He’s Everywhere

Probably the most exciting recent development is that of movement. He can’t properly crawl yet (it’s a funny little commando drag) but he can move! This has already caused some problems - it means he can drag himself over to the lego on the floor and, as he’s also at the stage where everything goes in his mouth, we now have to be a lot more careful about where we leave him.

Yesterday he used his newfound powers to crawl over to a door and shut it, and then crawl back to open it again. Repeat ad infinitum. In fact, repeat ad infinitum would probably be a better title for this post. Throwing things is fun. Sure. But you know what’s better? Throwing the same thing again and again and again. I suppose he’s got to make sure gravity and the laws of motion are still all working the same way.

As well as the commando crawl, he’s now got a pretty gnarly set of head nodding and shaking and even the rudiments of waving. All of these are hilariously overexaggerated whole body experiences.

He’s just getting onto the ‘posting’ phase where the height of fun is dropping things into other things. Balls into tubs. Toys into the bath. Blocks into other, bigger blocks.

Eating

He eats like a horse. He has for a while and sometimes he has off days but generally, I’ve never known a baby eat as much. On probably a third of days, he out eats his 4 year old sister. No real dislikes. Some very strong likes though (broccoli, naan bread, dhal, pasta with creamy cheese). Also, he likes to think he’s independent so anything he can hold and eat himself is usually a good bet. He also gets upset anytime he’s eating something and everybody else is eating something else.

There’s no self-preservation mechanism either. A massive bit of clearly undigestable apple (for somebody without any teeth)? No bother - he just lobs it in his mouth and hopes for the best. Starting to choke? Better throw in some more to force it all down. Fishing food out of a baby’s mouth without accidentally forcing it further into their mouth is a skill, and one that I don’t think I’ve mastered yet.

Sound

He can’t speak but he can mimic and he is the loudest baby. Not the loudest baby I’ve ever known. Just factually speaking, the loudest baby. We went to a wedding and he shouted with such ferocity, such volume, that people sought us out to tell us just how noisy he was. He’s not angry. He just likes the sound of his own voice. His eldest brother encourages him and they have shouting contests and it feels like a scene from a sitcom.

He spends a lot of time playing with his tongue and making different sounds so I’d have guessed that he’ll end up speaking quite early but :shrug: - who knows? I’m not really hoping he speaks early, but it’ll probably undo some of his frustration if he can let us know what he wants.

Sleeping

I mentioned I’d been up since 5:30am, didn’t I? He’s not the worst sleeper ever but I do wish he was a bit better. He tends to wake up somewhere between 6 and 7, have his first nap around 9 - 10, give us somewhere between 40 and 90 minutes. Then we’ll give him 3 or so hours, and he’ll nap again for usually between 30 and 90 minutes. Bedtime is often 6 - 6:30 and then he’ll wake up between 1 and 2 times in the night.

There are good days and there are bad days. Yesterday he was a massive pain. Maybe today will be better.

He’s sort of halfway between 2 and 3 naps - he should probably be on 2 naps by now but his naps are often pretty weak and if he does two 40 minute naps then he’s really not getting enough sleep. But it’s too late in the day to put him back down again for a third so we’re on two.

We’re also in a transition where he’s starting to nap in his cot more than his pram (where previously he’s exclusively been pram napped). Last child we went too heavy on cot naps and lost the ability to nap her in the cot, so we’re hoping to keep both options available to us this time.

Fun

He likes peek-a-boo, loud noises, baths, shouting and flapping (being a dinosaur), his big brother (mainly) and big sister (slightly), grabbing things he shouldn’t (this laptop, right now), books, chewing things, and of course, the big one, mummy.

Conclusion

He’s finished his breakfast and is shouting at me and mauling me so I’ll bring this to an undignified close. He’s changed a lot and will keep on changing. I just need to try to bask in it all without going insane.

When it came to revision time at the end of each year, something cool happened. The bits that I’d breezed through (or copied from somebody else) were foreign to me - I’d have to relearn them from scratch. The bits that I’d struggled with were the bits that I knew.

Learning to Code

When I was 22, I decided that I wanted to learn to program. I started off with Python and Ruby tutorials and yet again…the struggle was real. This time I recognised it, and knew that it was good. Knew that any time I wrestled with package installation, or hunted down an off-by-one error, or nerfed my operating system, these were just the ways different ways of learning.

It worked. By the time I was 23, I was employed as a data scientist - programming every day. And that’s how I’ve spent the last 13 or so years. Programming and struggling with data, with varying sizes of data and a growing collection of methods, trying anything and everything to do something useful.

Learning in the Age of AI

I recently saw the guy who had a brief flash of fame sharing the ChatGPT prompts that got him through university at his graduation. I was reminded of myself: as an impoverished student, I made a £50 donation to Wikipedia in recognition of the help I’d received over the prior 4 years.

However, I do think there’s a real difference with AI and that’s because the struggle is gone. It doesn’t have to have gone - I’m not saying it’s impossible to use AI for education, and in fact I think I really motivated learner could probably go much further much faster by using AI.

But I do think it has become increasingly difficult to struggle for prolonged periods of time on a problem, now that we know the answer is often a few keystrokes away.

Mobile Phones, Kids, and Balancing Momentary and Long-Term Dissatisfaction

If I can offer an analogy from my academic work, let’s consider phone use and children. Boredom sucks. There’s a famous psychological experiment where people gave themselves electric shocks rather than endure the horror of boredom. “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone..

And yet, increasingly, boredom is being viewed as an essential part of growing up and developing creativity and initiative and resilience, and all sorts of good things.

Any rational parent would choose to allow the boredom, taking the short-term pain of a whiny child in exchange for the long-term benefits of a child that can occupy themselves. But in practice, that isn’t what happens. Kids whine about a long car journey. They get given an iPad. Then they whine about a haircut, and get given one for that too. Ultimately, they find that the key to getting the iPad is whining, and before you know it, you’ve got an iPad kid.

The point is, while we’re aware of the long-term benefits of the psychologically discomforting experience, we’re wired really strongly to avoid psychologically discomforting experiences (sort of by definition) and so face a real uphill battle.

The Struggle

Struggling on a problem that you can solve in a heartbeat is one of those psychologically discomforting experiences. So sure…you can be disciplined, and fight your inner workings and force yourself to struggle and struggle and struggle.

Some people will, and those people will learn faster and more effectively and will end up better than those before them.

Most people won’t. Most people, when faced with a 3 hour long struggle or a 10 second query are going to go ahead and take the shortcut and skip the struggle. This is not me being high-and-mighty, by the way. Me too. It’s hard to justify spending an hour reading a data schema when you can just bung the thing into ChatGPT. Why bother learning how to create the perfect scatter plot when Claude will do it just fine?

Conclusion

I think we’re in for a wild few years when it comes to education. Learning hard subjects ultimately requires struggling, and LLMs have made struggling obsolete. However, LLMs are advancing at such a rate that perhaps we no longer need large swathes of graduates who know how to solve hard problems by themselves. I don’t know any of these things - I’m just along for the ride.

It was great.

The eldest got to cycle to the park by himself, found some friends, and played until their lesson started. More than half of his school year does the cricket lessons, and so he’s got a bunch of pals that he gets to play with. After the lesson, they all decamp to the park, have sweets and generally live their best life.

The middle child goes to the park where there’s a collection of supervising parents (often not the child’s own) and she finds her nursery friends and they run around after each other.

The parents go to the bar and buy a drink and enjoy not parenting of a Friday night.

The cricket lessons are run by teenagers - my guess would be 13 - 17 year olds who are presumably getting experience, getting paid (a small amount) and are getting a bit of responsibility handling 30-odd 6 year olds.

What a wonderful thing for everybody involved. Probably something like 5% of the entire village goes to the cricket club of a Friday night. The bar is run by volunteers, and I’ve got a feeling that I should join that team at some point. The pitch is maintained by volunteers. The park was funded by volunteers and is probably maintained by volunteers.

It takes a small army of people to make some magical village life. But at least to me, all their hard work is worth it when you see what it brings every Friday evening.

Last Week

The Lake District

We went to the Lake District over the weekend and stayed in a timeshare. I know that’s only a couple of days but honestly, an event like that swallows your whole week. There’s the packing, the washing, the preparing, the drive… and then when you get home you do the whole thing in reverse, and you find a weekend trip can drain you of a whole week.

It’s the first time we’d been in about 4 years and the lakes themselves are magnificent. The scenery is something else and seeing the dramatic hills made me feel a certain pang of nostalgia from when we came here every year. Working remotely means I could live in the Lake District quite happily and every time I visit I wonder if we should.

The drive up was hard, and the baby just won’t sleep properly at the moment and that’s draining in every sense of the word. However, there were some magical moments to compensate: skimming stones and falling over in shallow rivers, running up hills and chasing sheep, having a traditional lunch in a wonderful country pub.

It was hard, but I’m sure we made some wonderful memories that’ll stick with all of us for a long time. Isn’t that just all of parenting boiled down to its essence?

Submitting a Paper

I finally submitted the second paper of my DPhil (probably the second paper - either way, it’s a paper and I’m doing a DPhil) - this time going for a pure psychology journal. I’m fairly proud of the paper and really hope it gets accepted. I got beaten up pretty bad last time, only getting accepted on what was I think my sixth attempt.

I put a lot more work into the proof reading/fixing things part of this paper and I’m hoping that it paid off. The cadence in academia is sometimes glacial so I might not know the fate of this paper before I go back to work. Either way, I’m now having a brief breather before I get started on whatever I end up doing next academically. I think I’m going to get properly started on something

• this parental leave is a gift and if I don’t make a bunch of DPhil progress, I think I’ll regret it later.

Gym Watch

I kept up gymming and am doing myself proud in this respect. I wasn’t healthy over the Lake District weekend but continue to believe in the holistic view of health that includes whisky, burgers and giving yourself a break when things are tough on the childcare front.

Climbing Party

Kids parties continue to be fun - I’ve had a good run of them. I think it’s because the children have become a bit more independent which means I spend less time chasing after them and moderating their behaviour. That means I’ve got a whole bunch more time to spend chatting with parents, drinking coffee, and contemplating things.

Conclusion

No deep insight - just another busy week, inching forwards my DPhil, keeping up with family life and having a mini-holiday. If all my weeks were like that, I’d be in a good place (though fairly tired).

Background

There’s a really famous paper (Car Seats as Contraception) in this space which basically shows that the creep of car seat legislation has led to a reduction in the probability of having a third child in America, just because the average American car can’t fit 3 car seats in the back. So people postpone, or in some cases, don’t have a third child because it’d require a new car. It’s a funny look at incentives and unintended consequences. Well, funny if you don’t think about it too hard.

If you look at the number of children’s lives that the legislation have saved (57) and compare that to the number of children who weren’t born because of the impact of car seat legislation (~8,000), you end up with a big big child-shaped gap. Net, car seat legislation is costing us children’s lives.

Now there’s all kinds of philosophical musings here on how you value people who have never been born, especially when compared to those who already exist. Maybe you think that only existing people count morally, and so 57 saved lives outweighs 8,000 people who were never born. 8,000 people who never experienced the magic of life, and who never enriched the lives of others. While that’s an interesting argument to have - it’s not what I’m really here for. Personally, I think an unborn person is worth less than a born one, and probably quite substantially less. But not nothing. Anyway, the point is, even if we consider mandatory car seats versus not mandatory car seats…I think there’s a chance you could argue pretty well for not mandatory car seats.

Car Seat Anxiety

However, once you look into things, It’s not enough just to have a car seat. There’s a collective anxiety about the type of car seat, its provenance, and its orientation. I’m knee-deep in all this right now as the proud owner of 3 small children, so let me share a little of my anxiety with you.

The Type of Car Seat

91% of observed car seats demonstrate serious installation errors amongst newborns. Improper installation is a bigger safety concern than differences in crash test performance between seats. And so ISOFIX seats are recommended, not because they’re safer but because they’re harder to install incorrectly.

So far, so sensible, right? Even if you put the car seat in right every time, what happens if somebody else doesn’t? Does it matter that ISOFIX seats are harder to put in a row and fewer cars exist that’ll take 3 ISOFIX seats? Of course not. Where safety is concerned, are we willing to compromise?

Second Hand

So much baby stuff is available on second hand markets. Babies grow out of everything really quickly and so being able to buy/sell things to other parents as you move into/out of sizes is invaluable. Except the advice with second-hand car seats is “if you can’t verify that the seat has never been in a crash, it’s not safe.”

What a way to completely kill a second-hand market. Sure, you can buy a second-hand car seat. But what happens if it’s been in a major crash that’s structurally weakened the car seat, but in a way that’s completely non-visible? The people selling it swear they haven’t been rallying with their toddler in the back…but are you willing to take the risk? Where safety is concerned, why risk it?

Extended Rear-Facing

It’s been shown that the safest way to travel with kids in the car is to have them rear-facing: their back pressed against a chair pressed against a front-seat, and their feet resting against the back row of seats. Is it more boring for the child? Sure. Does it exclude them from the communal experience of driving together (mainly I-Spy in our car)? Sure. Then there’s the complex array of mirrors that you now need to keep an eye on them. But where safety is concerned…

The Risk

22 children (aged 0-15) died as car passengers in Great Britain in 2024. I don’t have specific stats on that age-based distribution so let’s assume linear and say around 11 children aged 0-7 died in 2024. Around 2,900 children aged 0-7 died in the same period of any cause - but around 2,300 of them were under 1, dying primarily of birth complications and defects.

In short, the risk of a child dying in a car crash in miniscule. Even without car seats, a child is incredibly unlikely to die due to a car crash.

Perhaps car seats aren’t primarily about saving children’s lives but instead about preventing them from injury. I don’t have good stats on that, I’m afraid. However, as they’re not the stats that we tend to report on in the child safety industry, I can only assume that they’re not the primary means of judging the efficacy of the car seats.

Relative versus Absolute Risk

So when we say that car-seats are often installed incorrectly, or second-hand could be dangerous, or rear-facing is safer…what do we actually mean? I don’t dispute that any of those things are true. But my point is that the absolute risk of a child dying in a car crash is so small that the relative risk becomes increasingly irrelevant. At what point should we consider it to be negligent to give advice on a topic and to talk about relative safety levels? Technically it’s safer to put your children in cycle helmets when getting in the car (and if not, we could make helmets that made that true). Mercifully, I don’t think anybody is suggesting that particular intervention just yet. At the extreme, rummer shoes reduce the risk of dying by lightning strike. Yet the NHS (or other, similar bodies) don’t say that wearing rubber shoes is safer. Doing so, in fact, would be wildly irresponsible.

Follow the Incentives

There’s a much larger essay on this lurking somewhere, but for now, I’m not even going to focus on the fact that the car seat industry (manufacturers, sellers, fitters and safety testers) are all incentivised to act as though a 5% improvement in crash test actually matters. Of course manufacturers would like the second-hand market to be dead. Of course they’d like ever more stringent regulations and legislation mandating usage.

Instead, let’s look at what public health bodies recommend. The NHS says that you should not buy a secondhand car seat because “it could have been damaged in an accident, and may not have all its parts, including the instructions. It may also not be the safest and most user-friendly model, plus it may not fit your car properly”

Jesus Christ. Is that really public health advice?

The NHS isn’t going to get into any trouble for recommending that people be safer, are they? The risk, from their perspective, is that somebody follows NHS advice and then their kid gets hurt/killed in an unsafe car seat. The potential public risk of the advice is thousands fewer children being born, and more stressed and more impoverished parents. Also known as: “Things that won’t show up in statistics or get us sued”.

I believe that when it comes to public health advice on parenting (and to a large extent, pregnancy), most advice is focussed on directly measureable and attributable risks, and completely ignores a more rounded and holistic perspective (i.e. being a parent). As more of us get advice online and not from the older generation, we’re losing advice that centres our overall happiness and instead getting advice that eliminates measurable tail risk at the expense of…well, life.

Conclusion

Car seat safety is one of those things that plays off all our worst mental tendencies. Cars are ever-present in our lives and driving is probably one of the riskier things that we all engage in. The death of a child is the most terrible thing we can imagine. Combine these things and we yearn for a way to feel as though we have some control over this situation. Enter the car seat industry, where we invest hundreds or thousands of pounds over a child’s life in order to eke out basically negligble gains in safety.

I expect it of the car seat industry: their job is to build and sell the safest possible car seats. Parents, without training and blinded by love, can’t be expected to argue against the rising tides of safetyism. But I think public health bodies should know better - advice is a dangerous thing, and a public health body should consider holistic health before recommending something

Family Weekend

We’ve got a really busy run of weekends and it seems like every busy weekend ends up dominating the week. We got back from our Scottish wedding late on Sunday and so spent Monday recovering, washing and generally getting our life back together.

Then on Thursday, my parents came to visit. My wife went away to see her friends this weekend and I often get my parents to come and help out when she goes away. They have a great time looking after the kids, the kids have a great time being looked after, and I have a great time getting a little break. My mum does a whole bunch of a gardening jobs (usually taking at least one child with her) and my dad looks after whoever is left, and does odd-job DIY things. This time, sanding a table.

We had our first BBQ of the year (my happy place: I love a BBQ) and the weather was just delightful.

Cricket

Friday marked the return of the cricket season - my eldest is a member of the local cricket club and it’s sometimes just the best thing. We walk in the toasty early evening heat to the cricket club, where there’s sunshine and friends and a bar. The 4-year-old played with schoolfriends in the park while I stood in the setting sun watching the 6-year-old play cricket and chatted to the parents.

Bliss.

Gym

I’m back! One of the benefits of childcare (and sorting myself out) is getting back to the gym and getting back into the routine of it all. I’ve not injured myself so far and I’m glad to be improving myself. I’ve got a run of holidays coming up (Lake District, Tenerife, lads weekend) which might make my gymming a bit harder, but I’ll do what I can to keep up with things.

PhD

I’m working pretty hard on a paper and I’m really hopeful that I’ll be able to get it submitted before the end of April. It’s been a long old slog (papers always seem to be) but I think it’s in a much better place than the paper I already have published was when I started hawking that about. Let’s hope that I can tidy up loose ends (cover letter, title page) and get it sent and it flies through review and then huzzah…2 out of 3 papers done.

Halfway Reflections

Not to go too big on this (I’m reading a new book that I’m pretty into and it’s already late) but I am sort of halfway through my parental leave. It’s going fast, but I am enjoying the forcing function of having to write up what I’ve done each week. I don’t write about the day-to-day stuff generally, but that’s really what’s taking up the time and effort. The baby learning to crawl (he’s pretty close now!) or homework and spelling tests, or practicing skipping and getting dressed.

I really feel like I’m practicing a little what retirement would be like and honestly, it’s pretty good. I had a research idea that I’m seriously debating pursuing (even though it’s a bit of a ball-ache) and I can potter around the house and do jobs and learn things and…well, retirement doesn’t seem so bad after all.

My financial modelling says I’ll be lucky to retire at 43 or more practically able to do so at 45. That’s still 6 or 8 years away I’m afraid, so back to work will happen and it’ll happen soon.

Not to worry - I like work too, really!

My understanding (wholly my surmising from public comments) is that my supervisor believes that Haidt is over-interpreting and is starting with a conclusion (social media bad) and using data to try to find that interpretation. Haidt believes that my Andy is burying findings by lumping all screen time and genders and ages together.

The Thesis

Haidt shows a growth in a number of ‘bad’ mental health problems affecting teenagers across the developed world. Depression, anxiety, suicides and more have all seen sharp rises - especially amongst girls and especially since 2012.

Haidt then dismisses a number of plausible hypotheses (things are worse now, global warming, political turmoil) by showing that the timing/geography doesn’t line up. Instead, he points to social media during adolescence as the key change. He draws upon a collection of research aiming to link social media and mental health outcomes, and says that our mental health crisis is due to adolescence on social media, and the rise of “safetyism” - an overabundance of caution in the real world.

What I’m Sceptical About

As a data scientist, I’ve lost count of the number of investigations like this I’ve carried out. We see an important number move and we want to know why - so we go digging and try to find out where it happened.

Those investigations are brutal, draining, and it’s easy to make mistakes. In order to be confident it’s important to be exactly right - close isn’t good enough.

Based on what I know of the psychological research, there’s a fair amount of evidence that heavy social media use is negatively correlated with mental health. However, the evidence isn’t uniform and it doesn’t show strong negative effects. There are potentially a bunch of reasons for that, but Haidt doesn’t dig into them.

I’d also love to have seen much more on comparing social media adoption rates and mental health impacts across countries. If Latin American countries adopted Facebook 6 months later than European countries, and the effect is as pronounced as Haidt suggest, we should see a 6 month lag on all mental health metrics.

If certain regions were quick/slow/heavy users/light users, we should see regional impacts. If religious communities or different language speakers or…

The point is, a good inter/intra-country comparison could be worth its weight in gold when it comes to causality. I didn’t read any of that in Haidt’s book. Given how thorough he was, I’m erring on the side of that evidence simply not existing. If it doesn’t, what does that say of the thesis? If it doesn’t seem to matter when a country adopted social media, what kind of causal chain satisfies that claim?

Finally, I wish there was more about the relative importance of “safetyism” and social media. Perhaps they’re intertwined too closely, but given that they occurred at different rates and at different times and impacted different genders at different levels…surely something should be doable here?

What I Loved

You know how sometimes you read a book just to hear your own thoughts echoed back to you, only better? I needed to hear the safetyism chapter. Needed it deep to my core.

I’ve been wrestling with the notion of childhood independence for a little while, and this has culminated in letting my 6 year old cycle back home from school by himself. It makes my wife a little uncomfortable, but as I keep on telling her…we live in a small village where, 30 years ago, every child would have walked or cycled to school. The village is safer than it used to be. Why wouldn’t we let him?

I see the pressure everywhere - hover over your children and make sure everything they say and do is OK. Make sure they’re not in any danger. Guard guard guard. And at every juncture, they try to gain independence. And there we are, showing them that we don’t trust them and questioning their decisions.

Haidt’s diagnosis that children have been forced into the online world for any degree of independence feels spot on. We’ve traded independently playing with kids a couple of years older at the park for talking with strangers halfway across the world. The risk of (short-term) physical harm has decreased…but to what end?

I also think Haidt did a good(ish) job at showing that it’s not just anxiety that has risen. It’s easy to say that maybe the (over?)diagnosis of mental health conditions is really what we’re seeing here. Haidt covers a number of conditions and shows that all of them are moving in what looks like a dangerous way.

Haidt talks about the problems being collective action problems - that is, problems that are better tackled by all of us, rather than each individual. I don’t disagree, but as I’ve discussed elsewhere, I find mandating a solution both practically difficult and rife with hypocrisy. Can I really tell a child to be bored for 2 minutes when I pull my own phone out given a 30 second gap?

What Next?

I need to know more about safetyism. I’m living it right now, and have already taken steps to correct my behaviour. At the Scottish wedding I went to, I left my 6-year old to play with the older children outside as they were wrestling and throwing sticks and chasing and doing whatever else. He loved it, and I had a much better time not trying to police his behaviour.

If all that The Anxious Generation gives me is that, it’s already more than earned its place on my (and maybe your) reading list. Who knew parenting could be this much easier, when you trust your children and let them behave as 6-year old boys want to?

For my next read, I need to know more about the origins of safetyism. What impact did it specifically have (separate to social media)? Is it a legal concept, or just socially expected? And can we just ignore it, or will I get social services called on me if I let my children play at the park by themselves?

In-Laws and Weddings

Towards the tail-end of last weekend we had the in-laws staying with us. Not a great excuse for anything, but there were some pretty good and pretty serious conversations that needed to happen and me tapping away on my laptop would have disturbed them. Instead, my wife managed to get some great time with her dad and the kids got to play with their grandparents.

So we bid farewell to them on Wednesday…and then drove for 4 hours up to Scotland on the Friday for a wedding!

The journey up was everything you imagine a car journey with 3 young children could be (in a bad way) - delays, screaming, crying, falling out…we got there but said that it’s probably not realistic for us to go to Scotland any more. Certainly not for a weekend.

Then the wedding - I love a Scottish wedding. The pipes and kilts and ceilidh are all fantastic, and this one was no different. Even better, we decided to take all the children and ultimately to let them stay until the end. This was debated, but as my wife said: “We can’t drag them all the way up here and then send them home to bed when it starts getting interesting”

So we didn’t, and they had a wonderful time and were well behaved and got to experience so many new and different things that the whole thing seemed like the best idea ever. My four-year old daughter fell asleep in the car on the way back in her dress clutching onto a glow stick. A perfect picture of the night we’d had.

The drive back on Sunday…seamless. The baby cried, we changed his nappy, and the slept. The four-year old slept. The six-year old read for about 3 hours. No traffic. Sunshine. We should do this more often.

Building Work

We got scaffolding put up on the first day of the Easter holidays and it finally came down last week. We’ve had our roof mended, a chimney mended, another uncapped, the whole house washed and then painted, the fascias fixed, the gutters cleaned, the roofs scrubbed…

The general idea was, “let’s make the house look like a decent house from the outside”. It was a lot of work but we’ve been meaning to do it for 3 years so it’s good to finally have that out of the way. Next, however, is a whole bunch more work.

The garden is full of stuff we should throw away, the house needs decorating inside, there’s…well, honestly, I could work for the next year and still not get our house all the way sorted. Bit-by-bit, I suppose. Bit-by-bit.

No Gym, No Blogging

Over the Easter holidays I had something of an excuse (the general exhaustion caused by childcare). Now, I have nothing. I didn’t go to the gym this week because I’d gotten out of the habit, we had visitors, and I was putting my efforts towards my PhD.

Poor excuses, and next week I’m getting back to it.

I also didn’t blog anything because I was writing to my supervisors, or otherwise working on things. Let’s say this week I’ll comment on the book I just finished listening to (The Anxious Generation) and the general idea I’m fleshing out with one of my supervisors.

Conclusion

Next post will be the halfway point of my parental leave. I think I’ve probably done a crazy amount of ‘stuff’ - I certainly don’t feel like I’m sitting on oodles of time. It’s interesting…maybe this is what retirement is like? People who retire always say that they don’t know how they ever found the time for work. I get that. Let’s see if we can bring in the halfway point with a bit more focus!

The Philosophy Behind our Easter Holiday

That’s probably a little grandiose, but we decided that we’d stay at home for the Easter holidays (all two weeks of them) and not go on any ‘proper’ holiday. However, we had a brief look and found that a holiday would cost about £2,000 for all of us, and so reasoned that we could spend something like £100 a day on day trips and similar in order to create a comparable ‘home’ holiday. We didn’t quite manage to spend that much, but we put together a board showing every day, and created cards that we could stick (as a family) on the board to work out what we were going to do.

Highlights

I’ll not go through all of the things we did, but I’d like to call out some highlights. I managed to burn my head quite badly given the wonderful weather when we went to Piglets. We had some temper based problems but there were a few moments of brilliance: sitting in the sunshine having an ice-cream while the two eldest children played in the sand was magnificent. They fed lambs and did Easter egg hunts and all sorts of ‘proper’ activities but it was the self-directed playing in the sand with water and sunshine that was brilliant.

The four-year-old maintains that the family swim was her best thing - I don’t know why she thinks that, and there were no signs that it was going to be her favourite but she continues to maintain that swimming is her favourite.

Gymnastics was such a highlight that we ended up going twice (again on the final Sunday) - both of them love bouncing and jumping into foam pits and generally getting a little crazy.

The Easter egg hunt was a lot of fun and they’ve ended up with more chocolate than they could eat before Halloween. Hopefully they won’t notice the odd bit of egg disappearing.

I had a very strange bout of potential diverticulitis on my birthday (or actually on the 3rd, but it extended to movie day on the Saturday) - one day of pretty intense pain and tiredness and then nothing. By Monday at Monk’s Cross (for clip and climb) I was fine.

The playground at Beningborough Hall was brilliant and the kids occupied themselves for a couple of hours, chasing after other children and building dens and testing themselves. And the playdate was an unexpected and wonderful highlight - both big children had a great time and the four-year-old cried all the way home because she never wanted to leave.

Finally, the Deep was a proper trek but the eldest absolutely loves it - he’s been a couple of times with school and was delighted to be able to play the tour guide and tell us where all the things are were and what we should see.

Lowlights

Having soup for my birthday was pretty low - we’d planned a takeaway and drinks and a film and instead I had soup and an early night. As a treat, I managed a tin of rice pudding. Not my finest birthday.

We all fell out over shoe shopping at Monks Cross - it turns out picking shoes with 3 tired and bickering children after nearly two weeks of activity is not likely to work well.

We just didn’t have the energy or time to go to the Royal Armouries Museum, Lightwater Valley, Dig, an Indian Restaurant, or Yorkshire Wildlife Park. I’m not really sad about that - the only one I wished we’d done was an Indian. I just think the kids are of an age and a temperament where I think they’d handle going to a proper restaurant pretty well. But I’m not certain, and I’d like to try it.

Next Holidays

Next half-term we’re going on a proper abroad holiday, and I think that’s going to be pretty good. However, it was nice to have a ‘stay-at-home’ holiday and get to do a whole bunch of activities as a five. Exhausting, but nice. I’m a little wary of the summer holidays - we don’t have any plans and I’ll be back working. I’ve told my wife that I don’t envy her and that I strongly suggest she get help, plans, and anything that’ll help see her through the six weeks.

Lazy Days at Home

We spent the whole day at home and it was gloriously sunny (unseasonably so for early April - 20 degrees!). We put the stream on and the big two kids splashed through it and spent the day on the trampoline, bothering builders, and racing up and down the garden.

And then in the early evening, my wife took the baby to the shop while I made a lawnmower and strimmer with the elder two…or at least, they were there and ended up doing pirate training, chasing buckets of water down the path, tackling each other and generally causing mayhem. My wife came back with fish and chips from the local chippy and we sat outside and everybody ate and was merry. The baby tucked quietly into pasta, watching the madness unfold as the older two became increasingly giddy.

After we’d finished, I put the baby on the grass, and while he happily fed himself handfuls of grass the eldest entertained him by running in circles around him and shouting.

We finished the day by sticking the boys in the bath while the girl played with Lego, which appears to be her new discovery.

Nothing special happened - no major milestones or big plans. Just pure, unadulterated family time in the sunshine. You know the days that they say you should grab with both hands? The special days where nothing happens, except life? That was today.