Weeknotes 29

It was F-‘s 1st birthday on Friday. For obvious reasons his first year has been very different to how we’d planned and imagined while A- was pregnant. But the important things are he’s healthy, happy and makes everything better. Happy birthday little chap.

We used our new-found freedom to celebrate with friends and family over the long weekend. Unfortunately not as one large party but rather 3 separate little picnics. It’s been over 6 months, more than half F-‘s life since my parents saw him. We visited them on Sunday and it was wonderful.

Whenever F- is upset looking at photos of people always seems to calm him down, so we made him a picture book with some of his favourite photos. We got it printed as a baby-friendly board book with captions in English and, so he can take one to nursery, in Spanish too. We also gave him a small steel tongue drum. This seems like a good instrument for his age. It responds well to being bashed with hands or the little beaters it comes with. And as it’s tuned with a pentatonic scale it sounds fine no matter which keys you hit together.

I spent most of the week at work working with CSS. I really love this stage of a project, starting to polish things up ready to share them and making a prototype feel more like a “real thing”. Doing CSS work also takes me back to the feeling I had when first building websites in the 90s, making a change to the code and seeing a visual result. Just with more indirection and compilers. Seriously though, SCSS and the module style we’re using for this project do make things much easier and more immediate. But trying to do things like applying an inset shadow on a single side of a div makes me realise why they call them CSS tricks.

I met Nigel for a walk on Wednesday night. We took a growler of beer from The Southampton Arms up to the heath and had a good natter. Happy days.