Parental Leave - Week 8 and 9
Bonjour!
I am now on the second part of my parental leave for Jonathan, which will take me through the beginning of August. I will be providing weekly flash updates on how things are going!
The highlight of my day, currently, is the first smile I get from Jonny each morning. He is a really strong crawler now, and is able to easily pull himself to standing. We expect he'll be walking within a month or so. It is becoming more of a challenge to keep him out of trouble, and he does not take well to being fenced in.
We will be starting daycare for him in a couple of weeks, when I end my leave and return to work.
Sometime before our LAX trip, Amelia watched an episode of Spongebob Squarepants that depicted Spongebob's mental process as a collection of tiny Spongebobs working collaboratively in her head. Since then, she has been referring to her self as a collection of little Amelias. Like, if she has an idea or a new opinion, she will tell me one of the Amelias thought of something. Or if she is thinking, she will say the Amelias are working on the problem.
I've used this mental model to try to improve her focus while practicing violin, explaining that the reasons she gets distracted is that one Amelia wants to practice, while the others want to do things like coloring.
Amelia is coming up on her last week of preschool. She then has about a month of day camps before starting Pre-K at Villa Academy.
I finally caved and signed up for a Disney+ streaming subscription. We subsequently finally breached the Frozen perimeter and Let It Go is the soundtrack to our lives. No, I haven't watched Bluey yet.
Upon Amelia's request, I also bought a chess set. She has been eager to learn, and we played a few of games this weekend. I'm looking for some very basic strategy books (as we're quickly approaching the limits of my knowledge), so let me know if you have any recommendations.
For myself, I'm coming up on the last few weeks of parental leave. I'm going to try to have some time with both kids being in childcare before I go to work so I have a little bit of transition. I've also been getting a lot of reading done. I finished Second Foundation and The Phoenix Project. I'm starting Arthur C. Clarke's 2061: Odyssey Three
Wishing you the best,
Aleks