Go kart racing

When we are local and want to engage the kids.. the usual drive through Vasona park or playing indoors inside some Jungle type place are not options anymore.. we now have a "tween" and a "teen"!

They had tried this racing once in summer and gave it rave reviews. So we went again to give it a shot. It is 35$ for two races of 10 minutes each (14 laps where the kids average 35-40 seconds a lap) and a 30 minute break between the races to let other folks go. They treat the first race as a warm up!

 The little one likes to compete while Jr. was mostly happy going at her own pace and having fun.

They both yelled at me afterwads because I was cheering them from the side on the long leg where they come straight at me. Apparently it was not a good idea to take their eyes off the track to look at "cheerleader daddy" as it made it difficult for them to turn. How was I to know?! My job was to watch and cheer. Maybe next time I will do a race to figure this out. 

Strongly recommend this if you have teens or tweens bored out of their wits and it is cold and raining outside, when the rest of their friends are instagramming picutures from warm and sunny beaches! 

There should be an App for that!

Okay, it has been a rant here that the kids are more interested in watching hours of Tamil Variety TV programs or nail polish videos on Youtube. 

Wile checking the history recently, had found that the two of them had watched more than 7 hours worth of Nail Polish videos on youtube in just one week! 

So when all other attempts to steer them to subjects like Geography and science during the hours after they just make it back from school had failed... there was only one thing left to do!

Find Geography quiz and science quiz apps on the iPad and play with them. It has been a very successful program, if one can call it that! The Geography rehabilitation program.. 

Today I watched with pride as Jr. correctly identified the Capital of Azerbaijan as Baku and the little one said Brunei's capital is Bandar Seri Begawan... Life has its little moments! They are able to identify capitals and flags reasonably well. 

Next step, they have to actually be able to point to them on the world map. That is a work in progress. 

All this app business gave me an idea, given there is no App for making them eat a quick breakfast. 

We should have an App that shows them a mish mash of nail polish videos, my little pony, good luck charlie, an occasional geo quiz question, and every 90 seconds those should be interrupted by a video of daddy saying "take another vai (mouthful)!" or "another spoon" or "chew and swallow" or "why is the throat not moving!" .. the App should let me pre record 3 or 4 such 10 second videos which the kids have to hit with a snooze type button (or we could rename it the "I ate" button. 

That app alone has the potential to improve the quality of our life 347.5%! 

Sometimes I wish my day job was to write apps.. would at least write some for my kids. Unless there are some crash courses for old engineers whose last programming exercise was with Fortran 77 or C++ in the late nineties. 

Let me know if there is a weekend course for app writing in the local area or online.. 

A new home record..

The kids almost always beat me at a game of Ticket to ride. It has replaced sequence as the new popular game, thanks to the MIL who introduced it to us.

Today, Daddy answered back with a new home record score of 140 points by connecting three sides of the board... Yes! I went from Los Angeles to Miami via Vancouver and Montreal..

Just on a side note, Jr. made a 130 once and the little one made 135 once and they play like pro's.

Now that Daddy is on the same footing with the girls, the games are going to be interesting!