Dave's Journal - documenting the path to FI

[Dave]

I really appreciate the kind comments, guys!

I'll still be around the forums for sure, just not posting updates in this journal as often unless/until things change a bit and there is something ERE-relevant to talk about. There are some modest goals on the horizon like sleeping on the floor (no mattress experiment), maybe going phoneless again, and trying my damndest to fight the Big Baby industry in myriad ways, so we'll see what happens . Actually, since I wrote my last post my wife is (finally) reading the ERE book, so maybe that'll catalyze progress, but I think we're going to have our hands full here for a while and my goals are mostly to hold steady on current values and activities during this time of change.

@ertyu

If you ever wanted to chat about this in PM/email/whatever I'm glad to chat. And in ERE threads too, if it's a value-based analysis where I have something useful to contribute!

[ertyu]

For the no mattress experiment, no padding at all, or?

And thank you for the offer to PM and/or @ you, much appreciated!

[Dave]

I'd go straight for the throat and just do minimal padding like a comforter on the floor, but DW wants to do it in 2 stages with an eggshell mattress pad on the floor, to start.

Given that she's pregnant, I think it wise to agree .

If stage 1 goes alright for a few months, we'll shift to just the floor and see how it goes.

[white belt]

I'd go straight for the throat and just do minimal padding like a comforter on the floor, but DW wants to do it in 2 stages with an eggshell mattress pad on the floor, to start.

What is your sleep position? I used to be a stomach sleeper for years but supposedly it is bad for your neck and shoulders so I made the transition to side sleeping. One thing I've noticed is that it is extremely uncomfortable to sleep on a hard surface while side sleeping. But it also depends on the surface. Dirt or grass is more comfortable than wood or concrete.

[OutOfTheBlue]

Sleeping on the back is I think the optimal position when sleeping on the floor. I bet this is what Dave does.

[white belt]

Sleeping on the back is I think the optimal position when sleeping on the floor. I bet this is what Dave does.

I haven't figured out how to sleep in that position without snoring.

[Dave]

Yeah, I sleep on my back. My wife rotates between back and side sleeping.

@white belt

How long did it take you to switch to side sleeping?

Regarding snoring, have you tried taping your mouth shut at night to force nose breathing while sleeping?

I'm not sure if you've seen the excitement about the book Jaws and mouth breathing - it's made it way to Huberman's podcast. This is one of those interesting things where some vanguard/"edge" scientists have put together a theory of a modern health issue based on a seemingly-logical theory and some limited evidence, but we're not at the point with sufficient data to know for sure. Personally, I think it's really interesting and the idea has merit with little harm in trying the recommended practices. One of which is using hypoallergenic tape at night to keep your mouth shut for a temporary period while you are retraining your oral posture such that it stays shut at night.

As absurd as it sounds, after reading Jaws I actually just started taping my mouth 3 weeks ago to test whether sleep quality went up from forcing nose breathing at night to combat the variety of potential issues from mouth breathing. I don't have any means of being scientific about the whole thing, but so far I subjectively do feel better with the biggest perceived difference being better energy sustained through the afternoon. Who know though, could just be placebo or short-term variation in my energy.

Anyways, curious if you've heard of that/tried it, as it may be an option. Definitely worth researching for safety and so on given your level of snoring, OSA if present, deviated septum if present, etc., but thought I'd share.

[SavingWithBabies]

I have the same problem with back sleeping plus snoring. If I back sleep, I wake up with a dry throat too. So it sounds like that is my exact problem and taping might fix it! I'm going to try this out...

[white belt]

How long did it take you to switch to side sleeping?

Regarding snoring, have you tried taping your mouth shut at night to force nose breathing while sleeping?

I did it years ago, but from what I remember it took a few nights to adjust. The key was using a pillow between my legs to keep my hips in a neutral position and a pillow between my arms to keep my shoulders/arms in a neutral position. That also keeps me from rolling over. I sleep very well with those, but without them it can be uncomfortable sleeping on my side.

I heard about mouth taping on some podcasts a few years ago, but I was turned off by pursuing when I saw there wasn't really any clinical or evidence-based research on the subject other than anecdotes from people peddling their own brand of mouth tape. I can look into it again since there might be updates since the last time that I did a deep dive.

[Dave]

@SWB

I am certainly not an expert and don't think there is sufficient data to know one way or the other, but I thought it worth a try. My wife is no longer getting dry mouth after doing this. She doesn't notice any other benefits.

@white belt

Gotcha, that's pretty quick adjustment, nice.

Yeah, my reading and digging didn't come across a body of quality research, so not sure anything will change there. I just look at it as an n=1 experiment with, from what I can tell, little downside. Good chance it doesn't bear fruit, but for <$5 you can do the test and find out.

[theanimal]

Down with Big Baby! I think much of the industry preys on parents who are exhausted and often committed to other things besides their kids. The challenges can be real. But the parents efforts end up misdirected, instead of spending time with their kids, they buy some class/service/product wrapped up and marketed as a solution. It ends up being a self fulfilling cycle in a lot of ways and is both sad and bizarre. Mrs. Animal and I often wonder why many people end up having kids and wanting more when their actions signal otherwise.

I share many of your sentiments, so I will be eager to read about you and your wife's experiences with your child.

[Dave]

So we’ve been sleeping on the floor for something like 6 weeks now and it’s going great. We ended up not using the eggshell mattress, just a few blankets. The first 2 nights were rough, but overall it’s been great. It’s hard to explain, but basically I wake up feeling more limber. It’s similar to how you feel after stretching – your body is “on”. I imagine it’s the not having your shoulders/upper back & hips sink unnaturally into a soft surface for 8 hours that keeps you in natural alignment that causes you to feel better. Similar to how you feel off getting up off the couch after a long sit.

Interestingly, I have slept on my side a fair amount during this period, and my wife mostly side sleeps. She has an extra blanket setup under her hips and uses a pillow between legs as @white belt mentioned, but I don’t use anything. I have to adjust my posture a bit, but it’s fine. I tend to fall asleep on my back and at some point go to the side. I think this is reducing over time, probably as my body gets better adapted to being on its back on a hard surface.

@theanimal

The struggle is real! Our campaign against Big Baby is ongoing, and I can’t say we’re winning every battle. But we’re doing what we can.

It’s amazing how many things people buy you without ever having an indication that you want it. It’s tough because I’m not ignorant that people are coming from a good place of wanting to help, and it is heart-warming. But in many cases there is no means to return the product, and you’re left with the burden of trying to find it a new, grateful owner.

I strongly agree with what you wrote there. It seems like tired, time-scarce parents turn to consumer products for solutions to every issue, but there are alternatives. Like you said in your journal, there are a lot of great products out there worth using, but man there is just overkill on each and every thing. I recently “learned” that a mountable battery-powered fan is a “must have” for our stroller (that we don’t have and aren’t getting), because it can get hot outside. For some reason I thought we could just avoid going for walks in the middle of the day when the sun was blasting down and it’s 90 degrees out, but I was wrong .

Jokes aside, the whole scene is very confusing, and it does seem like the strict compartmentalization of the modern human creates weird effects in this space that, from my perspective, are either very hypocritical, require large cognitive dissonance, or are the result of ignorance/lack of thinking.

[ertyu]

cool to hear about your experience with floor sleeping - i sleep on just an eggshell mattress and that's the next step for me as well.

In addition to time scarcity, I think there's a natural drive to want to do and provide the best for your child that big baby has coopted; it seems to me that new parent anxiety is another big one cured through the accumulation of Baby Product hoards

[Dave]

Right on, sounds good. How long will you have slept on the eggshell mattress prior to transitioning?

One thing I think about there is how far it can be taken. I don't want to just sleep on the carpet or just a sheet and risk damaging/dirtying the carpet (or maybe this is a silly thought and it's fine, don't know). Maybe a hard futon is the ideal endpoint. For now happy to just get used to this, but I need to reflect more on the ideal long-term solution.

Well said on coopting wanting to provide the best. For the standard consumer, this translates into simply buying more things. For someone with our way of thinking, it's a more holistic consideration of options and tradeoffs. I'm not opposed to buying things here, but I want to be thoughtful about it in consideration alternatives and tradeoffs, and ideally procuring used items when possible.

In reference to the above comments of not winning every battle, though, I'm gaining firsthand experience of how hard it is when other people - parents, siblings, friends, etc. - are involved. I can't control everything and frankly don't think I should.

I'm doing my best to try to find the correct balance, but it's an ongoing process with ongoing learning that I'm sure will continue until the day I die!

[ertyu]

Right on, sounds good. How long will you have slept on the eggshell mattress prior to transitioning?

It's getting on two years now. As for how long it will be, idk - depends on my luck renting. If my apt comes with a bed, it'll be an eggshell mattress, if it does not, on the ground i go. Im letting serendipity decide this one for me

[Dave]

@ertyu

Right on. We ended up switching to the eggshell mattress, too. It was there, and DW found it made here noticeably more comfortable. Also saves us the need to get some sort of mattress/pad to protect the floor.

In other big news, it's been a busy ~8 weeks since our little one arrived! It has simultaneously felt like it has flown by & that it has been a lifetime since he took our world by force. It's been a big learning curve and we're still figuring it out, but things are going very well so far. DW is off for 13 weeks so we're enjoying this special time together.

I purposefully built a life with a fair bit of slack so I've been able to absorb this change without complete destruction of my prior habits . While getting better, my sleep has gone to shit...but I've kept with my strength and endurance/power training to a reasonable degree, which I'm pleased with. I've done this largely by making two changes: changing my strength workouts to high frequency low (daily) volume) with ~15 minute workouts ~5 days a weeks, and integrating my rucks and hill sprints into either when DW & DS are sleeping, or now that DW is largely healed to family walks with DS in a carrier on days when it's not too hot out. This strikes quite the image and we are becoming low-grade celebrities (the local crazies?) in our neighborhood with DW carrying our infant and me walking shirtless in my minimalist sandals and weight vest . In Hawaii this would have been more normal, but in this piece of suburbia it borders on absurd.

The battle with Big Baby continues, and I can't say we're winning on every front. But we're trying. It's tough with family and friends who are genuinely trying to help in the way they're most comfortable with: giving physical things and giving standard advice. I am not ungrateful, and I'm trying my best to gracefully navigate the situation.

For example, one recurring conversation we have that brings concern is that we are cosleeping with DS. We try to explain that when adjusting out for tobacco and drug use and various risk hazards (soft and excess fluffy bedding, gaps between bed and wall, etc.) the risks are cosleeping are nil. Consider Japan's cosleeping statistics. And see how nicely it pairs with floor sleeping (wait, you guys are sleeping on the floor, why?!), and how suddenly we don't need a whole nursery setup - a simple mat on the floor for changing and DW breastfeeding in bed makes the nightly wakeups far less jarring. But just like it's hard for regular folks to understand the virtues of going carless and how it directly translates into benefits in other areas of life, the end result tends to just be bewilderment and concern. Oh well, used to it at this point.

I've been blessed with good fortune on the investing front lately, presently sitting at +47% YTD. I have not built any new positions this year, but have traded around a bit as various holdings have seen widening and narrowing of the price-value gap. New stock research has dwindled during the last couple of months, I've just been focusing on maintenance research and doing what I can. I only record my portfolio accounting twice per year, and even this frequency is too short to confidently evaluate my process. More noteworthy than that, or better said that one potential takeaway of that is that I believe that several changes I made over the last several years are bearing fruit, namely my designated effort to integrate momentum into steering the timing of trading (the "when") rather than strictly valuation metrics (the "what"). It's funny considering how much the old Dave would have mocked this, but the integration of "the trend is your friend" has appeared to make a significant difference in shortening the period that I hold stocks on downtrends and getting to uptrends quicker. This delayed entering and exiting (premature evacuation ) has served to drive up my IRR. Said differently, better trading has helped translate stock research into better annualized portfolio returns, with the point that the two are not the same thing and both are important.

Of course, I could be reading tea leaves here, and all that's happening is I've just been lucky. I'm ever cognizant of that.

Big picture, our life is kind of repeat mode right now with a little one and we're trying to get a point of stability. I am going to be the main caretaker of DS when DW goes back to work (although I'm teasing her that it might be time to hang up her cleats soon), and I have some stress about how I will navigate that while also trying to have time to work on investing and various other projects I have running, but I'll take it as it comes.

Onward.

[Biscuits and Gravy]

Congrats on the little one! I coslept with my littles and loved all the precious moments of tracing their tiny profiles while they slumbered, but it did wind up generating codependency and dependency issues. It’s sweet to be their security blanket when they’re 6 months old; 4 years old, not so much.

Good luck fighting Big Baby. I put far too much effort into that and ended up hurting some people’s feelings, which in hindsight wasn’t worth it. The good news is it’s so easy to offload things to other new parents as soon as your kid grows out of it (looking at you, Bumbo chair). I was so frustrated when my son’s great-grandma bought him a pack of 5T socks when he was 3 months old (“Now I have to keep track of these for 4 years!” I had lamented), but she has since passed and every time I put them on his feet, they make me smile, and I’m humbled that so many people care for my kids. Sure, they’re American and the only way they can apparently express their affection is to buy things, but it just is what it is.

[theanimal]

Big congrats on the arrival of your son! You're not crazy, they're the crazies! Way to keep up the strength routine, my hat is off to you. I think it took me way longer to get something regular going again.

Regarding accumulating items from others, you can accept them and just pass them on. Probably about half the stuff we have received we have either given away, sold or given to other couples about to have a kid or who just had one. We still try to have boundaries with others in saying that we don't need, want or have space for x,y or z. But in the event someone does give us something, we don't feel obligated to keep it but are willing to provide them the satisfaction of giving a gift.

[Dave]

Thanks guys, really appreciate it!

@B&G

Yeah, those cosleeping concerns are on our radar. We'll see how it goes and make sure to begin a slow transition when the time comes, as we don't want to linger too long!

Re. the Big Baby stuff, I am halfway joking around with my comments, but I definitely know what you mean. It can be taken too far (from the perspective of hurting others' feelings), so I definitely hear you there. It's a balancing act, but it comes with the turf. As both you and @theanimal say, it is easy enough to find a new home for items, so we're keeping that in mind. Especially since a number of our friends/family have little ones on the way!

I really like how you said "I'm humbled that so many people care for my kids." - this is a wise perspective and one that I will keep in mind when feeling frustrated by things.

@theanimal

Thanks man! The strength routine isn't perfect, but at least it's something. We ate pretty poorly the first 4-6 weeks DS was born and I put on a few pounds, but I've been trending in the right direction the last little bit here. And as DS is sleeping better and better I'm scaling the workouts up! Haha, don't sell yourself short though, maybe you waited a little bit but look at what you're doing right now with a baby! I assure you we won't be anywhere near that level when DS is babyanimal's age .

Gota love the journey.

[Divandan]

Just read this journal from start to finish in two longer sittings. It is nice that this journal was six pages or so as you could see the progress and updates and ease of living. The whole thing was inspiring to read because of the ease/lightness of it (i.e., I didn't upgrade my phone and went without one for a month). I also loved the simplicity and focus of your life and how you take gratitude in the flow of life.

I hope all is well and you are enjoying the time with your son and family!