Diary of a Senior Geek - EP 25 - Early Parenthood

A man named Jerry Fisher shares his experiences of early parenthood in his podcast, "Diary of a Senior Geek." He talks about the challenges of taking care of his daughter, Amanda, and the exhaustion his wife, Debbie, faces as a breastfeeding mother. Jerry also discusses their pets and how they had to say goodbye to their aging dog, Sam. He mentions Amanda's negotiation skills and how it drove Debbie crazy. Jerry also talks about his job as a Unix system administrator and his additional duties of PC and Mac support. Cute old guy. What's his name? Gary from Lantronics. Gary, love him. This week on Diary of a Senior Geek. I drove her mother up the wall. I swear, I... A few points during the year that Amanda was three, I was concerned that one or both of them, Debbie and Amanda, were not ever going to see Amanda's fourth birthday. Hi there, this is Jerry Fisher, back with yet another episode of Diary of a Senior Geek. This week, I'm going to talk about early parenthood, shortly after Amanda was born. I'm trying something a little bit different this week. I'm going to do minimal editing. I'm trying to pretend like this is actually just a live stream going out, and avoid as many ands, ums, sos, etc. placeholders, and just record straight through. So, I'm not going to do that much editing. With that said, let's get to it. The first thing I noticed after we got Amanda home was there was this kind of weird time distortion going on. She had a big... Well, it wasn't that big. She had a stump from where the cord had been cut at her navel. And they said, if I remember correctly, it would take somewhere between one and three weeks, and it would just fall off on its own. And for some reason to me, this seemed like forever. It was a long, long, long way in the future. And we kind of had to be careful, you know, clean around it. We usually clean around it when we change the diaper or something like that. And I got reasonably proficient in changing diapers. Truth be told, Debbie did most of the diaper changing. I had a little bit of time off. I think maybe it was a week, possibly two. But once I went back to work, Debbie was a stay-at-home mom, and she did the vast majority of baby maintenance. One thing was that it took us so long to get Amanda here that we were major helicopter parents. We hated to even just leave her in the other room at all. So there was always one of us usually within a few feet of her, at least during the day. We would, well, in the early days, I think she slept in a bassinet near Debbie's side of the bed so that Debbie could feed her. And I don't remember when we moved her into the nursery, but, you know, a couple months maybe. I'll have to ask Debbie about that. But during the day, we had this little kind of springy, I can only call it a baby holder. And it was just a wire frame with a canvas sling in it, and you could put a tiny baby in it. And as the baby moved around, it would kind of bounce up and down. And we just put that on the kitchen table while we were eating dinner. Or if we were, you know, just sitting around talking. Debbie's dad was still alive, and he would come over quite often, and we'd all have dinner together with Amanda down the other end of the table, bouncing in her little baby sling. And she just got cuter by the day. But after a few weeks, Debbie was just exhausted. Since she was breastfeeding, she wasn't getting a whole lot of sleep, and Amanda was not a great sleeper. We would trade off every night. One night, Debbie would go in, and we found that singing to her was a pretty good way to get her to sleep. But it would take 45 minutes, an hour, an hour and a half, before she would finally drop off. And then when you tried to gently lay her down to go to sleep, she would wake right back up and start crying or want to play or whatever. And so bedtime really got to be an ordeal. And I remember not being as patient as I probably should have been with Debbie, because I would be exhausted from work, and it would be Debbie's night to put Amanda down. And so she'd go in there, and she'd finally get her down, and all I wanted to do was sit and read for half an hour or 45 minutes before I went to bed or watch something stupid on TV. And she'd come in, and she'd sit down next to me, and she'd start telling me how tired she was. And Mr. Tack from Diplomacy here, I'd say, well, then go to bed. And what I didn't realize at the time, until I was told in no uncertain terms, was that she didn't want solutions. She just wanted somebody to listen to her about how tired she was. So we worked that out, another chapter in our marriage, and I already knew this, that when women are sharing something with you 99.99% of the time, they don't want you to do anything about it. They just want you to get it. So I did my best to just get that my exhausted wife was exhausted, and that she needed to talk about it before she could go to bed. In order to give Debbie a little bit of rest, in the evenings after I got home from work, and quite often on weekends, I'd put Amanda in the stroller, and there were, we lived in a track house neighborhood, and there were sidewalks all over the place. So I would take her for long, long walks, a couple of hours. And as long as the stroller kept moving, she tended to be pretty happy. She might even fall asleep. And that gave Debbie a little time for herself, so she could maybe take a shower and relax, maybe do something other than tend to a baby. At the time, we had three pets. So we had Sam, the dog, who I mentioned in an earlier episode. And he was great with Amanda. When Amanda got older, she would use him as a bench. She'd sit on him. And she didn't weigh that much, so it didn't hurt him any. But he'd just sit there, and he'd roll his eyes over at me, and say, look to me like he was saying, really, I have to put up with this? But he never really objected that much. And she'd kind of dress him up a little bit. And he was a fairly big dog, as I said. I think he was part, I think last time I said he was part German Shepherd, but I was thinking of a different dog. He was actually, as near as we could tell, a cross between an Airedale and a Golden Retriever. Just a really, really nice dog. But he wasn't getting any younger. And then we had two cats, one of them named Sutty, who we had inherited from the roommate in the Taurus house that I had mentioned earlier. And she was a black cat. And then we had Pippi, who we had also adopted through a friend of the previous roommate. And Pippi's mother was a pureblood Himalayan, and nobody knows who the father was. The mom got out one day and had a great old time, and some kittens came along a little bit later, and no two of them looked alike. But she had this thick, luxurious fur. And Pippi kept saying that she wanted to make her into a muff. She had a very obnoxious meow. She got her meow from the Himalayan side. And she was the queen. And she mostly didn't want anything to do with Sutty. But they were indoor-outdoor cats. So we had a pet door, and all of the animals would go in and out. And the cats would go out in the front yard, and they really didn't want to have anything to do with each other unless a cat from another house came by, and then they would team up to chase it off. It was always fun to watch that, because they were a team against any intruders. But as soon as the intruder was gone, then they didn't want anything to do with each other. And poor old Sam, he continued to get older and older. And I think once Amanda was like 3, 3 1⁄2, 4 years old, he just got to the point where he couldn't even get up by himself. We had to help him up. And so it was time. So we all went into the vet. Amanda came with us. I don't think she really quite understood what was going on. Thank you, phone. I don't think she quite understood what was going on, but we walked into the vet, and she looked at the person behind the counter, and I don't remember exactly what it was she said, but she announced that this was Sam's last trip to the vet, and he was going to die, or something to that extent. Something along those lines. Boy, for one that I'm not editing, this is really incoherent. Of course they're all incoherent before I edit them, so this is what you get, guys. Now, we had heard of the terrible twos, and Amanda was actually pretty well behaved when she was two. But after she turned three, she started negotiating everything. And so we would tell her to do something, and she would start negotiating, well, can I play for five more minutes and then go do it, or can I go do something else instead, and she was just constantly negotiating. I always told her that I figured she was going to grow up to be a corporate lawyer. And it drove her mother up the wall. I swear, a few points during the year that Amanda was three, I was concerned that one or both of them, Debbie and Amanda, were not ever going to see Amanda's fourth birthday. But it all worked out, and Amanda eventually settled down. Now, during this time, I was still at Hughes Aircraft Company. After I got my degree in computer science, I moved over and I was no longer in the test labs anymore. Unix system administration job had opened up, and so I was sharing a window office, of all things, with two other people. I forget the name of one of them. The other one was my co-sysadmin. Her name was Becky. And so the three of us had this cool window office, and I never figured that my physician had to have a window office, but they didn't know where to put us in the org chart, and so we wound up reporting directly to the division manager. And the offices available for support staff for the division manager were mostly window offices. So I actually, through that window, I watched the beginnings of the construction of the blue line, the west end of the blue line where it cuts south to go down towards Manhattan Beach. And that was really interesting. I also, about this time, IBM PCs were showing up in a lot of the labs, and so were Macs, and there wasn't anybody formally set up to support those, so along with my Unix sysadmin duties, I also was doing PC and Mac support. So I'd get to run around all over our part of the building, and at the time, you know, setting an IP address on an IBM PC, anyway, involved you had to find the right file and bring up a text editor and actually edit the file. And this started getting really old. Anyway, I told you that so I can tell you this. After, I don't know, it was several months, maybe even as long as a year after we had put Rainey down, I got a phone call from Debbie. This was before cell phones, so I just got a phone call on my office phone, and she said, look out your window. And I looked out the window, and here are Debbie and Amanda pulled up in Debbie's car, and they're playing with this little puppy, Shepard mix, Australian Shepard and German Shepard, we're pretty sure. And he was a cute little guy, so I went running down and I petted him a little bit, and they had adopted him from someone who put an ad in the paper, as I recall, and he also turned out to be a really great dog. But I will tell the story of Rainey, which was what we named him, because he was adopted on a rainy day, in another episode. That's it for this week. Our dad's journal, the prompt is, this is how my family celebrated Christmas or Hanukkah. My dad said, traditional. My folks loaded the presents under the tree after we were in bed. My sister, that would be my Aunt Yvonne, and I were up before sunup and opened our gifts. Mom and Dad told of the fun listening to us as we opened our gifts. Traditional turkey dinner, sometimes we called on the Alexanders, close friends. And again, I apologize, my father's handwriting is not that easy to read. That wasn't much different than the way we had Christmas in our house. The only thing different would be that we were not allowed to open any gifts until Mom and Dad were up. And Mom always insisted that we get some kind of breakfast in us before we opened presents. The suspense was killing us, but we had to eat a bowl of cereal. Or, usually, actually, she'd want to make eggs and bacon, and it would take FOREVER. But then we would finally get to open up our gifts. Thinking back, I think probably my favorite gift of all time, it was right about the time the Mercury 7 were starting to go into space. That was in the very late 50s and early 60s, so I was 9 or 10. We had our gift opening at home, and then we always went over to Grandma and Grandpa's house in Englewood. Our house was in Manhattan Beach, because that's where the cheap land was at the time, believe it or not. And we'd go over to Englewood, and Grandma and Grandpa were in the big house there. And I walked in, and there was an unwrapped gift behind the Christmas tree. And it was this cool-looking rocket launcher. It had a little cart that went across the back of it, and it used batteries, it looked like, and it was motorized. I was not allowing myself to get my hopes up. I realize now that I was the only kid in the whole family that would have had any interest in that at all. But all through dinner, because we weren't allowed to get gifts until after we'd eaten dinner, all through dinner, I was not allowing myself to get my hopes up that that rocket launcher was mine. And guess what? It was mine! So, that's probably one of my all-time favorite Christmas gifts. That's it. The quote of the week is, once more, from Matthew 5, from the Beatitudes. It is Matthew 5, 7, Again, given the way things are going in this country, in the world right now, I hope people will actually start reading their scripture and following it. Again, I'm an agnostic. I don't subscribe to the Bible. I don't believe in God. I don't believe in God. I don't believe in God. I don't believe in God. Again, I'm an agnostic. I don't subscribe to any particular faith. But I think we could use a lot more mercy in the world. I'd like to ask a little favor. If you like this podcast, please give it a 5-star rating on whatever app or site you use to listen to it. This will help get it out there to more people. Also, if you like it, please tell your friends and family about it. As always, you can find me on Instagram, Twitter, and or Facebook. Just search for SeniorGeek49. Hi there, Gary the Senior Geek, back again with another episode of Diaries... What am I calling this nowadays? With another episode of... Well, so much for not editing anything. I'll see you next time.