Weekly review: Week ending May 26, 2017

Posted: - Modified: | review, weekly

This week, A- picked up lots of gestures for the songs we'd been singing at circle time. She not only gestures while I sing, she also gestures to ask me to sing. "Rain is Falling Down" and "The More We Get Together" seem to be her favourites at the moment. She sometimes asks for those three or more times in a row.

She seems to take a lot of pleasure in imitating us, and has been paying attention to our household routines. She joined me in washing the spinach for banchan, loading the dryer with laundry, and putting away the stack of freshly-laundered wipes. It's fun looking for ways to involve her in more of our chores.

The Duralex Picardie tumblers I ordered for A- arrived. She now uses proper glassware (shatter-resistant, yay), so her snack cup can be restored to its original purpose. She's been having fun offering us food and snatching it away at the last minute, complete with a delighted "Gyah!" She spent quite a few minutes experimenting with the fridge magnets. They stick to the fridge, but not to the wall, and they stay on the window sill if she lets go of them. Wow! She also practised pouring with the small pitchers I borrowed from the JFRC. She still spills a bit, but that's to be expected.

For our field trip this week, we checked out the Gooch family drop-in. It was a quiet afternoon and A- was the only kid in the main area, but she still mostly stayed close to me. The Gooch drop-in is in a building's rec room. It's a larger, more brightly-lit space than JFRC, with quite a few scheduled programs. The parent relief service might come in handy when A- is older. In the meantime, we might check out the main site at Shaw to see if that's worth taking the TTC to every so often.

I need to be more careful when it comes to A- and the cats. She had a couple of run-ins with them this week. Fortunately, it was a light scratch, but still.

W- did lots of work around the house. He tuckpointed the bricks, filled in a large gap with expanding foam, built a step for the shed, and showed me how to use a hammer drill to help cut a brick to the right size. Neat!

More updates from family, and a video chat as well. Speaking of video, I figured out a way to deal with the video backlog that we've been accumulating. I used ffmpeg to grab the middle 3 seconds of each clip and stitch them together into a quick movie. This lets me appreciate A-'s growth without doing a lot of editing. I got my Bluetooth headset working with my laptop, too, so I can listen to things late at night.

Other tidbits:

  • If I crack two eggs for my breakfast into a bowl after I pour out the scrambled egg for A-'s breakfast, it's easier for me to deal with any shell fragments and to cook the eggs evenly
  • If I do jumping jacks while pushing A- on the swing, she finds it amusing and I get more exercise
  • Now that the weather has warmed up, I've been setting the seedlings out. Might plant them next week.
  • Watched a bit of Orphan Black with W-. Played Trails of Cold Steel and a bit of Borderlands 2 as well.
  • Consulting: put together a hierarchical JSON file for someone doing data analysis.

Blog posts

Sketches

Focus areas and time review

  • Business (2.1h – 1%)
    • Earn (2.0h – 93% of Business)
    • Connect (0.1h – 6% of Business)
  • Relationships (1.0h – 0%)
    • ☑ Order glasses
  • Discretionary – Productive (7.3h – 4%)
    • Drawing (5.0h)
    • Emacs (0.3h)
    • Coding (0.8h)
    • Sewing (0.0h)
    • Writing (1.0h)
  • Discretionary – Play (10.3h – 6%)
  • Personal routines (11.2h – 6%)
  • Unpaid work (79.5h – 47%)
    • Childcare (67.9h – 40% of total)
  • Sleep (56.5h – 33% – average of 8.1 per day)

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