Mathemagenic

Trying to get back to “normal” blogging now it’s interesting to look back and to reflect on what happened with my blogging routines over last couple of years. The graph below provides an overview of a number of weblog posts I wrote per month between June 2002 and December 2007 with an indication of corresponding events in my life.

Little palm trees represent summer holidays (not necessary in some tropical location :). Winter holidays are not that obvious, but usually there is a drop in January (not in December, since Russian Christmas/NY holidays are 1-10 January and I tend to synchronise those with my family and friends in Russia).

Fire represents period of my weblog server being offline for 2 weeks after the fire that damaged the network at University of Twente (I lived on campus then and my weblog was running on my home machine).

“Relation” and “baby” - since I’ve got other things to do in my free time instead of blogging. My maternity leave in Jan-Apr 2007 is clearly visible.

“Project management” and “Microsoft”: not that important by themselves, but more as an indicator of my stress levels. In that period I was juggling coordination of an EU project, 10 weeks internship in US and personal uncertainties that came from the perspective of not returning to Russia as I had always planned.

Although all those things are important as factors behind the dropping frequency of writing, their influence is indirect. What I think is the real issue behind not blogging is broken information processing routines, especially those related to reading weblogs - those deserve a separate post…

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It is amazing how much observing Alexander exploring rain tells about human nature: the need for a safe place to start, playing on a boundary alternating between a few more steps to explore and coming back for reassurance, gradually venturing into more and more scary territory, getting confident, having fun while getting wet and cold…

I treasure moments like this - when he grabs my hand and invites me to join the fun, so I can shed the skin of things learned about getting wet and cold in the rain, and instead just be a kid who enjoys the simple fun of being in the rain.

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While trying to find things related to my previous post I came across a few posts I forgot I wrote. While reading this one I became mesmerized by “madly letting go” in the quote from Donella Meadows:

I don’t think there are cheap tickets to system change. You have to work at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off paradigms. In the end, it seems that leverage has less to do with pushing levers than it does with disciplined thinking combined with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.

I’m getting more and more convinced that letting go is one of the key skills in whatever 2.0 - web, business, science, life…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/11/29.html#a1959; comments are here.

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It’s dark and quiet - only clicking of the keyboard. My two favourite men are asleep and I’m typing. I can easily picture myself like that - in a few months - working on the finishing touches of my dissertation.

Still a few months to go - I’d better get some sleep before the little man wakes up :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/07/03.html#a1920; comments are here.

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Today is five years since I blog. Time flies. Writing to a weblog gives me an extra evidence of it - time becomes more tangible when you see it as a timestamp on a story that feels so recent. But having it there, written, also gives it depth - showing that the path between then and now has been long.

Today Alexander is 5 months old. Time flies, faster then I’d like to. Sure, we wait for every new development (when will he start sitting by himself? crawling? talking?), but every time I hold him in my arms I want to make time running slower. May be I should write more - to stretch those moments, at least on the screen…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/06/21.html#a1914; comments are here.

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I almost forgot how does it feel - when ideas run in your head back and forth waiting for you to catch them and to turn into a text. When you don’t think much about things that might not work, but, instead, focus on making things happen.

And that I actually feel like writing after evening play - bath - milk - sleep routine with Alexander :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/06/13.html#a1910; comments are here.

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I tell everyone that I hardly read blogs now. It’s not really true: I hardly read blogs from my usual reading list. Instead I read what I call “baby-blogs”, an eclectic selection of those on pregnancy, birth and all kinds of things about parenting. I thought I’d share some of those…

The Shape of a Mother - “Becoming a mother changes everything in your world - including your body. Here we share images of our bodies during and after pregnancy so we can see what real women look like.”

It is extremely powerful - a very good example of what a blog could be.

Midwife: Sage Femme, Hebamme, Comadrona, Partera - “The insights, passions and opinions of a homebirth midwife and mother.”

For the other side - the one supporting birth and talking about it from non-medical perspective.

The Motherwear Breastfeeding Blog

An entry into the world of breastfeeding blogs - with their carnivals of breastfeeding, stories about nursing in public in different cultures or saving the planet by sitting on the couch.

Parent Hacks - “a collaborative weblog of practical parenting wisdom”

Something to find solutions to the problems that I still have to discover :)

Lunch in a Box: Building a Better Bento

I guess it will be a while before I have to pack lunches for Alexander, but so far I’m picking up ideas for my own “back to work” time.

Babygadget

For all those designy, useful and not-so-much things that I shouldn’t buy (it never hurts to be an educated consumer :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/04/17.html#a1889; comments are here.

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I has been struggling for a while with some blogpost ideas that don’t fit my blog (or, at least, do not fit current tagline “on personal productivity in knowledge-intensive environments, weblog research, knowledge management, PhD, serendipity and lack of work-life balance”). As you probably guess those are all kinds of baby-related things. However, given that those ideas don’t disappear, it seems to be easier to blog - to get rid of the urge to write them down and to celebrate those few weeks I have left before going back to work. I’ll be back to work-related stuff - as soon as I get back to work :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/04/13.html#a1888; comments are here.

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[has been in drafts for a while]

I knew that giving birth was about priority changing, but somehow I didn’t expect how difficult it would be. I has been surprised with myself – being happy as stay-at-home-mom, being hardly energised and engaged by work-related talking, and, on the top of it, not looking forward getting back to work.

It’s still about a month before that. I already took a couple of weeks extra, but I keep on thinking if it was too little. One side of me says that another few weeks will not make much difference, that it makes a lot of sense to get back to my PhD research to get faster to the finish line, that eventually I’ll get all the fun of work back and will be happier… Another side wonders how it would feel to abandon those “lets see what the day will bring” days, with feeding on demand, cuddling, playing, little discoveries and, most of all, being able to see his eyes and his smile at any moment [although there is yet another side that tells to take the rose glasses off and think of all those crampy moments when I'm extremely happy to see Robert coming back from work to take over :) ].

I know that work can always wait and I wonder how I will feel about not taking those few weeks extra when I look back in ten years time. But for now – the arrangements are made and I’m getting prepared. I guess this time rediscovering work-life balance will be a serious challenge.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/03/31.html#a1886; comments are here.

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It didn’t take us long to realise that talking to the baby is not only about that. Often it’s also about talking to others in the room. For example, something like “mama is coming to feed you” is also something for papa to know. And all of this gets on the way of our intentions to speak Russian and Dutch to Alexander: we end up speaking a lot of English, as this is the language both of us understand well.

I guess I have to find more things to read on raising multilingual child…

More on this: What Language do You Speak Around Others?

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/03/20.html#a1883; comments are here.

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