Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com:

• Economist: Wrong Numbers – Global league tables are interesting, but not always reliable. Few people pay attention to margins of error. Combined indices in particular can be very sensitive to small changes in underlying data.
• Earn Trust By Never Doing Anything For Your Children – As parents, we often find that it’s easier to do a task ourselves than to spend time teaching the children how to do it. After all, they’ll learn when they’re older, right?
• Paracetamol hade inte godkänts i dag – Paracetamol is dangerous even when not overdosed (which can lead to a nasty death) – its hormone-disrupting effect is three times stronger than that of phtalates which everyone is worrying about. (In Swedish.)

I’m going to make a new attempt at keeping up daily journal-style posts, prompted by this post.

Visited colleagues at the office. Seems that they miss me; there was some disappointment when I reminded them that I won’t be back until mid-May.

I visited once before, I think Adrian was maybe a month old then. There’s a lot more of him to show off now: he smiles and looks at people and all that. He was at his best behaviour, he really liked having all that crowd around him. The crowd admired his funky Stokke Xplory stroller and watched with bafflement as I put him to sleep in a sling.

He barely slept all day, 20 minutes on the way home from nursery in the morning, 30 minutes in the sling at home, 30 minutes in the sling at the office, and then 15 minutes on the way home from nursery in the afternoon. So exhausted was he that he fell asleep for the night at a quarter to six.

In the evening Ingrid watched me play Plants vs. Zombies on the iPad. She apparently found it really exciting, commented, shouted out warnings when new bucket-wearing zombies appeared, had opinions on my choice of plants etc.

Adrian’s bedtime totally collided with dinner-preparing time, so we had leftover curry with noodles.

I mentioned sleep routines in my last post.

Ingrid has always been a lousy sleeper, and her sleeping habits were almost an obsession for me. (See this post, and this one, and this, this, this, this and finally this one.) It goes a lot better nowadays – she no longer fights sleep, and goes to sleep pretty easily.

But she does not want to do it on her own. She is quite cuddly in general: she likes to cuddle up with me when we read or watch a movie, to hold my hand when she is upset and wants help calming down, and so on. And at night she very much wants to hold her hand on me to go to sleep. (Also some time in the middle of the night she still wanders from her bed and her room over to ours.)

Getting to this point took some effort: when we stopped breastfeeding, I’d lie down next to her. Then I’d sit next to her on the bed, so she could cuddle up next to my legs. Only then could I sit by the side of her bed and let her hold my arm.

This closeness seems important to her. She gets visibly upset as soon as I mention the possibility of changing this routine. I’m sure I could just ignore her wishes and decide to stop, to force her to do it some other way. But if it is that important to her, I don’t see why I should. It’s actually a pretty nice ending for our days: quietly, pleasantly, together.

We have made sure that it doesn’t absolutely have to be this way. Weekend nights are Eric’s, and she manages those just fine. But she clearly views them as second best.

Adrian is a much better sleeper. He goes to sleep in bed every night, with a bit of fussing but usually no screaming. He does need breastfeeding in the evening, though. (And just like Ingrid used to, he gets hungry at night: usually wakes every 3 or 4 hours and eats a proper meal each time, despite eating frequent large meals during the day as well.)

So I’ve ended up putting both kids to bed most nights. This can take over an hour even on a good day, much of which I spend sitting in one dark room or another. Pretty boring. Added to that, Ingrid, being tired, is often less than cooperative during the bedtime routine (brushing teeth, going to the loo, putting lotion on her dry skin, getting into her pyjamas). She whines, complains, wants things done like THIS and not like THAT, etc.

Afterwards I am always drained.

This has been the part of my day that I am least happy with, so as part of my non-New-Year’s resolutions, I’ve decided to change it.

The new routine is that I continue putting Adrian to bed (easiest for all involved parties that way) and I will sit with Ingrid while she falls asleep, but Eric takes care of the practical parts of Ingrid’s bedtime routine. This way I still do a fair amount of sitting quietly in a dark room but at least I don’t have to get struggle with Ingrid’s whims, and am in a much better mood afterwards.

And, knowing her, I suspect that she will not come up with so many delays and objections during the pre-bed-routine, because the faster she gets them done, the sooner she gets to hear her bedtime story with me. Whereas when I do the pre-bed-routine, she has every reason to drag her feet: being with me is preferable to being asleep, even when she is making me cross.

Plus, this way Ingrid will start the bedtime routine earlier (since she doesn’t wait until I’m done with Adrian) so she gets more sleep, and I get more free time in the evening.

The results after the first few days are encouraging. We’ll see about the next step once this routine is firmly established.

I have no New Year’s resolutions but I have a few ordinary ones.

Foremost among them, and the root for all others, is that I will try to be happier. And if that sounds ridiculous to you – how can you just make yourself happier? – then think again, and go visit The Happiness Project. I am not resolving to spend a whole year on mine, not right now, but just try to be happier over the next month or so.

I have somehow ended up in a place where I feel life is all work and no play. I’m not depressed, but neither do I feel like I am having much fun in my life. I feel that I am passively floating along and not enjoying the journey much. I am stagnating. Not only does this make me unhappy, it also makes me snappish and short-tempered, which is not fun for those around me, either.

I feel like my days and nights are full of “musts”, leaving little time or energy for “wants”. By the time both kids are in bed, I usually can’t be bothered to do anything more demanding than surf the web or play on the iPad. I have read only 4 books in the almost 4 months since Adrian was born, and none in the past 5 weeks.

This is not how I want to live, definitely not in the long run (as in, until all existing and future children have reached school age) but not even in the short run (say, until I go back to work).

So I have recently resolved to:

• Read more. Read at least a little bit every evening. Reading always makes me feel good.
• Blog instead of surfing. Unlike surfing, blogging is an active activity, if you’ll excuse the pleonasm. Activity breeds energy, energy breeds more activity, and the passive floating along is replaced with a virtuous spiral.
• Along the same line, do crafts. I’ve mostly done textile crafts before (sewn, knitted, embroidered, etc) so that is probably what I will do now, too. I don’t want it to be too much of a challenge right now, just something that activates both mind and hands, and lets me accomplish something tangible.
• Do some sort of sports. Right now I cannot realistically expect to do anything outside the home, but at least some yoga at home. I suspect that this resolution is going to be the hardest one, because it requires the most energy to get started, so it will be easy to procrastinate each evening.

And in the very short term I have resolved to do (and indeed already done) something about the most energy-sapping part of my days, which is getting the kids to bed. But that’s a separate post.

If I did movie reviews, I’d write a rave review about The Secret of Kells. But I don’t.

This blog has a whole category for books, and none for movies. That’s no accident. Books are much more important to me than movies. If I had to live without movies, I don’t think I’d miss them much. Books, on the other hand, are essential. (So is the internet, for that matter.) And I often have opinions about the books I read, whereas I don’t know enough about the art of making movies to be able to say anything particularly intelligent about them. I don’t think in images, I think in words; I don’t process images as well as I process language.

In the evenings, when both kids are asleep, Eric will often watch a movie or part of some TV series, while I’d rather spend time reading blogs or a book. But I often listen to whatever he watches with half my attention. Sometimes I decide partway through that his movie sounds so interesting that I want to see the rest. And sometimes, very occasionally, I will take the time to watch a whole movie. Even more rarely, I will ask Eric for a particular movie, rather than just “tag along” with whatever he chooses.

I can only recall three movies that I’ve watched from beginning to end during recent months. (I may have seen more but in that case they didn’t make a very strong impression. And watching Ingrid’s “Barbie Rapunzel” with her does NOT count.)

The Secret of Kells, as I said, was wonderful. This one we all watched together on New Year’s Eve, in order to stay awake until midnight, and everyone loved it. It is beautiful, magical, gripping: a fairy tale excellently told.

Babies was one I had wanted to see. Just 4 babies doing their stuff: somehow totally riveting. Perhaps because I have one at home myself? (Review at Salon.com)

How to Train Your Dragon was just plain fun.

This book is often mentioned as a must-read for software developers who do user interface work. The basic idea is that when you have trouble using some item (whether it’s a phone or the controls of your stove) it’s not your fault, but the designer’s. Designers think more about their own needs than about users’. Things are often designed so as to look good, or to be easy to manufacture, rather than for usability. Norman writes about how and why design goes wrong, what kinds of mistakes and problems bad design can lead to, and of course how to avoid them. There are a lot of examples, some of good usability but many more of bad usability, and most quite entertaining.

I’m not going to write a summary of the book here. If you want one, try this one.

I have to say that my impression of the book was strongly affected by the relatively bad usability of the book itself. I found it difficult to navigate. It has a confusing layout (some headings are right-justified, some left; sections in italics are interspersed between normal paragraphs) and its structure is not very obvious. The text is organized more as a story than as a handbook: important points are hidden inside large blocks of text; lists of items are spread over many pages. And it has awful grainy photos that surely could have been updated for the new 2002 edition.

I wouldn’t say I learned very much from it. I suspect that I could have learned more if the book had been better designed. Also, I suspect that usability as a topic has become much more mainstream in the 20 years that have passed since the 1st edition was written. Now, much of the content felt familiar and obvious to me. The book does offer a structure for usability thinking, a terminology, a set of hooks to hang your intuitive thoughts onto – useful if you’re going to discuss usability with others in the field, or having to argue for or against some design.

Many people post 5-star reviews about this book but I was, honestly, disappointed. I would recommend it if you have never given usability much thought, or if you want to read a classic about this topic, but otherwise, well, not really.