Okay. I've gotten basic recording sorted out, I think. I can capture quick notes, photos, and videos to document our lives and serve as placeholders for further reflection. I can organize them into rough categories. Babysitting gives me enough brainspace for both consulting and self-improvement. My sleep is still a bit messy, but that's probably at least half because of me. I'm confident about spending time with A- and helping her learn stuff. Time to think of the next steps.

I think there are three big areas for me:

• planning and experimenting with potential improvements: needs attention, creativity, and implementation time
• sharing tweaks and things I've figured out: good for backing up and for conversation
• making sense of facts, asking questions, synthesizing, reflecting

Our continuous improvement capabilities are okay, although of course there's room to grow. Physical stuff (reorganization, trying stuff, decluttering) can happen throughout the day. Reading fits in late at night or in snippets throughout the day, although I'm still skimming for things to think about instead of being able to take notes or think about things in depth. Coding tiny little tools fits in late at night or during babysitting sessions – not big projects yet, but shell scripts and short Emacs Lisp functions are quite doable.

I'd like to get better at circling back and posting source code and experiment notes. Maybe I'll start by including just a paragraph or two describing key motivation and intended result, then jump straight into the code or description. I'm not sure if it will help anyone else, but who knows? Besides, it's good to have stuff like that in my own archive.

It seems like such a splurge to use babysitting time for thinking, drawing, and writing. I don't know if I can write a post worth $120+ to myself or other people, and besides, I want to write more personally relevant things before I get back into sketchnoting books or putting together, say, Emacs guides. But if I think of the babysitting as primarily paying for A- to practise independence and social interaction with someone one-on-one, I do some consulting every week, and I make an effort to pick up one or two new activity ideas each time we have someone over, I can think of the discretionary time as a bonus instead of trying to optimize my use of that time.

Let me think about sense-making. I've been focusing on just capturing what was going on because it was hard to think more deeply. I'm a little less preoccupied now, so I have some brainspace for thinking. Some questions to ponder:

• What is A- interested in learning? What does she think? Why does she do what she does? How can I grow so that I can support her even more effectively?
• What else can I experiment with? How can I reduce waste or costs (including intangibles), and how can I increase benefits?
• How can I make learning visible for both A- and me?
• What do I want from all of this? How do I want this to shape me?

Writing this on a bench in the park, arms around a sleeping A-, I'm somewhat challenged by the small window I'm writing in (there's room for a couple of paragraphs and that's it), the inability to refer to other things side by side, and the possibility of interruption. But maybe I can think and write in medium-sized chunks: a little bigger than the quick notes I've been taking, but small enough that I don't need an outline or the ability to easily rearrange my text. I can write more stream-of-consciousness stuff instead of worrying about editing. I can give myself permission to cover ground relatedly instead of worrying whether I'd written about something before, or if I'd just dreamed it.

Let's warm up those thinking muscles. :)