It’s times like these when I’m excited to be living in the future.

I learned algebra in seventh grade, from Mrs. Doyle if I remember correctly. That seemed appropriate; even while not starting until the seventh grade, I was probably among the first 20% of Holliston’s class of ’90 to learn algebra. It was hard, but I figured it out, eventually moving on to geometry, trig and calculus.

Sadie is in first grade.

I got her the Dragon Box game for the iPad after hearing about it from Leo Laporte on one of his podcasts.

We played it together in the beginning, but eventually she just started playing it by herself, eventually making it all the way through and beating the game.

In the beginning, it was matching various pictures. By the end, it was factoring out common elements and solving for x as you can see in this picture.

I’m proud of her, because I think this is actually pretty impressive for a first grader. (humble brag).

I’m more interested in what other forms of self-directed learning are now possible for her. If you have any suggestions for similar types of experiences, please email them to me or send them along on Twitter.

I can only imagine what college will be like for her in 11 years.

We had a little over two feet of snow here in Concord during the great Blizzard of 2013. At least it happened at the beginning of the weekend.

Six hours of shoveling yesterday, in which I got almost the entire driveway done. Probably another six hours today to do the end of the driveway (where the plows dump all the snow from the busy street we’re on), the mailbox across the street so the mailman can get to it, my mother-in-law’s car, the path to the oil tank and the path to the front door. Oy.

At least I got a couple of good pictures out of it. Here’s what it looked like when I opened the garage door to get started.

Sadie and Lucy liked going out in the snow. Lucy made sure to enforce the “If I go out and play in the snow, then I get hot chocolate” rules.

With any luck, I’ll be done shoveling by dinnertime tonight, just in time to get ready to go to work tomorrow.

I got this PlanetAll hat in 1998. A lot has changed since then, but the hat abides.

And the girls like it:

Even my students when I was living in China liked it:

Sadie’s about to wrap up her first season of kindergarten soccer here in Concord.

She’s still figuring it out, but she’s gotten a lot better over the course of the spring. Now, we’re working on having “high motor” on the field — less chasing the butterflies, more attacking the ball.

I just published my newest essay about feminism and daughters.

It’s pretty obvious that I’m not going to hit the initial target of getting 39 of these out this year, but I’m still going to keep writing them. We’ll see if I can speed up the process a little bit, though.

For now, I’ll just quote the great Douglas Adams: “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

This morning’s conversation with the six-year-old, re: what outfit she should wear to Kindergarten.

“Given that everyone in your school is going to be wearing Patriots gear today, what is the probability that you’re going to want to be wearing your Patriots sweatshirt when you get there?”

I’ve got to lay off the statistics work for a while.

I started Sadie on the Encyclopedia Brown books last night. She’s usually pretty quick at picking up stuff, so it’s fun to watch her squirm a little bit as she’s trying to figure out the mystery.

In a couple of months, she’ll probably be solving them before we’ve finished the last sentence…

Sadie is attentive, friendly and loves to color. As her mother likes to say, she’s made for Kindergarten.

Or, as I far more geekily say, she has achieved product/market fit.

If you’re five? You want to be WordGirl. You want to use your grand vocabulary to foil villains.

And if you’re three? You want to be WordGirl’s sidekick, Captain Huggy Face. You want nothing more than to be with and like your big sister.

And if you’re their parents? You want to be the type of parents who can wield a glue gun and cut some felt. And sometimes, you succeed.

Happy Halloween.

It’s been a while.

First, a professional update. I’ve transitioned away from day-to-day involvement with Practically Green. I’m still an advisor and shareholder, but I’m not going to be in the trenches any more. I believe deeply in PG’s mission of helping people go green, and I’m looking forward to the great things they will do.

As for me, I’m taking a little time off. I’ll take a few classes, bake a few brownies, rake a few leaves.

And, of course, by “rake a few leaves,” I mean “throw the children into the leaf pile.”

I don’t have time right now to do proper blog posts (damn you, startup world), but I can pull it together enough to put up new pictures of the girls. Enjoy!

I’m still the worst blogger in the world, but I can pull it together enough to put up a decent Halloween picture of the small children.

They are both girls. They both wanted to be Buzz Lightyear. What more could you want?

Ok. I suck. Also, my main camera is broken. And, I’m a little busy. That said, I feel bad that I haven’t put any pictures up in here in a while. So, here you go!

As part of having the house on the market, we’ve been working a lot on the garden. Lucky for us, both Sadie and Lucy really enjoy gardening.

Lucy also helped up sweeping the sidewalk, keeping everything pretty.

Lucy is now very much a two-year-old. She has pretty strong opinions about what she wants to do, what she wants to eat, and even on the proper way to hit a baseball.

She’s keeping up with her Toddler Room friends, texting constantly.

She’s also the social butterfly, hosting tea parties for all her friends.

Sadie’s been ripping it up as well. She’s patriotic:

She’s a blur on the hippity-hop:

She rocks the tricycle up and down the road.

And, in the end, we’re all in this together. Very fun summer.

I’m probably going dark for another couple of months. See you September (ish) with lots of new pictures and new life updates.

Things are a little insane at the Butler household at the moment (and about to get insanier). My photography duties have been dropped. Badly. I’ll try to be better. Here are a couple of pictures to keep you going.

Sadie and Lucy love playing Superman on the swings. They lie on their stomachs and are given giant swings. It’s like flying!

Sadie’s all about the Patriots shirt with the pink. This will be a tough combination for 2022 boys to resist. I cannot tell you how much I look forward to that!

Lucy’s second birthday party is this week. I’ll try to get some good pictures from that.

We’re getting to the point where Sadie’s mastering all the puzzles we have in the house. She knocked off this giant puzzle in about fifteen minutes (about as fast as I could do it, I think.) Egads.

We’ve had a busy month or two here in the Butler household. Here are a couple of pictures I’ve managed to capture while in the center of the maelstrom.

Lucy’s been feeding her book obsession. Her newest fun trick is to sit in the big green chair with her stack of books. She finds this an excellent use of fifteen minutes.

Lucy has very entertaining hair sometimes.

It’s very sweet that Sadie and Lucy both want to help me clean the house. They find the vacuum very useful for picking up the stray pieces of corn that someone managed to drop while eating dinner.

More soon!

They had “wear Patriots colors” day at Sadie and Lucy’s school yesterday. Luckily, we were able to make that happen. The teachers at school even gave Sadie a little war paint.

Lucy was excited too, but she was more concerned about bottle security. No way Meriweather is stripping that.



We took Sadie and Lucy to New York last weekend for a little vacation and a chance to catch up with some of our old friends. It was a great weekend, and I’ll probably write up some notes a little later this week. For now, I figured I’d just start with a couple of pictures.

We left the hotel and wandered through Central Park until we hit the Heckscher Playground. They renovated this playground since the last time we visited, and it was a big hit with the kids.

Sadie found a tire swing. That was enough for thirty minutes of sheer bliss.

Lucy was too little for the tire swing, so she was sitting in her stroller watching Sadie swing. She was a little bored, though.

So, we let her out to be free-range baby for a little while. She toddled around for a little while, but then found a mud puddle at the edge of the swings area. She circled it for a minute, then decided to investigate further.

As it turns out, you can do a lot of splashing in the mud puddle. It’s great fun.

Nothing makes Lucy happier than a little mud.

Sadie then wandered around the “castle” a little bit. Whoever designed the park did a nice job pulling this section together. There’s lots for a three-year-old to explore.

At the end of the day, Sadie was very happy.

The girls even got to share a big hug back in the hotel lobby.

I’ll write more later (especially about the Museum of Natural History), but I wanted to get these pictures up quickly.

We’re back from vacation. I’ll have a longer Cape post coming up eventually. (Did I mention I’m launching this week?) In the meantime, here are a couple of cute pictures of the girls to tide you over.

Lucy:

Sadie:

We went to Sadie’s Preschool/Pre-K graduation yesterday. This was my first one of these, so I didn’t have much of idea of what to expect.

It’s always important to have cake. If you want a quick snapshot of what parents were naming their kids 3-5 years ago, here you go.

The kids arrived on the bus from school and marched on in. They then went through all the songs they’ve been practicing for weeks. We had spirited renditions of “Open, Shut Them” and “Twinkle Twinkle Traffic Light.” Then, they went around the room and all the children called out what they wanted to be when they grew up. We had a couple of motorcycle racers, a fireman or two, several ballerinas, and Sadie: a farmer.

Then they came up to get their diplomas. Sadie strided purposefully across the stage.

She was pretty excited when she got to sit down with her diploma.

Then, the kids got cake and lemonade, and the parents milled around. I whipped out my charcoal pen and did a quick drawing of Sadie eating her cake.

Finally, it was time to go. But, we did get one last touchdown celebration.

Congratulations, Sadie!