Weekly review: Week ending June 17, 2016

Posted: - Modified: | review, weekly

W- started his parental leave, hooray! He'll be with us for the next eight months or so, making the most of the parental benefits offered by the government. We're looking forward to spending lots of time with A-, improving our household routines, working on various projects around the house, and taking a long-haul trip to visit family in the Philippines.

A-'s been developing by leaps and bounds. This week, we introduced her to solids. W- let her taste some of the strawberries from the garden, I cooked up a batch of sweet potato puree, and we've been yum-yum-yum-ing our way through teaspoons of yogurt (complete with maternal emotional signaling, of course). It was amusing watching how her eyebrows wrinkled as she tasted the yogurt, and how she soldiered on anyway. =) We've mostly been feeding her in her rocker. One time she was frogged up on my chest while W- fed her sweet potato. Some of it got on my shirt, and she started to eat that while waiting for the next spoonful. I guess she likes sweet potato!

She's getting better at coordinating her movements, too. She's been able to hold and manipulate the small sphere that we suspended from the play gym W- built for her. This requires fine coordination of both hands, as using one hand by itself would just send the sphere spinning or swinging around. She's been taking longer but fewer nasWhee!

I decided to pick up the ukulele, and have slowly started learning how to play nursery songs. There's some research on the beneficial effects of music (like this), and the ukulele is handier than the piano. Besides, picking up music is an excellent way for me to take advantage of babies' love of repetition. I'll get plenty of practice time. I downloaded a general-purpose tuner app on my phone, so I can use that to practise singing on-key too.

I enjoyed reading Baby Meets World, which is an amusing and informative historical overview of research into infancy. Looking forward to going through the sources it cited, including Darwin's observations on his children. I've also been going through resources on elimination communication, thanks to the library. Nice to live in the age of easy access to information.

We had friends over for a party. It turns out that it takes only a little more effort to make five quiches compared to the effort of making one quiche, and the five quiches (plus tarts using the excess filling and crusts) efficiently use all our oven capacity. =) The chorizo and cheese that Quinn brought were delicious in the quiches. This was our first non-relatives party since A- was born. Nice to see people! =)

J- had a piece in the art show at her school. It was entitled "Nostalgia", a painting of a red balloon floating up between grayish-white clouds, accompanied by a sculpture of a person's head looking at a clump of balloons. Nicely made.

Also, there's at least one skunk in our backyard. Might even be a skunk family under the shed. No big deal. We'll leave them alone until September or so, when the kits are a little older. Then we might look into ways of gently encouraging them to move along. Seems like the prudent sort of thing to do – respect the stripes! We've spotted rats, too. Those we want to hurry along a bit more. The cats (being indoor cats) are mostly useless in this regard, although Neko (as our most cat-ish cat) might have vague memories of playing with and eating parts of a few mice I'd seen her with before. Ah well, nature! Speaking of nature, the city is planting a few new trees on our street: gingko, oak, and a weeping tree, I think. Should be quite lovely in a few decades.

Excellent progress on my consulting gig. A coworker helped me figure out something that had been stumping me, so it's all systems go for the thing I was building. I'm now waiting for the French translations so that I can add them to the app, and then I can take it through the usual testing/deployment stages.

Next week is a big one for medical things: a follow-up with the cardiologist, and general anaesthesia so that the ocularist can take an impression of A-'s eye socket and fit a prosthesis. A- can't take any breastmilk for four hours before the procedure, so she might get pretty fussy. Still, it's for her benefit and it's temporary, so we're just going to have to get through it. One step at a time!

2016-06-19a Week ending 2016-06-17 -- index card #journal #weekly output

Blog posts

Sketches

Focus areas and time review

  • Business (5.4h – 3%)
    • ☐ Doublecheck business preauthorized debit
    • Earn (3.4h – 62% of Business)
      • ☐ Earn: E1: 1-2 days of consulting
    • Build (1.4h – 25% of Business)
    • Connect (0.7h – 12% of Business)
  • Relationships (12.6h – 7%)
    • ☑ Add solids
    • ☑ Set up preauthorized debit for hydro
  • Discretionary – Productive (6.0h – 3%)
    • Drawing (2.5h)
      • ☑ Sketch thoughts re watching E
    • Emacs (0.4h)
      • ☐ [#A] Do another Emacs News review
    • Coding (0.8h)
      • ☑ Add potty and pee score to visualization
    • Sewing (0.1h)
    • Writing (0.0h)
  • Discretionary – Play (0.0h – 0%)
  • Personal routines (16.1h – 9%)
  • Unpaid work (70.4h – 41%)
    • Childcare (55.9h – 33% of total)
  • Sleep (57.5h – 34% – average of 8.2 per day)

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