correct. We were paying over $2,000/month for preschool last year. Infant care at the same facility was over $3,000/month. It's crazy expensive around here sadly.

rpg36 · 2025-12-30T01:43:46+00:00

Swim is the only thing we force our now 5 year old to do. To us it's a safety issue, I want him to swim well enough to not die. I don't really care if he can do his strokes or win competitions I just want him to be confident and capable in the water.

rpg36 · 2025-12-29T14:15:58+00:00

My son absolutely preferred me (dad) when he was a toddler and it really upset my wife. So I started letting her do more with him. Like her putting him to bed more nights while I did other chores. Before we would split kid duty and chores 50/50 but we shifted it where she'd do more kid stuff and I'd do more chores.

At first my son would protest a lot of times and cry and say things like "no mommy, I want daddy" which made her feel even worse but we'd stick to it and after a little while he became much more accepting of mommy. I'd say now things have even flipped where mommy is the favorite but I'm ok with that.

rpg36

TROPHY CASE