• Fine motor
  • A- wanted to type on the Bluetooth keyboard. She did a good job of finding various letters. I wonder if it's time to write her a little Emacs Lisp thing that will give her visual and auditory feedback when she types a letter…
• Language
  • I received the cookie cutters for numbers and lowercase letters that I ordered from Amazon. A- had fun identifying a few letters and numbers, cutting them out of playdough, and playing with them.
  • At the cardiologist's office, we were making small talk, asking A- if she thought the cardiologist was short or tall. I said that relative to A-, everyone is tall. A- said, “Except for Mama.”
  • A- can tell me why she likes books. She said, “I like this book because it has chicks in it.”
  • We were at A&W, and A- was happily using a straw to bubble water in a huge mug. I reminded A- that dinosaurs don't bubble their milk. She interrupted her bubbling to say, “Water!” and kept bubbling away.
• Self-care and independence
  • A- was crawling around when she stumbled and cut her lip. She didn't ask to nurse, although she was happy to do so when I offered.
  • A- mostly sat still for the ultrasound exam. The cardiologist said that the VSD is pretty insignificant now, although there's a slight leak in her aortic valve and the muscle bundle continues to grow slowly. We'll follow up next year.
  • I decided to relax my weaning restrictions because I needed more sleep, so I offered to let A- nurse in bed instead of going to the nursing chair (really a large pillow set against the wall). She refused a few times, insisting on going to the nursing chair.
• Sleep
  • A- resisted bedtime. She ended up falling asleep on my pillow with the light still on.
  • W- took over childcare in the evening, making it possible for me to have a much-appreciated nap.
• Emotion
  • A- stomped down the hallway, hangry tantrum in full swing. She stopped at the end of the tape on the floor and did a few squats just like the ladder exercise that W- taught her, and then resumed her tantrum.
  • A- was overtired since she resisted going in the stroller for a nap. I put A- in her room while I put away the groceries and the stroller. She had a major tantrum because of overtiredness and separation anxiety. She gradually shifted from yelling about wanting to turn off the fan herself, to wanting to go downstairs with me, to patting the pillow beside her and yelling at me to lie down with her too and snuggle her tight. I was amused. Once she was okay with being tightly snuggled, she fell asleep.
• Household
  • I was feeding Neko some wet cat food. I noticed I had reached the end of the can, so I said to myself, “I'm going to need another one of these.” As I scraped the last of the cat food into a bowl, A- fetched another can of cat food and gave it to me, all without being asked.
• Social
  • A- was greatly amused by the cat-trap that W- made. He dangled his arms down, and then swung Luke up when Luke wandered within reach.
  • I was exhausted. I had stayed up late doing some consulting and planning, and A- had gotten up early and had a long tantrum about weaning. Even our emergency morning nap didn't let me catch up enough. By mid-afternoon, I was sneezing practically every other minute. It was time for a cat-nap. I let A- play in the living room while I dozed on the couch. She puttered around, read me a book (Piglet and Mama), and then discovered the laundry basket next to the couch. “I'm folding laundry,” she said. She found a washcloth, then asked, “Where's the water bottle? I want to wet this.” Imagining the possible spills, I suggested that she use the sink instead. I heard her run off to the kitchen, climb into her tower, turn the faucet on and off, and come back. She wiped my face with the damp washcloth. “Wake up, it's spring!” she said. “You slept all winter.” She had reenacted the scene from Little Brown Bear Won't Take a Nap, complete with props.
  • A- had fun playing a shushing game. She asked me to make a loud noise, and then put a finger to her lips and hushed me.
• Pretend
  • We're slowly moving away from plastic toys, so we made a cardboard kitchen for A-. She had fun cooking an egg on the stovetop and baking a pizza in the oven.
  • A- asked for a pretend microwave. I glued white paper on a cereal box, drew the microwave interface, and cut the door open.
  • I made a cardboard point-of-sale terminal with a coin drawer, a scale, and a slot for pulling out a receipt. A- liked it very much.
  • A- played pretend ultrasound quite a few times, raiding the sticker bin after each exam. She also kept revisiting dental surgery in our drawings and stories.
  • A- liked pushing books through a slot in the coffee table legs, pretending to return them to the library. She also pretended to request one of her favourite books from a librarian.
  • A- was interested in using real cash in the cardboard point-of-sale terminal I made her. W- pretended to buy something with a $20 bill, and she gave back $5 and $10. W- jokingly asked her how much she made, and she said $5. Lucky guess! Anyway, W- made her a bunch of bills out of coloured paper.
• Kaizen
  • Lots of cooking. I tried out a dinner roll recipe, and it turned out okay.
  • I updated my ledger to reflect my conversion of many of my TD e-series fund units to ETFs.
• Us
  • David Ing dropped by since he was biking through our neighbourhood. We chatted about retirement, financial planning, kids, and returning to the workforce.
  • Spurred by the prospect of collecting another stamp in my library passport, we visited the Malvern library. I liked the way I could watch the automated book return conveyor belt do its thing, and A- liked the play area.
  • Our medium-haired cat Leia has been having tummy problems, so she's confined to downstairs until it all gets sorted out.
  • Given my low energy and lack of discretionary time in the middle of weaning, I started thinking about whether this was enough and what I might want to prepare for the next five or so years. I think I'm mostly okay with this being a possible new normal, although I still have much to learn about being in the moment and accepting things.
  • I tossed some salt on a chicken and popped it into the oven to roast. It turned out to be a really easy weekday dinner.
  • After W- rescued us from a mini-breakdown because I was super-tired and I didn't like the way A- kept pulling up my shirt to try to nurse, I realized I was all done with nursing.
  • W- told me how the mostly-deflated balloon kept following them around unnervingly, perhaps drawn by the convection of air heated by their bodies.

Blog posts

• Weekly review: Week ending August 24, 2018
• 2018-08-27 Emacs news

Time

Weaning is still disrupting our routines. I think we're slowly making progress, though.