I don't know which is more tiresome, 3-4 hours of focused programming and thinking, or 8 hours attending two children below 5.
They are both tiring, but differently. Intensive programming is like working hard at the gym. Tiring, but content. Attending children is low intensity in attention, but constantly vigilant. And you are expected to pay that kind of attention for another maybe 4 years. Very different kind of tiring indeed, both makes you unable to focus afterwards. So while thinking hard makes us tired, not thinking hard can also makes us tired.
It really is the vigilance. It's hard to explain to people who haven't experienced it. I certainly tried to understand my colleagues who had kids, but it turns out it's quite a bit harder than the hardest I imagined. Nowadays I'm a part time developer, and the rest of the time, I'm the primary care for a toddler.
Programming at work is my time off.
You have to be react so quickly to certain things that it keeps you totally wound up. You see them pick something up off the ground and wonder, 'what is that, are they going to eat it' and instinctively you sprint half way across the room to grab what turned out to be a cheerio from their mouth. It's almost always a cheerio. But your brain won't let you rest if there's even an impossibly small chance it's a battery or I dunno, glass or whatever, it doesn't matter how many times you check, you can always imagine something. It's exhausting.
I feel you completely. The children brought me joy that no way I can express how grateful I am. They made me realized experience can only be, well, experienced. No amount of describing can imprint the experience onto anyone. Now I empathize much more with co-workers when they seem oblivious to some solutions. Right now the children are asleep. I tried to catch up some articles or to prototype some something. But hey, no more focus juice left at all :)
You'd think nap times would help, but due to a combination of being zonked from the morning shift, and the mild anxiety that you need to take advantage of this nap time to relax, you end up just staring at a figurative wall for 2 hours.
My wife and I were in a bind last year, and a younger friend from work watched our toddler for about 5 hours. It was his first time taking care of a small child, and it was eye-opening for him to say the least! It gave him some perspective as a manager as to why folk with kids are always so tired.
I always suspect those people who brag they do 60+ hour weeks continuously without a problem of not being responsible for the care of their kids or their household.
In my view all of the work in our life piles up, whether it is actual work, or driving through traffic, or cleaning the windows or the floors, or preparing the evening meal, or entertaining a toddler. I feel like we have about 80 hours of “work” we can spend in a week without reaching exhaustion, and the more of the non-work “work” we can shift into someone else’s lap, the more of those 80 hours can be dedicated to actual work. Hiring a cleaner, ordering food, taking an uber, hiring a nanny, or just letting a significant other take up the workload, these are all ways to get more actual work done. It is not just about the saved time, it is about the avoided fatigue.
And of course, when you have a household with young children, you quickly come to realize that it is not possible for both parents to have full time jobs and also run the entire household and take care of the kids, and have a personal life on top of that. The only way as a two-income household to avoid exhaustion and losing touch with friends while the kids are young is to have others pick up the chores, whether free (friends and family) or paid. It can be difficult for people that don’t have children to appreciate what a taxing time that is.
My team lead, my manager and their manager are all childless. It's actually been kind of an issue. Maybe I should ask them to take care of my kid for a day or two. As a team building exercise.
I think it's the boredom mixed with the vigilance (limiting this at 1-2 year old). Often they want to be "watched" playing, without you playing. It's super boring and you still need vigilance.
1 hour later, puts you to sleep.
To be fair, when kids are bored, they get sleepy too.
Agreed. I also (personally) find the positivity draining. I used to be kind of a sarcastic asshole. It was a low energy state. Now I'm an always smiling toddler comedy bot, who at any point in time will sing, or juggle for tiny laughter. I don't have the muscles for it yet and the audience keeps requiring increasingly complex routines.
Heh, somehow once you have kids, keeping all the cheerios in the box becomes very challenging.
- When I had the first kid, when they would drop a cheerio on the floor, I would pick it up.
- When I had the second kid, when they would drop a cheerio on the floor, I would leave it there.
- After the third kid, I would just open the box of cheerios and dump it on the floor.
Tangential story, early-teen equivalent of floor-cheerios:
My daughter currently has braces and is at the stage where she needs those elastics (tiny rubber band thingies) on either side of her mouth, which she needs to take out before eating and put back in after eating.
I've started taking photos of the various places in the house that we've found these rogue elastics as they have a habit of 'pling'-ing off into the ether during removal or replacement, and they're freaking impossible to track mid-flight by the naked eye (mine at least).
Hallway outside the study, just inside the laundry door, on the footstool, on the coffee table, on the kitchen bench... Nothing particularly funny in and of itself, but I'm hoping the volume and regularity of discovery makes it funny.
If you've put in the hard yards leading up to it, it will be much easier. We don't really have much trouble from either of our two, but they're early into their teens (13 ands 15). Talk to them at a higher level than you think they're at and they'll pick up what you mean if not by the actual words, then by the tone and body language and all those other factors we, as adults, pay zero attention to. And make sure to explain things, take the time. Explain your choices, explain why they have to go to sleep, why they can't just eat dessert forever, why mummy and/or daddy have to leave them for the majority of sunlight hours five days a week. They understand more than you think they can, and they're always learning from literally everything that you do when you're around them.
I'm actually not looking forward to the later teen years for a couple of reasons:
- Girl/Boy-friends and associated emotional messiness
- Their moving out - Empty nest syndrome. I moved out at 18, which is only 3 years away for my eldest.
The 15-year old has always been good at pointing out flaws in our logic when either trying to discipline him or get him to do things he doesn't want to do, and we choose to persist with answering his talk-back to a certain point, but after that it's "do it or else". He's generally compliant, but will let us know if he thinks we've done him an injustice. And I'm fine with that. Don't roll over, but know when you're beaten. He plays computer games too much, but is still getting "good enough" grades and playing two sports, so it's difficult to justify coming down too hard on him for the (unbelievable to the parent version of me) amount of time he 'wastes' gaming. Little version of my pre-parent self. I suppose the gaming keeps him out of other troubles. He also put his PC together himself and has a frankensteined mechanical keyboard with replaced switches and keycaps. Sigh (that's a sigh of jealousy for the time he has to pursue these things).
The 13-year old is the most beautiful human I've ever met. She's so much better a daughter than I deserve. She's smart, she works hard at school, sport, music, and is friendly and nice and unbelievably aware of, and capable of dealing with, different personality types and their social 'comfort' or otherwise. We have a great relationship, she confides in me things I wouldn't always expect. She's the literal example of "having kids is like wearing your heart outside your body". She's more dependent upon parental attention and support than the 15-year old, and not just because of the age difference (maybe it's a gender difference). I'm vaguely concerned about how her transition to real teenage-hood and puberty will change her, but I'm also relatively comfortable in that we've set her up, as best as we possibly could, to not go off the rails.
It's not that I don't love the 15-year old as much, but he needs it less overtly. He's, like, on his own path already, we're just there in case. There was a recent incident in which he actually initiated a hug with me to comfort the both of us. That never happens. But it shows he's still our little dude in there.
I consider rebellion as part of growing up. Better earlier, while you still have some leverage, than later. My son waited until his 20s and it's been hell.
Thanks, yeah, we also have a girl on the way and an older boy. Looks like I'm in for a similar adventure. I also left at 18 and you're right that seems young now. But at the time, I remember feeling quite old. :)
There’s also something to be said about hiking vs sightseeing or shopping.
A few hours at the mall drains and exhaust you while hiking in rough terrain spends a lot of energy but also gives you a lot of energy.
I think it’s the slow pace and constantly stopping combined with hundreds of small decisions (that doesn’t really matter. “Will my life be better if a splurge on the Pottery Barn toilet brush or should I just get the Tesco?”)
They are both tiring, but differently. Intensive programming is like working hard at the gym. Tiring, but content. Attending children is low intensity in attention, but constantly vigilant. And you are expected to pay that kind of attention for another maybe 4 years. Very different kind of tiring indeed, both makes you unable to focus afterwards. So while thinking hard makes us tired, not thinking hard can also makes us tired.