Nerd Pride Radio

A/K/A- How I Decided to Accept Being an Old Person

Y'all. Oh my gosh. Y'all! I've mastered the 1-hour nap!

Typically on the weekend, but sometimes on days like today where I had a rough night and came home early. I can now take a nap in the afternoon. Sleep for approximately an hour to ninety minutes. Then wake up and, within five minutes, be fully awake and refreshed.

This is the best! You MUST try this.

Do you listen to something to fall asleep or turn off your phone? Eg. I took a half day today to relax, but every few hours my phone would blow up with work messages, phone yelling at me to take a look and give input.

I turn my phone off, put CNN on tv and do deep yoga breathing. I’m asleep within two minutes every time. It’s heaven.

I just do 45 minute naps...cool dark quiet room with a fan...thinking about how badly I want to be awake and doing something....Zzzz

I don't want to mock you all so I don't think I should comment, but some of us trained on this by having a baby late in life. There is a kind of sitting-upright 4 minute nap with one eye half open, very satisfying! We champions and desperados of sleep can nap for any number of minutes at any time of day or night, sometimes with profound snoring to let people know, this is a serious nap. It's like in the wild West or when they would have duels - some people can pull out a pistol in a split second, others can fall asleep as soon as their hair slightly brushes against the flannel of the pillowcase, and then we can pop up again as soon as we hear the light sound of a baby kicking its legs three rooms over or the cat beginning to work up a hairball.

So you said something anyways? None the less, it wasn't mocking.

With all eight of our babies, I was the one who got up and fed them in the middle of the night because I can fall back asleep pretty much at will. So I became pretty skilled at not really waking up at all while feeding babies.

Kyle wrote: ↑Thu Jul 28, 2022 3:42 pm So you said something anyways? None the less, it wasn't mocking.

With all eight of our babies, I was the one who got up and fed them in the middle of the night because I can fall back asleep pretty much at will. So I became pretty skilled at not really waking up at all while feeding babies.

My wife and I have always been the same way. I can wake up in the middle of the night, take care of a task, and then fall asleep again within two minutes. If my wife wakes up fully, she's at least 30-45 minutes getting her brain to wind down enough to fall asleep again.

Kyle wrote: ↑Thu Jul 28, 2022 3:42 pm I was the one who got up and fed them in the middle of the night

This is one of the key problems with being the bottle.

I’ve had friends who have breastfed and the husband still gets up at night. But everyone figures out their own way I guess.

But what does he do? I'm deep in mental struggle. Imagine the scenario: I'll lay here snoozing at 86% while you bring me the baby and deal with my boobs so I can rest during? My god. My god. Like does he hold up the other unused breast? Does he cup the one in use for milking? I feel dizzy. These are the moments when I gain a clearer view of the chasm separating my normal from others! Vertiginous. Confusing.

Others are hurt by this discussion now because they may have missed out on a particularly great and singular opportunity that could have been justified as a benefit. Can you imagine? Like there was a sanctioned reason to be squeezing somebody's boobs repeatedly? A sanctioned reason that even brings glory and gratitude?

So yeah. I've mastered the one hour nap!

I'm still glad for you but now I want to know what these late night nursing helpers were up to. I don't want to give in to the cynicism that says they are virtue signaling without coming even close to doing a meaningful share of the labor involved in night time nursing, but when I get into specifics it turns out to be something my husband would enjoy because of the contact with boobs, and that just doesn't seem like work either. These life puzzles come and go.

I imagine there’s a breast pump, refrigerator, and baby bottle involved.

Tahlvin wrote: ↑Sun Jul 31, 2022 4:12 pm I imagine there’s a breast pump, refrigerator, and baby bottle involved.

Of course there is.

This did not occur to me at all, given the implication that it was helpful!!! But this is unhelpful - at best, if you're cool with pumping, it's like a situation where you decide to take the dogs out in the morning, because that's easier for you even though it's a more challenging effort with the dogs, because you're hoping someone else will then do it at night when you'd rather be resting. Usually that's going to be complicated further because if you can't go out with the dogs every time they want to go, you have to make some adjustments in your own situation to ensure that you're prepared to keep up with them physically. At worst, if you dislike pumping, it's a situation where the woman has to suffer even more in order to transfer the gift of being able to feed the baby to someone else. There is no bottom to my dark cynicism about the sex division of labor, is there? But what I'm saying is true.

Yeah- I don't really care about this. I wanted to talk about the 1-hour nap and then it became this hijacked thing where you really just wanted to talk about something else.

It's okay if you don't want to talk about it, I don't mind!

I understand you're being snarky. But you could always just start your own thread about something if it's that important to you. Instead you derailed a subject I was actually bringing up and then insisted on going on about it in an intentionally obtuse way.

I'm not trying to be snarky, honestly. No idea what you mean - obtuse? I won't discuss it anymore but I really don't know what you mean.

Okay. Thank you for coming to your TED talk.

I feel like you're trying to insult me but I don't know what I did wrong so it's not having a great effect - or let's put it this way, I feel bad because I've clearly done something to offend you but I don't know what the heck it is, so there's very little educational improvement going on. It's kind of like when my husband tries to educate other drivers. If they remain clueless it doesn't work and they just think that he's a maniac driver. I was just trying to be somewhat entertaining or funny and apparently that did not succeed. Very sorry!

It’s not my job to educate you. Be more self aware. If you can’t, that’s fine. I’ve come to accept that you go through phases like this. It’s fine.

Phases like this ... you've come to accept? Lol, okay guy. I've been nothing but nice and supportive to you, for real, for many years, despite the fact that you go through these regular "phases" where you decide I'm a horrid internet troll. I have no idea why, and never have, but if it makes you feel better to police my going off topic, or whatever terrible crime you're big mad about, I hope you feel good for insulting me.

Scroll up.

You could block me; I can't do that to an admin on this site, but it would probably help you.

No. I've come to accept this. It's fine.

Lol, okay. My problem is always the same: I assume that if I consider someone in a friendly way then they probably consider me in a friendly way, and unfortunately that is often false! But now maybe this time I will finally convince myself that you don't consider me a friend and you aren't ever going to, so I should stop stupidly treating you as if you think of me as a friend. Would have been somewhat handy to figure that out a while ago.

Let me start by apologizing. I'm rereading this and I realize that I'm being snarky and shitty to you for reasons unrelated to anything you've said. I've got a trial coming up, my 30+ live litigation cases are having everything happen at once and my daughter has been in labor for 36 hours. The law stuff is no big deal, but I realized at lunch today that I'm being a super shit to everyone close to me right now because I'm worried about something going wrong with my daughter and it's out of my control. I came to this realization when I realized that this same phenomenon occurred every time my wife had each of my kids.

But that's not a justification. There's no excuse to be cruel and a dick to people to deflect your stress. I was being a dick to you. And you don't deserve that. I apologize. You don't have to accept my apology. It's your right to react or not react however you want. But I want you to know that I regret saying what I said, I feel like a real prick about it, and I'm sorry.

And here's the deal- we all do stuff that annoys each other from time to time. Me more so than most people. So I shouldn't vent my frustrations on you for something that, on a normal day I wouldn't think twice about. That's super shitty of me.

I'm sorry.

And I also understand that, given my sarcastic nature, there's a healthy part of you that is questioning if this is sincere or if it's part of some elaborate ruse that I'm plotting to pull the rug out. I assure you that it is not. I'm 100% sincerely apologizing without equivocation. I thought about private messaging this to you, but I think that's a chicken shit move to be a dick and then privately apologize. This was bullshit by me and I should publicly apologize and own what a dick I was.

I'm sorry and I hope you forgive me.

Well obviously I do! My goodness, you don't have to give an elaborate justification either - if someone says "trial" I just assume everyone might be opposing counsel or a hostile witness for the next month and that's how it goes. If someone says labor, OMG, and 36 hour labor? Basically everything should stop until it's over. Hope it goes well! Forget everything! I'm oversensitive anyway although less so now that I have another actual real life friend my age to hang out with, who is not from work! Miracle. Do whatever you have to do! Go pull out that baby!

Thanks and, for real, I’m sorry.

Agghhh stop it, I was being a whiner. You should apologize for apologizing!

OMG not until we get an update on the labor. Been wondering ever since!

Still in labor. Day 4. It has some name. But she's in the hospital and she thinks they're going to induce her today.

Good luck! I'm hoping everything works out well for your daughter and her baby.

Update- given that she's been in labor this long and how the labor has developed, they've decided that if she doesn't have the baby today, there's a higher risk of the baby getting an infection. Don't worry, mom and baby are perfectly healthy. But as a precaution, they're going to try to induce her, and if that doesn't work, a C-Section (which she doesn't want to do, but understands why it might be necessary). The doctor said that one way or another it's today.