12 Metatasks for the Clueless Father-To-Be

1. Get your calendar, to-do lists, cell phone, and other ‘coordinating’ tools under control and in constant use.
If you’re like me you don’t always have a very full schedule, and so your calendar and to-do lists may be rather scattered and ad-hoc. Expect that you will probably lose 50 IQ points for the first month or more. Construct your calendar and lists for a person who is that challenged. That person will be you.

2. Watch videos — there are many aspects of baby care you just need to see rather than read about.
I’m very verbal and tend to get my information from books. I’m also impatient with stupid instructional videos. I should have just rented every video in the library. Thing is, you can practically turn off the sound. Just watch how people handle and interact with their babies. It’s informative.

3. Get your insurance straightened out and mark your calendar to follow-up on the newborn’s insurance.
Most personal insurance covers the baby for 30 days after birth. Insurance companies are ruthless if there is a preexisting condition. Need I say more?

4. Clear your schedule for 3 weeks on either side of the due date.
You can cancel, postpone, and float tasks. Tell relatives to go away unless they pledge to change diapers. Seriously. “So you’ll change her diapers and watch her so that we can sleep” is a good reply to “We’re all coming to see the new baby!”, followed by “Please only one relative at a time (who is willing to change diapers). Otherwise we’ll be overwhelmed.”

5. Try all means of education early so you can see what works for you.
Go to classes, read books, watch videos, etc., but do it EARLY. By about month 7 you’ll both start to run out of time to get ready.

6. Be über-social – hang out with friends who have babies, enjoy couplehood, observe real parents in the wild.

7. Be healthy (so it’s easier for wife to do so).

8. Be understanding (you’re going to need the practice).

9. Be communicative.
Lots of guys are not very communicative. After you have a child, your ability to communicate with your partner may well determine whether or not you get divorced in a few years. Practice while it’s easy.

10. Practice the following skills (napping, doing everything one-handed, multitasking, all while your helpful partner blasts one of those miniature bullhorns in your ear).
Somewhat joking. Don’t hurt your ears.

11. Finish all preparation 1 month before due date.
I’m convinced our due date was off by at least a week. If you read up on how due dates are calculated, you can understand how arbitrary they are. Although she was technically two weeks early (though to term), our baby had super-high APGAR scores and was fully baked. Most babies arrive before the due date, the assigned due dates are guesses at best, and slightly pre-term arrivals are quite common–so at 8 months your time’s up, buddy. Of course you might still have to wait six weeks. Think of it as an arbitrarily wide finish line that you’re crossing in the dark and you’ll know you’ve reached the end when the ground disappears from beneath you.

12. Buy or otherwise obtain the gear you’ll need, or know exactly which items you want and where you’re going to get them.
It’s prudent to not buy absolutely everything, as you rightly don’t know how the pregnancy will turn out, but don’t let that stop you from shopping. Again, after the IQ point drop, everything is difficult.

Tips on Sleeping while Caring for a Newborn

1. Don’t blog. It’s an enormous waste of time. You should be sleeping.

2. Accept that you are not going to get much sleep. You are going to be so tired you feel a new kind of physical pain.

3. Nap. Oh, you don’t nap? If you don’t know how, just pretend. It’ll happen soon enough. You’ll know you’ve napped when the baby wakes you up.

4. Learn to distinguish distress sounds from annoying noises. In the beginning, just about any noise from your bundle of joy will send a jolt down your spine. After a few weeks, you’ll be able to take a bullhorn in the ear without wincing. Keep in mind that if you get it wrong and ignore distress, you’ll have that bullhorn in your ear for a while.

5. In the evening, set up your sleep area and the baby’s sleep area at the same time. You might be exhausted by the time you get her to sleep, and you won’t be capable of searching for a blanket or glass of water. You probably won’t get to sleep much, but having a nicely aranged sleep area is soothing and gives you a feeling of distant hope.

6. Learn what it takes to put your baby into a deep sleep mode. Babies have a light sleep mode that comes before deep sleep. If you put them down in light sleep mode, they are restless for most of the hour or two they could have been soundly sleeping. If you fail, remember that there will be many, many more opportunities to fail.

7. Snack, but not too much. My theory is that you’re burning extra calories by staying awake. Might as well snack on good stuff like pop tarts and twinkies. Wash down with milk. Nap while standing.

8. Change the baby when she is fed, not when hungry. This leads to the problem of additional waste elimination during changing. However, if you use the new-diaper-under-old-diaper trick, this is relatively easy to deal with compared to the pissed off how-dare-you-try-to-change-me-when-all-I-want-is-FOOD-NOW meltdown you get when changing a hungry baby. A calm baby might remain calm and be easier to get to sleep.

9. Learn to sleep when you don’t really feel like sleeping. Then do it.

10. Whenever you put the baby down and she is out like a light, say to yourself, “I could be sleeping right now.” Eventually it will sink in.

11. See #2.

The Singularity, Transhumanity, and Poop

I’m reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near between diaper changes, naps, and feedings. He’s very fond of his logarithmic curves and exponential change. His ideas are essentially mathematically based projections and predictions that easily extrapolate into the absurd. One of those ideas is that we will upload our brains to computers and live forever.

It’s hard to think about uploading your brain to a computer when you’re dealing with a newborn. It’s not just hard, it’s downright impossible. What if a baby crawled over the carbon nanotube chip with your brain in it and dropped a load of yellow turd? What would all that oddly colored poop do to your circuits? Heck, what if she ate it? Adios immortality. Ah, but if we’re all uploaded, I guess there would be copies of ourselves backed up somewhere and there wouldn’t be any of these baby things to care for. Now I’m mad at him for implying my flesh and blood baby isn’t a wonderful gift.

There are a lot of worthwhile things about being human. Reading Kurzweil, I get the impression that before the end of the 21st century it will be quaint to remain only human, sort of like being in SCA. Transhumanist Utopians–I’ll call them transhummers–will remark that if you want to remain human why not run that messy reality as a simulation, sort of like in the Matrix? I may very well become augmented some day, upload my brain to a rice grain of carbon nanotubes and live forever. But somehow the prospect seems more macabre than tempting. The Gothic creatures of Anne Rice novels and campy tv shows are more appealing than cold circuits.

Being human, like art, is about working with and overcoming imperfection, adversity, mortality. Life is tough at times, and there’s a time limit. No do-overs. I can’t help but think that many transhummers are just escapists and intellectual gamers, trying to get away from themselves and their lives. Some are probably angry at the world for all of the personal shortcomings it bestowed upon them. And I’ll admit that the possibility of endless exploration sounds tempting.

Reality is a harsh and beautiful. I want my child to know beauty. I want her to respect the harshness of the wild god of this world (something three young men teasing a tiger at the San Francisco Zoo this Christmas did not, and one of them died). I want her to know how to interact with people better than most people do today. I fear that it will be difficult for her to learn these things. You cannot learn them in the safety of a virtual world. Most of the world we live it today is padded, shielded, disneyfied, or otherwise not real. When reality does intrude, lawyers swarm to blame someone. There should be a “reality” defense.

Kurzweil’s vision includes blinding cognitive speed as well. But efficiency, speed, and bandwidth are not equivalent to quality. So what if you can think a million times faster than a human and live forever? Somehow I don’t think it necessarily results in better quality as a person or even in terms of lived experience. Being human is something you have to do as a human, and not as some hyperaugmented digitized creature. Virtual mortality is not the same as mortality, unless you trick yourself into thinking you’re not living in a simulation.

Come to think of it . . .