Recently, my son had a small day surgery at Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Corpus Christi. It wasn’t anything major, and the next day, he acted like it never even happened. While we were there, though, I noticed that their logo included a balloon – just like I’ve seen in so many other logos for children’s…
I have a constant internal battle about my Apple Watch. On the one hand (no pun intended), it’s incredibly helpful to be able to look at my wrist and see the date, the time, the weather, and progress on my personal fitness goals for the day. On the other hand, I don’t always need notifications…
My son and I often build things with his Magna-tiles , and I love to watch as he catches on to what parts are essential to ensure our creation stays standing after we let it go. Recently, I was thinking about some downtown redesign conversations we had when I was the City Manager in Commerce,…
In a recent post, we talked about the marble run that my son and I love to play together. There are so many fun varieties of this game. The one my son has is fairly straightforward, but some have magnetic connections or some are designed for much younger children . Depending on your goal, there…
Not every book in The Reading List will be a non-fiction self-help book. Those aren’t in our high school English classes because the stories contained in fictional literature can often teach us just as much or sometimes more than those non-fiction manuals. One great example is To Kill a Mockingbird, a book that is not without…
My son loves video games, but we regularly need to take breaks from the screen and play something else. He has a mountain of toys, but one of his favorite things to play with is his marble run. It’s also one of my favorite things to play with him. I don’t have the mind of…
After the last day of school this year, I planned to take my son on his first camping trip beyond the backyard. We went to Brazos Bend State Park, and we had a great time. I was thrilled to finally make use of the Coleman Evanston 6-person tent with Screened-In Porch that I bought on…
When I was younger, one of the popular Christmas gifts from family members was always the multi-tool. You know that thing that looks like a pair of pliers had a kid with a Swiss army knife? One of the best ones that I ever received was the Leatherman Wingman, but I can honestly say I…
As a kid, I had a little leather pouch that I had taken from my mom, who picked it up on a field trip to a Native American reservation when she was a kid. Inside it, I kept a very small but very interesting coin collection – at least for a kid. I never met…
“Listen my children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere…” Thanks to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, most of us know the story of Paul Revere riding to warn the colonists that the British troops were beginning their invasion of the American colonies. In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell tells us that Paul…