Weekly review: Week ending July 1, 2016

| review, weekly

More medical things on the go. A quick phone consultation with the ocularist helped us get a better sense of what to expect in terms of process and budgeting. If all goes well, A- will get her first painted shell in a couple of weeks, and we'll learn how to maintain it. Also, A- got her 4-month vaccines. She came down with a fever and was a bit grumbly the following day, but recovered by evening or so.

We took A- for an abdominal ultrasound. It turns out that her liver has something with a blood supply, so now we're waiting for the results of follow-up tests, and we may have to take her for more diagnostic exams next week. Fortunately, W-‘s on parental leave, and Canada has a public health care system. Whew whew whew. Anyway, just plugging along.

While waiting for results from a few of the blood tests, we amused ourselves by examining the privacy curtains in our area. They turned out to be brilliantly designed: a matrix of alliteratively-employed animals, like the waiter walrus and the engineer elephant. Our favourite was the ventriloquist viper, whom we had initially misidentified as a storytelling snake before catching on to the coverage of the entire alphabet. Much fun.

In terms of cooking, necessity was the mother of yummy dishes. I grilled pizza when it was too hot to bake it, and W- made shortbread when we found ourselves all out of eggs.

Lots of reading, mostly on my phone. Hooray for e-books! I enjoyed reading the summaries of parenting-related research in Zero to Five, Science of Mom, and Thirty Million Words, and I'm looking forward to trying out those tips.

W-‘s been working on the garden, and copycat that I am, I've been spending more time out there with him weeding and planning. It's a good excuse to bring A- outdoors, too: research supports sunlight exposure as a way of avoiding or slowing down the development of myopia.

Speaking of development, the Healthy Babies Healthy Children visit this month was fascinating. The nurse conducted the NCAST teaching scale assessment, filling in a 73-item checklist as she observed me helping A- explore a rattle. The nurse recommended periodically focusing on teaching specific skills through play – a little like the Teach Your Baby book by Genevieve Painter that I bought based on my mom's exporience. The nurse also recommended more frequently giving specific praise by naming what A- was doing well. It was pretty cool to have that kind of checklist-based observation, and I'm looking forward to playing and teaching even better. =)

Also, W- has gotten curious about Org Mode. Whee!

2016-07-03a Week ending 2016-07-01 -- index card #journal #weekly output

Blog posts

Sketches

Focus areas and time review

  • Business (3.1h – 1%)
    • Earn (2.4h – 77% of Business)
      • ☐ Earn: E1: 1-2 days of consulting
    • Build (0.0h – 0% of Business)
    • Connect (0.7h – 22% of Business)
  • Relationships (0.0h – 0%)
    • ☑ Book appointments with ocularist
    • ☑ Book 6-month follow-up
    • ☑ Research high chairs
  • Discretionary – Productive (10.0h – 5%)
    • Drawing (3.4h)
    • Emacs (1.4h)
    • Coding (0.5h)
      • ☑ Fix flickr-upload.js
    • Sewing (0.0h)
    • Writing (0.0h)
  • Discretionary – Play (2.6h – 1%)
  • Personal routines (25.1h – 14%)
  • Unpaid work (70.5h – 41%)
    • Childcare (59.2h – 35% of total)
  • Sleep (56.6h – 33% – average of 8.1 per day)
You can comment with Disqus or you can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.