Week 13

Comfortably beyond halfway through my parental leave now, and time is flying. I feel retired and to be honest, it feels good! I know why people say that they don’t know how they found the time to work when they finally retire. I too don’t really know how I found the time to work!

Village Bike Ride

This weekend we had the annual village charity bike ride and it was brilliant as usual. 6 miles each way, and our 6 year old handled it very comfortably - he rode off ahead with a couple of his friends and I hung back with their parents and we chatted away as our children exercised their independence (and bodies).

Each year we get a little faster and I get to see the children become bolder.

Each year, I say “Wow - it’s really not that far to Boroughbridge - we should do this more often!”

Maybe this is the year I actually implement a normal bike ride. Something for the summer or before gymnastics on a Saturday morning, perhaps.

Speech Therapy

My eldest had his first speech therapy assessment this week and has started lessons pronouncing his ‘s’ (as in ‘sea’) and ‘sh’ (as in ‘ship’). No major notes here other than an insurance that is ‘use it or lose it’ and so encourages us to get relevant therapies (which is probably the point of the insurance - make sure me and the people in my life are in tip-top shape) is the driving factor. And, it’s nice to note the kind of things I can find time for now I’m not working.

Car Seats

I worked on a project (the first of many) this week that clearly has nothing to do with my DPhil and yet is a very data heavy project. This is noteworthy because it was my suspicion that this is how I’d spend my time if I were retired, and it might end up being true. The NHS car seat advice on second-hand car seats seems barmy to me (as covered in another blog post). Using Claude, I gathered as much evidence as I could and put together an opinion piece for the BMJ or similar. Ultimately I argue that the NHS should allow, and indeed recommend, second-hand car seats.

I’ll share more on this if it goes anywhere, but I emailed a Professor of Risk/Public Health at Oxford and will try to get somebody else interested before moving forward.

Weekend Exhaustion

We’ve had a real run of busy weekends and have more of them coming up. One of the honest answers to “what did I do this week?” is recover. I’m finding that lots of weekend plans have a lead up (planning, washing, packing), an execution, and then recovery (washing, unpacking, gathering). The start of this week was taken up with a lot of jobs like that. No glamour. Just getting stuff done.

Conclusion

I’m actually writing this close to 2 weeks late so I’m not so hot on what I actually did - bad me, bad. I’m finding keeping up with these updates quite difficult because of a bunch of data projects I’m working on. Let’s see if I can do better going forward…