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cavity - lost tooth - booster seat - bike - Realms - splash - sewing - garden
June: More of everything! Dealing with the heat, playing outside.
Growing bigger: A- bravely got a cavity filled under nitrous oxide. She also lost her first tooth the regular way. She grew big enough to a use a booster seat in the car. She got a 20" bike with gears, and started getting used to it. Still a little wobbly and we walk up and down slopes, but she'll get there.
Having fun: We set up Minecraft Realms Plus so that we could all
play with my sister and her kids. Fun! Adventure & creativity.
Splash pads! I replaced the top of A-'s splash gown and it's good
for another year. Lots of play dates! Popsicle season.
Making time for my own hobbies: I started hand-sewing during playdates. It's slow, but at least I'm making progress! I sewed on some lace that A- asked for. and now I'm working on a hat.
Moved the plants into the garden. Whee! It's lots of fun watching things grow and learning how to eat them.
We spent a lot of time playing Minecraft with A+, who was curious
about both Java and Bedrock. I figured out how to export command books from Org Mode, so we can easily teleport around.
Matthew D. gave me an X230T and a Surface Book, since he moved on to
other computers. How kind! Happy to get more use out of them. The
X230T was a straightforward upgrade for my X220T, and the Surface is
neat too. (Krita supports multitouch!)
I want to learn a lot about gardening this year. Many of our
strawberries came back We started bitter melons, tomatoes, peppers,
and lots of flowers in March, and the seedlings are coming along
nicely. We also planted radishes, lettuce, beets, and carrots outside. We'll see how this goes!
Lots of playdates with A+'s friends, including biking around. She's getting better at figuring out what she wants
to do with other people and what she wants to do by herself.
Other moments: dog encounters, tooth extraction, booster seat, lots of baking, bubbles in bubbles, ice cream, respect the timer
Lots of little improvements because I've been getting some early morning coding time while waiting for A- to wake up.
Back to making visual book notes, thanks to the SuperNote
Lots of playing outside by ourselves or with others. A- sometimes feels jealous of others, but she'll get the hang of dealing with that feeling someday.
I reencoded the EmacsConf videos and tagged some pages for additional work.
I experimented with using speech-to-text on my phone to quickly
draft blog posts. That seems to be working out pretty well. I can
even turn them into timestamped captions with aeneas.
It looks like I'm averaging a little less than a minute on the 3x3 Rubik's cube now (Ao5: 57.01), so I upgraded to a DaYan TengYun V2 M. Feels nice. I also learned the beginner's method on a Megaminx.
I updated compile-media to handle temporary files, and I changed subed-record to use it.
I drafted the schedule for EmacsConf 2021, taking speaker availability into account.
I got the hang of solving the 3x3 cube without referring to a guide.
Now to build up speed and learn more patterns…
A- wanted to practise the fish move on the Rubik's cube. We did it
144 times, using the rekenrek in place value mode to keep track of
the sums after each round.
A- pretended she was Cat Ninja doing 3-point landings.
A- was able to hoop around her neck 12 times in a row.
A- tried different typing games.
A- was reading Astronaut Academy silently. I offered to read it to
her, and she chose to read it herself instead. I asked her how many
new words she was coming across. She told me she knew all of them.
I flipped through a book on teaching kids how to read. A- was able
to read many of the sample sentences, although she stumbled over
some of the more advanced phonics rules (ex: costly, costlier,
costliest).
We tried out Teach Your Monster to Read. A- enjoyed playing for
almost an hour. I skipped her ahead to the Champion Reader stage.
More stomach pain for A-.
A- went as a bat for Halloween. She wore the bat wings I made her
out of sofa cover scraps, and I covered her leopard headband with
the same fabric to make bat ears. She walked pretty far and did
several trips, confidently walking to the houses and greeting
people. She kept an eye out for the other kids we were going with,
making sure the 2-year-old didn't go near the road. Afterwards, she
sorted her candy and shared some with us.
I showed A- how to use the playing cards to exercise our memories by
naming the cards in sequence. I named cards until I started
forgetting (~7 cards), and we talked about working memory. Then I
showed her how mnemonics could help us remember better by using
silly stories. I used the cards to improvise a story using the major
number system that I'd modified to use Numberblocks, which I'd
taught her previously for memorizing digits of pi. (3 said, "Look at
me!" But 5 was too busy laughing at 7, who was riding a kangaroo and
chasing 4, who was dressed as a pirate…) She kept bringing me more
cards to incorporate into the story, and she said the numbers
whenever I paused and prompted her with our mnemonic cues. We got to
23 cards before she moved on to a different activity.
A- finished the Pre-reader Express course on code.org. We tried a
few puzzles from Course C, but "turn left" and "turn right" were a
little difficult for her to think about. We might revisit this once
she's more comfortable with left, right, clockwise, and
counterclockwise.
We played lots of math card games: Garbage (filling in a 10-frame),
Make 10 (adding two numbers), and Gain and Loss (black cards add,
red cards subtract). She was able to use number bonds to quickly add
or subtract numbers on the rekenrek. For example, when she needed to
add 8 to 17, she could add it as + 3 + 5 (add 3 beads on the second
row, then add 5 beads on the third row) instead of counting the
beads one by one.
We had our first sub-60 times on the Rubik's cube. A-'s now a little
faster than I am. She was proud of buying a premium cube with her
savings. She loved using the timer.
A- was was greatly amused by the challenge I set myself to solve
Rubik's cubes and stack them on top of my head. After I did three,
she wanted me to do it again, so I said I would only solve it if she
could balance a Rubik's cube on her head. She was able to balance it
for a few seconds at a time, practising her gross motor skills and
self-regulation.
I got the hang of swinging the jump rope for A-. A- also figured out
waist hooping.
A- wanted to help with knitting. After a number of knit 2
purl 2 repeats, we decided to change the pattern to knit the whole
row. "Sometimes I think of it as scooping the poop," she said,
working the needles. We experimented with different patterns and
observed the resulting textures.
A- loved the Hamster Princess series and the Princess in Black series.
A- was curious about Pirate Fluxx.
We made coin sorters and coin-operated candy dispensers using LEGO.
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