After you have a kid it can be hard to advocate for time to yourself. You fall into routines. Dinner time. Bath time. Babycino time. Bed time. Game time. My wife signed up for an art class on Wednesday nights, and she did something really cool... she pencilled in an "art class" for me too (on Tuesdays). She knew that there wasn't a concrete thing that I was going to ask for time to go do, so she just made space for [[Following the heat]]. It's great. She doesn't feel like she's the only one who asks for things, and I have... free time? I've rediscovered hobbies that don't feel important enough to otherwise fit into my day, but also... feel deeply like me. Some things that I've gotten around to again: - Working on moving my home-lab to a mini rack - Reading about probabilistic B-trees - Setting up graphene OS on a new phone - Cloning fly-proxy and fly-init and container -> firecracker VM builder - Dusting off The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time - Learning songs on my son's Casiotone keyboard - Migrating my gaming PC to Ubuntu to avoid Windows 11 (thanks Valve) - Ordering pizza and watching my friend play Silksong - Walking around Berkeley campus and feeling the vibrancy If you have young kids but you feel like you might be "coming out of it", try scheduling your version of "art class". It's great.