See, heres one of the Great Questions.

1. Given a deeply religious person is strong in their belief
2. Given there are multiple religions
3. Some religions are mutually exclusive

Is this just a case where religious folks have to agree to say “in this case, one of us is right; we don’t know, but one of us has a religion thats wrong.”?

Or what about religions that have common ancestry but have diverged significantly and have very different opinions on things nowadays? Isn’t that a problem?

We wonmt’ go near a third problem which is .. given that thinking in terms of religionm implies that you’re willing to accept ‘ghosts’ and ‘unexplainable things’ and so on, you’re pretty much opening up the forum to everything. Faeries? Why _not_? I mean, if there can be no proof for/against a given religion, then the same is true for faeries, right?(Or for people who make up crazy pseudo religions like the Flying Spaghetti Monster or Sciontology, who most would agree are basicly just silly.)

Faith is there because theres nothing else; but you believe, in your heart. Thats faith, and its powerful. I get it. But how do you deal with others having a different faith, maybe an opposite one, of equal conviction?

A difficult topic to discuss for sure, and not just because of the ethereal nature or the wide range of different beliefs even among those of the same religious breeds; its just hard because it is so easy to step on someones toes or hurt someones feelings. For whatever reason, be it because people might be insecure or have their own doubts, or because they’re just such strongly held things, people tend to get their backs up, get really defensive or offensive… instead of just discussing.

So theres no reason for this posting; a lot of questions come to mind here or there (especially around the holiday season), and because of life. My parents were some breed of Christian but had some troubles with it when they were younger so I think got fed up and departed their church. They met at church if I recall right, which is nice.  My brother and I were thusly raised more or less without any religious mention .. we weren’t agnostic or anti- or any such thing. It just wasn’t discussed, so we didn’t know it existed really (and went to public school; we did do the Lords Prayer, but it was more a abstract thing for me .. I just had it memorized, and spoke it, and I didn’t really think about it. It was rote.)

I’m a pretty curious fellow, so when browsing through my parents bookshelves as a little one I naturally discovered these ornate books; they had some fancy bibles with zipper cases around them and all that.. heck, I even spent a couple of days here or there reading some of the Bible; I didn’t know what it was, just assumed it was a book like any other, so I went digging to find the rousing adventure, and found lots of interesting bits. Gotta admit, the Bible can be an interesting story from drama to violence, especially the Old Testament.

I’m not sure if it was the monoculture of my friends (we were all unreligious) or as a result of a number of annoyances that churches caued (starting with how they treated my parents though we werent’ privy to much of that information I’m sure it stuck with us a little), but I ended up getting a nice anti-churchy chip on my shoulder for quite a few years as a kid. I mean, many churches do like to Get In Your Face, which is something they should not do imho — people really should respect each other, and that goes both ways — but historically churches have been pretty awful. Especially in this day and age where we must be secular, with many churches co-existing as neighbours.. they have to play nice lest we be taken back to the dark ages. Witness the many wars in the world….. but anyway. But the distinction I learned from my eventual girlfriend and later wife was respect, and not to hold history per se against the whole of the thing. Religion is not bad (but at times implementations of it can be).. but the bad parts are the failings of men, not the failings of any grand design. Or something. The Crusades .. sure, they were driven by the Popes, but the middle age popes were basicly crazy much of the time. They were supposed to be the voice of God, but they were nuts — see the Children’s Crusade, or stringing up random people or especially scientists — how dare you try to think problems through, rather than just say God made the sun come up?

And that my friends is my core problem with it all — religion is fine and I respect it, I truly do; again, its hard to discuss these things at all without causing some hurt feelings but that is not my intention; just showing my past and how I arrived at some thoughts — but my core problem is when religious is held up as an excuse not to think. Let someone else do the thinking for you.. that is always a recipe for disaster.

Religion (and when I say that, I’m basicly talking about Christian brands such as Baptist and Catholic and not Muslim or the like; thats a whole other discussion that I’m barely equipped to have.) is best kept in the realm of the unprovable, and cannot step into the realm of logic per se. It is ‘irrational’ by definition, though that term carries a negative connotation so I’ve learned not to use it (doh!) I mean, as soon as someone says ‘the sun comes up because God says so’, then I get annoyed and rightly so — we know bloody well why the sun appears to ‘come up’. Science _is not_ at odds with religion — those scientists who think so are idiots, just as much as those religious folks who think so. Science is a process of learning, and we all do that from birth. We have clothes on our backs, we eat healthy food, we have agriculture.. this is all science. Likewise, in my books, evolution is provable and only an idiot would refute it.. and it has nothing to do with religion. (For those hard core Christians who believe the Earth is only a few thousand years old.. then how do you explain fossils and dinosaur bones? If you cling to the earth being 6000 years old, then your God must have placed them in the ground to trick you… and who wants their god to be a dick?) But if you take the evidence that we can see and say hey, the Earth is pretty old, and we’ve got evolution going on… but just maybe there is a deity that sparked the whole world of physics off, or kickstarted the process.. okay, fine, theres nothing for or against that. It  is just a human made up idea, but theres no refutation, so fine, whatever. Anyway. We can demonstrate evolution in fruit flies and so on, and can see the very large flaws in the design of animals and people .. if there was an intelligent guide for evolution, then he sure made a lot of mistakes! (Consider that all the tiny little steps from no eye to seeing eye have been found in fossils, and each step is useful to its host. Further, we’ve found some dozen different kinds of eye design, and the human one is actually pretty inferior to many other animals. Light passing through a lens, to the optic nerve is all great.. but we do we have all this blood vessels and stuff inbetween, rather than behind? And so on..) — so religion and science _can certainly co exist just fine_ (witness all those Christian science folks!) — but when people tart using religion as an excuse to be dumb .. thats when I take offence.

Now, I had a lot of issues with the various churches growing up; I would have ideas, and churches would sometimes find a way to get up in my face. I made some crazy posters for a local band, and a church took offence (very creative and perversely I might ad) and got me some trouble. I played “Dungeons and Dragons” (a creative imagination  medievil role playing game with dice, not dressing up and waving plastic swords around), and churches got it banned in my city because they didn’t know what it was, or didn’t like kids pretending to have characters casting spells? Heck even more recently many churches get all uppity with cute movies like Harry Potter, because it has ‘witchcraft’ represented in it.) Supressing ideas and getting into peoples shit has been the stock and trade of religions since they began.. but again, we must hold the religious ideal up, and thats fine; its our human built religions that tend to cock it all up, so I will try not to hold that against them.. but as we live in reality, we do have to live with those concerns.

So when a non-religious person marries a religious girl, and wanting to do it ‘right’ ( in her church where she grew up .. its just a beautiful thing to be all swept away in that emotional state, to grow up and then be married in your church, don’t you think?), they make you take oaths. Churches tend to be self protective which I did question, but I can understand why, so.. fine. The ceremony is a little different for this situation thankfully (and is permitted these days.. it woudl have been much more stressful a few decades ago).. but our priest gave me a fair amount of grief. (You can see a trend here.. a few dozen times in life, religion got in my way, and that is why I had such a slant. One set of my grandparents woudl regularly tell me I was going to hell .. that was nice.) Anyway, I promise to be right and do the right things — as I’m a right honourable person, and I intended to be godo to my girl anyway, so the promise didn’t really take that much cajoling. We go to church on Sundays, because its a part of my wife’s life, and because I promised to do that.. to not be in the way of her faith.

Now, dont’ get me wrong — my wife is not one of those hard core bible thumpers; she’s an intelligent girl with a clear mind who has faith, and is not ‘whacko’ about it. We don’t talk about this stuff, since we have an understanding and we’re close.. I know where she’s at, and we do it all together. And I won’t let her be lazy on my account ;)

Anyway, when you get married, another promise is to raise the children religiously — another self protection the churches build in. And more promises for baptism and all that, fine. When we got married, we took this stuff seriously.. I’m not going to lie just for my benefit — to lie just so I can selfishly get married; that would be an insult to my wife and her family and so on, so we had a lot of talk over these issues to see where we all were. It was terribly stressful since these questions can tear apart a couple. (See, that slant I have .. no religion, no problem; one person religious, causes all these problems. Anyway.) But in the end, I figured sure, I can promise to raise the children religiously, since ultimatley it is their responsibility, and they can make up their mind when they come of age. It struck me that no rational person would become religious from not being religious (it is hard to suddenly believe in ‘ghosts’ say, something entirely heresay and unprovable), so if they are to make a valid decision then raising them religious and letting them back out or continue in those pursuits on their own is a good way to go. And certainly we can try to raise them right, so they don’t just blidnly accept whatever the priests may tell them, and try to think things through to form their own opinions. Just like witht he army.. too often have peopel done things because another told them to .. that is no excuse, we must each of us stand on our own feet and be measured at the end of our days for our actions .. not justifying by saying someone else told you to go forth and murder or whatever.

So, here we are .. happily married with some kids, and our first little girl is off to Catholic school. And I hope they do her right, teaching her that God is ebverywhere and comforts them when they are sad, and doesn’t teach them that it rains becuse He says so. I’m sure it’ll cause some friction, since I will always be careful to have funa nd fantasy (Harry Potter is great!), and explain why things work they way they do. We take things apart, we fix things.. everythign is like that; why the sun comes up, we can take it apart and examine it as best we can, too.. its not ‘magic’.

Anyway, goodness, I ahdn’t intended to write any of this; I do have some questions and thought I might write a series of articles about them, so they can be recorded; so some logic can be laid down or refuted, so I can mull some of these thigns over. I mean, I want to be fair, I want to do the right thing and think the right things. But ‘right’ is not something you get from a book, its somethign you do, through consideration of your actions.

The time to say this has passed now, by a week, but I did write some of this during The Bleak Days so I thought I’d pollish it a bit and let it out, Chris Tolkien-like.

Now, before I get started, let me just get this out of the way — we all know women are the heroes of the day – the very stones upon which society is built. Any woman, sick as a dog and with one arm can still get a family ready for school and work and out the door while doing laundry and preparing a dinner for later while paying bills. The man will prick his thumb will be out of commision for a week. Furthermore, my child is also the most beautiful and crafty little baby in the world, bar none. With that, I may continue.

As I mentioned once before, men don’t really get recognized over-much for what they’re up to in this whole Papa thing. And thats fine, since we’re usually the kind of lugs who don’t care to be recognized since all we’re doing is nothing special.. it is expected, it is the norm, it is merely what we do. Life and all that. Still, I I thought I would spill a little image of life out here, for fun.

The baby was sick for awhile, and teething at the same time. Which is to say she couldn’t stay asleep because her nose wus plugged and so couldn’t breath unless being held upright (or sitting in a bouncy chair but thats hard to set up and a trifle risky). The poor girl was moaning or crying a lot due to the pain, and it upset her eating and sleep habits terribly. Thats fine for awhile, but this dragged on for weeks, which was something. Sometimes these teeth just give us all a wallop.

So for a few weeks, my day went something like this … get up (usually a little late I might add), head to work. Work my tail off (near year end it is always like this) and rush home soon as could be to relieve the wife.. a day with a moaning unhappy squirmy baby is a challenge to be sure. Get home, take care of sed child intently (you just have to play with this little bundle, she loves it so much!) until she gets extra cranky and head up to get her to sleep. With luck maybe a cold dinner, but that was merely optional. During this period of time the poor little girl was in such discomfort that it literally took anywhere from two to four hours to get her to sleep.. oh, for sure she might fall asleep for a few minutes, but she’d be back awake, so I’m counting when she’d actually sleep for any length of time. Also for sure is my wife helped out a bit .. it takes more than 2 hands to get sprays into a squirming baby’s nose, or to get cough medicine into her mouth and so forth. But all told it was a good through-to-midnight or more to get her to sleep, and almost certainly she’d be up a half dozen times at night. Not too bad all told since we did manage to catch a few hours of sleep (interupted, but still) each night. But the thing that really got to me was the days whizzing by with not an instant to myself. Babies train you to lose the ’selfishness’, thats for sure.

Due to a loooong history of being a night person who awakes and sleeps instantly, I’m night warden by choice. Love it :) Still, it was a trying couple of weeks when I’d stumble off to bed at midnight or one, and be up for work at 8am after helping the baby back to sleep two-four times in the night, or having to hold her for another hour or two during the night.

Wow! Now, many nights weren’t that bad during this period, but many were.

You might recall my intense dislike of ebooks, mostly for reasons of DRM and interface. Still, if you can get a good book an rtf, txt, html or other actually open format, the DRM argument can be dropped. It is a rare book that you can obtain in sed formats of course, but there are tools for converting forcibly between some formats… so I made the plunge and fired up a very fine book reader on my PDA. (PDA because it is backlit, so I can read at night time or in the dark.) I’ve always ignored ebooks (I think I blogged about them in the past but if not, I can rant easily enough), but for this purpose they work well — a baby on your shoulder half asleep or sleeping and you can still read.

I mention this only because, sick as it might be, I’ve been reading two books a week for awhile, almost entirely at night time. Not short books, either. (OKay, they’re not Cryptonomicon either.) The days literally breezed by.. no TV, no chilling time for anything .. just work and sitting in the dark. Crazy times.

At least I’ve been catching up on some reading .. its been too long. About 9 months :)

Fortunately (for all of us), the baby is only a little sick now and seems to be finishing the current bout of teething — good for her the little trooper, she doesn’t deserve that punishment any more. So the last couple nights we’ve actually gotten a touch of rest.

Anyway, so there you go, thats the life of a daddy. Women do the hard tasks.. teaching the baby in her early months and all that, not to mention the entire birthing process. But lets not understate what daddies go through, too :) One thing I suppose worth mentioning is now that the baby is better and I have gotten a bit of time to myself, I have forgotten what it is I used to spend my time doing. I mean really..

.. isn’t it all about the family now?

Funny how life teaches you the real shit.

I think I will write a couple blog entries over the next little while to talk about the hardships of mommying and the usually unmentioned and swept away difficulties of daddying. Crazy stuff really, but perhaps I either need to get it off my chest or its enlightening.. probably more of the former than latter :) Oh and for the neeks out there, I’ll post a short how-to on porting code from PSP-Fat to PSP-Slim.

Yes, I know, I should be focusing on Razor (a flashback ‘movie’ in the new Battlestar Galactica series; I’d not watch it at all except I’m a year behind and well, this fits right into that timeline, so why not?) but alas my time has been so hard pressed and fragmented of late that I cannot focus; I am watching, but will have to take it in again later. Ensign Ro is still an evil wench :) And IKEA still sells BSG merchandise. Oh, I sort of enjoy, but not being hit so heavy wih it, the imagery that on Pegasus they hold the ‘phone’ upside down, since they only talk into it.. while on Galactica they hold it like a phone, so they can talk and listen too. A not so sublte message. Well done.

The last few days the poor baby has been teething and sick; her nose has been plugged with phlegm and so she cannot sleep very well and thus we spend some large time getting her to sleep, so that she can wake a couple minutes later. Very trying and takes me back to about 8 months ago when she was just a peanut in our hands .. pacing up and down the halls all night long while wishing for her sake she could settle, and for my sake since I .. guilty as it may be, just wanted to sleep for more than a few minutes. Anyway, I noticed something over the last day or two – the poor child has learnt to be afraid of the dark. Our nightlight wasn’t sufficient, so with the addition of another one.. my god, she sleeps a little bit more and a little bit easier. The poor girl has suffered so much the last week and a half, it breaks the heart. But this in its own way is cute, and something we can roll with to make her feel better. The other day I spent some 4-5 hours over the night just getting her to sleep. Man.

If you’d prefer to avoid stories about fluids, stop now. (And if you want to get a postcard from Auschwitz, apparently you can. Capitolism must be alive in Poland nowadays as fridge magnets at tasteless locations is the one true benchmark.)

I offer up that there are a few interesting classes of words. Words that are unusual together such as ‘lightbulb’ and ‘doctor’ – pleasantly rarely used in the same sentence (except in pervy internet chatrooms.) There are words that you would think are rare together except in the company of specialists: ’spooky action at a distance’ is an unlikely combination of words unless you’re with physicists or in pervy internet chatrooms. I suppose lastly, my dear friend Aphyd would say that there are just plain funny words, like Mukluk.

Today I discovered some of the words that are all of these classifications – unusual together, common to specialists, and on no sleep.. sort of funny.

Shit storm. Kaka Fingerprint. Pooper Go-Round.

I suppose I could go into detail, but suffice to say that everyone knows the endeavers a new father goes through. I used to code every night. Now I need shirts that can be pulled over ths nose and rubber gloves. And +7 Diapers of Unlimited Holding.

Is this why they invented the Diaper Genie?

It is an odd thing, I might say.

I mean .. as I understand it, babies are often fussy between 7pm and 10pm (even in the womb.) I know ours little girl is – then and now. Maybe its the switch from my wives arms to mine, the nightly hiccups or the outside pressure and temperature change in the weather.. who knows? I’ll get home each night, take a few minutes to gulp down some food (which will inevitibly be cold before I finish it) and then take my turn with the baby shift. Being that I usually get home around 7 or so, babs is just warming her cycle up: carry for 20 mins, feed for 20 to 90 mins, shushing and calming and singing as I go. Try and sit, change hands, swap her to another person and out comes the screaming monster. Repeat this cycle for a few hours and by 10 pm or ultimately midnight.. she’ll start to fall asleep. Well, she’ll sleep for 10 mins then awaken.. but eventually she’ll go down for the count. Sometimes it gets me a little mad, but usually she’s just gassy or constipated, so you can’t be upset with her. Its tough being a baby :P

Anyway, each night by about 9:30 pm I spend a good 15 mins being annoyed, and I complain to my poor wife who’s trying to catch some sleep (as my shift extendeds through to about 2-3am so she can get a few hours rest up front.) I imagine by now, anyone reading will be wondering.. wtf dude? Why tell you? Permit me to continue, dear friends.

Somewhere around 10:30pm .. maybe its the way the lighting has gotten to, or the heavier my eyelids have become, or just maybe the way she seems to suddenly recognize who I am and snuggle up to the warmth. Maybe its feeding her and the way she looks up with those adoring unspoilt eyes as she aclimatizes to my ministrations instead of mommies. Something happens and no matter if she is fussy or babbling happily, if she’s waving her hands around or spitting up .. she is beautiful. Don’t get me wrong as she has just as many quiet nights or days as she does freakout ones, but something about this magical notch on the clock.. you just have to lean back with this little person in your lap and feel like the world is okay. Not just okay.. gorramned awesome. Pudding, instead of oatmeal.

Sometimes she’ll crack that happy little post-feeding drunken gerber smile and that my friends is why I’m posting, and why I can’t wait all day to see her again. I know she’ll be ready to cry by the time I get home, but I know my wife is safe at home and ready to bring the baby to the door when I arrive.

Coming to the door of your home, seeing your wife holding a smiling little baby girl..

Who wouldn’t want to come home to that?

(Aside: BTW, this is Iron Maiden day in my books. Tomorrow might be The Distillers day.)

Today I guess was another of the ‘fussy days’ where the baby is kranky all day and just wants to be held. I get home from work and mommy is a little frazzled .. barely had time to have a cereal in the morning and no time for lunch or even to get a drink for herself; she got a few IM’s in to me so we could communicate a little, but in general.. a tiring day of carrying the baby around while shushing. For those who’ve never done it — its harder than you think, and tiring to caring a squirming twelve-pounder around :)

She was much fussier last Friday, but pretty good on the weekend when we were visiting. I think it tires the baby out to have lots of folks around so she ends up being quiet .. but the last few days where it was just my wife and her for the night and day, the baby was a fussy-bussy. Its hard on the wife, for sure.

After being sleep deprived and dealing with this all day, today my wife was a little on the upset side; she worries she’s not doing her part since I have to take over when I get home from work “after a long day of work” .. “shouldn’t I be able to do it all?”. She’s still worried about running up to shower while alone in the house (due to risk of fainting, however low). She worries about the baby fealing abandoned if she flops out to do email for a few mins .. so she ends up carrying the baby until just being exhausted.

I tell her .. she’s not superwoman; she can’t do _it all_ though she wants to. The baby has fussy days or weeks, and it _is_ hard. Just because other women don’t show that its hard, it merely means they’re not revealing that difficulty publicly, just as my wife wouldn’t. I tell her that I have the easy part since I’m just going back to work.. stuff I’ve been doing awhile and I enjoy, and that doesn’t involve squirming screamy babies. That my job is easy, and her job, being the mommy.. is hard. The hardest. Rewarding, but it _is_ tough. Maybe just for a couple months, or who knows.. but not to beat herself up. I say that a lot — it is tough, so don’t beat yourself up. You shouldn’t be ashamed for wanting to have a few minutes to yourself.. you’re human, and you need to unwind for 5 mins if you can get it.

She worries that she doesn’t feal enough love and attachment to the child yet. Its not that my wife is depressed.. she seems fine and doesn’t sound like post-partum or the like; she’s just tired the heck out and as we all know.. a little sleep dep seriously messes with your calm. So she doubts herself.

My wife is amazing. She’s doing an awesome job, and the baby loves her and responds to her singing until she’s raw in the throat from it :) She’s a great wife, my best friend, and a great mom. But she’s tired.

Women out there, if you’re reading .. please reply on Livejournal and let my wife know she’s not alone.. that it is hard, and that she’s normal. She’s just like veryone else. She’s not failing, the baby won’t grow up hating her, none of that. Give it up for a new mom .. its a tough job, but it has to be done :)

One thing I realized the other day, which confused me a bit — after going through a couple quick bouts of ‘omg, my wife might die’ (probably not, but it seemed possible at the time*), I realized that for one of the first times in my life I was in over my head. Its an odd feeling of insecurity when you don’t really know where things are going (I’ve always had various plans, you see), and discover you’ve not done any research, and you’re dealing with an alien species — what do you want? why are you crying? A little insecure.. who? me? who knew! Damnit, I’m human again :)

I also find this huge need to talk to people, especially my close friends who for the last while I’ve let slide by a bit in our pseudo-slight-depression as we waited for the baby options to come to term. Mr brother and I were raised to be independant, but here I am looking for every possible idea and confirmation. Like finding yourself walking in a cave, listening for every voice. The net is cool this way .. looking for mailing lists and blogs, you can see every dad goes through the same things, and so many people I’ve bumped into over the years are offering their voices. It is encouraging, and very much what I need.

SMS texting has been the godsend; it takes little time, and is asynchronous.. so I’ve been chatting away with a dozen people I’ve not talked to nearly enough. Have a kid, act like a teenager :P

* The wife? What happened? I know I know.. the long story is needed, but I’ll go a piece at a time. For this piece, just let me offer — there was a moment when blood was pouring out there, not like a faucet but something like that and there was a few inches deep pool around her bottom. (Too much information?) She started to get light headed, so I was talking to her .. to make sure she was answering right, to encourage her to get those last pushes done, to let her know she was amazing and like a train — could do it. But her blood pressuer had dropped to some very low numbers and it made me worry. It got weird there, but she seemed to recover a bit and we cried as the baby came out .. me for that joy and for the determnination and pain on my wifes face, and her for the joy of seeing what she’d been carrying for 9 or so long months. I’ll write about all that later, but what scared me was at one point a few mins later when they passed my daughter to me and said very sternly.. “take care of your daughter”. I watched paralyzed as the nurse pushed the ‘help button’ on the side of the bed and said something like “I need help in here”. My wife remembers hearing “do we need more blood?” and “transfusion” but they opted not to. But there I was, pushed aside, holding this fragile little baby in my arms, watching blood pour from my wife, her getting dizzy, and a half dozen medical ‘folks’ doing ’stuff’. I’m sure it wasn’t as serious as it is in my memory, but these images are part of what freaked me out. There are some amazing emotions and images forever burned into my mind, but these ones I won’t miss when they fade.

Permit me to ramble; the luxury to edit a post is long gone :) If your time is short, skip to the end — help me find a workable sleep/work schedule so I can enjoy life with my wife, and still get both of us some sleep, and properly care for the baby.

I don’t think I’ve lead a lazy lifestyle, but more a ‘just in time’ one. JIT is a good thing in service delivery and compilers, so it must be good all the time right? Anyway, as a male its been easy — shower every day, and if you need to go out its merely a 10 minute pulling on of the clothes operation. When you get married you quickly learn that the fairer sex takes an hour or more to get ready, and that you should appreciate such devotion. Maybe this is what leads to male JITness. Then you have kids, and being a little lazy seems to go out the door. Overnight you become a soccer-mom. So, future child who will never read this — we were normal once, and you broke us in hours :)

I suppose this posting is another in my ‘uncoolerer’ thread, where I tell the future child that ‘once we were cool, then we had you, and being a parent by definition makes you uncool.’ You can no longer just-in-time when you’ve got a newborn around — we pack her up to get out the door to the baby-doctor and theres a poop-explosion, or crying, or formula-preparation to ensure we’ve got enough. Heck, longer term — you could always grab take-out for yourself if you run out of food at home, but when you’ve got a child you’re on the look out for everything – enough laundry done for her? enough food? anything we need to get ready so we can leave in an hour or two?

She’s nor even two weeks old, but here I sit planning on what items to move from floor to floor (since my wife is still weakened and floor-locked), and planning to get the oil changes done, and ensure I’m on top of my birth paperwork and taxes .. all these things, since time is so utterly precious in a very different way now. I used to not worry about minutia, but now it seems like we have to be on top of our game to squeeze every ounce of sleep in when we can, or eventually, to get the kids all ready for school or hockey practice on time..

Anyway, I digress. As you can see, I’ve come a long way since the other days panic. We’re starting to get the hang of things.

Still, I’ve not returned to work yet. We’re already not getting ‘enough’ sleep.. perhaps enough, but not how much we want. I know my sleep cycles are totally messed up and I’m expericing symptoms of jet lag, but it’ll sort out. Of late we’ve been trying to hit the sack at 8-9 since we’re tired, but end up chatting till 10-11 anyway since we miss each other and need to go over all the things that’ve happened lately. My wife falls asleep near instantly, yet I can’t fall asleep until 1 or 2 am it seems.. then change and feed the tot, and she sleeps another hour or two or three and I hope to squeeze a bit in. Repeat a few times until its 6 or 7 am and then I try to actually crash and let my wife take over.. since she’s now slept from 10 through 6 or so and hopefully ignored enough crying to get some rest. Since I’m totally trashed from being up a day and most of the night, I crash from 7am or so through eleven .. likely explaining while I can’t sleep until 2am. But I hear every girgle and motion the tot makes, keeping me always semi-awake, and eleven through 8-9 is a pretty short day-cycle when you’re used to 16-hour day cycles. Its a survival sleep pattern where the days woosh by, but we don’t feel totally wrecked.. just half wrecked and in life-pattern shock.

Whats a normal sleep cycle for a couple with a newborn? ie: One works and one is home with the baby.

Some obvious options come to mind — alternating baby duties, alternating nights so every other night one person gets a full sleep, shifts in a night so theres relatively well defined duty-periods.. any others? Requirements are ’seeing my wife so we don’t just become room-mates’ and ‘enough sleep to survive’, and nice to haves include ‘getting enough sleep to actually feel good’ and ‘time to play games or watch TV again.’ For these last few years where we were a little depressed by lack of babies, I enjoyed playing some games and reading and we enjoyed a few TV shows and such.. you know, normal people stuff. It’d be nice to have some of that too, so we don’t just end up living purely for the baby, but a little for ourselves too. (Is that selfish?) Forget time to browse the web and time-killers like that :P And forget doing things off the cuff.. now it seems the baby wants one of us with her all the time, so need to tag off .. one of us can make coffee for the other, etc.

Say I work 10-6, and allow for an hour of travel on each side.. that means out of the house 9 to 7. Could work ealier or a bit later, though I’m trying to avoid rush-hour. If I want to see my wife, do I need to work those nutty hours all the other dads I work with do? 7-3 and such? urgh! Anyway, if I try for out-of-house 9 to 7, trying to get the newborn to bed by 8-9 so we have some time to ourselves for bed by 10-11, how will that work .. off the cuff:

Total guesswork: home – wake up: 8:30am
work – drive: 9->10am
work – office: 10->6pm
work – drive: 6->7pm
home – take over baby so wife can rest a touch: 7->9pm
home – put baby to bed: 9->10pm (hopefully less time?)
home – relax with wife: 9:xx->11pm (already too late.. must shift eveyrthing earlier?)
home – my shift with baby: 11pm->2am (so get 6.5 hours sleep?) home – sleep: 2am->8:30am wake up

This scheme hasn’t been thought out at all, but lets check the summary for my side: Sleeping for 6.5 hours in the night, maybe squeezing some more in there somewhere.. not bad, but not ideal for sure. Seeing wife for only an hour or two.. pretty bad. I truly regret screwing around before the baby for all those years when it should’ve all been with the wife. Clearly, optimizing travel time would be ideal, but I _like_ driving to work and being able to show up earlier or later at leisure..

Now, what does that scheme do to my wife? She’d have the baby duty 2am to 7pm.. like 17 hours. Brutal, but maybe thats the girls job since I’ll be working? She’d get sleep 11pm through 2am so a good 3 hours plus any cat-naps. Wow, insane. Note also she is still weakened from the blood loss, so getting around in the house and carrying the baby and such tire her out. We need to get her some sleep in here somewhere! Or do the mothers always get by on catnaps while the baby sleeps?

Clearly this schedule is unworkable!

We’ll have to sort it out soon, and find some workable balance. I worry we’ll end up with only 3-4 hours sleep a night each, and barely seeing each other, for a couple months anyway.

What have all you other parents done with your newborn, to enjoy life and survive and such while working?

There is so much I can and hope to say about the baby and birthing process. Men – wear comfy shoes that you think you can stand for 35 hours in, and women – you are all each and every one truly amazing. If I ever get free time again I will write about the birth, the in-hospital after-birth, the coming home, and life in chaos, but time is so utterly precious right now I’ll be brief. All of these events are incredible and soul altering, but of all things, I feel I must whine a bit this time. Consider this the 5th or so posting about the birth, where the others will come sometime :)

o My wife is amazing; I could never have done what she has done with anywhere near as much energy and strength .. especially after the complications and such she’s been through

o Our baby is beautiful beyond belief, but boy can she wail :)

o You know, when having a baby, life will be forever different, that sleep will be interupted and priorities will change; but you cannot understand the scope of life shock until it happens.. omg! It makes you wonder, at this early point, how anyone survives at all. I know it will get better but right now, it just seems like a scary future :)

There is so much to say about the baby and life and all, but right now I’m feeling super-stresses; worrying about my wife and the baby and caring for them at the expense of myself has shaken me .. walking for 5 hours at night time to get the baby to sleep through her cramps (she’s not pooping enough) has totally messed me up. I want to spend more time with my wife (I so regret everything I did that was not with my wife, before the birth), and have a good nights sleep again, and I wonder when (if ever) we’ll be able to flop down and watch TV or I’ll have a moment to read .. or play a game or any such frivilous thing. Right now we’re still in that panic-period where the baby is either asleep or screaming (usually the latter :), so we spend all our time being amazed by tiny toes, or trying to just get past the current tirade to the next time when we can rest.

Luckily my mother-in-law popped by a few times so I coudl crash for a couple hours during the day, but its still left me weird; we’ve decided ‘bed time’ is now 8pm and hoping to last 12 hours, so that somewhere in that 8-to-8 period we might get 5 hours or more sleep. Catching a cat-nap for an hour or two in the day is a rare luxury, but then just makes for problems later when we try to really hit the bed.. <– overwhelmed

Just .. wow. My wife lacks energy from loss of blood et al, but she can handle it all .. simply amazing. I find myself a bundle of nerves, rushing store to store to buy what we need, worrying about getting to a doctor to help with the babies constipation (counting the hours until Tuesday for that appointment), and dealing with sleeping in scraps during the day while zombing during the night.

Heres to hoping that sometime in the next couple weeks it’ll get better.. I’m not sure I can handle it all as it is, though I know that I will somehow or another :)