The Occasional Odyssey that is Exercise

Yesterday I got it into my head that I was going to bike past an exercise station on the way home and do some pull-ups, etc. When I arrived at the station, on the grounds of a nearby high school, I was dismayed to find that it had been removed. WTF?!

Arriving home, I found out that our toddler was asleep in the car, thus occupying wife and leaving the apartment to me. I managed about ten minutes of sit-ups and push-ups, started in on some curls, and they came in the door. End of session.

Still resolved to manage something, I decided to go to an early bird kickboxing workout the next day (today).

The instructor wore one of those loose fitting workout outfits, all white with stripes down the sides, microphone headset jammed down over his gel-spiked hair. Not the usual instructor I’ve had the four or five times I’ve actually done this. It’s okay, I thought, how different can they be? It’s the same studio.

Very different. Different music (80s remixed), different attitude. He bounced even more, if that’s possible, and did everything tightly. It was hard to tell if he was doing a hook or uppercut, roundhouse or front kick.

After about twenty minutes I realized that I hadn’t had to pause to catch my breath, which was heartening. Then we started doing this thing where you crouch down to the floor and then come up into a kind of karate-kid flying front kick. Cool, I can do that. Of course, I don’t so much fly as hover briefly, and the kick isn’t to the head but somewhere vaguely torso-ish, but I can do that.

Then we switch to something else and I’m all pleased with myself when the effort that went into those crouch/kicks hits me like a bear hug around my ribs, and the rest of the class is downhill. I’m covered in sweat, wondering when it will be over, and just trying to look like I’m keeping up.

Now I’m wishing for the usual instructor. It’s Stockholm syndrome. I want my usual punishment. Ugh. Shake it off. Not sane.

Things start to blur. “You can do it!” I can’t keep doing this. “This is it!” Uh, you just said that a couple minutes ago – Do you think we have the memories of goldfish? “Higher.” Yeah right. That chick over there is doing much worse that me. Good to know. I’m gonna stick with taking out imaginary knees and thigh-bones.

Now and then he brings around these black plastic sheets that he makes people kick. They crackle and make a loud noise no matter how well you kick them. He never holds them out for me. I’m obviously not worthy. But he does toss them on the ground near my feet. A few glances between jab cross jab confirm that those are in fact X-rays.

Whose X-rays? Why on earth are we kicking X-rays? Are these students who didn’t survive? Criminals? Mementos of the instructor’s martial injuries?

Then a brief feeling of serenity washes over me. Those are the keytones. Forgot all about that benefit of aerobic exercise. Haven’t felt that in years–since back when my ankles would let me jog long enough to get a runner’s high. Or else they’re piping some sort of gas into the building.

Okay, I may just stick with this kickboxing thing for a while.

Cardio Kickboxing

As part of my ongoing recovery from the stress and weight gain of early fatherhood, I am trying to increase my aerobic capacity to a level that is … well, on a chart somewhere.

Jogging is out (it would have been my preference). I’m just not built for it, and now past 40, my ankles don’t even recover well from three-milers.

I bike to work, but it really does nothing. I can’t bike fast because it would be hazardous. Plus I don’t want to show up at work bathed in sweat. Coming home that way is sometimes acceptable, so I’m going to do what I can with that.

Working out at home is out because our toddler daughter considers exercise the equivalent of ignoring her. Maybe she’s right.

So I’ve been trying cardio kickboxing. [looking sheepish]

Besides the occasional urge to direct one of my kicks into the instructor, who screams “HIGHER” over the techno beat, it has not been a completely embarrassing disaster. I do pause ever few minutes, with increasing frequency as the class progresses, to catch my breath or stifle the urge to throw up (five hours after last meal). I don’t tuck my hips under me for front kicks (not planning on backflips any time soon). My side kicks barely clear 2 feet off the ground. My quarter kicks and knee strikes from TKD ages ago have come back and seem to work pretty well.

I am literally the only person in the room who does not bounce on their feet. Seems martially wrong to me.

Just need to find a way to get to more than one class a week, or nothing much will stick aerobically.

Cult?

When my daughter was about 6 months old we were in a Target wandering toward the checkout when suddenly she saw something that really excited her. I looked in the same direction and was horrified to see a giant Hanna Montana head smiling and sparkling from one of those hanging poster boards.

To be sure, I took her over to the area and held her in front of various items, hoping to to find out the reaction was to a hello kitty backpack or such. Then I held her up to the poster. She was overjoyed, and I began to despair. How can we fight advertising that works on a six-month old?

[Several months go by]

A few days ago, while visiting relatives, we met a little girl who proudly told us she was four years old and proceeded to run about entertaining herself. We were all just innocently sitting around talking and having a good time, and then, out of the blue, that little girl ran right up to me, smiled, and said “Hanna Montana” just like she would have said “Boo!”

I stared, disbelieving. “What did you say?”

“Hanna Montana!” she said, confident she had hit her mark.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means I’m going to be a rock star!” she said as she skipped away.

I’m starting to get a wee bit frightened.

Baby Ukemi

From our baby I’ve happily handled hair pulling, her crawling repeated and gleefully all over my head, being kicked in the face, grabbed, etc. just fine, but yesterday, by jamming her little finger up my nose, our nine-month-old gave me my first bloody nose in a long while.

Her little finger.

She has, however, been nice enough to the cat (with close supervision) to elicit purrs.

Newborn Sleep Deficit

According to my highly inaccurate recollection and arbitrarily constructed data, I will be operating on something approaching a 140-hour sleep deficit for the foreseeable future. Note the asymptotic curve.

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.

how does it feel?

Probably the best question I’ve gotten as a new dad is “So how does it feel?” For some reason I have a different answer every time.

Before the arrival of our little girl, my spouse and I somewhat sneered at the idea that parenthood is “life changing.” I’m hear to report from the other side that we were right and wrong at the same time, but mostly right.

Both of us are bookish, fairly introverted, well educated. When someone says “it changed my life” we assumed they meant some sort of deep philosophical shift, an existential cataclysm. Hence our thinly masked disbelief that having a child would change our view of the world. We’re both mature and have been through a lot in life. We didn’t have children in our lives much, but we knew what it’s about.

My weltanschauung has not changed, or if it has, not by much. I’ll allow that it will change over time–how could it not? Parenthood is indeed a momentous change in one’s life, but if you’re a mature person, it is a visceral, essentially material change, not existential. You are pushed to the edge physically and mentally with your first child as you race to keep up with all the demands of the baby and somehow maintain a few threads of dignity in the maintenance of your home. Your body is filled with adrenaline and some sort of parenting hormones that make you feel like a superhero in the first few days.

I’ll admit that I’ve been seeing people a bit differently here and there, especially youthful strangers–early twenties and teens. You can still sort of see the baby in them, yet they are adults, and you are acutely aware that someone cared for them the way we are caring for our baby, and you feel that you can almost sense the presence of their parents. So there’s a kind of connectedness that comes to the foreground. I’ve already felt that before, plenty of times, but I can see how a young parent might be blown away by feelings like these.

On the negative side, I have almost zero patience for bullshit right now. Right and wrong are clear as a bell, I’m sleep deprived, and I have something to protect. It’s as though all my patience has gone into caring for our baby and making sure my wife is getting rested, etc. I love them dearly, but frankly it’s involuntary, visceral. I just hope I don’t veer off into being needlessly rude to someone at work at some point. In a physical confrontation I would submit that a new parent (1st few weeks) is possibly one of the most dangerous human beings you could ever tangle with.

In the spirit of sleep deprivation and gotta feed the baby, I’m not going to edit this much. It’s going up as is.