Quiet Week

This week has crept by pretty quietly.

I began Monday by meeting my midwife, who confirmed that my blood-work had come back fine, and that I appeared to have dodged the gestational diabetes bullet yet again.  Phew!

Anna’s school had a staff-organizational-day that day, so the two of us just hung out at home for most of the day, with Anna doing her homework, and me fiddling on the computer.  I decided to test my grumpy-pelvis by swimming 1 km while Anna attended swim practice, and it seemed to go well as long as I stayed away from breast-stroke legs.

On Tuesday I took Anna to the dentist to get her first tooth fixed, and then accompanied Bjarki to his (indoor) swim school session and swam 500 m myself (warm outdoors pool, in the freeeeeezing cold!).

Wednesday… uh… I braved the pregnancy gym class again after taking almost two weeks off to get the pelvis to settle.  That also seemed to go ok, and it was nice to go back to lifting stuff and getting a wee bit sweaty.

Thursday (today!) was also pretty slow.  The highlight was probably a grocery run, and Bjarki’s final swim school session of the year (600 m swimming for me) where they ended the session by giving all the kids popsicles (frostpinnar)! By the pool! 🙂

In stuff-around-the-house-news, the big achievement was printing out the labels from last week (but only cutting a few of them out – the labels are still mocking me), and sorting through our adult clothes, a.k.a. tidying up our closets that were overflowing, but are now doing much better.  I now have a big black bag to drop off at the recycling center.

And, finally, my main project for this week (which I’m hiding down here, hoping no one will read this far) has been to make/implement/write a web-based game in JavaScript to help Anna memorize her multiplication tables.  She’s been having a pretty hard time finding the motivation to learn the darn tables properly, so I figured I’d make her a ‘computer game’ featuring her favorite cartoon heroes (Monster High, ugh) and have her solve multiplication problems to ‘save’ one of her heroes.

Yes, I know there are oodles of multiplication games, but none seem to feature ‘her favorites’ so they don’t hold her attention for long, or grab her emotionally.  The few games I’ve seen with the Monster High characters seem to be either fashion-related (pick a dress, pick a hairstyle, pick an eye-shadow, then poke your eye out) or navigate-and-shoot-em-ups , so I decided to create our own game.  Of course I don’t own any rights to do this, so I’m keeping this very local.  And no, I’m not done yet!

The other reason for doing this was simply to teach myself JavaScript, and CSS by extension, because I feel utterly out of my depth programming-wise these days, having lived in Matlab-land for far too long.  And it’s been soooo long since I last did any real programming that I’ve become seriously rusty.  Finnur still won’t stop mocking my ‘programming face’ when I’m scowling my way through some problem or other.

Still, JavaScript seems to be a fun playground, and I know I’ve only just touched the surface.  It also helps that it seems like every problem has already been solved by somebody else, so programming just becomes an exercise in Google-searches, and when that fails, desperate pleas to Finnur, who’s the real pro. 🙂

Speaking of Finnur… Tomorrow he departs on a two-week work-trip to California, leaving me all aloooone.  I’m hoping my immune system will hold up this time, last year he hadn’t even landed before I’d come down with some nasty nasty bug!  But this time I’ve not been running myself ragged teaching and stressing and stressing some more, so I’m cautiously optimistic.  Knock on wood!