Introducing my daughter to the terminal
On giving full attention.
I told my daughter, "When my screen looks like this, you'll have to wait a moment."
Yesterday, my daughter learned what a terminal is, what a Mermaid diagram is, and that a dark screen with lots of colorful text means "I need to focus."
She needed help looking for something, and I told her "I want to help you find it. Let me finish this, so I can give you my full attention."
So she sat on my lap and watched me click and clack around until I fixed what needed fixing. Just took a few minutes.
In that time, she said "Ooooh" when I showed her a Mermaid diagram in Markdown, and she told me that she thinks the terminal is fancier than everything else on the screen (in VS Code) because she liked the colors better (purple syntax highlighting).
In the morning, she didn't remember the term "terminal," but she did remember "Mermaid diagrams" because, you know, five years old.
My work is largely mysterious to my kids, and I love these little moments to share my work and remind them that they deserve my full attention—even if a small bit of work needs to happen first.
P.S. Shoutout to Martin Woodward at Github, who on the README Project (now The GitHub Podcast) described the story of explaining to his kids what a dark screen means long before my kids were old enough to pronounce the word "terminal."
