{"id":219,"date":"2008-05-01T12:39:50","date_gmt":"2008-05-01T17:39:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pchristensen.com\/blog\/?p=219"},"modified":"2008-05-01T12:39:50","modified_gmt":"2008-05-01T17:39:50","slug":"lessons-learned-by-a-second-time-dad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/articles\/lessons-learned-by-a-second-time-dad\/","title":{"rendered":"Lessons Learned By A Second Time Dad"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been quiet since the birth of my second daughter 3 weeks ago. A little too quiet for my taste, so here&#8217;s a quick personal post (apologies to those anticipating my usual hardcore technical content).<\/p>\n<p>Lots of people write their impressions as a first time parent, but there&#8217;s not much to them. Usually it&#8217;s stuff like &#8220;Babies are small&#8221; and &#8220;I&#8217;m overwhelmed.&#8221; (trust me, I said brilliant stuff like that a couple years ago after my first). This time I&#8217;ve got all of the mechanics down pat (cooking while holding an infant, the proper bouncing to rocking ratio, etc) so I&#8217;ve had different observations that I was too blown away to notice the first time around. Let&#8217;s hope they&#8217;re useful to anyone contemplating a second child.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Typing with one hand is hard and slow.<\/li>\n<li>Watching a newborn is like driving &#8211; doesn&#8217;t nearly use your whole brain but occupies your body enough that all you can do is think.<\/li>\n<li>No matter how much your infant cries, if you jump up from playing with your toddler to care for the infant, then the toddler learns that crying = results. Bad lesson.<\/li>\n<li>Being able to fall asleep fast is useful, since you never know how long you&#8217;ll get to sleep.<\/li>\n<li>Some items of housework are important (clean laundry, empty sink) while most others are not.<\/li>\n<li>If you want your kids well taken care of during the day, make sure your wife gets to sleep at night.<\/li>\n<li>Anything you want done, get it done fast (see bullet #2 for explanation).<\/li>\n<li>Love doesn&#8217;t happen automatically, it needs to be cultivated. While I&#8217;m thrilled about the newborn, I don&#8217;t have the same feelings towards her as I do towards the toddler because I have years of memories, experiences, and interactions with the toddler. But that doesn&#8217;t diminish what I have for the newborn &#8211; I&#8217;m already so much closer to her than I was two weeks or even one week ago.<\/li>\n<li>Following up the last point, you have to put in the time and effort if you want to enjoy your kids. Just like you&#8217;d never expect to learn something you didn&#8217;t work hard at and experiment with, you probably won&#8217;t love your kids as much if you don&#8217;t put in lots of consistent time in caring for them.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s been a great couple of weeks and I look forward to decades more with my two little girls!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been quiet since the birth of my second daughter 3 weeks ago. A little too quiet for my taste, so here&#8217;s a quick personal post (apologies to those anticipating my usual hardcore technical content). Lots of people write their impressions as a first time parent, but there&#8217;s not much to them. Usually it&#8217;s stuff [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-219","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-fun","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pazgP-3x","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}