Since an update on my general status was requested, I thought I'd write it here because I've been meaning to do so anyway:
We were on vacation for three weeks with unexpectedly bad internet connection and not much time to check around here anyway. I had only announced it on the private dev forums because I did not want to give the trolls a clue.
Z-Girl is quite fine. Her body has now caught up with other kids of her age, her height is pretty much at the median, only the weight is trailing behind slightly, her lung capacity is far above average (all for healthy kids). She is climbing and running and swinging and sliding and throwing and catching and kicking like she ought to.
She learned to ride the bicycle around her fourth birthday. She robbed me of that classic parenting moment where you push and hold them and the kid goes "Don't let me go! Don't let me go!" and you let them go anyway and they only notice after riding for a bit. When we were doing the pushing thing, she always demanded to be let go and when I did, rode a little while, then stopped. And the day when she rode for a longer time without interruption for the first time, she simply mounted the thing and rode off all by herself. Bah.
Solar eclipse was a total letdown
Cloudy and misty all the way through. I did get her to guess the 3yo interpretation of the event later with pictures, though ("The Sun is hiding behind the Moon!"). She no longer thinks the Moon is attached to anything anyway, dunno why.
She quite liked the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter about two weeks ago. Viewing conditions were excellent from Portugal. While they were getting closer, we pretended they might collide
I... must admit I did not know about the conjunction in advance. I just noticed it randomly when getting out of a shopping mall while the Moon was also close to the pair.
The only significant setback we had was the beginning of a (for her) dangerous bacterial infection that had to be squished with a two week stay at the hospital and antibiotic infusions. Treatment was successful, but it can happen again arbitrarily. Those particular bugs, pseudomonas aeruginosa, are practically everywhere.
And with her increased body strength, somehow her interest in learning to read has dropped significantly. We're still on it and of course she can write her own name now and recognize a couple of whole words, but progress is slow. Can't say I'm too unhappy.
Oh yeah, another bit of good news is that her sleeping patterns have indeed stabilized and she only rarely wakes us up during the night. The bad news is that her bedtime is hovering around 11 PM even without afternoon naps. And she has to get up at 7 AM to make it to the Kindergarten on time (OF COURSE she's sleepy and grumpy then), and we have to get up an hour or so before that so we can get her through her routine without stress. So, sorry, we're still in the negative free time zone on most days.
I still have the same job. It's fine. Mostly interesting, sometimes challenging in interesting ways, sometimes in horrible ways, occasionally boring as heck. I can use C++11 there now which is quite nice (auto! override keyword! move semantics! proper smart pointers in std!) And we have new octa-core PCs with 1.75 TByte SSD storage. Practically no annoying downtimes with those when working with our standalone application, which is what I do most of the time.
Can't believe she's 4 already.
