Monthly review: February 2025

| monthly, review

2025-02-28-04 February 2025 -- monthly review
2025-02-28-04 February 2025 -- monthly review

Text and links from sketch (, and) a list of emojis per day

February 2025

  • field trips
  • birthday
  • music and art

By day:

  1. 👀 looking ahead
  2. 💃 dance
  3. ✅ curriculum checklist
  4. 🖼️ Art Gallery of Ontariqo
  5. 🤖 MakeyMakey
  6. 🐕 sheepdog realizations
  7. 📱 iPad experiments
  8. 📲 my own iPad
  9. 🛷 sledding
  10. 📸 sorting through photos
  11. 🎨 drew a review of A+'s 8th year
  12. 🏢 Moments in Modernism
  13. 🛷 sledding snow day
  14. 🎤 piano and voice
  15. ☃️ even more snow
  16. ❄️ quinzhee
  17. 🍪 galaxy cookies
  18. 🚲 shovelling trail walkway
  19. 📝 individual assessment
  20. 🧁 cupcakes
  21. 🧁 icing
  22. ⛸️ skating party
  23. ❄️ breaking up ice
  24. 🌀 Minecraft Parkour Spiral 2
  25. ⛸️ more skating
  26. 📈 results: growth, exceptionality
  27. 🤖 Comparing Claude and ChatGPT
  28. 🔍 word search

This month, A+ asked me if we could do a field trip. Since her virtual grade 3 class was doing a unit on drawing landscapes, I thought I'd take her to the Art Gallery of Ontario so that she could practise digital painting surrounded by lots of great examples. I enjoyed that enough to get my own iPad for drawing on. She asked for another field trip the following week to check out the Moments in Modernism exhibit, so we got to practise digital painting together. (We ended up back in the landscape gallery.) I wonder what we'll explore next month.

Being able to do iPad things together also nudged us to explore music and art. I experimented with paying for the Simply family subscription. A+ and I have been practising singing and piano, and W- has been practising patience. I've been going through the art tutorials too. A+ has run out of colourful drawings to work on and is not particularly interested in the pencil courses, so maybe that'll be for later.

It was A+'s birthday this month. She wanted to have a skating party with just her closest friends and their families. We made and decorated cupcakes and cookies, and then we brought her and the party supplies over to the park in our cargo bikes. W- brought over pizza and hot chocolate. I enjoyed drawing a one-page summary of A+'s 8th year, and that also helped other people get a sense of what we've been up to the rest of the year. I used parts of that drawing for little thank-you cards for her friends, too.

Lots and lots of snow this month. It's amazing how much some guerilla shovelling can make a difference. We cleared the entrance to the Martin Goodman Trail closest to our house, and W- also cleared some things in our neighbourhood and on our bike ride home.

Checking in with myself

I noticed I've been a little more fretful than I'd like to be. I think I've been letting myself get all tangled up in worries about A+ and school fit, and I've also been staying up late exploring sketching. My current plan is:

  • schedule fretting for Saturdays so that I don't fret too much at A+ during the week
  • remind myself of counterexamples: A+ does actually get her work done, and she's pretty good at making decisions; even if she messes up, failure is feedback
  • externalize my anxiety by calling her "Gumamelon" (long story), and thank her for showing up and trying to protect us and make life easier
  • try to get better at detecting when Gumamelon is sneaking up on me, write down her concerns, and remind her that she can come back on Saturday.
  • distract Gumamelon with other things I can do
  • sleep better

It's weird, but maybe it'll help. =)

Also, trying out this approach of answering reflection questions in order to think more deeply.

Where did I feel most energized this month? What activities drained me?

I liked figuring things out with W- and A+, whether it was breaking up the ice on the walkway or redoing the galaxy icing on the cupcakes. I also liked the calmness of going through the music and art tutorials, even if they felt quite slow at times. I'm not too keen on the frazzled feeling of fretting at A+, but I'm glad I'm getting better at recognizing the irrationality of it, and that both W- and A+ are good at reminding me to back off. I'm looking forward to finding ways to redirect that. This might be the time to get back into exploring the things I want to learn. That'll keep me plenty busy.

What moments made me say "aha!" this month?

It's interesting to see how both A+ and I respond well to impersonal feedback from a computer and to breaking things down into bite-sized, gamified learning. The pitch visualizations in the singing app have been helping her pay more attention to melody. I like the way the notes in the piano app don't let me move forward until I get them right. I'm going to experiment with pitch detection to practise singing scales. I want to see if I can get Claude AI to give me reasonably-useful writing feedback, too.

Emoji summary

Nudged by Gina Trapani's My Life in Weeks (found via HN) and the Life in Weeks app (also discussed on HN), I'm noodling around the idea of having a quick but expressive overview. I have a journal covering most of the days since 2016, somewhat spotty coverage of weekly/monthly notes before then, and yearly reviews going back to 2005. If I wanted to summarize each day with an emoji, February would be:

👀💃✅🖼️🤖🐕📱📲🛷📸🎨🏢🛷🎤☃️❄️🍪🚲📝🧁🧁⛸️❄️🌀⛸️📈🤖🔍

Which is promisingly compact and could be fun to experiment with over the year, and then maybe I could pick weekly highlights too.

Anyway, in March, I'd like to:

  • Practise being calmer and more easygoing; get better at thinking in terms of experiments
  • Take A+ on more informal field trips: Royal Ontario Museum, pottery class
  • Start digging into the ideas and tasks I've been postponing
  • Finish the Simply Piano course and start working on sheet music for the songs A+ wants to sing
  • Practise singing scales while waiting for A+ to catch up with Simply Sing
  • Automate the BigBlueButton setup a bit more so that I don't forget about meetups

Sketches

Time

Category Previous month % This month % Diff % h/wk Diff h/wk
A- 35.6 41.9 6.3 63.5 10.6
Business 2.0 2.4 0.4 3.6 0.7
Discretionary - Family 0.0 0.1 0.1 0.2 0.2
Discretionary - Play 0.6 0.2 -0.4 0.3 -0.7
Discretionary - Productive 11.7 11.2 -0.6 16.9 -1.0
Personal 8.6 7.4 -1.1 11.3 -1.9
Sleep 35.4 33.9 -1.4 51.5 -2.4
Unpaid work 6.2 3.2 -3.0 4.8 -5.0

Hmm, definitely want to get more sleep.

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