Raising kids takes a lot of time, _but_ it just so happens you get _way more time_ for certain odd activities. I call these dad skills, and so far I've only discovered one of them: Spinning a basketball on a finger. When I'm at home with my son he invariably wants to play, but he seems to have some internal rule where if I'm convincingly "playing" he won't try to get me to change activities. Example: I cannot pull out the laptop and do some work, he will immediately draft me to come play. However, if I'm holding the basketball i've passed some threshold and he's happy to let me do my thing. What this means in practice is that I've had some time to learn to spin a basketball. Not a huge amount of time—my sone still eventually pulls me aside to play with him—but maybe 20 minutes a day. It's been about 3 weeks and, unsurprisingly, I can spin the basketball for quite a while now. In fact just yesterday I kept it aloft long enough for my finger to feel a mild burning sensation from the spinning ball. The tip of my middle finger must have lost a few layers of skin. Progress. # Generalizing I suspect there's a general principle here. Something along the lines of: You will end up practicing any miscellaneous skill that your kid likes much more than the average adult, thereby developing a dad skill. I remember playing basketball with my dad quite a lot when i was young. Young enough that I was no competition for an adult, but of course that changed over time. I suspect he either increased or at least maintained basketball skills because me and my brother constantly wanted to play. Good times.