The Gaming Den

A piece of short-term advice, and also some long-term thoughts to plant in the back of your head. First:

The first month is the toughest, as far as adjusting to the lack of sleep. One option for the midnight feedings is to take turns, since baby needs to be fed every 2.5-4 hours, depending. If it takes you a half hour or more to accomplish the feeding, and then some time to settle you both back down to sleep... you can see that doesn't leave much time at all. For our first, we both tried to get up to feed the baby, which led to neither of us sleeping. When the baby cries at 4am, who gets to deal with it? The system we worked out was that whoever was more tired would be more bitchy and irritable about having to do it, and the other person had to deal. As I'm sure you can imagine, this wasn't a great system - it led to over-emphasizing our tiredness and bitchiness sometimes, conning the other person just to get another little slice of precious precious sleep. So, the second time around, we set up a whiteboard, made little notes about the time and quantity that was fed, and initialled who did the feeding. During the night, we leapfrogged whose turn it was, and that way we all got to have at least 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep. Which doesn't seem like much, but it will shortly become the object of your dreams and fantasies, to simply get four hours of uninterrupted sleep.

After the first month, you will be used to baby's pattern (unless baby was born premature, then it may take a little longer) and will be a pro at it. Soiled diapers and baby-puke everywhere are fairly revolting at first, but let me tell you - you get used to it FAST. In no time at all you won't even care about going out in public with spit-up on you - you probably won't even notice it after a time. People may give you funny looks - people without kids that is. The parents will see the tell-tale stain (and the bloodshot eyes, and the zombie stare), nod knowingly, and let you go to the front of the line.

Things will very slowly get better, until maybe 4-6 months, after which you can start to expect baby to sleep through the night at least some of the time. By six months, my kids were sleeping for as much as 7 hours if they had a large meal right before bed.

Get used to sleep deprivation. It is not as bad as it seems at first - it's amazing how resilient the human body/brain can be, and you will find yourself functioning on far less sleep than you ever thought possible for such extended periods of time. You might have a few problems - minor hallucinations, losing your train of thought all the time - but you can adapt. I don't know if I am unique in this regard, but sleep deprivation also makes me really horny. This was perhaps the most distracting of all of my problems, it kept coming up (so to speak) at inappropriate times.

Accept all the help that you can get at first. Don't try to be prideful about it, it's just not worth it. You will get a lot of visitors, especially at first. Here was the rule we laid down - it you want to come visit the newborn, bring something or do something. As in, either bring a meal prepared and frozen for me (a case of beer was also acceptable), or do a load of laundry/dishes for me. Everyone will just want to hold the baby and help change and feed it and stuff, but be firm. Tell them it would be more helpful to clean your kitchen for fifteen minutes, because you are just too tired to do it. They will understand.

Now that you have all the short-term advice, let's think about the future. Cognitive development is crucial at an early age, especially as far as language skills are concerned. Do you want your child to be multi-lingual? Start them off early! As in, right from the very beginning. Teach them words and sentence structures from other languages right alongside English (presumably that is your primary language, since you're posting here). If you live in North America, I'd highly recommend teaching Spanish right away, as it will be the language that will most benefit them throughout the rest of their lives. Also, and this may be weird to think about, but have you heard of Esperanto? It is a scientifically-created universal language that is actually used in some academic circles, including a university in San Marino. There is a version of Wikipedia that is all in Esperanto, the Vikipedio. Esperanto is cool, in that its language structures actually make sense. Phonemes are always pronounced the same way. Sentence structure is consistent, and there aren't a million freaking exceptions to every rule. The actual vocabulary of Esperanto is roughly based on Spanish and the other romance languages, so the words sounds like words and not weird gibberish or anything. Studies have shown that learning Esperanto at any early age is a fantastic base for learning other languages later in life. There actually are a number of good reference works about it for sale on Amazon - a little shopping around should give you good results.

Besides the already-mentioned advantages to learning linguistic flexibility from a young age, just think about how cool it would be to have a "secret language" that you and your child can speak, without having to go through the effort of making one up! Teaching someone else a new language, especially one that you are also learning at the same time, is a lot of work. Lay the groundwork out early, and teach them some words from as many languages as you can from the minute they are able to speak at all.

SockPuppet wrote:Lay the groundwork out early, and teach them some words from as many languages as you can from the minute they are able to speak at all.

Earlier.

Kids don't need to learn the structure of a language to learn the language. And if they aren't exposed to the sounds required to make a language when they're very young (0-6 months), they may lose the ability to hear those sounds. Teaching kids to read is the same way. The only thing you have to fight is visual acuity, and you can actually help develop that.

Yeah, there were some fun electronic toys in our toy store which were basically music-makers - but they had a group of french sounds and spanish and etc. Anyhow, just being taught that they're enjoyable to hear is a positive direction to go.

If you want a suggestion of language, I'd suggest chinese-mandarin as ones to give. It seriously unlocks a series of tonal differences which give a huge leg up when learning other languages... I seriously can't keep up with my chinese peers in japanese class, or other language classes because of that.

-Crissa

Mandarin phonology and tones are actually fairly simple, as Chinese goes. If you're just trying to teach a complicated phonology without concern for usefulness, Cantonese might be better.

Of course, Cantonese classes are hard to find.

Also, kids don't actually pick up languages easily, it just looks that way. They need to be forced to; they'll learn a language only if it's essential to an essential part of their communication. Generally, a child will learn the language their peers (neighbors, etc. When they're small parents have a degree of control over who their kid's friends are, so you can give them friends who speak whatever language if you can find them), and the language their parents speak, if different, but will generally favor the former, if their parents can understand it, even to the point of holding conversations where each side speaks a different language (documented in studies and anecdote. For example, just last month while walking in the park I passed a kid out with her mother, having a conversation. The kid was speaking English, and the mother Mandarin).

Also, considering how long it takes before a kid can pass for a fluent adult, it's not even necessarily quicker to get to fluency starting as a kid. If a kid says their first word at one, and can pass for an adult (in writing, to avoid voice issues, without effort) at 12, that's eleven years of complete immersion to achieve fluency. Granted, starting young can reduce accents, so it's not without benefit, but if I emigrated to Russia now (I speak no Russian), took five years of Russian classes (remember, so does the kid), and used Russian for day-to-day life full-time, I'd expect to be fairly fluent in Russian by 2020. Overall, though, it's not actually easier to learn a language, and you don't even need to be that early to get the benefits (Try telling someone who immigrated at age 6 from second-generation by their accent; one of my classmates who immigrated young has a perfect US accent, and that's just the one I know about).

seriously, lay it easy on them. it's fun to teach them as much as possible. but they have to be willing to learn. I realized this.my nephew hates tamil because it was forced on him. my daughter loves it because I've eased her into it.

One thing that I'm doing to help encourage my kids to think of the world in multi-cultural terms is having them refer to a country or language in that native language. Don't refer to Germany, call it Deutschland. Say that something is en Espanol instead of in Spanish (and also pronounce Mexico with the "h" sound instead of the "x" sound). It has been a lot of fun trying to figure out what to say, and how to pronounce some of them, like Francais, Italiano, or Norsk.

I'd like to "homeschool" my kids for the first couple of years of their life by traveling around the world and doing/seeing lots of stuff. I just don't know if my bank account can support that.

Maj wrote:I'd like to "homeschool" my kids for the first couple of years of their life by traveling around the world and doing/seeing lots of stuff. I just don't know if my bank account can support that.

Ah, the "Aunte Maime" School of Beginning education.

Maj wrote:I'd like to "homeschool" my kids for the first couple of years of their life by traveling around the world and doing/seeing lots of stuff. I just don't know if my bank account can support that.

I'm with you. We have all these plans to visit different parts of the US, and even the greater World, but it's not happening anytime soon. Fucking recession.

We rationalized it by saying that the kids are too young to really appreciate travelling yet anyway. It's one thing to say "Oh, yeah, I went to Oaxaca when I was two years old, but I only know because my folks told me so" and another thing entirely to tell stories about how excited you were when the monkeys stole your pretzels when you weren't looking.

Sock Puppet wrote:We rationalized it by saying that the kids are too young to really appreciate travelling yet anyway. It's one thing to say "Oh, yeah, I went to Oaxaca when I was two years old, but I only know because my folks told me so" and another thing entirely to tell stories about how excited you were when the monkeys stole your pretzels when you weren't looking.

Pretty much exactly. The only real advantage (?) to travelling with a small one is that they get used to travelling and it makes trips easier when they're older.

When I was a kid, driving along the local region of the country was good enough for us.

(Mind you there's a whole lot of interesting places in the North East; Even just New York alone, the Finger Lakes, Niagara Falls, Howe Caverns, not to mention all the interesting museums and recreation centers.) Damn cool stuff is literally all around you; all you need to do is research it.

tzor wrote:When I was a kid, driving along the local region of the country was good enough for us.

(Mind you there's a whole lot of interesting places in the North East; Even just New York alone, the Finger Lakes, Niagara Falls, Howe Caverns, not to mention all the interesting museums and recreation centers.) Damn cool stuff is literally all around you; all you need to do is research it.

There's some truth to that. We're a big fan of free night at the local museum - we go every month. And libraries are great [free] places to take kids to teach them about the time and place to be quiet (for preparation of movie theatres, ballets, plays, etc). We also take drives, and head to things like the annual weiner dog races.

But while all that's cool, there is a lot to be said for seeing Mt Fuji, or touring London, or eating gelato in Rome, or going on safari in Kenya, or...

Thanks for the warm wishes and advice everybody. Wife is bilingual, and her parents still use it primarily, so the language stuff was already expected. Touring the world is on the agenda as well, my family's eclectic enough that he'll get a wide variety of random experiences growing up even if I don't do them all to him myself.

Crissa wrote:If you want a suggestion of language, I'd suggest chinese-mandarin as ones to give. It seriously unlocks a series of tonal differences which give a huge leg up when learning other languages... I seriously can't keep up with my chinese peers in japanese class, or other language classes because of that.

That's hard to believe, considering that Japanese doesn't use tones. I'd imagine that it probably has more to do with sharing a large portion of the pictographic alphabet.

It does, though having a larger phonetic set doesn't hurt, either.

-Crissa