"Eleventeen" is my favorite of all the numbers.
Eleventeen begs a question though. Aside from being one of the memorized words/numbers that my three-and-a-half year old, Rex, spits out when asked to count to twenty, what does Elventeen look like? What is its math like? Is is 111 or is it 21 or is it just something else? Despite it being very wrong and its lesser version, 11 coming out of nowhere, Eleventeen makes sense.
Just over a month ago, I wrote my closing statement/entry/blog for my apprenticeship. Since then a lot has happened--i mean, Master Eleventeen is damn-near potty trained at this point. He also has croop along with his little sidekick--Leo-Meo. We've been to Chicago and Mauston and Hayward and back, and then I had surgery that counts somewhere between minor & major, and although I've had two c-sections, this one seemed more major simply due to the requirement of general anesthesia--a first for me.
Even though I've been tied down, quite literally, with little boys requiring full time attention, I've actually made decent progress on Epic, which comes at a great relief and can mean only one of two possibilities. One, I've suddenly become an amazing coder or Two, integrating with Trello was really really hard.
Nonetheless, since abandoning Trello, I've seemed to have made decent, and actually pretty good, progress week over week, despite not having my normal schedule or even close to enough time. So that has felt pretty good.
Why am I writing now? It's no longer required of me to write daily, and perhaps I won't write daily. I really liked writing and docuemnting this time period of my life. I've overcome a huge challenge, but that doesn't mean there aren't more to come. Why stop writing now when this time in my life is probably the most rewarding, frustrating, and important time in my life--and no, while it fits, I'm not actually talking about work.
It's about my two little dudes--that's what it's all about afterall. My blog was always mine, but now, since it's no longer requried, it's truly mine, and I will write about whatever I damn-well please. In all honestly, my topics probably won't sway much from those of my former posts: life! Life as a 'new-ish' mother; life as a working mother of toddlers. Life as a Hashtag boy-mom (at least for now and for the foreseeable future, but won't that be fun to write about when the occasion arises?!). Eleventeen steps to a happy life.
I can't not state the irony, that it was 11 months ago to the day that I wrote my first post called the same as this one: "Eleventeen".
What Came Next
Looking back, this was the post where the blog became mine. During the apprenticeship, writing was an assignment. Useful, sure, but assigned. After this point, every post was a choice, and the topics shifted naturally toward what I was actually living: the intersection of building software and raising small humans who have no respect for your deploy schedule.
The Trello integration I mentioned? That was a beast. I had spent weeks trying to make EPIC talk to Trello's API, and the complexity kept growing. When I finally walked away from it, the relief was immediate and the progress was real. It was my first major lesson in knowing when to abandon an approach that is not working, which is harder than it sounds when you have already invested significant time.
The drag-and-drop work that came next was a different kind of challenge -- one where I could see progress in the browser and feel momentum building. And the kids kept growing, kept inventing words, kept turning routine tasks into adventures. Rex's "Eleventeen" was just the beginning. The vocabulary explosions, the potty training sagas, the peanut butter incidents -- all of it found its way into these posts because that is what life looked like.
Eleven months of writing taught me that the technical stuff and the personal stuff are not separate stories. They are the same story, told from different angles. The patience required to debug a circular dependency is the same patience required to explain to a three-year-old why he cannot eat crayons. The discipline of test-driven development is the same discipline of bedtime routines. And the satisfaction of shipping something that works is remarkably similar to the satisfaction of a toddler who finally uses the potty without being asked.