Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share (3 page)

And then there’s the gadfly. He’s smart and he gets invited to parties, but he’s lazy. Or worse, he’s intellectually smart but emotionally ignorant, and doesn’t care. He’s the one most likely to be the pedant in any gathering, and he probably uses people to get the work done he finds beneath him.

Of course those are extremes, and there are perfectly lovely, functional people who fall into those categories; but they’re not the ones we’re here to talk about. In the sweet spot, right there in the middle, is the tripartite synergy that creates the geek. The mixture of knowledge (about comic books, particle physics, or the works of Mozart), obsessiveness (they’ll sit in front of a computer or a workbench for hours perfecting, building, or playing anything), and social skills (they actually get together with people for pen-and-paper RPGs or get in line with a bunch of friends to see the midnight showing of the next Star Trek movie), that makes a well-rounded, self-sustaining person of affable oddity.

Now maybe weigh it just slightly toward the social skill set, and you have someone who can actually get a date, find a mate, get married, and procreate. That, in a nutshell, is how a GeekDad comes into being. The conditions need to continue to be favorable—is there support at home for ongoing geekiness? Will infecting the child(ren) be allowed? How many times will the wife feign a chuckle when you lift your little tyke and in a deep voice intone, “Luke, I am your father” (knowing it’s a misquote) before it gets old? How many jokes about containment breaches will be tolerated at diaper-changing time?

It helps immeasurably when your mate is a geek, too (but that’s another book). I’ve been lucky enough to have that situation in my marriage. In fact, not only have my little quirks been tolerated, but some of them have actually been encouraged. And in return, I encourage back. I mean, how many men can say their wives wanted a trip to a science fiction convention for their anniversary? I’m one lucky man.

But the best part is getting to share with my kids, share the geeky things that informed my childhood and continue to inform my existence: Star Wars, Star Trek, math, science, reading, writing, music, computers and video games, movies and television. I can’t tell you the joy of having my kids get into
Doctor Who
and comic books and
Lord of the Rings
, and then talking with them about the important aspects of the stories and watching them just soak it up.

I lived through the school years as a breed apart (though I had good friends who were geeks, too), so it makes me feel great to be able to inform and guide my kids through the social aspects, and the occasional challenges, of growing up as a geek. All parents want to protect their kids, but I like to think the best protection I can offer them is to help them understand what will happen, why, and how to best deal with it. I want them to know that different isn’t bad, and that being intelligent and inquisitive is something to be proud of.

Indeed, that’s what being a GeekDad really means for me. For all our personality quirks and interests in pursuits that are outside the mainstream (or at least interests more technical than is usually palatable for the mainstream), we’re all about understanding, and communicating, and connecting with others by sharing what we love and helping others to grok it as well. Of course there’s a biological imperative to have kids and raise them to survive and thrive, but we want them to be happy, too—whatever happiness may mean to them.

I’ll encourage my kids to love what I do, but I won’t force it on them, and when they want to try something different, I’m happy to let them just as long as they come at it like a geek: They should be knowledgeable about it, be a little obsessive about it, and get along with the other people who are doing it. That’s what all the greatest geeks do.

Most “parenting” books aren’t about things you can do with your kids. Most are about things to do
to
your kids, tricks and tactics for tweaking their behavior in some desired manner usually at odds with what kids really want: to play, and spend real quality time with you.

I’m not saying all those books are bad. Some of them do try to reinforce the idea of spending quality time (though I’d really like to find a new phrase to replace
quality time
) with your kids. This book has the same goal of those others: to help you share time with your kids in their formative years in constructive, educational ways, without making that time seem as if it’s supposed to be constructive or educational (not always easy). The difference here is that from a geek’s perspective, constructive and educational may not mean what all those other books think it means. Here’s what makes our approach different:

There is a plethora of projects included here about an eclectic array of subjects, from board games to electronics, crafts to coding. But I’m not here to tell you exactly what to do. The instructions are meant give you a structure to start your adventure with your kids. Each of these projects will allow for extensive customization and personalization. Indeed, what I have in my workshop and available at the hardware store in my town may be rather different from what you have. So I expect you to improvise, adapt, and even (quite likely) improve on these projects.

At the start of each project, you’ll see a table with summary information to give you an idea what to expect from it, and there are some symbols not unlike what you see in a restaurant or hotel review to explain cost and difficulty. Here’s a legend to explain their meaning.

One thing you’ll notice as you go through the projects in this book is that they are not long, costly, or overly difficult and involved projects that take too much work before paying off in the fun department. If you and your kid have the kind of patience and geeky determination to spend days/weeks/months on a project, then let me suggest you take up painting Warhammer armies or mapping the visible sky in your area with a telescope you built from scratch.

It’s not that I don’t have respect for folks that do that kind of thing! On the contrary, they are the epitome of geekhood, and I am not worthy to clean their brushes or polish their lenses. I just don’t have that kind of time or energy. I want to do something fun with my kids NOW (or at least in the few minutes to couple of hours it takes to complete any project in this book). So you’ll find that the most important common features all these projects have is that they are accessible, affordable, and truly buildable for just about anyone with an ounce of geek in them.

Okay, it’s time. Go get your kid(s) and get started!