Tuned in to learn more about the Wisephone, but stayed for the parenting advice and philosophical/theological discussions. Excellent podcast. Well worth the 2 hours run time.

If you are a parent of young kids and you are concerned about how distracted you are around them, then you will find a lot to relate to in this podcast.

I think the reason I’m always critical of my time when writing posts for this site, is because the time I spend writing blog posts, is time not spent with my family. I may be in the same house as them, at times even in the same room, but during those moments when I'm writing, I’m not really with them.

You might be wondering, where is this coming from? It’s coming from the realization that my kids are growing up so fast. My eldest son for instance, is going to start school this year.

I fear that I'm losing my time with them. That window where they think it’s still cool to play with dad, I feel like that window of time is shrinking every day.

Twenty, thirty, forty years from now, I don’t want to regret not spending enough time with my kids. And let’s be honest, time spent with your kids is never going to be enough. They will grow up and eventually leave to have their own families. You can't hang on to them forever.

The highlight of last week was a birthday celebration for our little guy. Shout out to the wife for the wonderful decorations and theme. She really outdid herself this time around.

This cake not only looks good, but also taste good. What the Harry Potter design hides, is a delicious Ube flavored cake. Yum yum!

One thing that I thought was a great idea, is to take pictures of your kids as they hit some milestones. Then you can use those pictures as decorations for the birthday party, or just add it to a family photo album. It's a nice way to look back and see how much your child has grown.

After watching the horrible ending on the k-drama Iris, I kinda lost my appetite for watching TV shows. However, I still wanted to watch... something. So, last week I decided to watch some anime instead. I'm watching Kuroko's Basketball on Netflix and I'm enjoying it so far.

The biggest development from last week, was that after weeks of thinking about it and talking about it on this journal, I finally published my digital garden online. You can find it here.

It's a work in progress, so there will be changes. In fact, the nature of it means it will probably be forever under construction. When you go through it, don't think of it as a blog. It is not. There are no published dates. There's no RSS feed. There's no email subscription. The URLs to specific notes will probably change every week. It is really a digital garden/personal knowledge-base.

Matt shared this wonderful website on Mastodon. What an amazing find! It allows you to watch, what looks like dashcam videos, from all over the world. In an age where travel and road trips are put on-hold, this website lets you experience virtually driving in another country. It's a mesmerizing and very interesting way to see what other countries/cities look like.

Power outages and water shut-offs all across Texas. People have died in accidents on the road and at their own homes because of the cold. It's extremely disheartening. We've been extremely lucky to not have lost power or water at all. But that wasn't the case for everyone else. Last week's winter storm really showed how the state of Texas is just not ready for this kind of weather. I'm hoping that the state can learn from this and be better prepared for the next one.

So, 340 grams of Watermelon is around 109 calories. On the other hand, 85 grams of Butter Pound Cake (which I have to say taste so good) is around 337 calories! It's easy to see why snacking on pastries/baked goods makes it so hard to lose weight.

Last week I remembered why I chose to go with pen and paper for my bullet journal — it was to give my eyes a break from staring at screens all day long.

My only issue with this analog approach to journals, is how to digitize the text that I wrote so that they can be searchable in the future. Sure, bullet journals have an index for tracking down specific topics. But let's face it, that doesn't even come close to being able to search text digitally.

I previously tried to get around this by publishing journal entries on this site. As part of writing those posts, the content from my bullet journal would end up in a text (markdown) file when I download a backup of this site. This benefit went away when I decided to stop writing journal entries.

Now, I'm doing a similar thing with these Weeknotes posts. This time around though, my journal entries end up in my Obsidian vault. I still have to manually type them in though. This is the part I'm trying to streamline. But I'm not sure that's even possible. It's either I ditch my analog bullet journal and go straight to digital journal apps, or just continue what I'm doing — write on my bullet journal then migrate (type up) my notes into Obsidian sometime later in the day or week.

One day God gave me a gift . . .

My newborn was the love of my life. I almost couldn’t pull my eyes away from his perfect face. I knew every cry and exactly how to comfort him. I fed him and changed diapers and breathed in the sweet scent from the top of his head.

I never knew this kind of LOVE existed!

Then one morning I picked him up from the crib and found a chubby baby. His bright eyes danced at the sight of me, and his dimpled face broke into a drooly grin.

My newborn was gone.

I didn’t even get to say goodbye.

Link: Dear Son: I’ve Loved Every Stage With You and I’m Never Ready to Say Goodbye

I got a link to this post from Coney. It was written by a mom, for moms. But, even as a dad, this post still tugs at my heart strings. You'll never know when your child grows up and moves on from one stage to another. Today he might still sleep in your arms, tomorrow he will sleep on his own bed. Today he might still be a toddler, tomorrow he might already be a preschooler. You'll never know if today was the last day you got to carry your kid. This is why I've started recording on my journal the days that I got to carry Davin. I want to remember the last day I got to carry him. Eventually, I will do the same thing for Caleb when he grows older.