We had a little relief today. School was still closed, so the morning was rough, but we each got some nice play time in with the boys and then we got some help in the afternoon.
Miss Linda has just adored Rex since he first got to the baby room at his school, and she was noticeably disappointed that she’d missed all her time with Leo due to covid because he got moved up & out of her class a week after her return from social distancing in June. I learned in our first week in our new home that Miss Linda was now a neighbor just outside the subdivision. In fact, i can see her house from our backyard.
After realizing both mine & Keith’s stress levels from trying to do it all over the past couple days, i decided to reach out to see if she could help—afterall, i kinda knew she had the day off since school was closed, but that in no ways means that I was expectant. She was joyous & excited about the request.
She came over in the afternoon. The boys, especially Leo, were thrilled to see her. When i went out to check on them, she was sitting on a chair with both of them building ramps with Rex and entertaining Leo at the same time. I was worried that Leo might freak out upon seeing me, but nope. Not only did he not leap for me on sight, he wouldn’t even come to me.
You’d think that it would have made me sad that when i excused myself back to my office, Rex said “bye Mommy! Go back to work mommy!” and Leo practically blew me away with kisses, but it didn’t. I was actually thrilled. This said two things to me. First, this works, and we have an out when we need it. And second, that they really are well cared for at school—i always knew this, but you know, when you’re away from your kids for hours every day, you sometimes wonder. Not only that, but Miss Linda thanked me for giving her the opportunity to come over to spend time with “her babies”.
It seriously couldn’t have gone better.
Anyway, all this allowed me to actually do some work and study the code I’m trying to become accustomed to. I worked with Nick for a few hours today going over the design process. That was very cool to see the formatting & design of an app start with an “asdf” in the upper left hand corner of the browser to become nearly a full blown, static website with just a few deliberate keystrokes. It was kind of magical and certainly impressive.
At the point where he mentioned that the next part would involve a lot of internal thinking and might be tough to follow, we decided to break from the call as I had wanted to start reviewing the actual code in more detail. I have a task now afterall, and I needed to figure out where to start.
I started at the beginning—getting the database and both servers to run all by myself. Then, without components to really mess with—not that I should necessarily need them for some aspects of the task, I decided to attempt the admin-rights part of the task. I got two tests passing, but I’d skipped a step—i needed to set a user to have admin rights. Only one place in the code contains the key required to be an admin, and it was nested in one function that didn’t pass it forward. I couldn’t get it out, but i think i may have just thought through how to do it.
Perhaps tomorrow I’ll have some components to work with, and since school is kind of open (though they’ve requested that wfh parents keep their kids home with them), i might be able to put some decent time into this.
Rex:
Rex gets upset when you tell him that he’s three. “No I’m 2!” “Remember you had a birthday when we went bowling and you turned 3”. “But I don’t want to be three. I want to be two!” “Rex, three means that you are a big boy!” “But I don’t want to be three!” “Why don’t you want to be three?” “Because I want to be 4!”
Leo:
Leo is nearly obsessed with this little stuffed lion that has like 6 different clips on it. He’ll put them all together then bring it to me to open them so that he can do it again. At nap time, I put the lion in the crib with him, and when he woke up, I wouldn’t have noticed had he not been babbling over the work he was doing to clasp the clips—typically he cries upon waking up.
He has also take ownership of the house. He will meander throughout the house with no agenda other than visiting different rooms in the house and hopefully finding Tails at which point, he will squeal with glee, ‘run’ to her and lay on her—she’s a very good sport. Once he’s done, unless he finds a cat’s tail to pull, he’ll meander back to the rest of us.