It was interesting to read Zoe Chance's book Influence is Your Superpower (2022) with a focus on influencing A-, who is 6 years old and definitely more reachable via her Gator brain than her Judge brain. Shining is easier because I have to connect with just one person who really wants to connect with me. Creating space with the "No" challenge is a little tougher, since she's pretty wise to the way I try to soften nos. ("You always say later!") But I'm definitely going to try to practise doing aikido with her mind, accepting her resistance and exploring it with questions. I can work on using my relaxed voice most of the time, especially since she's sensitive to my tone. I also like the tip about using the Zeigarnik effect to invite her curiosity and get her to ask, maybe by using things like "I might know something that could help. Would you like to hear about it?" instead of jumping in with advice. Paying attention to how we frame things (monumental, manageable, mysterious?) and challenging ourselves to do bigger and better might be fun, too. She's old enough that I might even be able to ask her, "What would it take?" I'm sure she'll pick up that behaviour quickly and ask me that when she wants something, so I'd better be prepared for that!

I've been coming to terms with the idea that I might not get appreciably more focus time over the next few years, if we decide to either continue with virtual school or switch to homeschooling. It's okay. A-'s going to grow more independent and disappear for long stretches of time, so there's no need to rush or push her away just so that I can do stuff on my computer. I'll miss these days soon enough.

So I just need enough me time to keep myself sane and to make better use of interstitial time as the opportunities arise: waiting for her to wake up, waiting for her to finish reading or playing, waiting for her to go to sleep… I'm starting to be able to find 5 minutes here, 20 minutes there. Most of the time, I can't jump on my laptop. If I'm on a screen, she'll want to be on a screen. Fortunately, my SuperNote doesn't trigger that sense of unfairness, so I can draw or write as long as I'm willing to let her use it if she wants to draw too.

I get some coding time here and there, too. I've shifted to more of an advisory role for my consulting, helping a couple of other developers via text chat on my phone throughout the day and sitting down to code when A-'s watching a movie. Sometimes I work on personal projects while A- watches a movie. She's very good at insisting we both take eye breaks, and from all her questions, I get the feeling that her brain is still very busy processing the Nth time through Frozen or the LEGO Movie. Cool, cool. Might as well use that time to work on continuous improvement. There's always more tidying to do, but it's also good to play around with ideas and try to make things better.

So, what do I want to think about and work on when these opportunities come up? How can I accelerate during those little sprints of thinking time?

• Drawing and writing: I can collect questions to reflect on or thoughts to untangle, so I can quickly pick one and add to a sketch or a handwritten draft of a blog post.
• Book notes: I can keep a bookmark in a book and sketchnote a few more pages when I have the chance. Bonus: she sees me reading. Good time to learn more about parenting, education, psychology, and other topics that might be useful.
• Coding: I can work on setting up my server so that I can write and publish blog posts from my phone, including referring to sketches and converting hand-written drafts.
• House: I can get rid of more clutter so that I can find things more easily.
• Tech: I can prepare ePubs and PDFs to read on my SuperNote so that I can learn more about things that will make coding easier or more fun.

What if I want to create more time? How can I get more focused time?

• E-book reading time: A- quickly finishes books from the library, but the tablet can be a portal to thousands more books. Besides, sometimes she just wants to read, and that's okay.
• More consistent bedtime: if I go to sleep at a reasonable time, I can use some time in there morning to do stuff. I just have to be ready to set it aside when she wakes up.
• At the playground: if we're at a playdate, I like to still pay attention to the kids and the other parents. I can bring a 3x3 cube and my SuperNote to take advantage of spare time, though.
• More books to lose herself in: I pick up lots of book recommendations from Facebook, and the library's a great source. It's a win all around: we get extra exercise walking to the library, she learns about more things and more words, and I get time to focus on something.
• Take-out/convenience foods, preparing ahead: it takes me around an hour to make dinner. I can occasionally swap some of that time for thinking or coding time by using money. Hmm…

It'll be great. Sure, it's not the sudden jump in discretionary time that I might have had if A- was going to go to in-person school, but this way could be good too. I can grow into it just like A- will grow into her own independence. It reminds me of the way my 5-year experiment with semi-retirement started off with lots of consulting and slowly ratcheted down until I felt comfortable using most of my time for my own stuff. We can learn about time apart together.

I liked Oliver Burkeman's 2021 book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. It covered many of the things I've been working learning on for the past 10 years on this experiment with semi-retirement and parenting. Learning to sit with anxieties and uncertainties, accepting my limits and working with them, being here now… These are the lessons I find myself practising every day.

Some things have gotten easier. I've become comfortable with an ever-growing task list that I know I'll never clear. My default task status is SOMEDAY, and I treat the list like a buffet of ideas that I can choose from when I want to. Which is hardly ever, since I'm still living on kid time and have very little focused time for myself. Most days I'm okay with this, as childhood is fleeting and my main challenge is to really be here for it. This is tough. I've been learning that I'm very human. I turn into a hangry ogre if we're out too late. I grump at A- if I get too tired. I work on separating the shark music of my anxiety from what's really going on. We joke about my squirrel brain and find ways to deal with its limits. I've given up many of my illusions about control. Knowing that I still have lots to learn even though I'm almost 39 makes it much easier for me to appreciate A-'s being 6. My journal helps me see how the days build up into months and years. I'm still on the anxious side, but W- helps balance that, and developing resourcefulness and resilience will help too.

While the book is mostly about confronting and working with the limits of being mortal, it also had some interesting thoughts about the value of being in sync with other people. Tangling my life up with W- and A- has helped me learn about things I would never have stretched myself to do on my own. I can see how A- enjoys playing with her friends. We've decided to go with virtual school for Grade 1 to minimize COVID risks (and I've been keeping an eye on monkeypox news too, ugh). I wonder if we can get a full synchronous exemption again this year. It's been nice following A-'s interests. But we did kinda miss out on group experiences of music and dance, and I'm not sure I'll find outdoor classes for those within walking distance. Online classes exist, but then we'll need to sync up with someone else's schedule. Maybe someday, if A- wants it strongly enough. Here I remind myself not to worry too much about her future, not to try to orchestrate things too much. It is enough to observe, support, and join her in learning. Besides, we can still have fun with clapping games and tea parties.

Anyway. Mortality. Cosmic insignificance. I can attest that thinking about these things can be surprisingly reassuring. All we can do is what we can do, and that's enough. Tomorrow I will dress and eat and brush teeth and play and tidy and do other things that I do every day. Against this backdrop of mostly-sameness, A- grows. If I pay attention, I may even notice it–for just as unexpected lasts sneak up on you, unexpected firsts do as well. If I pay attention, I might notice I'm growing too.

I spend a lot of time waiting for A-. Sometimes I'm waiting for her to finish reading a book or watching a video. Sometimes it takes her forever to get to bed. She can sometimes amuse herself independently, but she often still wants me around somewhere in the room. Someday she won't, so in the meantime, I wait. I can't be on my phone or laptop during times like that, because then she'll want screentime too. Sometimes I tidy, sometimes I read, sometimes I write.

It turns out that learning to solve the Rubik's cube is an interest that slots neatly into my life with A-. We picked it up recently because A- was interested in my old Pyraminx.

Our order from Cubing Out Loud turned out to be a pretty good introduction to the world of speedcubing:

• a MoYu RS3 M 2020, a magnetized 3x3x3 cube for $10 CAD
• a YuXin Little Magic 3x3x3 M, another magnetized 3x3x3 cube for $9 CAD
• a YJ MGC 2x2x2 M, a magnetized 2x2x2 cube for $11 CAD
• and some lubricant

The speed cubes were way smoother than the Rubik's cubes I remember from high school and university. The 2x2x2 cube was great for helping A- practise simple algorithms and get that feeling of success. She quickly graduated to the 3x3x3 cubes. She loves solving it from the fish position, so W- and I solve the first two layers, and then she solves it from there. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly she picked up the beginner algorithms that we showed her, and she took great delight in learning finger tricks and being able to do the Sune move in three seconds. I can do the Anti-Sune just about as fast as she can do the Sune, so we trade cubes back and forth. Sometimes I mix things up so that she has to permute the last layer, too. She's gradually branching out to more algorithms, and will sometimes even take on solving it from a full scramble.

Cubing seems to be a good way for her to practise distinguishing left from right, clockwise from counter-clockwise. We talk about averages, minimums, and moves per second. She likes taking apart our cubes, tweaked the tension, and lubing them. (Reassembling them is a job for grown-ups, apparently.) She likes playing around with different patterns. It spread into her pretend play too. She loves watching JPerm and parroting his lines.

For my part, I enjoy slowly learning different algorithms and feeling things start to click. I can usually solve the 3x3 in under two minutes now (nothing remarkable; most beginners get there), and have lately been averaging around 1:30. I'm getting the hang of solving colour-neutral crosses by moving edges around and ignoring centers, and of solving the first two layers together. I like practising algorithms while keeping an eye on her at the playground. I'm getting better at smiling even when A- snatches the partially-solved cube I was working on with the timer running. I'm not aiming for any records, anyway.

Since W- has gotten into cubing as well, we have determined that we need more cubes. Also, to save our phones from A-'s rather enthusiastic timer use, a StackMat timer and a mat are probably a good idea. Speed Cube Shop had a wider selection than Cubing Out Loud, so we ordered a few cubes and accessories from there. She insisted on getting a Gan cube with some of her savings. Hey, at least these highly-engineered bits of plastic generally stay in one piece, don't get scattered all over the floor, don't need to be sorted into various bins, and don't get stepped on. (I'm kidding, LEGO, we still like you.)

In terms of Android apps, I like Nano Timer. It's free and allows me to keep times in different categories, like a regular solve, A- starting from the fish, or co-op. There's even a multi-step timer for breaking down things like CFOP. A- likes Finger Timer because it looks like a StackMat timer.

Naturally, I'm getting the urge to do something about Rubik's cubes and Emacs. A timer that will let me quickly reassign my current time from "Regular 3x3 solve" to "Solved until A- grabbed the fish"? (It'll have to work on my phone - maybe Termux or SSH, or a web-based approach…) An Org Babel block type for visualizing cubes and moves so that I can make my own notes and blog posts? An SVG version of that text-based Rubik's cube that someone wrote for Emacs? A scramble generator that lets me pick the type of scramble I want and then uses the Kociemba algorithm to generate the steps for scrambling it? Anyway, it'll have to wait until I get a few things off my plate, like EmacsConf and the usual year-end paperwork.

In the meantime, I have things to learn while I wait. I think I'd like to get to the point of being able to do the cross blind. I'm also working on memorizing the rest of 4LLL, and then full OLL/PLL after that.. Anyway, so that's what we've been up to in the evenings while waiting for A- to go to bed.

A- wants to be with me almost all the time. This can be challenging.

A multiple-choice question is easier than a fill-in-the-blank one, especially when it comes to "What do we do now?" A- seems less grumpy throughout the day when she can go from one activity to another of her choosing. I like letting her take the lead. I also like not having to come up with stuff. During bedtime, I sketched this menu:

A- loved Rosemary Wells' books about Yoko. When we came across the idea of a book tree in Yoko Learns to Read, I made one for her. I painted a tree trunk on a large sheet of paper and told her that she would get one book leaf for every book that she could read by herself. It was a great way to make learning visible.

We started staying at home in March 2020 in order to minimize COVID-19-related risks. The book tree grew more and more leaves, marking our progress despite the sameness of our days.

At first, the book leaves mostly came from books we had recently read together, so memory probably played a big part. She sometimes followed the words with her fingers and she could easily correct herself if I pointed to something she'd forgotten, though, so there was probably quite a bit of actual reading there. Later on, she read books that we hadn't read together in months, or books that I'd read to her only once or twice. There was even a set of beginner readers that I had put aside so that she could read them without having ever heard me read them. She read them all.

Reading has become part of her identity. “I love to read,” she often exclaims. After she finishes a book, she looks up at me proudly and says, “Book leaf?” We've been experimenting with letting her stay up late if she reads independently. She still wants me to hang out in the room with her, so as a bonus, I get to read, too. I still read to her during the day and at bedtime, of course. But she reads! By herself! I love hearing her.

It's amazing to see how the books pile up. Here's what it looked like in March and what it looked like at the start of September. It's almost time to make a new tree, I think. It might be interesting to make a book forest.

When we reorganized our living room to bring more things down to A-‘s level, W- thought of bringing the LEGO Heroica games down even though the boxes said 8+ years old. A- noticed them, of course. We built the different game elements and started playing. At first, she was too anxious to go near monsters. Her voice quavered and she made amusing attempts to distract us from the game. We said she could pick the wizard, hide behind our characters, use her ranged attack whenever the opportunity came up, and dash in to grab the treasure. She did so gleefully.

She eventually worked up the courage to deal with monsters with 1 strength, and then 2 strength, and even the occasional 3-strength final boss. She mixed in elements from other LEGO sets and invented her own rules, like letting cupcakes and cookies restore 1 health point. In pretend play, she fluidly shifted between being a golem, a goblin, and a wizard. We made up stories about a LEGO Friends cupcake cafe owner making friends with goblins by giving them free samples. She mixed game terms into everyday life: “I rolled shield!” She played with words like ranger and ranged. We took turns reading the comics and the manuals, and she had plenty of questions.

W- was curious about whether A- was ready for other roleplaying games, so he printed out Monster Slayers: The Heroes of Hesiod and The Champions of the Elements. I acted as the dungeon master, she played the wizard, and I played the fighter as well. We used the Heroica figures instead of the paper hero tokens, and we used LEGO cones for health points instead of shading in circles. She got the hang of rolling the dice and taking off the monsters' health points whenever she landed an attack. (I did the math for her.) It was lots of fun.

I wonder if I can enrich our pretend play to expand her world knowledge, help her practise solving problems, and maybe even motivate mark-making. We've been doing a bit of pretending with our improvised version of the LEGO Friends Lighthouse Rescue Center. I've shown her a few videos of veterinarians working in rescue centres, including one of a fish getting a prosthetic eye. She pretended to rescue some LEGO animals we had. I asked her to draw diagrams of where the animals were injured, come up with names for them, and write down the first letters of their names and the first letter of her name.

Amazing Tales released 2-page quickstart rules and lots of adventures for free. I might be able to adapt A Very Rainy Day to a wildlife rescue scenario. Hmmm…