Weekly review: Week ending May 27, 2016

Posted: Jun 1, 2016 - Modified: May 29, 2019| review, weekly

This week was a busy one. We celebrated A-'s 100-day party at a Chinese restaurant with W-'s family and with Ching, who flew in from California to come and hang out with us.

I sewed a party dress for A- . It was my first time working with silk brocade, which kept unravelling at the edges but managed to stay together long enough for me to sew the elastic casings and the hems. Level up!

My family gave us a GoPro, and I've been using that to record short videos that I post to the closed group on Facebook for baby-related updates. I've got a backlog of videos because I haven't had the time to review anything beyond a minute or so, which is why short videos work out better for us. Better to keep capturing, though. Storage is cheap, and there'll be opportunities to review things later.

Speaking of time – I continue to be preoccupied with childcare, but that's okay. I took A- to a lactation consultant who suggested some ways we could try to improve her latch, and recommended supplementing as many feeds as we can. She also diagnosed a case of thrush in A-'s mouth, so we've been treating that too. I haven't felt any pain yet, but the Internet has quite a lot of horror stories that I'd like to avoid contributing to, so we've been focusing on dealing with that and the supplementation. The lactation aid continues to be a bit too fussy for me to regularly use, although affixing it to a fridge magnet helps a little bit by giving me a way to adjust the level.

Since I keep bringing A-'s weight history to different places, I spent a little time tweaking the display and the calculations to take into account only the weights at the same location. I'm getting more and more comfortable with d3 visualizations. My rate of improvement is still pretty slow, though. All these interruptions – but that's a good problem to have. =) Here's the latest section of the chart. She's still gaining slower than the average weight gain for breastfed babies, but she seems to be skating along above the 3rd percentile line, so there's that.

Slow coding progress on my consulting project. I need to think of a good way to deal with the limitations of the iframe around the add-on I'm building. I have a few ideas that I might get to test this week. It's a bit difficult with the stop-and-go nature of being the primary caregiver for an infant, but fortunately my tracking system makes it easy for me to clock out when I need to change a diaper or when I notice my concentration flagging. I'll just have to set proper expectations with my consulting client. I've checked in my code so they can take it forward if they want, and I can keep building on it here and there. Actually, it might be better to trim the functionality and do a smaller release – I'll check prioritization and timing at the next team meeting.

I also want to make sure that A- gets plenty of stimulation. She's becoming more and more interactive, yay! Lots of cooing and putting things in her mouth.

Next week: catching up on drawing and thinking, more gardening, and a follow-up with the pediatrician. Let's see if I can make it out to the Quantified Self meetup, too.

Blog posts

Sketches

Focus areas and time review

Business (2.4h – 1%)
- Earn (2.0h – 86% of Business)
- Build (0.0h – 0% of Business)
  - Drawing (0.0h)
  - Paperwork (0.0h)
- Connect (0.3h – 13% of Business)
Relationships (3.7h – 2%)
- ☑ Take A- for more tests
- ☑ Notes for Dr. Roth
- ☑ Complete and fax pre-op questionnaire
Discretionary – Productive (7.1h – 4%)
- Emacs (0.4h – 0% of all)
- Coding (2.6h – 1% of all)
  - ☑ Improve weight display
- Sewing (0.0h)
  - ☑ Party dress
- Writing (0.8h)
Discretionary – Play (1.2h – 0%)
Personal routines (23.1h – 13%)
Unpaid work (67.7h – 40%)
- Childcare (57.5h – 34% of total)
Sleep (62.7h – 37% – average of 9.0 per day)