Sample weekday: 2012-04-25

In February 2012, I started my experiment with semi-retirement, shifting from working for IBM to consulting for a couple of clients. My week was still fairly typical, since I planned for 4-5 days of consulting each week. I usually biked or took the subway to the office, where I did some coding or consulting around enterprise social computing.

I wanted to experiment with different business models, so I also started doing some professional sketchnoting and illustration. I guess people liked stick figures. I did a few events here and there, but the semi- part of my semi-retirement was mostly consulting around enterprise social computing, collaboration and technology adoption, Javascript prototyping, and SQL queries.

2012 yearly review

Sample weekday: 2013-04-26

I continued to do a lot of consulting, but I started letting myself do some more fun stuff like Emacs and hanging out. The offset part towards the end of the year is when we went to the Philippines to visit family and attend a friend's wedding.

2013 yearly review

Sample weekday: 2014-04-21

I ratcheted consulting down further and I gave myself permission to work on more of my own things. I enjoyed hanging out at Hacklab.to.

2014 yearly review

Sample weekday: 2015-05-27

I continued to hang out at Hacklab and work on my own stuff, with a little bit of consulting. Towards the latter part of 2015 and the early part of 2016, I felt quite tired because of pregnancy, so I spent a lot more time relaxing.

2015 yearly review

Sample weekday: 2016-04-21

In February, A+ was born. Here's the obligatory visualization of how my sleep shattered into a million pieces and childcare took over my days and nights. If you have ever been the primary caregiver of an infant, you'll know what this is like.

… Sure didn't feel like 8.4 hours a day. Not enough continuous sleep, definitely foggy-brained. Although to be fair, babies also sleep a lot, and I tried to sleep during that time too.

Towards the end of the year, we took A+ to the Philippines to see family. We tried to do the usual short layover and that was miserable because of sleep deprivation, so our other flights included an overnight layover.

I decided that doing my yearly review twice a year was a bit excessive, so I moved to doing it in August for my birthday. This year was split between life as a 32-year-old and a 33-year-old.

Sample weekday: 2017-04-25

More childcare. We often went to playgrounds, libraries, EarlyON early childhood centres, museums, and the Ontario Science Centre. I often needed a nap in the evenings.

Another trip to the Philippines. The very regular section was probably when I didn't have a reliable way of updating my time tracker. (Yearly review split between life as a 33-year-old and a 34-year-old)

Sample weekday: 2018-05-08

We went on two trips to the Philippines. My dad died during the first one, and the second one was to keep my mom company. (Yearly review split between life as a 34-year-old and a 35-year-old)

Sample weekday: 2019-04-25

Sometimes I paid a babysitter so I could do some consulting, but A+ usually didn't like being away from me, so I just didn't do that much. This year was also our last trip to the Philippines before COVID changed the world. (Yearly review split between life as a 35-year-old and a 36-year-old)

Sample weekday: 2020-04-28

I started staying up to try to get stuff done. This was sometimes tricky to get right. If I stayed up too late and then A+ woke up early, I got cranky. I did much less consulting. The two dark blue lines towards the later part of the year represent EmacsConf. (Yearly review split between life as a 36-year-old and a 37-year-old)

Sample weekday: 2021-04-29

Still staying up to try to have some me-time. The dark blue boxes in the second half of the year show that I started taking a more active role in organizing EmacsConf, mostly by coding stuff late at night. (Yearly review split between life as a 37-year-old and a 38-year-old)

Sample weekday: 2022-04-25

A+ shifted to staying up late too, so I adapted by doing less. Trying to get her to go to bed earlier just resulted in grumpiness and crying. (Sometimes I was the one crying.)

I did a lot more automation for EmacsConf. Sometimes it was because she was attending virtual grade 1 during the daytime, and sometimes it was because she was just chilling out watching videos in the evening. (Yearly review split between life as a 38-year-old and a 39-year-old)

Sample weekday: 2023-04-25

A+ started grade 2. We had to wait a little while to get our exemption from synchronous learning approved, so we made an effort to attend school in the beginning. We eventually got the exemption, though. (Yearly review split between life as a 39-year-old and a 40-year-old)

Sample weekday: 2024-04-25

A+ started grade 3. Our application for an exemption from synchronous learning wasn't approved, so A+'s schedule (and mine) tended to follow the school schedule except for the days when I say, hey, let's just go on an informal field trip. I'm glad A+ decided to get on board with waking up at around 7 AM fairly consistently instead of sleeping in. The graph also shows the steadiness of the pink Childcare segments during the 11AM-12PM lunch breaks. Knowing when I'm likely to be interrupted by an armful of kiddo does help me use the morning and afternoon breaks a little more efficiently, although having 1-1.5 hours to think can still feel a little short if I'm trying to do some programming.

Part of this year was covered by my life as a 40-year-old yearly review. I'll write my "life as a 41-year-old" post in August this year.

Sample weekday: 2025-04-10

I started prioritizing practising piano and going for a good long walk at some point in the day, both of which feel very nice. I still usually handle A+'s recess and lunch breaks, but W-'s retired now, so sometimes he handles A+'s lunch while I do things.

I usually do a quick check of my time by looking at the category totals and percentages during my monthly and yearly reviews, but seeing it as a day-by-day view like this makes it easier to feel the flow of things, including when I tend to stay up late. (Revenge bedtime procrastination strikes again.)

Still, category totals make it easier to see high-level changes over time. Here's a graph of average hours per day per high-level category per year.

I can see that:

• childcare mostly came out of my consulting, personal, and play time
• I've managed to get back to doing more productive stuff and Emacs stuff

Here's the hours-per-day.py script I used to analyze it, using Pandas to sum it up, Matplot to graph it, and mpld3 to add some Javascript interaction so we can hover over points to get the label and value. I wrote a little SetViewbox plugin so that the graph could be more responsive.

My life is still fragmented, but I'm slowly becoming more okay with this. The general advice is, of course, to try to consolidate some focus time, but my life doesn't work that way. Besides, it's fragmented because the kiddo likes to spend time with me, which is wonderful.

I liked this quote from Eleanor Coppola from this Living with Literature interview:¹

The men artists I knew had a studio, and they went out to their studio, and they spent the day, and worked, and then they came back. I once read a book by Judy Chicago, who interviewed all these women artists, and they made their art on the back porch, they made it on top of the washing machine, they made it next to the kitchen sink, and they made it anywhere they could, for the hour and a half while their kid was taking a nap, and for the two hours while they were at the play group. They made it in between. It wasn’t, like, you get to make art for eight hours. You make art in 20-minute snatches, and you don’t, like, fiddle around. I know one time I went to see Francis in his working room, and he had his pencils all laid out, and his espresso there, and there was this whole little ritual of getting into yourself and into your work. There was no time [for women] for the ritual of getting into your work! You just snapped into that taking 10 minutes and making 3 lines on your drawing or whatever was possible. It wasn’t the same as the way men worked. And that’s how women got their work done.

This reminds me of the reflections on interruptibility in Meditations for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman, 2024): yes, try to ringfence three to four hours of your day for focused time, but don't try to control too much of your life; stay distractible, don't fight life, give your full attention once your focus has already been diverted. It also reminds me of Good Mom on Paper (edited by Stacey May Fowles and Jen Sookfong Lee, 2022); there are lots of other people who are finding their way through the "Mom! Mom! Mom!" phase. (A+ still has a finely-tuned attention detector. She can sense the moment I begin to think about something and interrupt it with "Mom, look at this!" even when W- is right there beside her.)

A+ grows more independent every year. It's like life is slowly easing me into this independence too. 2022 looked different from 2025, and 2028 will be different too. I used to have 5-10 minute snippets of time (still do). Now I occasionally get 1-hour chunks. Eventually I'll have 3-hour chunks again. I know from my experiment with semi-retirement that time isn't the thing holding me back from making a useful website or writing a book or saving the world, so that's actually kind of liberating. It can just be about trying things out and seeing where I want to go with that.

One of the things I've learned is how much of my day depends on feeling well-rested. When I've slept well, I can parent better and I can take advantage of little pockets of me-time better.

It's surprisingly tricky to get my sleep sorted out. My sleep isn't as fragmented as it used to be in the early days of parenting A+, but it's still a little challenging. These days, I usually start nudging A+ towards bed at 9 PM. I'm still an integral part of her bedtime routine. Sometimes she stays up because she wants to chat or improvise stories, and unless I'm super tired, I like to spend that cozy time with her. I snuggle her until I think she's fallen asleep. Sometimes I try to slip away too early and she sleepily asks for more hugs, so then I snuggle her for another ten or fifteen minutes. I try to stay awake because whenever I fall asleep in her twin bed, we're both a bit tired and cranky in the morning. After A+'s finally asleep, I call my mom to check on her. Sometimes I do a bit of reading or drawing as my personal time.

I can remind myself not to stay up late reading because then I'll get too little sleep and then I'll feel tired. I can find time to read the next day. Come to think of it, this is what I tell A+ too, and just like me, she also finds it hard to put books down.

I could also get a bit more sleep by accepting that A+ will probably wake up at 7:30 or so, and set my alarm for 7:25 instead of 6:55. She usually likes a lot of snuggles before finally waking up, though, so starting the snuggles early in the morning gives us more of a leisurely start to the day.

If I go to bed at about 10 or 10:30 PM, I usually wake up before my alarm goes off. If I move some of my personal reading and writing to that time (RSS, books, etc.), then I can swap out some of the less-useful scrolling through Reddit and start the day better.

Tracking my time is surprisingly reassuring. I can see that I have time for a few discretionary things, and I can see the trade-offs. More time spent doing one thing means less time spent on another, so it makes my actual priorities clear. In the beginning, I tended to fall back to consulting a lot because it came with clear tasks and the satisfaction of helping other people. I'm happy to see that I'm becoming more comfortable with choosing things like playing piano, going for walks, writing, or working on personal projects, or playing Minecraft with W- and A+.

W- does so much around the house, and we really enjoy the benefits. (Mmm, fresh-baked bagels.) It makes me want to increase my "Unpaid work" time so that I can increase the satisfaction I feel from helping improve the household. If I can tempt A+ along (say, cooking or gardening), then that would be an effective way to shift that time around. When I switch from "Personal - Routines" to "Unpaid work - Clean the kitchen," it feels nice. I know it'll add up.

When I don't feel particularly energetic or focused, I've learned to be kind to myself and just chill out with a book or my iPad, or do some tidying around the house. Sometimes I have a nap. No point in grumping at myself about it. I'm learning that I enjoy having a simple, leisurely sort of life, without feeling like I need an internal taskmaster. When I do have an idea, I'm fine with going with it even if there are lots of other things on my to-do list from before. As long as nothing urgently needs to be done, there's room to play, and it's easier to work on stuff I'm curious about or care about, even if it might not be the theoretically optimal way to use that bit of time.

I don't think I'll go back to my pre-parenting socializing any time soon. I miss bumping into interesting ideas and people at tech meetups and Hacklab, and hosting people for tea, but it's okay. We're still taking COVID precautions, so we don't hang out indoors. The weather's warming up so maybe people will be outside more. I bumped into Andrew Louis at a park the other day. That conversation reminded me that there are lots of wonderful people who don't blog nearly as often as I do (and even I don't write as often as I'd like), so spending time with them (either one-or-one or as part of larger conversations) is the main way to find out about the cool things they've been up to, enjoy that feeling of "I'm glad you exist," and perhaps develop friendships further. Someday, maybe. In the meantime, I like EmacsConf, I occasionally join online meetups, and I've dusted off my feed reader and filled it with people whom I also appreciate.

All my gaming time has shifted over to Minecraft because that's what A+ and W- play. I like playing with them. It's a fun way to spend time together and explore different situations.

I probably won't take up Latin or Japanese again for now. I enjoyed feeling my brain get the hang of something new. At the moment, my brain seems to want to get that from piano practice, so that's fine.

I'd like to sew more. A+ wants more skirts, skorts, and dresses, and she doesn't often find clothes to her liking in the stores. She likes it when I wear a matching skirt, too. If I'm working with stretchy fabric, that means using the serger at home. If I'm working with wovens, I can bring the project to the playground for something tangible to work on while the kids play. At home, it tends to feel like a choice between coding, writing, cooking, tidying, or sewing, and I don't pick sewing very often. At the park, sewing gives me something to do while I listen to other grown-ups chat.

I like what I've shifted my time towards: more time outside, time with family, biking and walking (especially awesome when we're out biking as a family!), more gardening, more writing, more drawing. It's okay that other things moved lower on my list.

It doesn't take a lot of time to capture the data: just a few seconds to tap into my most common categories using my phone. I recently added some Tasker tasks and Google Assistant routines so that I can track common categories by voice ("Hey Google, kitchen"), using face unlock to authorize it in case my hands are full. I've written code to automatically add time use tables to my weekly, monthly, and annual reviews, so that's also straightforward.

This particular analysis took me a couple of extra hours spread over several days.

• I noticed some entries I wanted to clean up (mostly when I didn't track when I slept), so that took a little time.
• I wanted to tweak my graph visualization to make it easier to visualize a whole year of data, so I modified it to take up the full width instead of a fixed width, changed the outline to a slightly-transparent version of the category colour, and recoloured the categories based on a palette I picked up from somewhere. This meant I needed to re-figure-out how to modify my web-based tracker, as there were some gaps in my notes.

• I wanted an Emacs Lisp way to visualize a single day, which meant adding quantified-svg-day and other functions to .

  Then I could define a named Org Babel block like this:

    #+NAME: day-graph
    #+begin_src emacs-lisp  :exports results :var day="2012-04-25"
          (with-temp-file (format "weekday-%s.svg" (substring day 0 4))
                  (svg-print (quantified-svg-day day 'horizontal))
                  (buffer-string))
          (format "#+ATTR_HTML: :style margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0\nSample weekday: %s\n#+ATTR_HTML: :style width:100%%; height: 20px\nfile:weekday-%s.svg" day (substring day 0 4))
    #+end_src
  

  To call it, I can use:

    #+CALL: day-graph(day="2013-04-26")
  

  Next step would be to visualize the data from a start day to and end day, which could be useful for weekly and monthly reviews.

• I kept wanting to add more thoughts.

I liked reviewing my data, though. Even with just the numbers and graphs, it was a way to revisit those quite different past selves.

This time data works together with other things. I built myself a web-based journal as well–just quick sentences to capture what happened, roughly grouped into categories. That provides a more qualitative view of my day and helps me flesh out the memories.

I used to leave quantifiedawesome.com more open to the web. To my amusement, it's even been used in a machine learning research paper, which, after much crunching of data, concluded that I tend to take the subway to things and then come back.² Anyway, I noticed my time tracker got a bit slower as bots started trying to crawl through the reports, and it occasionally crashed and needed restarting, so I tucked it behind an IP address range restriction. Not really sure what other people would find interesting in my data, anyhow. =)

If you like this sort of stuff, you might also want to check out my other posts about time or Quantified Self, or these other people's time analyses:

• [OC] I tracked every hour of my life for 5 years. - 1.5k comments, similar visualization
• I tracked every minute of my life in 2024 - similar visualization
• I tracked every hour of my life in 2024 - similar visualization + category totals
• [OC] I tracked every hour of my life for 2021 (REPOST) - similar visualization + category totals
• [oc] I've started tracking my time in 2023 - Sankey diagram of categories
• Quantified Self – Analysis of my Time · Brett Kobold - location tracking, Tasker
• Quantified Self: Tracking My Time Spent | by Stephanie Rogers | Medium - calendar, category totals
• Time-tracking guide - RescueTime, Toggl, stacked bars, treemap
• I Tracked Every Minute Of My Life For One Year, Here's What I Learned. - used the EARLY app, category totals
• RPubs - Quantified-self Report - group, mood
• I tracked every minute of my time for the last 4 months. Here are 7 totally unexpected results - DEV Community - used Toggl
• I time tracked my life for a month - by Lane Scott Jones - category totals
• Time Tracking Experiment: What I Learned After Analyzing Every Minute of My Life for 30 Days - category totals
• I tracked every minute of my day for 3 years - Quantified Self - Quantified Self Forum - Google Calendar, category totals
• I Track My Entire Life - #35 by Algorithm - QS newcomers - Quantified Self Forum - FileMaker Pro, 25 years, discussion of categories

If you want to start tracking your time, it might be helpful to try it for a short period (a week, a month, whatever) and then see what surprises you. People can track time using all sorts of things: pen and paper, a spreadsheet, a digital calendar, a time-tracking app… It might take a few tries to find something that fits the way you work, and that's okay.

Interactive figures in blog posts with mpld3 was also helpful for figuring out Javascript-enabled charts from Python, for which of course I totally want a smooth Org Mode workflow.

Looking forward, I expect childcare to still be a significant portion of my day, but that's all right. It'll wind down all too quickly, so I might as well enjoy it while I'm here. I think I'd like to do maybe 5-15 hours of consulting a month, which is a few hours each week. I enjoy helping my clients explore crazy ideas. Aside from that, there are lots of other things I want to do with my time, and each day feels nicely full. Now that the weather's warming up, I'd like to become even more comfortable with sitting on the porch with a book or a sketch, or going for a walk with A+ to the ice cream store, or wandering around the city checking out playgrounds.

A+ is 9. I am more than halfway to the end of A+'s childhood, and adolescence is around the corner. I have only so many years in this easy stage with W-. My paternal grandmother had dementia towards the end of her life and my mom is dealing with both physical and cognitive decline due to Parkinson's. Tick tock, memento mori, four thousand weeks go by quickly. I'm half-past that mark, too. But it's not a matter to feel despair about or something that should make me try to hang on to this moment too tightly. Keeping track of my time doesn't mean subjecting myself to some kind of Tayloristic time-and-motion study of the sort that dictates how many packages an Amazon warehouse worker must process each hour, out of the urge to wring out every last bit of productivity possible. It's enough, I think, to savour here and now, to laugh at the things I worried about in the past and to accept that future me will also look back and smile.

I wonder what the next few years could look like. I'd like to keep tracking time as a low-effort way to sketch out the shape of my day, to see my revealed preferences and see if they match up with what I value, and to appreciate how little things add up.

She had had a case of the meh​s. After a little bit of empathizing, I flung myself over her and declared that she wasn't going anywhere, I was just going to snuggle her. It was my evil plan. I cackled a little, and then asked her for tips on proper cackling. Was it "MwahaHAha, or MwaHAhaha, or MWAhahaha?"

She said, "Meh."

I rolled with it. "Meh heh heh heh."

Ah, there, a little giggle.

I hammed it up some more. "Meh HEH heh heh heh." More and more cackling, until she was giggling continuously. She giggled so much that she started hiccuping.

"You're so funny," she said between sips of water.

That might be the only time I'll hear that from her, so I'm immortalizing it in my blog. And yes, correlation doesn't mean causation, and n=1 anyway, but I'm still going to take the win.

I didn't quite know what play could look like for us, in the early days. Some parents seem to effortlessly break out silly voices or play pretend with toys. In the beginning, that felt awkward, even though I'd grown up with my dad telling captivating stories complete with sound effects and gestures. As a new parent, I often felt tired and my mind kept sliding away. It was easier to let A+ take the lead, and to focus on things like supporting and documenting. That was probably the right call for both of our personalities. From time to time, I come across parenting articles that even recommend this approach of letting the child do most of the directing. Serve and return, that's all, I just needed to keep the rhythm going; when A+ leads, I can focus on responding. I didn't even have to do it all the time; I could be a good-enough parent.

When A+ was interested in stacking blocks, I felt my job was mostly to observe and narrate appreciatively, and also to help tidy up. When she was fascinated with the water table at the Science Centre, my job was to bring dry clothes to change into. When she started building with LEGO, I helped her find pieces, but I didn't really spur her on with build ideas or roleplaying. When she moved on tea parties, I accepted my share of muddy teacups and sand cupcakes. At 9, A+ mostly likes to sing, play Minecraft, and make up stories with me. That's something I'm more comfortable with.

I'm somewhat reassured by the Slate essay Playtime Is Over!:

If you meet the child on his level and mostly watch what they’re doing instead, it’s still an act of love and attention without being such a draining experience.

I never quite felt comfortable staging those playacting dramas that would probably have helped A+ develop better social skills, like pretending one doll has accidentally bumped another one so that we could explore apologies and acceptance. I probably wouldn't have been able to get it past A+, anyway; she's pretty good at sniffing out when I'm pretending to play instead of playing pretend.

I was pretty worried in the beginning. The first six months of A+'s life were a bit of a blur, with quite a few diagnostic exams and follow-up appointments at Sick Kids Hospital. She went under general anaesthesia a couple of times, so I was extra nervous about the possible impact on her growth.¹ It's hard to be playful when you're tired and anxious. Anyway, it was just what's got to be done, so we focused on figuring out how to mitigate the risks by enriching her environment. I applied to the Healthy Babies Healthy Children program, and we got approved. We regularly met with a nurse and a home visitor who helped us keep track of A+'s development, suggested relevant activities, and gave me feedback on my interactions with A+. (My notes)

I still wanted to learn more about play. We went to libraries and EarlyON child and family centres for songs, storytime, and free play. One of our favourites was the EarlyON centre at Indian Road Crescent, where Ms. Lesley was basically how I imagine Mr. Rogers or Calypso: kind, appreciative, and wise. I reach for her voice in my head when I want a model for how to talk to kids.

Thank goodness for Bluey, too, which not only demonstrated a whole trove of little games that we could play, but also helped me imagine more playful parenting with the examples of Bandit and Chilli. Bluey's totally a parenting show disguised as a kids' cartoon. A+ often suggests playing games from Bluey, like:

• Shadowlands: walk only on shadows
• Bandit's version of Follow the Leader: kids hide right behind leader, leader complains (from Daddy Putdown)
• Come Here / Go Away: played on the swing, where the humour also comes from the complaints (from Daddy Putdown)

I also borrowed all the books on play that I could find, like Playful Parenting (Lawrence J. Cohen, 2008) and Play (Stuart Brown, Christopher Vaughan, 2009), because of course I'd try to learn about play from books. Might be time to reread them, come to think of it.

Thanks to all these different resources, I found lots of ideas to try. Experimenting helped me gradually figure out the things that resonated with both A+ and me. I liked the music classes that A+ and I went to when she was younger. We also read and read and read. I couldn't quite do the cheerful patter I sometimes heard from other parents, but songs and books helped me fill in the times when I didn't have much to say to A+. I found another little form of play to share with her, changing the words in a book or a song so that she'd laughingly correct me. She started talking at 18 months, a little on the late side of normal, but quickly expanded her vocabulary. (Also totally fine now.)

It wasn't all cerebral, of course. A+ liked the vestibular stimulation of swinging, so we spent a lot of time at the playground. She also likes climbing and hugs, so I boost her up to monkey bars and I snuggle her for as long as she likes.

A+ likes to dive deeply into her interests, and I like to go along with her. Over the years, I've learned a lot about sharks, Rubik's cubes, Star Wars, and Minecraft. That's our kind of play, too. We have some running jokes now. For example, on learning that nurse sharks might possibly trick fish into a false shelter and then ambush them,² we had fun imagining a nurse shark holding a "Definitely not a trap" sign. This sketch doesn't quite have the shark pointing upwards, but it was fun anyhow.

I'm learning a lot about play from life with A+. I'm learning that it can look different from person to person. I tend to have a quieter type of play, and that's okay. Also, if I don't feel like playing a particular way, it's good to say so. We can usually figure out something else, or I can figure out what I need and then check in again when I'm ready.

I'm upfront about still figuring all of this out. I think it's good for her to see that. Sure, it would make more sense for fun to be natural and effortless, but this is the kind of person I am, so I've got to work with what I've got–and that's enjoyable too, in its own way.

One of the things that's been helping me is seeing A+ also learn about and accept her own play preferences. At the playground, A+ often takes a break when her friends play a shrieky sort of game like tag. She knows she doesn't like those kinds of games, and she can find other things to do until her friends move on. She usually comes and hangs out with me instead. Sometimes we go play one of our own games. Then she heads back to check in with her friends, and they all go off to play something else.

It's fun watching A+ figure things out. When she had a hard time settling down at bedtime the other night, she suggested taking turns reading a book. I agreed, of course. I'll always say yes when she offers to read out loud, and reading out loud lets me play our old game of changing things up. "I knew you'd say yes to that," she crowed. She's learning to offer games we both like.

We're both learning about ourselves through play. Reading about play personalities, I think: ah, my dad was a joker, even towards the end of his life; one time he stashed an ice cube under his tongue to prank the nurse who came in to check his temperature. My sister's a bit of one too with her witty rejoinders. A+ might be a storyteller considering her fascination with story variations. I might be a creator, considering my list of crafty hobbies and the fun I have tweaking Emacs. Play is fun, and fun is great for self-knowledge.

Physical play: Pretty good way to get her out of a grump. I can challenge her to tackle-hug me: she'll try her best to push me over and collapse on me with a hug, then I'll try my best to wrap her up and prevent her from escaping. I can carry her on my back and whirl around. I can lift her up to the chin-up bar.

Clapping games: We can play Double Double This This or Slide pretty much anywhere.

Bubbles: We like bubbles. We even make our own giant bubble mix following the guar gum recipe on the Soap Bubble wiki. We've decided not to bring giant bubbles to the park when there are lots of kids around, though, because then we tend to get swarmed by other kids and it's a little stressful for A+. It's something to enjoy at small playdates.

Wordplay: It's fun to come up with puns and variations on songs. She's getting pretty good at it too.

Drawing: Silly faces are fun and easy to make. Pictionary is also good.

Singing: Good way to get in sync. We like to sing songs from Disney movies and from Wicked. There's a fair bit of research about maternal singing³, and entrainment⁴ might have prosocial effects even for older kids. Besides, music is fun, and we can do it pretty much anywhere.

Robot: Lots of chores get done by the Chore-Bot 9.0. A+ is amused whenever I'm a hug-bot. She also likes it when I'm a scientist or engineer investigating the functions of this mysterious device that seems to be powered by hugs.

Minecraft: Inside, we play in Bedrock if I've got the patience to reboot out of Linux and into Windows, or Java if we want to play in the world we share with W+. A+ likes to start up new worlds to try out different ideas or add-ons, so I'm slowly learning how to be less attached to any particular world.

Our shared Minecraft experiences even help us pass the time at the playground. We often play pretend Minecraft. I don't mind being the odd grown-up who's pretending to mine for iron or run away from skeletons. I think A+ enjoys rescuing me from the predicaments I make up for myself. ("Oh no, there's an Enderman! Aah! Don't look at it!" "Here's a pumpkin I carved!")

Stories: A+ loves making up stories related to Disney or Star Wars characters. Sometimes we use the fortunately/unfortunately structure to improvise a story, and sometimes we just pile things on. When I'm tired, it's hard for me to imagine enough to improvise, but I'm glad that I can explore some of her "what if" questions with ideas translated from fanfic. She also does a bit of LLM-prompting of story ideas, and she includes those in some of our bedtime improvisation as well.

I've got maybe a year or two of A+ wanting to play with us before she focuses on playing with other people. I'll take that however it looks: screen time when that's what she feels like, park time whenever we can. I'm not terribly worried about screentime. I know that it can take a while to get her outside, but then she wants to stay at the park for as long as possible. It's easier to get her outside when we have playdates, which we schedule fairly regularly. When it's just me, we go with the flow.

Here's what I'm keeping an eye out for to help me get better at playing with A+:

• Managing my own patience: It's a lot easier to play when I'm well-rested, I'm not fretting, and I don't have an unfinished task hogging my brainspace.⁵
• Seeing the invitation properly: "Can we play together?" means "I want to connect with you." So does "I'm bored bored bored bored bored."
• Building our play vocabulary: Bluey is totally research, yeah, that's why I'm watching it. There's also paying attention to the little things that A+ and I are curious about or enjoy. The more things we try, the more ideas we can combine.

It's child's play, and that's why it's worth it.