General life update
Me: Doing work, parenting, intermittently attempting to socialise. That mostly sums it up. I'm still involved with a local nature reserve and have been running a series of events for them which has taken up a certain amount of time and energy.
I'm halfway through my Permaculture Diploma, but doing my best to fit that into everything else by designing things that I would be working on anyway. So we now have a shoe cupboard (this is a thing of deep joy which removes the Awkward Shoe Shelf from the hallway), and the nature reserve events were another design. I'm hoping to be finished for next September in time for the international convergence in London.
I might have a rather nice work project on the horizon but it isn't yet confirmed so I am avoiding counting any chickens. I've had a couple of stories out recently (see previous posts) and working on more fiction currently too. I have a long queue of craft projects and have been trying hard to treat them as enjoyable-process rather than as goal-to-reach, with moderate success.
I've taken to working in the London Library recently, which is better for my focus than I expected it might be. Far fewer options for distraction than when I'm at home. I suspect my overall productivity is about the same, but less of it involves chores/DIY/other random projects, and more of it is on the things that I am deliberately working on. This is probably a good thing. Next step, once this is a properly established habit, is to start cycling there rather than taking the tube. Pre-Leon, this would have been a no-brainer; I'm somewhat annoyed at myself that I've lost that deeply-ingrained habit of cycling everywhere.
I am still not much good at 'relaxing'. Working on it. Sort of (she says, busily ploughing through the to-do list). I have this ridiculous vision that One Day the to-do list will be empty and then I can just, like, do nothing for a bit. This is, of course, arrant nonsense. I am still trying to get out and see people, which is lovely when it happens but does seem to take a bit of organising.
Leon: is now 2y7m, and very very busy. Mostly, currently, with letters and numbers. A normal day currently features some or all of the following: write letters on the whiteboard, paint letters on the easel, play with alphabet puzzle, request supervising parent to make letters out of playdough, play letter games / watch YouTube alphabet song videos on iPad, go to playground and (among other things) draw letters on the ground with finger, go to playgroup and dig out all their letter-related games/toys, go to sleep drawing letters in the air, wake up in middle of night singing alphabet song. So he is, um, quite focused. ("Letters" here meaning one of English, Russian, or Hindi alphabets, or indeed numbers. He keeps finding more alphabets online and getting interested in them. His parents are not entirely keeping up.)
He's super chatty (especially about letters) but still highly ungrammatical and hasn't got the hang of pronouns at all. He's still very much at the stage of communicating by rearranging chunks of sentences that he's heard from us / books / other people / videos. He's reading at maybe about his spoken vocabulary level - he's great at verbs and nouns but still struggles with all the little joining words and doesn't always read top to bottom if the text is small and there are lots of lines.
He likes music, and sings to himself all the time. His pitch and rhythm are pretty good, and he usually gets the words roughly right. He can build Lego structures now but really at the moment if it's not a letter he's not interested, so Duplo, blocks, train set, etc are all a bit neglected. He does do a bit of imaginary play. (Usually also involving letters. Acting out a video he likes where the letters are hiding, or yesterday he was introducing the numbers from his number puzzle to a wooden knight.)
He's still not sleeping through the night; he wakes a Some of times (I choose not to know how many). He's still breastfeeding. He likes eating potatoes (his mother's son!). He can't dress himself or put his shoes on or use a fork convincingly or any of that sort of thing (just not remotely interested). He's been out of nappies for ages (he didn't like them and was mostly using a potty anyway) but every so often goes through another stage of experimenting with his bladder control which inevitably results in puddles. (This too shall pass...) He walks nearly everywhere. He's very cuddly which is nice.
(Parenting in general continues exhausting, interesting, boring, educational, challenging, &c &c by turns.)
ION: I'm on Ello (as julietk). I'm not really sure what it's for, & I am unconvinced by their "beautiful design", but if anyone is using it then feel free to follow me.
Originally posted on Dreamwidth (
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