THESE ARE NOT PARENTING ADVICES, but merely my brief note on the first hundred days of parenthood.
- Parenting for infant, especially newborns, is extremely heavy work, which requires full attention 24/7 with not a day off. Forcing such responsibility on a single person is abuse.
- To me, it feels like maintaining a system which an outage occurs in arbitrary interval ranging from fifteen minutes to three hours, without verbose error log but a loud alarm, by a team of two, 24/7, no day off. If the outage is not well handled there may be consequences varied from prolonged alarm to critical situation. There are some variations in the alarm sound but it takes time to learn to identify the nuances.
- Sleep deprivation is the name of the game in parenting. Finding windows to rest is a duty.
- Being sleep deprived in high pressure situation for an extensive period brings negative impact on mentality. I just keep going hoping this period will eventually pass.
- Everybody has to find their own ways to get by. Mines are reading and thinking about computer science problems. I save problems I actually encountered in side projects, and think about them when both hands are occupied by holding her. Currently I'm thinking about two problems: minimum React router implementation with good type-guard, and improving my markdown parser in Rust. In other words, I think to keep depression from occupying my mind.
- Babies do not sleep like a baby. Sleep, while easy to be taken for granted, is a skill that requires months of training.
- Babies do not understand the feeling of tiredness, but she sure knows that she doesn’t like it. "Doesn't know what to do when tired", sounds very cute. Not so much when she cries like there is no tomorrow. The most intense cries she had were almost never about hunger or discomfort but over-tiredness.
- The most important factor in putting baby to sleep is when rather than what i.e. recognizing her cues of tiredness and sleep window.
- She sleeps, this time, like a baby, when one is holding her. It is easy to settle for holding her the whole night because that is the only way to keep her sleeping. Then you get one parent restrained permanently, holding the calamity off from its awakening as if they were The Emperor or Mankind.
- Infant sleep span duration is about 40 to 50 minutes. It’s very easy to see the pattern when she always wake up 40 minutes into her nap. Therefore, the key to extend sleep time is the ability to get back to sleep on her own between spans.
- Swaddling is very effective on this. One of the biggest game changer so far.
- White noise is another prop that is often used for soothing baby. Not a silver bullet in our case but significant difference is observed.
- Excretion is another skill that requires training. Too much or too few in a day both gets us concerned.
- Everything that requires going out, even for chores such as going to the public office, feels like parole.
- Having people to talk with is a second wind.
- The first several weeks there is no explicit feedback on everything we do. Often I forgot she is, same to us, human beings, but some extremely fragile entity that requires extensive effort. But the first time she socially smiled–it was a magical moment.
- Handling baby is not that different from handling League of Legends solo queue teammates. I would even argue baby is more predictable.
