Candide: Zombieland

[candide]

It begins. . .

I am at something like 3 and a half hours of sleep spread over the last two days. I'm downing a five hour energy to get through supporting these next few rounds of feedings and swaddling her up for sleep, with the last hour of my five hour's energy to be used faking enthusiasm for a visit from my mom and her husband. After that, we'll tag in my sister-in-law to be with my wife today (outfits and social media!!) while I crash.

It takes a village.

As for right this moment, praises be taurine, b vitamins, and caffeine.

Previous journal:
viewtopic.php?t=12399

[OutOfTheBlue]

May I suggest Yoga nidra to help get through this?

It's a guided deep relaxation-meditation practice, where you lay still in the corpse position, and let the body fall asleep while the mind stays awake.

If you can muster half an hour or more of uninterrupted peace, put on some headphones and try some sessions off YouTube.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend any, as I do mine in French...

I have been using it a lot, for instance when I wake up early, in place of a nap, to regain mental energy and clarity to continue with my translation work, or to survive some occasional sleepless nights. It helps you get some good deep rest in a short time.

May this serve you well. Hang in in there!

[theanimal]

Congratulations on the arrival of your child! I hope your DW and the baby are healthy and doing well.

[candide]

@OutOfTheBlue

I will look into it. I certainly know what is like to not be able to "just sleep," in the slivers of time I may have (will I have? I dunno -- we're looking at a trying few weeks minimum).

@theanimal

Thank you. Your turn is coming . . .

[candide]

As a general rule, assume that any of these journal entries are closer to brain dumps, as this is, after all Zombieland.

===

Today was the first day our baby woke up at our home. What a day. The forum has as of late been discussing social capital, so as I was thinking about the day, I thought about how much social capital it involved, with extra redundancies built in.

My wife’s sister stayed the night. She watched me do a 2 am feeding, which helped me develop a skill and let my wife sleep. Later on in the earliest morning, she watched DD for about 3 hours, allowing my wife and I to get sleep even through a feeding time.

When I woke up, I made breakfast for us all. I heard later that my wife’s sister liked the meal, but even moreso appreciated having it made for her, as it had been 2 years since anyone had done that.

My mother was slated to bring us lunch and have a visit with the baby, but she was running a fever, so instead my wife’s parent’s came for lunch and had a longer stay – social capital redundancy! – which allowed my wife to get another sleep session and myself to do dishes from that big ass breakfast.

After this, I needed someone to drive me up to the hospital so I could get my car back. I tried a friend, but she didn’t get back in time, but my wife got two friends lined up – redundancy redux! – one to stay with her and one to drive me.

Incidental yield: these friends set up a “meal train,” so we are going to get meal a day from churchy people for a few weeks.

I also want to note that all the people other than family we knew from having taught with them. Work is the way we build social capital and maintained it. Heck, it is how DW and I met in the first place. (My parents also met through work). It also helps greatly that these are teachers on summer vacation – a time-rich people looking for something to do indeed.

[candide]

I find it interesting to think about how (or even if) the market could replace the kind of services I described in my last post.

Sure, a nanny would work for the holding, but the incidental yields such as conversations and further meals would either not occur or be of lesser quality/higher cost. And then there would be more negatives, such as managing people, watching out for theft, etc.

===

I think we’ve settled into a routine that will work for a few weeks. DD sleeps well after feedings during the day, but between 2 am and 4 am is absolutely wired. So my wife pumps some milk and then after an 11:00 or midnight feeding, I take the absurd shift. I don’t think I can get anything else done during that time: DD makes it a “cluster feed,” so I feed when she is fussy, rock her, let her look at things, and then repeat.

She fooled me last night into thinking I could sooth her to sleep, but each time she cracked her eyes open to show me she wanted to experience life. . . I’m just going to go with it for the next week or so. We can rock in a chair, talk, and get fed. But soon enough my wife and I have to figure out a transition plan for when I’ll be going back to work August 11th.

===

I have had a roll-over.
Habit fund: $156.

I am looking to increase the air quality as a prelude to setting up power dusting, and other use of power tools.

I’m going to stick with my rule of not talking about projects until I’ve already done them, but it is a safe bet that I’ll have at least a respirator soon, and then go from there.

[candide]

Last night DW tipped over a small bottle after doing some pumping and was very upset about it. I immediately, reflexively said “don’t cry over spilled milk.” I really shouldn’t, as she is not the type who finds the inappropriateness of a comment to be an additional reason why it is funny.

Less than a beat after making the comment, I was talking about how we needed some kind of box to prevent them tipping over. She was doubtful that could help, but by staying persistent and asking questions, I figured out what she needed. Here’s what I came up with:




I have a jig to measure out the bottoms of litter boxes to that size, as I have cut some out and painted them as organizer trays for my classroom in the past. Then I took a hole saw from the set I bought this summer (Harbor Freight -- not sure it was that good of a buy, but it helped this time).

I asked my wife if she then wanted me to make one out of wood, but she has been around me in tinker mode, so she made the decision to have my man hours go to helping her with the baby instead.

[candide]

Here's what I've been working on during my 10 minute-a-day maker time:



Working on this toy, I was frustrated with how I drilled the axles, and knowing I am planning on making a lot of toys in the future, I decided it was time to get a drill press. I bought a super-cheap 8 inch Harbor Freight model. While there, I figured I saw their diamond plates and figured I'd give them a try. Lastly, I bought some blue painter's tape, as it is my favorite tape to use when I am prototyping.

Habit Fund:
$156 - $104 = $52

I need to get backing to earning.

[candide]

I am starting to experience a sense of flow when doing childcare tasks for my baby. Although it might have moved to “relaxation” (high skill, low challenge) already. But for a few days there, it was a challenge -- also meaningful and with stakes that mattered to me.

This came to me as a flash of relief in the morning today. It was 5 a.m. check diaper – nope, get to feeding pumped milk, hear the blow out, do the diaper, feed some more, get down to sleep in such a way that I didn’t wake my wife (cats were fed along the way as well, as they are also perfectly capable of waking her if their needs aren’t met).

I didn’t realize how much all of this would be skill, how much I would learn, and how quickly. I’m an only child and I have just never been around little children much. All of my experiences I was told that I was doing things wrong, and that made me scared of the whole thing. . . Going into this, I really thought that I would take care of everything else in the house so my wife could take of the baby. In my head, I was only going to do the rarest of diapers, and in my imagination my wife would be up and around, and I’d be doing it just to free up her hands. I didn’t think I’d ever be feeding the baby.

This wasn’t out of some chauvinist feeling that childcare tasks were below me, but rather unexamined fear that I couldn’t cut it, literally childish fear of the type that festered in my younger and more vulnerable years. Well, I’m past all that now. Skills can be learned. Skills should be learned. The right relationship to skills is the centerpiece of my life philosophy. That, and spending time with my family.

===




My wife has a friend’s baby shower coming up. The theme of their nursery is ducks, so that explains why these are ducks. I wanted to make a better toy for my daughter than the car, so that explains why there is more than one. We have a neighbor who had a baby, in fact on the same day as we did, so that explains why the number is three.

I was given permission to spend more than 10 minutes a day on these. Also, having a drill press was a huge help in making multiples quickly. I absolutely recommend the Central Machines 8 inch drill press for toy making. And I’m willing to now recommend the Warrior brand hole saw set from Harbor Freight. The cuts are circular and the saws have not flown off and killed me yet.

===

I am pretty amazed how this is all going so far. Prepare for the worst and be pleasantly surprised, I say. If I get back to the school year and I am feeling even this good, I won’t be able to rightfully call this Zombieland. It might be on to a new journal, this time to stay on it until the summer.

[candide]

Sleep
====

I have begun training my sleep patterns to be ready to report to work.

When I was picking up the odd-time am shifts with my daughter, I had my alarm off. As a reminder, I find getting sleep right to be very difficult when I am not working and have found that it is best for me to keep an alarm going, even if a good chunk of days I just fall back asleep after turning it off. Having to actively watch a child until 3:00 am worked as a sleeping pill. (Luckily, especially for my wife, my daughter’s crazy spaz I-want-to-learn-about-the-world time has started to shift to earlier in the evening and she is going to sleep after her evening and early am feedings).

But now it is back to alarms for me. Yesterday, I heard them and then went back to sleep. Today, I am up, have made my coffee and am using the time to write these very words. (True when I wrote it; I stopped and started this piece the rest of the morning). We also have a visitor coming around 10:00 am, so this might just close to a cold-turkey shift in my sleep.

I find that working on the “demand pull” end works for me. I imagine I’ll have naps and crashes while I am adjusting to this pattern, but more and more sleepiness will start to align to fit 5:55 first alarm/6:06 catch alarm (again – multiples of 3, but not 9. I also tend to microwave things at 0:33, 0:42, 1:02, 1:23, 2:01, etc).


Function Stack at Work Site
=====================

I also am going back to my school site, to stack productive functions. Yesterday, I arranged my desks, built a very small stand for my mechanical keyboard to go over my computer I had salvaged. But most importantly, I used the school’s dumpster to deal with the overflow of trash that has come with a newborn, having others cook for us, liberal use of paper plates, etc.

When I pulled into the area near the dumpster, I smiled when I noticed a pallet that was left there to be disposed of.

I went to the school library to ask if the librarian had a saw. This is less stupid of a question than you might think, as public school libraries are more and more billed to include, if not suffer attempts to be replaced with, Maker Spaces.

All the librarian could could come up with was some odd angle grinder thing that was battery operated, but had no charge, and nothing to charge it with . . . so maybe it was a stupid question after all.

To make me feel even more stupid, I later realized that I had a saw in my trunk for this exact purpose. So in the end I did get my incidental yield of pallet wood from the trip.

I did not expect to run into people, but there were a few teachers who were there either because had been coaching in the morning or they too wanted to get a little ahead on preparations for the new year so they don’t feel rushed to squeeze them in between all the meetings that come with the time between when we officially report and when the students come for the first day of school.

This allowed me to work on my new persona as a guy who just shows pictures of his child.


Food
====

Today is the last day of our “meal train.” I had thought that it was a “churchy” thing, but it turned out that it was actually just a work thing, once you added the fact that one of the two ladies who set it up was a former co-worker of my wife’s and thus was able to cast a slightly wider net, one which included some other people my wife had worked with, and in one case a former student who is now college age. This goes to show how much of our social capital is bound by work. But that’s a problem to think about another time.

I’m really looking forward to getting back to doing the cooking. I’ve snuck in enough fiber here and there in snacks or sides to go with the leftovers to make this not a complete disaster, but it just so much easier to eat lentil soup. Lentils! I haven’t had any since the baby was born. I had a soup that I had made and froze before the birth. It has been thawing, and today or tomorrow, I will eat it, and that will be good.

The variety was nice, and the price could not be beat, but I’d rather lower my sodium and increase my intake of fiber, vitamins, and minerals.