111–120 of 216 posts
I'm father of 6. Ages 7,5,4,3,2 and 8 months. (I'm atheist before you ask.) My best work--in technology has coincided with a pregnant wife. Between our disappearing nightlife schedule (more hack nights FTW!) and the caveman drive to go hunt on the plains (which for me means more LOC), a pregnancy has been productivity heroin. Yes, a baby does change your life--in other more significant ways. The intensity of emotion…
There's a two- or three-week period, usually around the six month mark, when your baby can sit up unaided but can't yet crawl. During this time, you can put the baby down on an activity blanket (supervised, obviously) and enjoy maybe five or ten minute contiguous stretches of uninterrupted time to do stuff. Note: activities like preparing a meal and straightening up the place tend to take priority over developing a s…
* Seriously consider having the baby sleep in your bed with you, especially if you/your spouse are breastfeeding. In my experience this leads to drastically less sleep. You disturb your baby and your baby disturbs you. We put the baby in another room and invested in a baby alarm. * Seriously consider breastfeeding. Yes, but don't pressure yourself too much...the most important thing is that the baby eats properly. Bo…
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Consult your pediatrician before even considering letting your infant sleep with you. There may be additional SIDS concerns.
My son is two weeks old by now, and the nurses at the hospital all said that a mother won't crush her child in bed. Apparently women have some kinds of instincts at work here. Men are a less safe bet, apparently. My sister (a phyisician) said that it can be dangerous if the men are drugged (alcohol, for example). There is also the sudden infant death syndrome. They still don't know what's going on, but statistics see…
The term does. The phenomenon is hardly new. Infants probably have died suddenly and without quick explanation ever since there were infants.
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Consult your pediatrician before even considering letting your infant sleep with you. There may be additional SIDS concerns.
And what would the pediatrician say? No one knows what SIDS is caused by and deferring to external authority won't change that. Do whatever feels right for you.
There are many studies on what reduces the occurrence. For example, the "back to sleep" campaign saw SIDS incidence go down by 50% in just a few years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_Sleep
Slightly off topic parenting discovery: if you're the dad in the USA, you can count on general approval or at least tolerance for just about anything you do with your kids in public so long as you're not hitting them or screaming at them. It's kind of insulting that the standards are so low, but most people still seem to expect dads to be clueless, and/or they treat taking the kids out in public by yourself as an ext…
There's a two- or three-week period, usually around the six month mark, when your baby can sit up unaided but can't yet crawl. During this time, you can put the baby down on an activity blanket (supervised, obviously) and enjoy maybe five or ten minute contiguous stretches of uninterrupted time to do stuff. Note: activities like preparing a meal and straightening up the place tend to take priority over developing a s…
We let both our girls (now 1 & 3) "cry it out." It was quite hard for a couple of weeks, but they both now have very good sleeping schedules. And, as far as I can tell, no psychological damage!
Sleep with your baby if you find it emotionally gratifying, but I'm skeptical that there's any significant benefit. It didn't work for us - my wife still wakes up occasionally from disturbing "baby in the bed" dreams.
You will also discover yourself doing things that you had never dreamed of - like a 3 year old yelling to you "Dad, come wipe my bum!" or calmly dealing with a child projectile vomiting and having a bowel movement at the same time. Children amplify the highs and lows of life. The smallest things they do become huge triumphs in your life (look! the baby smiled!). It is wonderful and I could not imagine it any other way.
You can still accomplish anything that you want to - my wife got tenure a week before our second child was born. I have started 3 companies while having kids. You get better at time management and it helps to have a little staff. We use a maid service and have a full-time nanny. The older kids now go to school and so we have a little structure (and I have the time between 8:30 and 11:30 in peace and quiet). You learn how to structure and delegate. You can't do it all yourself, so you have to figure out how to manage time and people. Once you get these skills, then you can actually get MORE done than you could before.
For anyone concerned about doing a startup and looking for a partner, have a look at the kid. They may not bring much in the way of technical expertise, but you will never ever want to let them down, no matter how rough the going gets. Each day when you get home and those bright eyes ask you "How was work today Daddy, what did you do?" you will find more accountability and support than you could ever believe. When they get a little older, you buy a Lego Mindstorms and start making projects that move and do things and this gets fun in new ways - teaching your kids to program/hack whatever. You can get them going on Python Turtle and watch their little minds expand once they realize that they are controlling the movements. And as someone else noted, you get a lot of baby-focused startup ideas.
Oh, where to start? Having a baby entirely eliminates your life and replaces it with a different one. And you can't undo it. You cannot spend all your time on a project now - you have to change your priorities. This is not an option, and unfortunately it's not something that happens magically by itself, either. Like maintaining a marriage, it's something you choose to do because not to do so is unthinkable. The payof…
However there is nothing to be afraid of. Priorities shift. Things that were important to you beforehand, things you thought defined your sense of self, or you couldn't live without - no longer matter as much.
You find a new focus, a new center. Until that point you're still the center of your own universe in a large sense. After a baby is born you're in orbit around that center.
Fear - I used to be firefighter but before the birth of my son, I did not understand what it really meant. "On his right hand Billy tattooed the word love and on his left hand was the word fear" Cautious Man/Bruce Springsteen. My "treasure", I know I can lose it all. Like I never was, I am all in.
Taking a stand - It is a big responsibility. You want to make money for his security, have a stable life to take care of him... but on the other hand you want to show him an example for his own life later on. Who will be his father? Sbdy hiding in a comfortable well paid corporate job, sitting on the side of his dreams? or sbdy who wants to create sthg of value, who takes a calculated risk (this comes with age;) with costs (eg. time to take care of him), but shows him nonetheless what he believes in by what he actually works on. I chose the 2nd. It broke my relationship with his mother. When my son is born, the cycle of life was in front of my eyes and in a strange but positive way when was looking at him I also saw I will die. He changed that I had to be harshly true to myself (I am still working on it). You can lie to yourself but not to your child. This "not to BS yourself" burns (at least for me). I had to make a decision. All in.
Wonder - Children are the greatest miracle and wonder on Earth. Sthg I kinda knew got clear and more existential, the rest not important anymore. His sheer existence gives me inspiration and focus: to give a tiny bit of this miracle/wonder/awesomeness back, share that wonder fire with others. I now orient my life on 2 things: 1/ truly caring for people (they were also babies;), to listen to them, their own story when you can, and make sthg of value to them, never to take them only as means for your own interest 2/ focus my work on sthg for a minimum of 10 000 hours. (10k h or 10y. rules) (necessary to achieve wonder results, not sufficient). My co-founder and I we build a service for that. Walking the talk, eating our own existential dog food. Something that could help people achieve wonders (doesn't mean big) by doing things, practicing regularly over a period of time... We build it for us and, why not, I really hope my son one day will use it too. This sense of wonder in life, impersonated by my little boy, is what fuels my engine, that's what gives me focus and perspective. I want to build wonder machines which help others to create wonder machines. Might fail, but thank Life, my "whole" is in ;)