I was revisiting SSC's review Of the Body Keeps the Score when I came upon this passage. I'm sure it must have meant nothing to me at the time, but now I'm finally realising that "indescribable mental motions" were all I've needed to start thriving this whole time

I swear one way that oxbridge was great for marriage is the regular formal dinners where you dress up because, like, people look good done up in formalwear and young people basically don't do it unless they are forced to anyway I am thinking about this because of this chinese tiktok account of the guy whose schtick is offering two single strangers money to go do a wedding style photo shoot together and it's ludicrously effective for getting them to like each other and agree to date afterwards and the girls are always like "wow you're pretty good looking huh" because yeahhh it turns out if you get done up and look good and go have fun together you get attracted to each other...

psa that it's unclear how much choline you need to take in pregnancy for more choline to not be more good. could be like 2000 mg/day. I like to do intuitive supplementing and I was doing a ~1000mg supplement AND four eggs a day and still craving more eggs (so some days I had more). and my kid has always been super smart and patient and easy and great temperament since she was born

lil captain, not sticking her landing after jumping off a box, while picking herself off the floor: "MAX! A MAX!!"

I have never witnessed parenting disagreement so heartfeltly vehement and also steelmannable, as under a tiktok video of a mother filming her 2yo sobbing about weaning, with the disagreement between camp A "the way to handle a crying toddler is to hold space and let them sob, anything less is giving them long term issues" and camp B "the way to handle a crying toddler is to redirect them to something else, anything else is cruel". most parenting disagreements are between something framed for the child's perspective vs something framed for the parent's perspective. but like, this one actually is unusual in that it's actually a conflict between the child's immediate suffering/pain perspective and the child's emotional tech debt perspective! and as always with these things both steelmanned perspectives have truth to them and it's a genuine tradeoff. do you let them experience pain to build resilience. except with physical pain people are mostly well calibrated with each other on severity. but there are mums who genuinely do not have the capacity themselves to find that level of sobbing bearable so could not do camp A in any circumstance anyway

lil captain's current catchphrase, at 19 months, is "self." as in "I'll do it myself". and it's making me feel so proud of her, like I've been raising her montessori "help me to do it myself" and hearing her being able to finally advocate for it feels like such a payoff

nearly 1am, in bed in the dark: him: "oh, for f***'s sake" me: "what is it?" him: "oh, I was thinking about the london system"

this totally ruins looking at selfies btw - someone says "I am proud of this selfie" and you cover the bottom half of their picture with your hand and you're like "ohh your eyes still look pained actually, probably due to the self-coercive process you went through to get what you thought was a good photo and how much you're judging yourself for the previous takes right now"

the numbers in english according to lil captain one, two, three, four, six-seven, eight, nine, ten, fourteen, fourteen, six, seven, eight, nine, ten-ten

lil captain bumped heads with another kid at nursery today and is feeling a bit poorly. declines most of dinner. asks for music. tells me "cuddle". agrees "head hurt" when I ask. asks for mama and daddy. asks for bread and butter. asks for her favourite story books. recites words from them when I read them. declines a bath, agrees to pyjamas. walks herself towards the stairs to go to bed. I'm awed by her self-understanding and communication, much of this is so new. she's lying next to me in my bed and I've put on the soothing ocean waves + relaxing music album that I played for her to sleep to when she was a baby. how is she, simultaneously, so big and so capable and so small and so my baby

saw a tiktok today with a science experiment showing babies become aware of the self at 18 months, so I'm like "yess my observations are on point"!

my extremely boring take on potty training is that it is absolutely daft that the term "potty training" collapses "learning to use the potty ever" and "always using the potty and never missing and therefore being ready to ditch diapers/nappies" into one concept? they're clearly appropriate at very different developmental stages, and getting a kid happy to sometimes use the potty can be super chill and unpressured and early and that gives them the body awareness they need to be able to start learning control and choosing to go when they get older. I've been pottying lil captain opportunistically by holding her above the potty since... ~4 months? then ramping up a lot around 7 months when she could sit. I think a good time to start for most families is probably when they can sit up independently with light assistance, because the holding above the potty thing was kinda awkward (though the squat pose did help her learn how to poo). she's had phases of being more keen or less keen, I tried to encourage her a lot but not force her (though I was well motivated because a potty poo is a lot easier to clean). at 18-19 months she does maybe >half her wees and all her poos on the potty (and mostly she asks to go, especially for poos). she usually does one nappy wee on a nursery day, and maybe 2 or 3 on a home/playground day, otherwise she's dry. but obviously she's not fully potty trained yet, some days she's just not keen to use the potty or think about her wees, and I don't particularly intend for her to stop wearing nappies until she's a bit older and has confidence in her bladder control. so I just really don't understand the all-or-nothing mentality around the potty. most EC guides come at the perspective of getting EVERYTHING on the potty and I think it's just unnecessary that early and creates too much stress and pressure. but clearly doing NOTHING on the potty is also a disaster because you're missing the developmental stage for getting body awareness of the potty feelings! and I'm sure it ends up with older kids resistant about going to the potty if it's unfamiliar and not part of their routine. like I don't think there's anything wrong with waiting for "readiness", but "readiness" is... readiness to ditch diapers/nappies altogether. it has nothing to do with whether they're ready to sometimes use the potty. tl;dr get your kid comfortable on the potty before they develop self-awareness, but don't try to get them diaper-free until well after. the two stages can and probably should be literally a year+ apart.

is macaroni cheese a gratin

trying the jhourney technique makes it suddenly clear how existential kink both obviously works and is completely the wrong frame as a technique because yeah everything you experience has the frisson of enjoyment lying underneath it if you find the right way to attend to it and leaning into the enjoyment gives you more capacity to hold the feeling which you would normally flinch away from and thus gives you more slack to resonate with and process the feeling itself, but also there's literally nothing special or unusual or weird or twisty about that if you don't want there to be, it's not a paradox or contradiction like how it's framed in EK

lil captain just decided to put herself to sleep tonight??? like I left her room at bedtime to grab her a snack that she asked for, she had it, I asked if she wanted more, and she was like "bye bye!" and I was like "you want mama to... go???" and she was like "bye bye!" so I left??? and she sat there zen and calm for a bit and passed out within like 5 minutes. girl continues to astonish me with how much self awareness she

oh no wait I remember my intention was to try to do something in a jhana direction and that seems like it has the potential to be a solid trump card for this