Wren

Do the maths before you conclude it is not enough. Forty five minutes five nights a week plus two hours on Saturday is a bit over five hours a week, which is more than 250 hours a year. That is not a small amount, and plenty of finished things have been built in less.

The reason it does not feel like progress is that six weeks of small sessions produces something invisible: a bit of structure, some decisions you no longer have to make. Keep a two line log of what you did each session and read it monthly. It stops the feeling that nothing is happening, because you can see that something was.

Six weeks is nothing and one new pothos leaf is a good sign, not a bad one.

Realistic timeline for a tank like yours:

• 4 to 8 weeks: roots establish, very little visible above ground. This is where you are.
• 3 to 6 months: pothos and other vines start genuinely covering ground, ferns push new fronds, moss either takes or does not.
• 12 months: the tank looks like the photos you were copying.
• brom: it will grow slowly, flower once eventually, and pup. Do not expect it to do anything dramatic this year.

The single biggest lever on that timeline is light. Most tanks that look sparse at six months are underlit rather than badly planted. A screen top plus a small bulb is not much light by the time it reaches the substrate. A decent LED bar across the top, run 10 to 12 hours, changes the growth rate dramatically and costs less than replacing plants you assumed were failing.

Second biggest lever is planting density at setup. Nurseries and photographers plant heavily. Five plants in an 18x18x24 will take a year, fifteen will take four months.

The lux app is the single most useful five minutes a plant owner can spend. I moved three plants after doing it and two visibly changed within a month. Human eyes adapt so well that a spot which looks bright to you is a cave to a fig.

The moss pole point deserves more attention. I fought mealybugs for five months, finally unwrapped the pole, and found a colony living in the damp sphagnum that no spray was ever going to reach. Replaced the pole and it was over in three weeks.

For what it is worth, a swing is not automatically wrong. Most species do better with high humidity at night dropping through the day than with a flat 90 percent, which encourages exactly the fungal issues everyone else worries about. 90 in the morning down to 60 by evening is a healthy pattern. Down to 40 is too far, so you do want to fix it, just do not aim for a flat line.

Soft at the base is the bit I would act on today. Tip it out and look. Healthy sansevieria rhizomes are firm and pale, rotting ones are brown, squashy and sour smelling. Cut everything soft away with a clean blade, let the cuts dry for a day, and repot into fresh dry mix.

The reason you are here is four things stacking up: a plastic pot that does not breathe, a peat based mix that holds water for ages, a cool room, and modest light. A snake plant in those conditions might use a full watering in six weeks, not twelve days.

When you repot, go gritty. Roughly one third potting mix, one third bark, one third pumice or perlite, in a terracotta pot barely bigger than the rootball. Then water when the pot feels light and the leaves show the very first hint of a wrinkle, which for you in winter will probably be monthly.

This happened to me almost word for word when I added a second bulb in autumn. I was convinced my isopods were eating them. Deepened the leaf litter and pulled the lamp back an hour and they were everywhere again in about three weeks.

Also worth saying to her out loud that graphic novels count, since a teacher has implied otherwise. Nine year olds internalise that stuff, and a child who thinks their favourite kind of book is the wrong kind reads less overall.

Also give a deadline in the ask. Something like, if you get five minutes before Sunday. Open ended requests from friends drift indefinitely and then everyone feels awkward about it.

Second this, and let them scrape the crust off the jar and eat it. It tastes fine, it just looks like frost instead of gems, and it stops the whole project feeling like a failure.

For what it is worth, a lot of people who read a great deal reread constantly and do not think of it as a problem at all. Rereading is how you get to know a book properly. If you are enjoying it and it is not preventing anything, missing out may just be a story you are telling yourself about what reading is supposed to look like.

Three weeks fading is within the normal range. The smell is off gassing from the foam and the packaging, and most of it goes in the first few days, with a long tail after that. Mine took about a month before I stopped noticing it, and I only noticed at all because I was looking for it.

What actually speeds it up is airflow across the surface, not time. Strip the bed, stand a fan blowing across the mattress for a few hours a day, and keep the window open. Heat helps too, so a warm room with airflow beats a cold room with airflow.

What does not help: covering it with a thick waterproof protector immediately, which traps the smell in and slows everything down.