A 2017 Revival

sashagee made me a Kirby Korner above my desk!:



These are all the Kirby blind box figures we've gotten at various anime conventions and anime goods stores, that I've just had sitting in our bedroom because I didn't want Laila to eat them (when younger) or steal them and step on them (nowadays). But now they're up on the wall behind my desk, where Laila can't get them, and I can look at them every day.

So lately, I've really been getting into using Shortcuts on my iphone lately. Some of them are just basic things that probably everyone could use. Like, when the battery gets to 20%, automatically put on low power mode, when plugged in and above 50% power, turn it off; send me a description of the day's weather at 7:45 a.m.; turn screen rotate on when I open Youtube and off when I close Youtube; that kind of thing. I have a few other shortcuts from specific apps I used, like a shortcut so that when I get a message on Signal, Minifolders puts a red dot on the Signal app in the folder, and removes the red when I open Signal.

Lately though, as per the post title, I've been trying to reduce my phone use on Shabbat, so I developed a bunch of automations around it. I made a Shabbat focus mode that turns all the icons to maximum Liquid Glass so it's extremely annoying to look it, I set shortcuts so Shabbat mode activates 15 minutes before sundown, automatically turns back on when I deactivate Sleep focus on Saturday, and ends 1 hour after sunset on Saturday. Just yesterday, I set up some automations so that when I open a bunch of time-wasting apps--Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, etc.--and apps dealing mostly with secular concerns like my banking apps, they auto-close. I rarely look at them and almost always close them anyway when I open them on Shabbat, but hey, another reminder can't hurt, right?

I found an app that does this called Shabbat Mode but they wanted $30 a year (and were charging $4 a week if you wanted to pay by week!) and it annoyed me so much I went to look up a better way to do it.

Now, you might ask, "dorchadas, why not just turn off your phone?" which is a fair question. The most selfish reason is that I want my Shabbat walks to count as exercise in my stats, but I also want me phone in case I'm somewhere and sashagee needs text me, like if something happens with Laila. So, in lieu of that, I'm trying to make my phone as annoying to use as possible so I just don't want to do it. Hopefully it works.

As I wrote in my last post, when Hallowe'en Weekend was over, we left Laila with Papa and Nana and took the train back. It was a quiet train ride, where we both just read and there wasn't really any disturbances, and then we went home and went to bed early.

I had taken that Monday off, since originally I saw that it was a no-school day on the school calendar and wanted to be home to help sashagee with Laila. But then we came up with this "Laila stays out with the grandparents" idea and so I didn't actually need the time off...but hey, I wasn't going to complain about a day off. We woke up late and did light cleaning and otherwise didn't do that much all day--it was my rest week off for exercising, and a couple people I texted were busy, so we stayed home until the time came for Laila's parent-teacher conference in the evening.

Now, we had sent Laila to the grandparents' house before we realized that this parent-teacher conference was supposed to be student led. I e-mailed her teacher explaining the situation and her teacher said we should just come and Laila could have fun. Well, we did and it...kind of made me feel better. We mostly talked about her behavior and participation, and they're seeing improvements, though someone still needs to be with Laila at basically all times to prevent her impulses from getting control of her. We did learn that when she gets some fun iPad time at the end of the day--they said it's like ten minutes and only sometimes--Laila always wants to practice math. She doesn't want to watch videos, she doesn't want to play games, she wants to do the ST Math supplemental math instruction edutainment stuff. Wild.

But what we didn't get is much comment about Laila's educational progress. Like, she has a lot of trouble, and I understand that she has to work on some skills that other kids her age are already very good at, like sitting still and listening. But we're not sending her to a babysitter. She needs to be learning her numbers, her alphabet, and eventually how to read. She loves having us read books to her, and I've asked her if she wants to learn to read herself and she always says yes. But the biggest problem is getting her to display her knowledge, especially to us. She'll bring home worksheets with all the numbers correct and at home she'll yell "One two three five nine twenty!" And then we'll be out somewhere and she'll see a "2 for $6" McDonald's deal sign and say "twenty-six" so I have no idea what her actual level of knowledge is.

We'll just need to settle her down with some more practice worksheets once her keppra rage eases up.

We wore some fancy clothing out to the conference--which her teachers commented on--because we were going out to dinner afterwards. See below:

( Food pictures )

On the way home, we saw these fine gentlemen reminding us to vote: