Friday bullets -- January 14, 2022

This could be short it has been a pretty uneventful week.

• I really don't mind uneventful weeks, but they don't make for terribly interesting blog fodder. My writing that we did school, took care of the house, took care of animals, and I worked in my studio over and over doesn't make terribly interesting reading. This is why I didn't post anything yesterday, there was just nothing much I had to say. I'm not complaining, but it does make it more difficult to write.
• D. heads back to school on Sunday. J. will be driving him. The original plan was that TM would drive him, but TM will be working at his new job all weekend, so we are on to plan B. We will miss having D. around, but he is enjoying school a lot and doing very well.
• G. and L. are having a sleepover at B's apartment tonight. They have been so excited that ever since Monday they have been counting down days and hours. 
• We are still caught up with our school schedule. This alone says that my functioning in winter has vastly improved since moving out here. There were some Januaries that we played a lot of school catch-up because January was such a non-functioning month for me. 
• K. has spent the week building cars. It seems he is branching out from building Star Wars ships. As with his space ships, K.'s methodology is to find a photograph and then build a three dimensional model from it. This week's car was a DeLorean.

• Hayden and Her Family will have a live, in-person screening in Chicago on February 5, at the Chicago Filmmakers. There will be a Q&A afterwards with the film maker (in-person) as well as J. and I (via internet). If you didn't get a chance to see it and/or are interested in seeing it on a bigger screen, here's your chance.
• It's only January, but I'm realizing I probably need to sit down and plan out when my next horse classes are going to be and start the publicity process. By the time spring rolls around, I will definitely need the money to buy more hay. 
• We finished the fourth Incorrigibles book today. There are only two more to go. I think we will all feel bereft when we finally finish the series. Seriously, read these to your children.
• If you have read here for any length of time, you know that I feel extremely strongly about allowing children to play for a good long time as well as delaying academics in order to make room for that play. Play allows so many pro-social skills to develop in ways that sitting at desks and doing worksheets cannot. Under the heading of 'vindication', a new Psychology Today article confirms my suppositions: Early Academic Training Produces Long-Term Harm 
• Earlier this week, a cell phone tower near us ceased to work which meant that for a couple of days our already sketchy internet was virtually non-existent. It was more annoying than anything, though it meant that Y. missed her Japanese class because we couldn't get her connected.
• R.'s new phrase is, "Mommy [or Daddy], you hear me?" any time we don't instantly acknowledge what she has said whether it requires a response of not. This feels very much like a toddler-age verbal tic, which should feel good that it is a developmental step that needs to be taken, but like the vast majority of toddler-age verbal tics, this is one which will be far more endearing in hindsight than it is in actual reality.
• One of Y.'s Christmas gifts finally arrived earlier this week. One thing that she really, really wanted was a wooden, color sudoku game, which, when I went to order it was back-ordered. I gave her a book of color sudoku games along with an IOU. She has played with her new game pretty much non-stop since it arrived. It was definitely worth waiting for in her opinion.

And with that, I think I'm tapped out. Life has been pretty quiet, which is lovely. I hope it continues for a while.