Now it turns out that a bunch of heavy-duty researchers agree with me. But that doesn’t stop guys like this:

“Children are solicited every day online,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “Some fall prey, and the results are tragic. That harsh reality defies the statistical academic research underlying the report.”

That’s Richard Blumenthal, the CT Attorney General and one of the biggest hysteria-mongers around this stuff. Ha.

What’s interesting is that they do find kids bullying each other a lot online. That kind of matches my unscientific impression, I guess.

For some parts of the day we stood around the statutory 100 feet from the polling place, handing out slate cards and waving our signs. Every couple of hours we checked the list of people who had voted, and then called and reminded the people who hadn’t. Late in the afternoon we knocked on the doors of some of the last holdouts. We didn’t have to physically drag anyone to the polling place, but it would be fair to say our phone calls and door-knocking may have accounted for up to ten votes that might not have been cast if we hadn’t been on the case. That felt pretty good.

Our candidate didn’t win — not a big surprise, for an underdog effort against two other candidates with better funding and name recognition. But I got everything else out of it that I wanted. Mainly a chance for Laura and Lilly to see what it’s like when a diverse bunch of progressive, big-hearted people get together to do something good against the odds. Lots of young people from the neighborhood got mobilized. The campaign office was crammed every evening with latino and African-American kids using their own cell phones to call voter lists. We went on a couple of noisy bike parades to get attention, and just for fun. We met some great people, like Sasha, David, Huli, and of course Eric, and we got to know some out-of-way corners of our city by walking campaign literature door to door. I’d say we’re ready to do it again.

It’s cool to be reminded of what a place looks like from a view four feet off the ground.

Later that evening we walked at least four miles, starting at Kristin and Mark’s place near Guerrero, wending our way up into Bernal Heights and then back over to Glen Park. Our kids are in that Halloween sweet spot, age-wise: old enough to walk more than a few blocks, young enough to want to. We live in a pretty hilly part of town now, so it was a workout.

The teacher, Angelica Chang, has been speaking exclusively in Chinese to the kids all year. She didn’t even talk to us parents when the kids were around, so they wouldn’t catch on. This afternoon Monika, the mom of one of Lilly’s classmates, said: “Cameron watched it with us. As soon as Angelica started talking, he said ‘I knew it! She can speak English!’”

Lilly’s classmate Xavier was talking about shooting off toy rockets with his dad, and Lilly decided she wanted to do that too. So last week we ordered a kit from Hobbylinc.com and put it together, and today we went out with Xavier, Dan (his dad) and his big sister Guadalupe to a softball field in the neighborhood to try it out. It was beautiful out but a little windy, so Houston, we had some problems, but everything was recovered and we came home with a new hobby.

This is, by the way, the luckiest picture I have ever shot. I was fiddling with the camera when I heard Xavier starting his countdown from five, and I turned toward his voice and shot at whatever. You have no idea, unless you’ve seen it, how fast these things take off. I could have spent years trying to squeeze the button at the exact millisecond, but this one just came out.

Lilly has been participating in a heart health program at her school. She went from two consecutive jumps to 50 at a time in about a week. She’s also been skating, with and without a hockey stick, and has a fine-looking swing with a bat. She spends more time than ever on her living-room trapeze, and she does an hour and half of gymnastics on Saturdays. Somehow she finds the energy to stay up until 10 whenever she can get away with it.

We threw a party for Lilly’s birthday a week after her actual birthday. All the aunts and uncles and cousins came over. The best present was a tablet on which you paint in water and it shows up like black ink, but disappears when the water dries. Her grandfather showed her how to hold the brush and write her name.

After the songs and my little shtick about Africans inventing the banjo and bringing it this land (lifted from this site and translated into 5-year-old), this kid let on that he knows someone who plays one of these in his neighborhood, which is the housing project across the street from the school. I was doubly impressed: this is not a kid who talks a lot to strange white men, plus I had no idea I was going to run into a (potentially) Black banjo player around this ever-whitening town. I was already stoked about getting involved in this school, but this is better luck than I’d expected. I hope I get to meet this person eventually, if he exists. It’s a commonplace in the old-time music world that Black banjo players are all around, we’re just conditioned not to notice them. I know the second part of that is true; I just hope the first part is too.

Lilly calls him “my uncle Peter.” He has certainly become accomplished at the uncle-ly arts, chief among them that of making mere dads look kind of stodgy and lame by comparison. Right, thanks for the clothes, dad. Now uncle Peter, he gave me this cool set of knitted finger puppets that will encourage my creativity and stimulate my intellectual growth. Bye, gotta go play now.

Also for Lilly’s birthday, we saw “Flushed Away,” the animated movie made by Dreamworks with the Wallace and Gromit people. Its one I’ve-never-seen-anything-like-that moment was when one of the evil henchfrogs delivers a live message from his evil toad boss by strapping on a video cell phone so the boss’s face is in front of the henchman’s, and the minion then lets the boss talk and mimes the boss’s body language. I don’t know why this is so funny, but it was worth the price of the ticket right there.