[fartcannon]

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'm rambling because I'm tired. :)

[a_c]

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 :)

[fartcannon]

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.

I agree about the joy. This child woke me up.

[sgtnoodle]

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.

[Joeri]

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.

[fartcannon]

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.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

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.

[fartcannon]

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.

[tempestn]

> Programming at work is my time off.

I'm often reminded of this comic: https://www.fowllanguagecomics.com/comic/long-weekend/

[fartcannon]

Made me laugh, thanks! The bonus panel is accurate, too.

[kortilla]

Protip: store your cheerios in the box they come in rather than on the floor to disambiguate this scenario.

[jwarden]

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.

[BLKNSLVR]

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.

[dgfitz]

Tell me you don’t have kids without telling me you don’t have kids. :)

[fartcannon]

Hehe. Brilliant.

:)