A new friend says the first months being a new parent are like that episode of Battlestar Galactica where the Cylons attack every 33 minutes. I liken it also to the card game Fluxx, where the rules shift with every hand. Compared to all the projects and hobbies I’ve written about here, I’ve never had to learn anything that’s changed so quickly as I was learning it. What worked today to calm him, burp him, get him to sleep and shit and smile will suddenly stop working two days from now. Every problem has multiple variables, every solution has hidden consequences. Never have I understood this more viscerally: correlation is not causation.
It’s as much wild-hard as wild-good. Sometimes mid-fuss I’ll, without thinking, switch him over to my opposite shoulder or roll his butt clockwise along on my leg like always, and he’ll suddenly, miraculously calm. There are rare nights when he’ll sleep six straight hours, feed while barely opening his eyes, and sleep for another three. There are mornings of endless coos and smiles, and others of inconsolable screaming (we are currently at peak gassiness). My quads are getting toned from the digestion-friendly squats our pediatrician showed us; my bi-s and forearms are swelling from lugging the car seat down long hallways. Meanwhile, my torso softens via middle-of-the-night stress snacking. Is this … dadbod?
And books. Book Energy is waxing again. A week ago I spoke on a publishing panel for Detroit Lit, and a few days later signed at a shiny new (new!) Barnes & Noble in Lake Orion, Michigan. A couple weekends from now I’ll be down at the Toledo Lucas County Public Library for their annual Welcoming Week event. And Today I put five hundred new words to the new manuscript – for the first time since July. That I’m awake enough right now, at 11pm at night, to even type this is a sign of how it’s going.
Earlier this summer I chatted about Bebop with Fredrik Bjoreman of the Swedish-English podcast Kodsnack. The episode went live last week, and in it I elaborate on what I wrote in my original process post about the app’s design decisions, and about my experience building the app with the help of LLMs. Have a listen!
In the interview I blanked on the name of the AI-augmented code editor I was trying out: it’s Cursor, and I’m still using it.
Speaking of product recs, I was going to include a few (non-baby-specific) favorites that have resulted from these postpartum weeks, but I’ll save that for a future letter – I think I spoke too soon about the being awake-enough-to-type thing.
So it goes.