In September I took over most of the parenting chores to allow Pam to study for exams at the end of the month. This involved a minimum of 3 hours driving for the school run alone. Plus the usual grocery shopping, cooking and laundry. And of course giving the children something to do other than make a noise around the office! It left about 5 hours a day for other things, which meant lots of postponement. But it has been a very worthwhile project which I’ll continue in a less intense way. It really showed up the benefit of hands on attention to children that makes parenting interesting, challenging and productive. The children (4 of them aged 4-12) get the kind of guidance that is missing at school and get to develop a more friendly relationship with parents. It makes clear the undervalued trade-off that people make by handing children over to child-carers so that they can live and work without them. I really recommend a more hands on approach to all parents.
The other big change has been the reformatting of this newsletter to a blog format. That has been time consuming but adds much more value because it is easily segmented by subject, titles become summaries and entries can be more timely. However, I still have catching up to do.
On the investment management side, I did reenter the markets, largely in response to market sentiment, but with great caution for limiting downside.
And in the garden some chores have been postponed till October, while essential harvesting of tomatoes, french beans and root vegetables did provide us tasty fare for the table (especially the cherry tomatoes of which we’ve already harvested about 10kg 🙂 ).
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