One-on-one with your kids is awesome

My wife and I share two awesome kids. Both boys, two awesome boys.

With that out of the way, it's time to explain some things about our household. By now it shouldn't be a surprise when I disclose that we have to sons, my wife and I. And although the youngest is rather competitive, competition for our attention is not really an issue... anymore. It used to be, but that's history since quite some time.

Nowadays the boys have turned into even more different personalities then before. Which is a blessing since there's hardly a point to compare the two of them. Makes life a lot easier as a parent.
But since their 'personality divergence' is only increasing, it becomes more and more important to have those one-on-one moments with the boys. So there's time for the talks that you can have as a parent with your kid. You talk about them, about you, school, sports, etc. There's just no way to have the in depth talks when both boys are around. There's no unwillingness, it's just not doable.

So my wife and I agreed that in addition to our annual weekend together to celebrate our anniversary, just the two of us. We also are going to spend a weekend with the boys, one-on-one. So over the course of a year both of us have spend a weekend away with either of the boys. Consequently, the other spends time at home with the other boy. That way we get to spend time doing things either boy enjoys, talk about stuff either boy loves to talk about and we get the chance to discuss what we want to discuss with them, in a totally carefree environment.

Last weekend we had such a weekend. I've been spending the weekend with the youngest of the two, at home. My wife was away with the oldest. And it was awesome, for all four of us. It was unanimous.

Iwan

It's a new year... 2017, let's make it a happy new year

Hi everybody,

My first post in 2017 in this blog will be about what 2017 might have in store for my world.



But first, check out this link: Article for Backfield Group. It's an article, in Dutch, I wrote last year about the changing role of the project manager. There's also a blog post about this topic, which you can read here.





Now on to the good stuff, being 2017.

There's some awesome stuff coming up for me. The coolest thing happening this year, if all goes well, is that my boys will get their PADI OpenWater certificate this summer. Last year they finished their PADI Master Seal course.




Also planned for 2017 is finishing my Coursera Scala Course, which doesn't mean that I'll be a Scala developer, but it will mean that I actually understand what all that fuzz about functional programming and BigData and Map-Reduce and stuff is about.

Also pretty awesome is that at least in the first 6 months of this year, I will continue with assisting during the Science classes at the Columbusschool in Almere, the Netherlands. Teaching gifted children on how to think about science, how to apply it and how to become the next generations of big brains.



Writing the above mentioned article really inspired me and so maybe I'll be actually starting writing my first book and (self-)publish it. Time will be the bottleneck here, also because I'm really pumped about a startup a friend of mine asked me to work on together with her in the second half of this year.

So besides writing that book, a startup seems to be in my stars. What it's all about is still sort of a secret, and there's plenty of work to be done still, but we're really serious about it and our current commitments prevent us from already starting with it. Hmmmm, a delayed startup? Nope, the thinking is already there, it's just that doing that is postponed.


Of course, 2016 had enough in store for me to blog about, which I'll do in the coming period. So keep an eye out for this blog and you'll be able to catch up on my life in 2016.

Iwan
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