📅 April 2008

Okay, so my first week of fatherhood is past me now.

We took the little guy home on the 17th. It became a little stressful when he had some difficulty feeding, but eventually stuff worked out. Right after he was born, he got jaundice, which he still has but which we're working to lower. Apparently, newborn jaundice is common, but it's a little upsetting seeing your son have yellow eyes.

@inscrutable's family came up and helped us with stuff, like laundry and keeping sane.


Lesson's I've learned:

- You really have to watch them every second
- While you want to be gentle with them, they're hardier than they look.
- The "you'll have to change them every several hours" warning is bullshit. You can change them and they'll go in the new diaper thirty seconds later, and another clean one thirty seconds after that.
- Never be more than five feet away from a pacifier if you lack the ability to lactate.
- Not being able to lactate doesn't mean they won't try to get milk from you anways.
- Having a new child is like meeting somebody new whose personality you're trying to figure out.

Born at 10:55AM, weighing in at 8lbs 8.8oz, it's Mr. Wiggles!

Dammit, I need to let off some steam.

I'm trying real, real, hard for the image of my infant son relying on me for food and shelter to get me past the image of the enormous, ridiculous brick wall that my predecessor's built into what I'm working on.

I have tried my damnedest to redirect these people I work for around this problem, and every attempt I make to take the loaded gun they're pointing at their foot out of their hands has led to one more loaded gun they manage to somehow pull out of their cavernous desks/other spaces.

No matter what workaround I try, it's just not good enough for them. Yeah, I could easily make something new that would solve their problems now and in the next 20 years, but that's making something new, and that's something that they don't want to do, even if during the timespan of me modifying something old I could have made at least three new things twice as better.

People, please, momentarily stop rearranging the f'ing deck chairs on the Titanic long enough to understand what the heck a tradeoff is. Yeah, things are far from perfect. Yes, I hate the way I to get around them as much as you do, if not more-so. What I'm working on has been so enormously damaged and limited for so long by the people who came before me that it should be expected that there's a whole freakin laundry list of stuff that is going to suck and that you're going to have to put up with.

In the tradeoff, you accept having to deal with one thing for the ability to acquire another; in the case of this business, it's putting up with lack of explicit detail they so crave yet don't understand themselves in order to get what they want working at all. In the case of me, it's putting up with this situation so I get money to support my family.