better, i think

this parenting thing has rough moments, especially for a decidedly imperfect parent like myself. mr smear was MUCH better behaved overall this week with his screen time reduced to almost zero, and in general things felt smoother between us, but yesterday he got his privileges back: some of it was great fun (we played around with the universe sandbox together, and then hit boomerang fu hard (he'd cheated being grounded by playing it at our neighbour's on friday evening), and things were good. well, until he threw a tantrum because he wasn't winning on the hard level by himself (he claimed the game was cheating).

that eventually resolved well, and the afternoon was fine: we all took the pikmin for a walk around cape town, encountered all the unmasked hordes with no concept of social space was unpleasant, but the falafel from nish nush was great and we levelled up until we unlocked the AR feature which was really cool - although gd got in trouble for squishing one of the pikmin while we were interacting with them...

last night was going great until shower time, at which point mr smear did something really ugly that i can only compare to lucy pulling the football away from charlie brown. this being the millionth time, i reacted badly, and then he reacted badly, and we all had an awful night as a result.

this morning he slipped into our bed and said some hurtful things, after a period of time with no response i eventually got an apology and some resolution. so far, we've had a pretty good day.

...

work was good, but friday was a weird emotional rollercoaster. we spent a few hours doing the annual "top 5", with everyone presenting their highlights of 2021 and some of the presentations were quite touching. what followed was a good day, and then our manager called us in to share a shit feeling about the awesome team t-shirts we made because he's concerned that others think that we feel superior... i've never been so offended by a perceived offence before :/

anyway, i think we'll all be fine, but it was a bit of a downer after an otherwise successful week (even if i didn't make my hours).

...

i've now had two days to recover, i've prepped the script for the next two pages (the current one's looking really good so far), and i've done nothing towards the side project except maybe getting my head (mostly) back in order.

am i addicted to sudoku? i think so. is my son getting the hang of it? i think so. is he reading like a champ? i think so. is he writing nicely? i think so.

okay, it's potter time (movie 3).