A- got a new conformer last week. Progress: she didn't cry in the waiting room, although she still burst into tears as soon as she saw the ocularist. We're continuing with the conformer approach instead of switching to a painted shell because A- still rubs the conformer out of her eye from time to time, and it's easier to replace a conformer. Maybe we'll switch when she's closer to school age.

I asked her where she wanted to go for Field Trip Friday. She said, “Riverdale Farm. I miss that. I have fun. Big sheep make big noises.” So we went, and we enjoyed looking at the baby goats. We passed by the Children's Book Bank, and I was delighted to find that you can take double the number of books on Fridays. I picked up a few more Seuss books.

We've been making more of an effort to explore and catalogue places so that we can make the most of Toronto's resources. We checked out Baird Park, which has a playset with a short tunnel that A- actually worked up the courage to go through. She liked going down the twisty slide on my lap, and then graduated to going down the twisty slide at Lithuania Park with a little push. I posted a few park reviews in Google just in case other people find those notes handy, and I should find some way of organizing my own copy of the notes too.

A- has been having fun with both fine and gross motor skills. She practised using a ladle to pour and a butter knife to spread. She goose-stepped and danced.

A- can talk about more abstract things. She scribbled and said she was drawing “nervous.” One time, W- was carrying her up the stairs to change her diaper, and she was getting a little wriggly and distracted. He said, “Focus.” She said with enthusiasm, “Diaper!”

She likes being involved. When she was at the sink, she said with delight: “Yes! I'm busy!”

One time, she insisted that I carry her up bridal-style in my arms (which she accomplished by flopping in a certain way and protesting if I tried changing things). I was mystified, but it all became clearer once we got upstairs and she wanted me to read Emma to her. The Cozy Classics version has just twelve words, and “carry” is one of them. “Frank Churchill carry. Emma,” she said. Aha!

She often sings nursery rhymes and other songs. She sang part of “Mamma Mia” while dancing, and then obligingly repeated while I suppressed my laughter long enough to record her on video.

Little improvements:

• W- set up a Synology DS718 network-attached storage server. Wheee! I feel more grown-up with proper backups. I set up borg backups for my server and my laptop. Next: Docker containers for testing the backups…
• I set up lots of voice shortcuts to help me with groceries and with tracking. For example, I can say, “Okay Google, baby awake” and it will log that in my system. I explored Tasker's Memento support, too.
• I figured out how to use Org Mode and LaTeX to typeset drawing templates for children's books, and I used that to make a book about smoothies. Next: photos, more layouts
• Lots of tidying up in the basement, too. Whee!
• I switched to writing in Markor on Android. I briefly enabled Markdown support in WordPress, but it was messing up some of my other posts, so I turned it off again.
• I set up god-mode in Emacs, which does make phone use a bit easier.