Monthly review: January 2017

Posted: - Modified: | monthly, review

We took A- for her eye checkup at Sick Kids Hospital. She has 20/80 vision in her right eye, which is within normal range, and they prescribed safety glasses to protect her right eye as she becomes more mobile. We also took A- to the ocularist, who’s trying a new conformer shape in the hope that it will stay in. After a few weeks of A-‘s conformer getting rubbed out daily, things seem to have settled down a bit. We’ve also figured out how to put the conformer in solo, instead of it being a two-person operation – hooray! All the care and attention that W- had put into trying to make it a pleasant experience for A- paid off. He noticed she liked it when he swung her upside down, so we started swinging her after putting in the conformer, and now she sits still for the placement and doesn’t cry at all. Whee!

A- has figured out a few gestures to let us know what she wants. She squeezes her fist or curls her fingers if she wants to nurse, nods and bounces up and down to say yes, and closes her eyes and shakes her head to say no. She’s pretty comfy with the toothbrush we got her, although the fork and the hairbrush are still mysteries.

W- bought lots of used Duplo off Kijiji, filling in the gaps with a few pieces from Bricklink. We’ve all been having fun with the blocks. A- has also gotten pretty good at stacking wooden blocks. Our family home visitor introduced her to crayons, and she occasionally manages to touch the crayons to paper. The rest of the time, she’d rather crumple up the paper – our little agent of chaos!

She’s quite a good crawler now, and can even make her way up the stairs with supervision.

Jen and E- visited, and we visited them too. The weather has been a little more cooperative lately, so we’ve been going to the Junction Family Resource Centre and the Ontario Early Years Centre.

Other little things: W- spent some time making a coffee table for the living room, including a jig for floating mortises and tenons. Also, Neko got stuck in a shallow bath, so W- rescued her. We’ve been doing a great job at eating more vegetables – roasting turned out to be pretty easy.

I reviewed all my sketches and blog posts and I sketched a few yearly summaries, but I haven’t gotten around to writing it up yet. I wrote lots of other stuff, though! Hmm, I wonder what the difference was… I started using Google Tasks to capture ideas and drafts. That helped a lot. Lately I’ve been more distracted by social media, but that’s okay too.

I managed to do a bit of consulting: extracting comments, building a little prototype for displaying data on another server, supporting simple A/B switching, and tweaking the Iframe snippet. On the personal side, I updated my evil plans code to work with the latest version of Org, issued a T4 and a T5 slip from my business, converted my QuickBooks file to Ledger, and helped my parents with their visa paperwork. I also went for my first eye exam in years – my prescription is actually a little less than it was before. I should probably order new glasses to replace the ones that A- accidentally messed up.

Getting ready for W-‘s return to work next month!

Blog posts

Sketches

Time

Category Dec Jan Diff h/wk Diff h/wk
Unpaid work – Childcare 36.3 42.4 6.1 71.3 10.3
Unpaid work 43.7 46.7 3.1 78.5 5.1
Sleep 35.3 38.2 2.9 64.1 4.8
Personal 8.1 9.2 1.2 15.5 1.9
Discretionary – Social 0.2 0.5 0.3 0.9 0.6
Business – Earn 0.3 0.7 0.4 1.2 0.6
Business – Connect 0.2 0.1 -0.0 0.2 -0.0
Business – Build 0.7 0.4 -0.2 0.7 -0.4
Discretionary – Productive 3.1 2.5 -0.6 4.1 -1.0
Discretionary – Play 2.6 1.5 -1.1 2.5 -1.8
Discretionary – Family 2.1 0.1 -2.0 0.2 -3.4

More childcare now that we’re back in our usual routines. Haven’t been particularly good at tracking the switch between childcare and other activities, so 71h/wk overstates it a little bit, but it’s okay. I still get a little time for other things, and I managed to do a fair bit of writing done anyway.

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