One day at a time

Alice is nearly three months old now. I can’t say that she is a colicky baby or that we’ve had any of the common sleep issues such as day/night confusion or waking up frequently in the night. She’s always slept her longest stretch at night, and her longest stretch of sleep slowly built up to the current six hours without any sleep training. She doesn’t even mind being in her crib. But sleep always begins with a bout of crying.

This morning’s feeding involved her crying during the feeding and then more crying when being burped and then crying and yawning while being rocked. Having reached her two-hour limit for being awake, Alice started yawning this morning around 8:45 a.m. and turning her head away from me to stare off into the distance. She was clearly tired. I promptly carried her into a dimly lit room and started to rock her, but she cried anyway. As Alice cried and screamed into my chest, I began again with the theories as to why sleep always had to begin like this for her. I began to ruminate over the parenting decisions I made. Breastfeeding, for example, takes too long and isn’t as predictable as formula; Alice must have lost so much precious sleep over cluster feeding and crying for more food while my boobs refill, and she must have lost so much alert time to feeding instead of learning – all because I wouldn’t swallow my pride and put her on formula. And perhaps she’d be a better sleeper if I took the initial hit and just let her cry it out for a week instead of the routine exchanges of crying and soothing tricks which seem to soothe me more than her.

I have a list of baby sleep training books that have been recommended, but I recoil at the idea that I have to resort to “training” my baby like I’ve trained my dog to defecate exactly two times a day. We used to be able to easily soothe her into a deep sleep, and, as predicted in Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, this changed at her six-week growth spurt and sleep became a daily battle thereafter. Her sleep patterns are emerging exactly according to the proposed scheduled in that book. But still, there is the crying. There must be a more effective strategy. Can I really continue on this path and give the current strategy a good, honest try?

And then the crying stopped, she fell asleep in my arms, and I took note of the time she spent crying: three minutes. It took three minutes to replay how her sleep and feeding pattern and my responses played out over the preceding 24 hours, philosophize over faulty parenting, propose a new strategy, and vow to be a better parent going forward. As she slept in my arms, I reflected upon how fragile new parenthood is that three minutes of crying can undermine every decision I’ve made to date. I reflected that she is only three months old, not old enough to share my own affinity for routine. I recalled that she has another month of development before she can appreciate a schedule. For now, one month doesn’t seem so distant and tomorrow, we’ll begin again.

Alice is born

6 pounds and 14 ounces. 20 inches.

I’m pregnant.

And I don’t like babies.

I never thought I’d get married, much less have a kid. I’m not one of those girly women who love weddings and babies. I’ve always been somewhat of a tomboy, but more importantly, I’m a pragmatic sort of person who realized early on that it would be nearly impossible for me to find anyone that I could be happily married to. But then the impossible happened. I did meet that impossible match, the conditions were right, and we eventually married. And now, after four blissful years of married life, I’m pregnant.

Most people go through sure-footed and excited about the things that they anticipated life would bring them. I knew I would have a career, so I proceeded confidently and enthusiastically with that. But since the idea of having a kid is a recent concept in my life, I haven’t been super excited about being pregnant like most other first-time mothers. I’m not one of those baby-crazy women who bask in the attention their pregnancy brings, and as such I feel that I need much more room to find myself as a mother. It’s no surprise, then, that I do not like being pregnant. It’s not magical, and it’s not spiritual; it’s just a big pain in the ass. From people thinking that your pregnancy is public property to the annoying physical aspect of carrying around a weirdly dense mass in front of you that you are constantly aware of to this wild expectation people have that you should be glowing with happiness — it’s all just a big pain in the ass. I am almost ready to say that I’d rather just have the baby now and take care of it now than go on being pregnant for another four months.

Over the last few months, I’ve started to get used to the idea of having a kid and now wonder about what my kid’s personality is going to be like, whether it’ll be a baby who likes to be burped mid-feeding, whether it’ll be a baby who likes to be swaddled, or whether it’ll be a baby who isn’t bothered by a wet diaper. I’m a pragmatic person and as such I like to think about these things, but even more, I like to execute. For me, I think the main joy of having a kid is not having a cute baby to dress up or talk to or exercise your ideologies. I think of parenting as the practical task of raising another human being to go onto to become their own person with their own life adventures, and I think the best pathway to this is to pay attention to the kind of person your kid is and adapt your parenting accordingly. And I think this will be my main joy as a parent: the time when my kid becomes self-reliant, moves out of my house, starts calling me less frequently, and just goes on to experience life on his/her own terms.

Memories

An old memory surfaced today. Seven years ago, Scott said something to me that was kind of mean and kind of hurt my feelings at the time. Before I started dating him, I had a gym calendar and I put star stickers up on it for every day I completed my gym routine. This only lasted another few weeks after we started dating, as did my washboard abs. Then several months into our relationship in an argument that I can’t recall now, he said that I was immature because I gave myself gold stars on a chart. I still make my stupid check lists and calendars — admittedly it would probably be considered neurotic except for the fact that it really does help me keep healthy habits and I don’t get too disappointed when I don’t get to check things off my list. But I never use the star stickers anymore, and I tuck away my lists in Excel spreadsheets (which is a more dangerous habit) or folded pieces of paper on my desk.

Seeing the backlog of years worth of check marks for the things I did reminds me that no matter how miserably I failed that day, life is much more than one day and mine doesn’t look too bad.

I’m fickle when it comes to keeping up a journal, but I consistently make my check marks and record other mundane numbers. I was going through the files on my laptop last week, and the most interesting and memorable files on there were not the old email exchanges between me and Scott or the occasional journal entry, but the measurements of my life – my weight, whether I exercised that day, my check book balance, my monthly budget. My favorite part of my trail journals is that I record the distance, elevation gains, wake and sleep times, departure and arrival times, and other seemingly useless measurements — and somehow the memories are clearer with those recordings than the actual occasional journal entry I wrote.

Scott is now mocking me by saying that he’ll record the time he poos every day, but if he did and charted it across time, he could point out “Oh, there’s where I went backpacking for the first time and couldn’t poo for three days” or “there’s where I got the stomach flu and diarrhea and Jisun and I were stuck in bed the whole day holding hands and clutching our stomachs”. And then he’d be reminded about how great our marriage is because we can share that level of misery. See? Fond memories.

Party Lines

On my 18th birthday, I registered to vote. I was Libertarian even then, but I decided to register as a Republican because I figured that any sensible Libertarian politician would likely try to run under the Republican party. I could vote for the most Libertarian candidate in the Republican primaries. But this idea was never realized before I decided to formally switch my political affiliation because I figured that if number of registered Libertarians grew to a substantial percentage, politicians would have to start paying some attention to the Libertarian ideals.

I bring this up because I would have liked to vote for Ron Paul in the Republican primaries. He won’t actually win, but I think the fact that he’s gotten more attention and more votes than most people initially thought he would makes a strong statement about the current state of American politics.

The truth is that none of this makes a damn difference, and Ron Paul is probably just as much of a shitty bastard politician as the next guy. If I had $500 billion maybe it would make a difference. I am overwhelmingly disheartened by American politics — by how thoroughly disconnected it appears from popular consensus, by how being a politician has become such a specialized career path that our governments are being run by people who take the shortest path possible to advance their careers, and by how arrogant and brash politicians think they can be, telling all sorts of lies in confidence that they can get away with it.

When I was your age…

I don’t know how to send a text message from my cell phone. This may seem odd to some people when you consider that I make a living as a software engineer on the cutting edge of “Web 2.0″. Wait, are mainstream people still calling it “Web 2.0″ nowadays? I guess it hardly matters what it’s called. Technology actually seems to change very little with most of the changes being syntactical with a few semantic changes throw in. I deeply suspect most of it is marketing.

Anyway, this texting thing… For the past eight years my cell phone has been my only phone line. I cut my land line when I was a poor college student who figured out that paying $25 a month with minutes for cell phone service was costing me the same amount as having a landline and making the occasional long distance call from a regular phone. Last month, an 80-year-old woman who I deliver meals to on Saturdays managed to leave a voice message on my cell phone and tag it as an urgent message. As the ubiquitous voicemail woman informed me that the message was marked urgent, I wondered, when did the ability to tag messages as being urgent come about?

When text messaging was introduced to the mass consumer market, I received a letter from Cingular informing me that my friends can send me text messages by sending emails to a particular email address. I believe that this letter also outlined the basics of text messaging, but of course, I was only interested in my cell phone as a one-to-one mapping and replacement of my landline, so the extra information went ignored. As I signed up for online bill payments, traded my Nikon film camera for a digital one, and turned off the radio in favor of podcasts, my phone still stayed my phone.

I now get an offer about once a month from Cingular to upgrade my phone, a gentle reminder that my phone is an old hag in the business. But I like old hags. After all, I married a man who, though considered a technology expert, doesn’t even own a cell phone.

Everyone is Trying to Lose Weight

And so am I. About eight pounds to be exact. I was really hoping that I wouldn’t have to resolve to lose weight this year. I replay December 2007 over and over again with a calorie journal that documented every mistake: if I had just worked harder and if I had just been reasonable about my food intake, I wouldn’t be joining the millions of Americans who resolve to lose weight on New Year’s. On December 19th, I consumed 1,405 calories of Marzipan and chocolate. On December 25th, I consumed 3,000 calories of snacks. On December 12th, I consumed 1,350 calories of candy and nuts.

On the flip side, I have ONLY eight pounds to lose. Since September, I lost 18 pounds. All-in-all, I’ve lost roughly 40 pounds from my peak weight two years ago. And actually, I did reach my original goal of 120 pounds; I lowered it to 110 pounds when I found out that being 120 pounds still involved a mini pot-belly and a slightly bigger butt than I had hoped. The truth is that I’m 15 pounds lighter than my lowest weight in the past three years worth of weigh-ins (I keep Excel records of many mundane details about my life). And beyond the spreadsheets of data, at the heart of this New Year’s is the fact that I’m not fat anymore, and this has been the first New Year’s in a very long time that I’ve been able to say that.

Grand Canyon, Down South Kaibab Trail and Up Bright Angel Trail

On Sunday, Scott and I hiked the Grand Canyon, descending via the South Kaibab Trail to Phantom Ranch and then ascending via the Bright Angel Trail for a total of 17.9 miles and a steep descent and ascent.

San Diego Brewers Guild Festival

Scott and I went to the San Diego Brewers Guild Festival tonight.

No Trick-or-Treaters

We had no trick-or-treaters visit us today. Furthermore, I caught two of my neighbors shuttle their toddlers off to trick-or-trick at some mall so they can have lame-o memories of a staged, distilled childhood. What lame-o’s. Sure, my neighborhood is known as a beach town that is the prime destination in San Diego for getting drunk and getting a tattoo (in a drunken state). But still. The crime rates here are actually very low, as evidenced by the astronomical house prices. And what fun is a Halloween with sales people handing out candy in a brightly-lit consumer mecca?

When I was a kid, I had a guy in my neighborhood who would always give out toothbrushes to disappointed faces every year. He was relentless, and yet, we would always stop by his house (and I, being a nerdy kid, would actually use the toothbrush, sometimes secretly wishing I had gotten a trial size tube of Sparkling Crest toothpaste instead). Once, I went trick-or-treating with a friend, and we accidentally stumbled onto the doorstep of a second-grade teacher at our elementary school who was giving out apples instead of candy. My friend started eating the apple right away — never mind the annual stories about poisonous Halloween candy. She lived despite the budding societal fears of the times, which now infests every aspect of our lives and produce lame-o parents who take their kids to the shopping mall for Halloween.