Categories: parenting

RSS - Atom - Subscribe via email

IndieWeb April 2025: Renewal

| parenting

The IndieWeb writing prompt for April 2025 is renewal.

One of the things that I struggled with in the early days of parenting was the repetitive nature of my day. Every two- or three-hour cycle brought the same kinds of tasks: nursing, diapers, snuggles, sleep. Nothing could be crossed off a to-do list, nothing stayed done. Nothing built up towards tangible accomplishment, or at least, not for me.

There was change. A+ grew by leaps and bounds. One day she could only roll in one direction; the next she could roll every which way. My job was to take care of the foundation so that she could grow, to take care of all the repetitive tasks so that she could have all her firsts.

I remember thinking of the Zen kōan (sometimes attributed to Wu Li and sometimes elsewhere)

Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.

I don't claim to understand this fully yet, but I remember reasoning: these things had to be done. I signed up for them. Every day we still need to take care of ourselves and others. Some people make major lifestyle changes and forgo a high income in order to shift to a contemplative monastic life with the same kind of cycles. I can do it where I am. Maybe I can even treat them as moving meditations.

I recently finished reading The Courage to Be Disliked (Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi, 2013). Part of the book talks about seeing life as a dance:

Do not treat [life] as a line. Think of life as a series of dots. … Life is a series of moments, which one lives as if one were dancing, right now, around and around each passing instant. And when one happens to survey one's surroundings, one realizes, I guess I've made it this far. … With dance, it is the dancing itself that is the goal, and no one is concerned with arriving somewhere by doing it. Naturally, it may happen that one arrives somewhere as a result of having danced. Since one is dancing, one does not stay in the same place. But there is no destination.

Thanks to that tide of ever-renewing tasks that engulfed my day in the beginning and is only now beginning to calm, I've been slowly learning to let go of the desire for my own forward motion. I circle, and circle, and circle, and that's okay. I'm settling into the rhythm of our days, knowing that the beat will change over time. Sometimes I look up and I'm surprised at how far we've come.

… Aaaaaaand now I've got Dancing Through Life in my head. I definitely fall on the side of overthinking things more than swanning my way through life, but maybe I can learn more about relaxing into it.

Another comforting thought, this time from Meditations for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman, 2024), about how we don't have to do something extraordinary:

The first is that it simply need not follow, from our cosmic insignificance as individuals, that our actions don't matter. The idea that things only count if they count on the vastest scale is one more expression of our discomfort with finitude: accepting that they might count only transiently, or locally, requires us to face our limitations and our mortality. … Instead, you get to pour yourself into tasks that matter for no other reason than that nothing could be more enlivening, or more true to the situation in which you find yourself.

My life is still mostly full of the everyday rhythms, but that's okay. I don't change diapers any more, but there are still dishes to be done and snuggles to snuggle. When W- offers to do the dishes, I can say, "Thanks, I got it, I enjoy this part." In between, I'm slowly reclaiming time to do my own accumulation of progress. I'm even beginning to be able to write about life. Now I feel more at ease with the undirectedness of it, the little steps in my own dance.

• • • • •

Sometimes, of course, we stumble during the dance. Life with A+ isn't always smooth. Sometimes I (figuratively or literally) step on her foot. Sometimes we're out of sync. Sometimes we have a bad day. I'm learning that I don't have to feel too guilty about it, or try to fix it right away, or worry that I've permanently messed things up. Today, I can take the loss, the failure. Tomorrow is another day, another renewal. We can try something else then.

Besides, there's no point in trying to sort things out in the moment, when people are dysregulated. Better to take notes and figure out what to experiment with next time. There's so much to learn, and that's good.

This is probably something I'm going to need to remember when we head into adolescence, for at least as long as there are tomorrows I can share with A+.

• • • • •

That's the last aspect of renewal that I wanted to touch on: how parenting is helping me (re-)learn and examine all sorts of things. The skill of figuring things out together. The lessons that A+ is taking at school. The things I find fun. The hang-ups I've been carrying within me since my own childhood, and how I can untangle them. The parks and playgrounds and libraries in the city. The joy of sunshine. The way seeds sprout and perennials return in the garden. Everything is new all over again.

This is probably something I'll want to learn as much about during my kid-phase so that I can still enjoy it in my post-kid phase. I think the people who age the most gracefully are the ones who keep wondering, learning, and enjoying life, both familiar ground and the new opportunities that arise. I'd like to be one of those people. Renewal isn't just about going back to a previous state, like an axolotl regrowing a lost limb. Even with the rhythm of the same steps in this dance, I can find myself in new places, and I myself am changed.

View org source for this post

Playfulness

| parenting, play

Assumed audience: I'm writing this for:

  • me: I want to remember what this is like, celebrate my progress so far, and look ahead
  • maybe other parents who also find themselves still figuring out playfulness

Achievement unlocked: I made A+ giggle so much that she started hiccuping

She had had a case of the meh​s. After a little bit of empathizing, I flung myself over her and declared that she wasn't going anywhere, I was just going to snuggle her. It was my evil plan. I cackled a little, and then asked her for tips on proper cackling. Was it "MwahaHAha, or MwaHAhaha, or MWAhahaha?"

She said, "Meh."

I rolled with it. "Meh heh heh heh."

Ah, there, a little giggle.

I hammed it up some more. "Meh HEH heh heh heh." More and more cackling, until she was giggling continuously. She giggled so much that she started hiccuping.

"You're so funny," she said between sips of water.

That might be the only time I'll hear that from her, so I'm immortalizing it in my blog. And yes, correlation doesn't mean causation, and n=1 anyway, but I'm still going to take the win.

Play didn't come easily to me

I didn't quite know what play could look like for us, in the early days. Some parents seem to effortlessly break out silly voices or play pretend with toys. In the beginning, that felt awkward, even though I'd grown up with my dad telling captivating stories complete with sound effects and gestures. As a new parent, I often felt tired and my mind kept sliding away. It was easier to let A+ take the lead, and to focus on things like supporting and documenting. That was probably the right call for both of our personalities. From time to time, I come across parenting articles that even recommend this approach of letting the child do most of the directing. Serve and return, that's all, I just needed to keep the rhythm going; when A+ leads, I can focus on responding. I didn't even have to do it all the time; I could be a good-enough parent.

When A+ was interested in stacking blocks, I felt my job was mostly to observe and narrate appreciatively, and also to help tidy up. When she was fascinated with the water table at the Science Centre, my job was to bring dry clothes to change into. When she started building with LEGO, I helped her find pieces, but I didn't really spur her on with build ideas or roleplaying. When she moved on tea parties, I accepted my share of muddy teacups and sand cupcakes. At 9, A+ mostly likes to sing, play Minecraft, and make up stories with me. That's something I'm more comfortable with.

I'm somewhat reassured by the Slate essay Playtime Is Over!:

If you meet the child on his level and mostly watch what they’re doing instead, it’s still an act of love and attention without being such a draining experience.

I never quite felt comfortable staging those playacting dramas that would probably have helped A+ develop better social skills, like pretending one doll has accidentally bumped another one so that we could explore apologies and acceptance. I probably wouldn't have been able to get it past A+, anyway; she's pretty good at sniffing out when I'm pretending to play instead of playing pretend.

Resources

I was pretty worried in the beginning. The first six months of A+'s life were a bit of a blur, with quite a few diagnostic exams and follow-up appointments at Sick Kids Hospital. She went under general anaesthesia a couple of times, so I was extra nervous about the possible impact on her growth.1 It's hard to be playful when you're tired and anxious. Anyway, it was just what's got to be done, so we focused on figuring out how to mitigate the risks by enriching her environment. I applied to the Healthy Babies Healthy Children program, and we got approved. We regularly met with a nurse and a home visitor who helped us keep track of A+'s development, suggested relevant activities, and gave me feedback on my interactions with A+. (My notes)

I still wanted to learn more about play. We went to libraries and EarlyON child and family centres for songs, storytime, and free play. One of our favourites was the EarlyON centre at Indian Road Crescent, where Ms. Lesley was basically how I imagine Mr. Rogers or Calypso: kind, appreciative, and wise. I reach for her voice in my head when I want a model for how to talk to kids.

Thank goodness for Bluey, too, which not only demonstrated a whole trove of little games that we could play, but also helped me imagine more playful parenting with the examples of Bandit and Chilli. Bluey's totally a parenting show disguised as a kids' cartoon. A+ often suggests playing games from Bluey, like:

  • Shadowlands: walk only on shadows
  • Bandit's version of Follow the Leader: kids hide right behind leader, leader complains (from Daddy Putdown)
  • Come Here / Go Away: played on the swing, where the humour also comes from the complaints (from Daddy Putdown)

I also borrowed all the books on play that I could find, like Playful Parenting (Lawrence J. Cohen, 2008) and Play (Stuart Brown, Christopher Vaughan, 2009), because of course I'd try to learn about play from books. Might be time to reread them, come to think of it.

Figuring out our types of play

Thanks to all these different resources, I found lots of ideas to try. Experimenting helped me gradually figure out the things that resonated with both A+ and me. I liked the music classes that A+ and I went to when she was younger. We also read and read and read. I couldn't quite do the cheerful patter I sometimes heard from other parents, but songs and books helped me fill in the times when I didn't have much to say to A+. I found another little form of play to share with her, changing the words in a book or a song so that she'd laughingly correct me. She started talking at 18 months, a little on the late side of normal, but quickly expanded her vocabulary. (Also totally fine now.)

It wasn't all cerebral, of course. A+ liked the vestibular stimulation of swinging, so we spent a lot of time at the playground. She also likes climbing and hugs, so I boost her up to monkey bars and I snuggle her for as long as she likes.

A+ likes to dive deeply into her interests, and I like to go along with her. Over the years, I've learned a lot about sharks, Rubik's cubes, Star Wars, and Minecraft. That's our kind of play, too. We have some running jokes now. For example, on learning that nurse sharks might possibly trick fish into a false shelter and then ambush them,2 we had fun imagining a nurse shark holding a "Definitely not a trap" sign. This sketch doesn't quite have the shark pointing upwards, but it was fun anyhow.

I'm learning a lot about play from life with A+. I'm learning that it can look different from person to person. I tend to have a quieter type of play, and that's okay. Also, if I don't feel like playing a particular way, it's good to say so. We can usually figure out something else, or I can figure out what I need and then check in again when I'm ready.

I'm upfront about still figuring all of this out. I think it's good for her to see that. Sure, it would make more sense for fun to be natural and effortless, but this is the kind of person I am, so I've got to work with what I've got–and that's enjoyable too, in its own way.

One of the things that's been helping me is seeing A+ also learn about and accept her own play preferences. At the playground, A+ often takes a break when her friends play a shrieky sort of game like tag. She knows she doesn't like those kinds of games, and she can find other things to do until her friends move on. She usually comes and hangs out with me instead. Sometimes we go play one of our own games. Then she heads back to check in with her friends, and they all go off to play something else.

It's fun watching A+ figure things out. When she had a hard time settling down at bedtime the other night, she suggested taking turns reading a book. I agreed, of course. I'll always say yes when she offers to read out loud, and reading out loud lets me play our old game of changing things up. "I knew you'd say yes to that," she crowed. She's learning to offer games we both like.

We're both learning about ourselves through play. Reading about play personalities, I think: ah, my dad was a joker, even towards the end of his life; one time he stashed an ice cube under his tongue to prank the nurse who came in to check his temperature. My sister's a bit of one too with her witty rejoinders. A+ might be a storyteller considering her fascination with story variations. I might be a creator, considering my list of crafty hobbies and the fun I have tweaking Emacs. Play is fun, and fun is great for self-knowledge.

Some things that seem to be working for us for now

Physical play: Pretty good way to get her out of a grump. I can challenge her to tackle-hug me: she'll try her best to push me over and collapse on me with a hug, then I'll try my best to wrap her up and prevent her from escaping. I can carry her on my back and whirl around. I can lift her up to the chin-up bar.

Clapping games: We can play Double Double This This or Slide pretty much anywhere.

Bubbles: We like bubbles. We even make our own giant bubble mix following the guar gum recipe on the Soap Bubble wiki. We've decided not to bring giant bubbles to the park when there are lots of kids around, though, because then we tend to get swarmed by other kids and it's a little stressful for A+. It's something to enjoy at small playdates.

Wordplay: It's fun to come up with puns and variations on songs. She's getting pretty good at it too.

Drawing: Silly faces are fun and easy to make. Pictionary is also good.

Singing: Good way to get in sync. We like to sing songs from Disney movies and from Wicked. There's a fair bit of research about maternal singing3, and entrainment4 might have prosocial effects even for older kids. Besides, music is fun, and we can do it pretty much anywhere.

Robot: Lots of chores get done by the Chore-Bot 9.0. A+ is amused whenever I'm a hug-bot. She also likes it when I'm a scientist or engineer investigating the functions of this mysterious device that seems to be powered by hugs.

Minecraft: Inside, we play in Bedrock if I've got the patience to reboot out of Linux and into Windows, or Java if we want to play in the world we share with W+. A+ likes to start up new worlds to try out different ideas or add-ons, so I'm slowly learning how to be less attached to any particular world.

Our shared Minecraft experiences even help us pass the time at the playground. We often play pretend Minecraft. I don't mind being the odd grown-up who's pretending to mine for iron or run away from skeletons. I think A+ enjoys rescuing me from the predicaments I make up for myself. ("Oh no, there's an Enderman! Aah! Don't look at it!" "Here's a pumpkin I carved!")

Stories: A+ loves making up stories related to Disney or Star Wars characters. Sometimes we use the fortunately/unfortunately structure to improvise a story, and sometimes we just pile things on. When I'm tired, it's hard for me to imagine enough to improvise, but I'm glad that I can explore some of her "what if" questions with ideas translated from fanfic. She also does a bit of LLM-prompting of story ideas, and she includes those in some of our bedtime improvisation as well.

Looking ahead

I've got maybe a year or two of A+ wanting to play with us before she focuses on playing with other people. I'll take that however it looks: screen time when that's what she feels like, park time whenever we can. I'm not terribly worried about screentime. I know that it can take a while to get her outside, but then she wants to stay at the park for as long as possible. It's easier to get her outside when we have playdates, which we schedule fairly regularly. When it's just me, we go with the flow.

Here's what I'm keeping an eye out for to help me get better at playing with A+:

  • Managing my own patience: It's a lot easier to play when I'm well-rested, I'm not fretting, and I don't have an unfinished task hogging my brainspace.5
  • Seeing the invitation properly: "Can we play together?" means "I want to connect with you." So does "I'm bored bored bored bored bored."
  • Building our play vocabulary: Bluey is totally research, yeah, that's why I'm watching it. There's also paying attention to the little things that A+ and I are curious about or enjoy. The more things we try, the more ideas we can combine.

It's child's play, and that's why it's worth it.

Footnotes

2

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations:

Young nurse sharks have been observed resting with their snouts pointed upward and their bodies supported off the bottom on their pectoral fins; this has been interpreted as possibly providing a false shelter for crabs and small fishes that the shark then ambushes and eats.

3

Here's one example: Markova, G., Nguyen, T., Schätz, C. and De Eccher, M. (2020). Singing in Tune – Being in Tune: Relationship Between Maternal Playful Singing and Interpersonal Synchrony. Enfance, 1(1), 89-107. https://doi.org/10.3917/enf2.201.0089.

Results showed that 38 dyads spontaneously engaged in social game routines. In these dyads, both playful singing and rhyming were positively associated with dyadic gaze synchrony, while only playful singing was also positively correlated with affect synchrony of the dyad. These findings suggest that rhythms, in general, may have important implications for the establishment of interpersonal synchrony in infant-caregiver dyads. However, musical rhythms seem to be particularly emotionally-salient and thus attune both interactional partners to the affective content of their social exchanges.

4

Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance | Music Perception | University of California Press

A variety of studies have revealed that synchronized movement, both musical and otherwise, can affect attitudes and cooperative behaviors toward one’s co-actors.

View org source for this post

A typical weekday

| life, parenting, time

Text and links from sketch

A typical weekday

family time: 11/16 hours, me time: 5/16 hours

  • 7 AM: Morning routines
  • 8 AM: piano practice
  • 9 AM: gardening, recess
  • 10 AM: Walk, braindump
  • 11 AM: Lunch
  • 12 PM: focus time: code, write, draw, read, do stuff
  • 1 PM: tidying, recess
  • 2 PM: writing, hanging out with A+
  • 3 PM: hang out with A+
  • 4 PM: sometimes a play date
  • 5 PM: dinner with W- & A+
  • 6 PM: chores, evening routine
  • 7 PM: hang out with W- and A+: Minecraft; watching; Pictionary, other games
  • 8 PM: hang out with W- and A+
  • 9 PM: A+'s bedtime routine
  • 10 PM: call my mom, read

Context: A+ is 9 and in virtual grade 3. W- is retired.

https://sachachua.com/2025-04-10-01

Feel free to use this under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

I came across Hourly Comic Day1 in anhvn's weeknotes. I've been meaning to make some kind of timeline, even if it doesn't feel as insightful or humorous as other people's comics. That's a skill, I can develop it. Besides, capturing bits and pieces of my life now is likely to be something I'm glad for later on.

Some things I notice:

I'm A+'s default parent, so she comes to me for snuggles during recess and lunch, and she wants to spend time with me when she's bored. She's 9, as I keep reminding myself, so this is a time-limited offer. It's amazing. At the moment, she often chooses to hug me instead of read books or play Minecraft, or chooses to play Minecraft with me instead of by herself. Inevitably, the day will come when she'll switch to just grunting at me from time to time and then disappear into her room for hours on end. This is the time to snuggle and hang out.

I have maybe an hour of reliable focus time right after lunch. I could have more, but I like setting aside some time for playing the piano and for walking.

conscientiousness-piano.jpg

Playing the piano is an exercise in humility. I can't quite get my fingers to do what I want them to do, and my brain picks up phrases more slowly than I'd like.2 But it's also enjoyable to hear myself learn, so I continue.

Walking is good for me. It's important to keep moving. Biking gets me farther, but I have to pay more attention. Walking helps me have extra thinking time. I take a lapel mic along so that I can use the time to talk to myself. I notice I'm not the only one talking to myself in the park. I also like how I see other people out there with books, or with cameras, or with their lunches, or simply sitting on a bench and enjoying the sun. It's reassuring to see other people enjoying a slower pace.

I usually run out of thoughts to think before I run out of trails to walk. It's interesting. Sometimes I wonder how I might tinker with that. I have plenty of source material to think about from books and life experiences, but maybe I can dig into things further. Or maybe lowering the threshold with stream-of-consciousness dictation will help me bring more of my monkey mind out into the light. It's also okay to enjoy the quiet. Running into the limits of my thoughts makes it easier to use my computer time for tasks or coding instead of staring at a blank text file. When I do find myself drawn to a topic, then the braindumping gives me a head start on figuring out the parts of it that I care about.

I'm here because I choose to be. I could theoretically have a two-hour chunk in the evenings if I really wanted to, but then A+ tends to just watch videos. Sometimes if she's in a video-watching mood, I'll squeeze in some writing or some code, but it's not reliable and she might stop at any time, so I don't like to get into anything too deep.

I haven't been doing much consulting lately, since that's hard to do in small bursts. There are a couple of front-end Javascript requests on my list, but it's a little challenging for me to get into front-end tinkering because I have to load a fair bit of context into my brain when I'm trying to work around the vendor's way of doing things. I'll probably let them know I can't get around to those requests for now. Maybe someday.

I miss being in flow,3 but since that can often result in my experience A+'s desires for connection as an interruption (the Ovsiankina effect4 doesn't help), that's not a good fit for right now. Instead, I'll accept that this is the time for (mostly) fragmentary chaos, but I can still occasionally squeeze in 15 minutes here and there.5 The lack of focused time used to make me a little frustrated and antsy, but I think it's becoming a little easier as A+ becomes more independent. I can both see the light at the end of the tunnel and know that our paths will diverge.

I could have oodles of focused time during the day if A+ were to go to in-person school, but fortunately, I know from my experiment with semi-retirement that I probably won't actually end up writing a book or changing the world even if I have more focused time. Virtual school continues to be a reasonable fit for us.

Since I know I've only got about an hour of focused time a day, I can try to choose things carefully. It's surprisingly freeing, knowing that I'm not going to get to everything.6 I tend to:

  • Code little things for myself, because it's fun and it can make things marginally easier. I like tinkering with Emacs, although sometimes I also write Javascript or Python to automate things.
  • Writing and drawing, because then I can understand and remember things a little better
  • Working on important tasks, like doing our taxes

And then the odds and ends of time can be used for:

  • More writing: usually on my laptop, but sometimes on my phone too. It helps to keep my laptop on the main floor instead of leaving it upstairs.
  • Reading books and blog posts, especially when I can highlight and capture snippets. The iPad has come in handy for this.
  • Coding, but only things that I can put down easily
  • Tidying: always good to stay on top of things

E-mail tends to fall to the bottom of my list, especially e-mails that require thought and consideration. Even reviewing my inbox tends to be lower-priority, unless there's something I remember and want to work on.

April 2025_16.jpeg

So this is my life at the moment. This is already a big step up from before. Since A+ handles virtual school a little more independently now, I can mostly count on a bit of focused time, instead of living my days in interruption limbo.

It's pretty easy-going. It feels a little like we're making this breakwater around a bay, so that A+ can learn the ropes in a reasonably calm environment instead of being buffeted around by the stormy waves outside, and then she can sail out when she's ready. As lives go, this is all right.

Seasons come and seasons go. I'm glad my day gets to look like this. Even if it might seem pretty humdrum, I want to remember it, because there'll be a time when I'll miss us.

Footnotes

1

Hourly comics:

2

Brain speed: I vaguely remember being praised for being able to think quickly when I was younger. I think age, parental rewiring, and periods of sleep deprivation (also due to parenting) have thoroughly scrambled that part of my brain. That's okay. This is life. Gotta work with what I've got.

3

Missing being in flow: gosh, there used to be a time when I felt like I needed to rein in long programming sessions

5

Related: Meditations for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman, 2024):

  • Day Thirteen: Three hours: On finding focus in the chaos
    • Yup, definitely can't find three hours.
  • Day Twenty-one: What’s an interruption, anyway?: On the importance of staying distractible
    • My natural state isn't that of focused attention anyhow.
  • Day Twenty-eight: What matters: On finding your way

    Instead, you get to pour yourself into tasks that matter for no other reason than that nothing could be more enlivening, or more true to the situation in which you find yourself.

    I don't have to do anything that makes a big difference for humankind. I can just do the next little thing.

  • Day Two: Kayaks and superyachts: On actually doing things
    • Perhaps I can do one thing today, and that's okay.
6

Also from Meditations for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman, 2024): "Day One: It’s worse than you think: On the liberation of defeat"

But this is where things get interesting, because an important psychological shift occurs whenever you realise that a struggle you’d been approaching as if it were very difficult is actually completely impossible.

View org source for this post

My words will become her inner voice

| parenting

Trawling through blogs to add to my feed reader, I came across a number of posts related to the February 2025 IndieWeb Carnival theme of affirmations. It nudged me to think about the words I rub into A+'s brain with repetition.

Once a year or so, A+'s virtual school teachers typically play a video about affirmations as part of the social-emotional learning aspect of the curriculum.1 The perky narrator exhorts the listeners to repeat the affirmations after her. A+ doesn't. I don't know if many of the other kids do.

The words I use with A+ are more powerful, so I want to be thoughtful about them. There's this idea floating around: the way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.2

Here's what I find myself repeating:

  • "You worked hard on that." I'm not 100% clear on the results of the meta-analyses of growth mindset research, but it makes sense to me to focus on acknowledging her effort rather than things that might be considered fixed characteristics. It's a good contrast to the "You're so smart!" that she might get from people impressed by her skills at solving Rubik's cubes or her enjoyment of math. She likes it when I see what she's doing, so I also add specific descriptions, and I extend it with a long-term perspective. Today she excitedly told me about how she worked together with a classmate on their literacy groupwork, so I echoed that back to her and connected it to her growth over time. I also often say "You did that!" and flesh it out with details.
  • "You got this." Because it's important for her to feel my belief and trust in her, and to enjoy confidence and self-efficacy. She's been doing well with increased personal responsibility for things like homework. Sometimes I say "We got this" instead, when we're working together.
  • "You know the way." Because it's extra fun (and extra effective) to sing the things I want her to remember, and because often she already knows the next thing she needs to do and this is a fun way of sending her off. This one is from the We Know the Way song from Moana. I like how I can use snippets of Disney musicals and bring in all the emotional storytelling connected to them. I occasionally touch on another line from that song: "We set a course to find a brand new island everywhere we roam." She's going to have to find a brand new way. She can do it. We're wayfinders.
  • "I got you." Because sometimes she stumbles and falls, and that's okay. We're here. Sometimes all she needs is a snuggle. Sometimes she needs a bandage or an energy bar or an emergency frozen treat. Sometimes she needs an extra pair of hands or someone to brainstorm with. We can figure things out together.
  • "You're wonderful." Because it's good for her to know I'm glad she exists, in a way that focuses on her wonderfulness rather than my act of loving her. Along these lines, I also frequently say, "You're awesome!"
  • "It's your experiment!" Because trying things out will help her learn, and this reminds me to back off and let her decide.

Over dinner, I mentioned this list of things I often say to A+. She wanted me to add these ones:

  • "I appreciate you, child."
  • "I love you."
  • "I'm going to pounce on you." Which is usually interrupted by her pouncing on me. This amuses her greatly. I like this playful way to offer a hug.

It is easiest to say these things when we're both well-rested and in good moods, so part of my job is to manage myself so that I can be in that state as often as possible.

A+'s beginning to echo these words back to us. She tells me what she'd like to use her allowance to experiment with. Yesterday at dinner, she told me, "You're awesome!" in the same way that I often tell her. Sometimes, as I send her off on her next task, she sings, "We know the way."

One night, as I was tucking A+ in, she asked for snuggles. I burrowed under the blankets and said, "I got you." She said, "You always do."

Footnotes

1

A1.3 Positive Motivation and Perseverance in Health and Physical Education (2019)

2

Hard to pin down a specific attribution. Goodreads has a page attributing this quote to Peggy O'Mara, but I can't find a citation. There are also plenty of variants on the Web, like this "The way we speak to our children becomes their inner voice" article from Kurtz Psychology. Anyway, handwaving this as a pithy concept I didn't come up with.

View org source for this post

Cases of mangoes, coolers of freezies

| parenting, life

Assumed audience:

  • Future me, when mango freezies are a distant memory
  • Maybe other parents who might consider splurging on fruits
2025-04-08-cases-of-mangoes.jpg

We have two cases of mangoes on our kitchen counter: the last case of Ataulfo mangoes W- could find at the Nations supermarket a short bike-ride away from the house (slightly underripe at purchase; it's been a few days, so now A+ says they're perfect), and a case of Tommy Atkins mangoes that are greener and tougher. He had meant to buy Hadens, but accidentally picked the Tommys up instead. That's okay, I said. I can turn them into mango shakes.

Wikipedia describes the Tommys as:

Although generally not considered to be the best in terms of sweetness and flavor, it is valued for its very long shelf life and tolerance of handling and transportation with little or no bruising or degradation.

Thomas Atkins submitted the fruit to the variety committee of the Florida Mango Forum multiple times during the 1950s, which rejected it due to its unremarkable eating qualities and considerable fiber in the flesh.

2025-04-08-mango-turtle.jpg

A+ has definitely developed mango preferences. Like me, she likes the smooth, sweet creaminess of Ataulfo and other Philippine-type mangoes. She's the one who regularly checks the mangoes for ripeness and reports on their status, letting us know as soon as they're soft. After a good meal, she often prepares a mango for herself, using a paring knife to skim it close to the seed. Sometimes she cuts a criss-cross grid and flips it into a turtle, or scoops out the insides for chopstick practice. She's gotten much better at getting most of the mango out; there's usually very little for me to scrape off the rest of the skins. Without prompting, she remembers to wash her hands before and after. One evening, watching her deftly cut her mango, I said, "People pay good money to send kids to cooking classes so they can pick up knife skills. Could buy a lot of mangoes for that money." We had fun joking about the short-term and long-term benefits.

I grew up eating mangoes in the Philippines. Sometimes they were on the breakfast table. Sometimes I had them at merienda (afternoon snack). Mangoes were either yellow, kidney-shaped, soft, and sweet, or the tart green mangoes that were also delicious in a different way, either straight-up or with salt or with bagoong (fermented fish or shrimp paste). (It took me a while to appreciate bagoong, but eventually I got the hang of it.) Green mango shakes were also a treat.

2025-04-08-mango-treats.jpg

After I moved to Canada in 2005, I went a long time without regularly buying mangoes. Still mentally converting costs to Philippine pesos, I balked at the expense of individual mangoes. The supermarket rarely sold good-looking Ataulfo mangoes, mostly just other mango cultivars that were more fibrous. If they did have the yellow kidney-shaped mangoes of my memory, the ones sold individually tended to be wrinkly and sad. A case of mangoes felt like overkill for just me, and I never quite got around to seeing if any of my friends wanted to, I don't know, rotate mango buying.

I think we only started buying cases of mangoes last year or the year before that. Now we're more comfortable knowing that even if we buy cases one after the other, we'll eat them before they go bad. We'll never say, "I'm all mangoed out." (And if we ever do get to that point, I can just dehydrate whichever mangoes are left.) It is definitely a frill and we're lucky to be able to enjoy them.

2025-04-08-blender.jpg

When it's warm enough for the kids to complain of the heat, we tend to ramp up our mango consumption even more. For the past two years, I've been bringing a cooler of frozen treats to A+'s park playdates. It started as a way to fend off temptation from the ice cream trucks that like to prowl around parks, and as a reaction to the ridiculousness of retail/wholesale pricing when it comes to summer refreshments. My days in A+'s sphere of friends are numbered, so I may as well make the most of it. It's a splurge, but time-limited. She will probably not invite me to lurk in the background with a cooler of popsicles when she's 18 years old. So yes to all the things, for now: home-made mango freezies; strawberries and peaches from the farmers market when they're in season; freezies made from pick-your-own strawberries when we make it out to a farm. (Child labour!) Raspberry freezies are sometimes too intense or too seedy for the kids. A+ is not a fan of cantaloupe freezies, but I like them. For the watermelon freezes, we're a bit divided. I like to add a little bit of sugar to the watermelon if it seems like it needs it. A+ takes pride in not adding any sugar to home-made freezies, so whenever she wants to be in charge of making them (which is almost always), I let her go with whatever she wants. She likes to use the mini-watermelons and add a splash of lemon juice. It always tastes refreshing.

Sometimes we bring Chapman's ice lollies (the kids prefer the single-flavour ones) or other store-bought treats. Sometimes A+ proudly insists on paying for these herself; early experiences of prosocial spending, hooray! When the fruits are in season, I prefer to make home-made freezies. We don't follow any recipes. We just prepare the fruits and put them into the blender.

2025-04-08-popsicle-bag.jpg

I use disposable popsicle bags from AliExpress since I haven't found a local source I like, and have determined that:

  • Zipper seals are nice for filling, but difficult to open. The best bags have a little notch for tearing under the seal, but this is hard to see in product photos. I often bring scissors if the bags don't have notches.
  • 22cm x 5cm: just right
  • 28cm x 5.5cm: too much

We have a couple of reusable freezie molds that we sometimes use. I save those for A+ and me because I know they'll find their way back to the cooler.

I used to walk to the playdates with A+ in a stroller (she still fits in the Thule Chariot Cheetah XT, even at 9 years old), with the cooler balanced on top of it. It took me 45 minutes to an hour to walk to her usual park playdates, but the freezies were fine if I packed the cooler with lots of ice packs. With the cargo bike, I can get to the playdates in 15 minutes or so, which means there's plenty of time for A+ to play and get warm before she decides it's time for a freezie break, and the freezies are all still nicely cold.

2025-04-08-friends.jpg

A+'s favourite friends get first dibs by virtue of proximity when she decides it's popsicle time (after A+, of course, who gets first pick). It feels quite satisfying when A+'s friends sidle up and ask very politely if there happen to be any more of those mango popsicles. Then we extend the selection to everyone else in the playgroup, and then, when everyone's sorted out, the occasional brave soul who wanders up to the strange woman handing frozen treats out to kids. I try to make eye contact with their grown-up first to check if it's okay. Sometimes when I'm distracted, I ask the new kids if their grown-up is okay with it, but I get the feeling that their quick nod might not be entirely reliable as it tends to be done with their eyes fixed on the prize. Gotta find their actual grown-up. I know A+ likes to go back for seconds or thirds on really hot days, so sometimes I keep a special stash for her in a nylon drawstring bag in the cooler. Sometimes I have one too.

2025-04-08-mango-heart.jpg

I'm Filipino. Part of my love language is food. Taste can anchor memories, and I hope these are part of her core experiences of childhood. I want these to be part of my memories of her. That's worth the mangoes.

View org source for this post

Productive procrastination and parenting

| productivity, parenting

Text from sketch

Productive procrastination

We are going to procrastinate. That's the way our brains like to work. No sense grumping about it, that'll just make it worse. We might as well get better at it This is a skill that takes practice, so try to learn when the stakes are low.

  1. Have a good idea of what needs to be done
    • Why? (Useful for motivation)
    • What? (Including details, subtasks, prerequisites)
    • By when?
    • For how long? Estimating & tracking time helps with accuracy
  2. Choose procrastination wisely. A few good options:
    • Something else that you needed to do anyway & that won't get in the way
    • Something that resets your brain and helps you grow
      • ex: exercise, music
    • Something that builds up dopamine or manages energy
      • sure, have a short video
      • calming, energizing -> the zone
  3. Use timers
    • so that your break doesn't stretch on
    • and to make work feel more manageable
      • I can do that for 5 minutes
  4. Celebrate! Pat yourself on the back even for small wins.

A+ is 8 (almost 9!) and is starting to learn how to procrastinate. I think this is a fairly new development now that she's got more classwork and more ideas about how she wants to use her time (not doing classwork). That's cool. I procrastinate, too. Part of my job as her parent is to help her learn how to procrastinate well, and to let her practise while the stakes are low: while she's dealing with schoolwork, instead of when she's making critical life decisions on her own.

This is hard for both of us, but mostly for me. I keep getting the urge to try to keep her on track. I have to remember that it doesn't work out if I'm the one pushing. She resists. Also, she doesn't get the practice in managing herself.

I think it'll work out better if I help A+ learn to tune into and manage her energy. That might look like 5-minute breaks and the occasional snuggle, or reading during class and then catching up on work. As she experiments, she'll get a better sense of when she should pay attention and do things at that moment because they're going to use those things in a discussion or because the opportunity isn't going to be available later.

There'll be failures along the way, like underestimating how much time a task will take, not managing energy well enough, or making the wrong choices about attention–but that's just feedback for the experiments. Failure is low-stakes at the moment: a reminder from the teacher if she hasn't gotten started on the class activity, some negotiation about when to do things if she ran out of energy the night before, a worksheet we take our best guess at because we don't know what the instructions were. She'll make mistakes along the way, but that will help her learn. As long as she gets the work done, that's cool. And if she doesn't get the work done, then that's an opportunity to debug and improve.

Her virtual school teachers are more on the synchronous "everyone should be working on this slide for the next ten minutes" side of things, so we'll see how long we can get away with this flexible approach. I hope eventually she'll get the hang of getting the work done and then reading, but that's probably something she's going to figure out with experimentation.

It's great seeing A+ start to learn how to manage herself. I made a menu of activities before, but now she often thinks of activities herself. Earlier in the schoolyear, she wanted the breaks to be playing 20 minutes of Minecraft with me. Now we've gotten that down to 10 minutes of Minecraft or videos, and sometimes she even chooses 5-minute breaks instead. She sets her own timers. Now that we're experimenting with the Simply apps for piano/singing/drawing, she sometimes uses that for her break. Going through a bite-sized lesson or practice session gives her energy and makes her feel great about herself, especially if she's picking a song like How Far I'll Go from Moana.

Sometimes A+'s breaks are a bit longer because she wants to help out with something around the house, like baking cookies. (It's funny how much her motivation to help increases when there's a piece of homework in front of her.) Practical life skills are worth it too, and we talk about what she gets out of those activities.

We also talk about dopamine levels and the effect different activities have on our energy levels. We talk about how things like music can shift how we're feeling and help us get ready. She can tell when she's ready, and she can tell when she's too tired to work. (Goodness knows that getting better at detecting when I'm in the negative productivity zone is useful as a coder…)

Someday she'll be able to manage her own checklists. In the meantime, I can help make lists (and resist the temptation to add pressure to them). Someday, all her breaks will be self-regulated. In the meantime, if she wants snuggles as a break, she gets them. Someday she'll have a variety of breaktime activities that she can use to manage her energy. In the meantime, I can update the menu as her skills grow and her interests evolve. Someday, she'll be able to work longer and take shorter breaks, maybe something like Third Time. In the meantime, it's okay to start where she is. Someday she'll be in tune with when she has the most energy in the day, and plan her tasks accordingly. In the meantime, I can share my observations. ("Hmm, we'll probably be tired after we get back.") Someday, she might even be able to strategically use procrastinating on other tasks in order to get her main tasks done. This is the time to experiment and learn.

One of the things that I appreciate about virtual school is that her classwork gives her fodder for practising the skill of figuring out how to get things done. Sure, the skills and bits of knowledge she develops by doing it are handy, but she can learn that whenever. The process of getting stuff done (including things you might not particularly enjoy doing, but which need to be done anyway)–now that's a generally useful thing. If we choose to homeschool, I'll probably want to come up with something similar so that she can keep practising.

Speaking of feedback, I wonder how I can make something that'll help us estimate and then track how much time a task actually takes, without feeling the pressure of a count-down timer or a missed goal. I occasionally track my time on tasks using Org Mode effort estimates and clocking, and I like to approach it with curiosity instead of stress. My tasks are usually not repetitive, so it's more about calibrating my sense of effort. It might be interesting to help her start developing that sense too. She's already used to timers on her watch. This is more of a stopwatch thing, but maybe something less frenetic than a digital stopwatch or a Stackmat timer. Or we could use her timer and then treat it as a check-in reminder… I don't think she's quite there yet, but it could be something to try later on. Something to grow into.

On my side, I'm working on staying focused on our long-term goals. It's not about making sure this particular thing gets done now. It's about helping A+ develop ownership of the process and the ability to tune into herself: her interests, her energy levels, her decisions and experiments. I'm also here to help build her up by catching her doing well and celebrating those small wins. It's very tempting to try to use pressure and stress when I feel responsible for helping her develop a work ethic that's convenient for fitting in, but maybe there are other things that could work well for us. Practising letting her work it out–even if it means the occasional failure–will be important as she gets older and more independent, so I might as well learn that while the stakes are low, too.

It's easier to work with what we've got than to grump at ourselves for not being who we wish we were. It's like the way I've been learning to work with how my brain works, too. Our brains procrastinate. We can get better at doing it. Could be fun.

Does your brain tend to procrastinate too? What do you find works well for you?

Related:

View org source for this post

Learning more about looking ahead together

| parenting, planning

Text from sketch

A+ is 8 years old. We're letting her be part of managing more things for her future self, like keeping track of when we're running low on her laundry or her favourite yogurt or toilet paper under the sink. She doesn't always get it right, but then again, even grown-ups have a hard time. She still sometimes melts down. Maybe I can break this down into subskills so that we can get better at them together.

  • Anticipating: Noticing an opportunity is the first step. Predicting what might be helpful is another.
    • Plan out loud
    • Talk about future self
    • Walk through questions.
  • Choosing your future self: Delayed gratification, investing in future
    • Talk about tradeoffs
    • Add more benefits
  • Preparing: Cues & memory aids
    • Show us using lists, checklists, notes, cues
  • Celebrating: Patting ourselves on the back helps reinforce the habit
    • "I'm glad we…"
    • catch her doing well
  • Adapting: Sometimes we forget or things don't work out. What are we going to do now?
    • This is hard for A+ to do in the moment, but my staying calm will help, and experience helps too.
  • Experimenting: Instead of blaming ourselves or blaming other people, it's more useful to treat it as a data point that can help us improve our processes.
    • Best done during a calm moment, maybe at the next opportunity

These things are challenging when we're dysregulated. We can grow together when things settle down.

There will be tons of opportunities to practice, and we can all grow.

One of the neat things about parenting is that I get to think about how to develop different skills. Today I want to think about planning ahead. I can see the beginnings of it developing in A+, like when she says, "I'm going to put on my boots before I put on my mittens because that's easier when you have fingers." I can see when it's more of a struggle, like when we've forgotten to bring the stuffed toy she wanted to take along and she's overwhelmed with frustration. I can draw parallels between that and the way I'm learning more about this skill myself, like when we use the Band-aids I've stashed in my emergency kit or when I've forgotten to pack lunch and have to find something that A+ will like within walking distance. Even grown-ups have a hard time with these skills. We've got plenty of examples around us of people working on improving that skill and people who struggle.

I like breaking skills down into smaller chunks so that they're easier to think about, practise, and learn. Breaking down the idea of looking ahead into anticipating, choosing your future self, preparing, celebrating, adapting, and experimenting makes more sense to me than treating it as one big lump. I want to think about these subskills in this blog post so that I can get better at them and so that we can swap notes.

The parts that are hardest for A+ at the moment are adapting and experimenting. That makes a lot of sense. That's when planning gets tested. That's when you get feedback from reality. That's difficult for lots of people, even grown-ups, and I have plenty to learn about those parts myself.

Adapting: cognitive flexibility

I think of adapting as handling things in the moment, switching to the question, "So, what are we going to do now?" To be able to do that, A+ needs to be able to manage or sidestep the fight-flight-freeze response. I think a large part of this might just be accumulating enough experiences to know that these things are survivable, and part of it is probably waiting for her brain to mature. I can't skip those things for her, but I can validate her feelings and show her that they're tolerable by staying calm myself. I'm pretty good at staying calm if I've paid attention to my basic needs. If I'm off-balance, I can ask W- for help. When I'm calm, I can be curious about what she feels and how she eventually calms down.

I also find this part challenging. When she asks me for something that she's thought of late, sometimes I'm not sure whether my figuring it out will mean she doesn't get as much practice or feedback in planning ahead or adapting. Sometimes I hesitate or say no, and then she gets grumpy and frustrated, and then I become even less flexible because I don't want to encourage grumping at me to get what she wants. I guess she's going to eventually figure out how and when to ask so that she has a higher likelihood of yes. For my part, I think it's okay to want most decisions to be slowed down and considered without pressure, so I can get better at tolerating A+'s discomfort so that she gets that feedback.

When it comes to accepting things, I like drawing on radical acceptance and Stoic philosophy, although A+'s probably a little young for me to talk about preferred and dispreferred indifferents, at least in those terms. I can model those ideas out loud, though.

Another part of adapting is having a wide vocabulary of ways we can solve problems, which we pick up through experience, skills, and learning from other people.

Sometimes I come up with ways to solve a problem, but she's not ready to move to that step yet because she's still dealing with strong feelings, and I can't help her co-regulate because she's grumpy with me. There's no rushing past that, there's no shortcut I can do to help her with her feelings, but I can be curious about what she does to eventually help herself cool down.

Besides, me coming up with ways to solve a problem is not nearly as useful as her eventually learning how to cool down and come up with her own ideas for solving it. I can save my ideas for wondering out loud, if she asks me for help. Might as well not waste a good motivating problem.

Resources:

Experimenting: reflective practice

It would be counterproductive for me to try to cushion A+ from failure. I want her to develop her own skills, so I want her to make decisions (especially ones without long-term negative consequences). Some of those decisions won't work out the way she wanted them to, but that's life. Besides, "How can we make things better next time?" is a question that can build on both positive and negative experiences, so even the uncomfortable moments can be useful.

When things don't work out, it's very tempting to blame ourselves or other people, but that doesn't really help us more forward. I want to be able to see the ups and downs as data points in our experiments and as opportunities to improve our processes. I keep working on getting better at responding to my own oopses and my delegated oopses. Fortunately, I have lots of opportunities to practice.

Swiss cheese

From James Reason's Swiss Cheese model of human errors:

The basic premise in the system approach is that humans are fallible and errors are to be expected, even in the best organisations. Errors are seen as consequences rather than causes, having their origins not so much in the perversity of human nature as in “upstream” systemic factors. … When an adverse event occurs, the important issue is not who blundered, but how and why the defences failed.

Failures point to multiple ways that we might be able to learn and to improve our systems. Paying attention to those opportunities could save us from bigger mistakes later on. Finding bugs when developing means dealing with fewer bugs in production, and this is basically her development environment. Besides, there's a lot of satisfaction in improving our systems.

Still, it's hard to think when people are dysregulated. It's easier to take that perspective when things are calm and there's an opportunity to try something new. So in the moment, my job is to weather the storm and adapt as well as I can. After the storm passes, I can think about what would make things better next time around. When I notice that A+ is calm and ready to learn, I can invite her to think along with me. She still gets defensive if I use the past events as an anchor for reflection. She responds better if we're planning for something that's coming up soon. I can use avoidance sparingly ("last time, that didn't work out so well") and lean more on building on things that worked well. That kind of reflection will probably be mostly on my side for now, but maybe she'll grow into it eventually.

I keep a brief journal, but life with A+ doesn't usually lend itself to quickly looking things up so that I can pull in the appropriate anecdotes at the right time. The tough moments tend to be easy to remember because they're emotionally-laden, but since I want to build on positive experiences as well, I can:

  1. slow down and notice things out loud in the moment,
  2. retell it shortly after, perhaps during dinnertime,
  3. capture it in my journal so I can look it up again, and
  4. think of the next little step, or some cues or situations it might be relevant to.

It's also probably easier for A+ to learn from my thinking out loud about my own processes than about hers. Fortunately, life gives me plenty of opportunities to practise learning out loud.

We already have a habit around drawing a moment of the day, and I could probably add something like Rose-Thorn-Bud to dinnertime or bedtime conversations. A+'s teachers sometimes add reflection to their assignments, too.

I probably don't even have to worry too much about explicitly teaching A+ these skills. I just have to try to not get in the way of her learning them. If we learn together, I think we'll figure all sorts of cool things out.

View org source for this post