Family complete #achievementunlocked
This is where it all started. Above is my completed family of four, standing in front of the college dorm where I met my wife in 1999. As we only have a couple days left in Japan, we decided to take a photo. Unfortunately the weather didn’t cooperate and it was pouring down, so we weren’t exactly able to pose a bunch and take lots of shots. In fact, we only took one. The result is less than perfect, but it is a pretty good representation of family life: haphazard, slap-dash, but smiling the whole time.
In two days the four of us will be boarding three planes and landing in Canada’s Okanagan Valley next Tuesday. My wife and first daughter have been in Japan for six months. I have been here for three months. My second daughter has been with us for two and a half. Needless to say, it has been eventful. Soon new chapter will begin.
Over the past twelve years my wife and I have moved back and forth between Canada and Japan on average once every two years. As we have now completed our family, this next chapter of our lives will be focused on building a foundation. That means trying to stay in the same place, building a community, creating a healthy and loving environment for our kids to grow up in. So, for the next while, it is goodbye to Japan.
I still have a few months left on my paternity leave, and am looking forward to getting a few things done after returning to Canada. For example:
- continuing Lining Things Up
- building some more Rails apps
- rethinking my wardrobe
- improving my career
- getting a vasectomy (・・；)
Helping my wife and daughters re-integrate themselves into a Canadian lifestyle tops the list though. Also, getting healthy. I gained about 10 kilos during this pregnancy and am going to try and lose it by dieting, running and training. I got a Wi-Fi Body Scale for Xmas, and a Nike Fuel Band is in my future. My wife wants to do yoga together, which I am all for.
As always, there is lots to do. But my view on life is different than it was in the past. My new keywords are “long view” and “life-editing”. I know I can’t do everything I want to on a whim. But I am perfectly satisfied with that. Enjoying my time with my family is the cake. Everything else is icing.
Paternity Leave Lessons Learned (in Japanese)
Next month an article of mine will be published in an Osaka-based newsletter. The article is based on a blog post from a few years ago: End of paternity leave and a lesson on negative support. It is all in Japanese (edited by my lovely wife), but for those interested, click on the more link below:
父親育児休業の最も大きな学び
Big Day
Click to see all the pics on Flickr
It has been a long 40 hour day.
Today my second daughter Maya was born at 7:24 on 31 Jan 2012 at 3070g and 50.0cm. The birth took about 7 hours. My wife was amazingly brave. No meds, all natural, just like last time. I did the best I could to alleviate the tension with sarcastic humour. That has probably killed some men in the delivery room. My wife is different, and that is just one reason why I love her.
Maya is brilliant too. She is super cute. Her eyes opened right away. She poops like crazy. And she is tiny. Adorable. Sasha is treating her very well (at least for now). I can’t believe the tears that filled up my eyes. The second time around has definitely been a very different experience, and I am such a big softie now.
Speaking of being a big softie, one thing different this time around is my weight. Last time I was battling anxiety, and was extremely thin. After the birth of Sasha, I was so tired and had dark rings under my eyes — I looked like I was just freed from Auschwitz. This time on the other hand, I do have the dark rings, but it looks like it is from engaging in an all-night eating marathon. I felt only a twinge of anxiety this time. Most of all I think it was sympathetic pregnancy. Either way, I am a fat bastard. Good thing I got a cool scale for Xmas (though don’t expect me to hook it up to my Twitter account).
As is tradition (in that I did it before my first daughter was born), I let my hair grow for the duration of the pregnancy. My hair grows slowly, but it got pretty scruffy. This time I took it to another level and grew my beard too. Just like last time, I shaved it all off once the baby was born. See the evidence below.
Anyways, it is time to sleep. Thank you all for your congratulations. We are looking forward to 2012 and all it will bring.
Kiai from Chad Kohalyk on Vimeo.
UPDATE: Job not done yet. Wife suffering from after pains. Back to massaging her. I guess I can sleep when I’m dead.
Homeless
About I week ago I mentioned on Twitter that the condo we live in has been sold. The new owner wants to move in as soon as possible, thus we have made an agreement to leave by October 29th.
This decision has forced our hand somewhat.
After considering our options, we have decided to have the baby (which we are tentatively calling “Maya”) in Japan. The baby is due late January. I plan on leaving for Japan in mid-January. My wife will leave sooner. In fact, she will be leaving October 18th, taking our 2-year-old with her.
This means that I need to find a room to rent for two-and-a-half months. I am hoping to bunk with a friend or co-worker downtown, but will be checking out Konbinya and other places for shared accommodations. I would gratefully appreciate if anyone out there has any ideas or suggestions.
Addendum
This will be about the seventh time in 10 years that my wife and I will spend an extended time apart (extending from a few months to nearly a year at a time). It will be the third (and longest) time my daughter and I have spent more than a month apart. International marriages are amazingly rewarding, but also can be very difficult and lonely — not just in terms of cultural and language differences, but also in terms of making the decision (or not) of which country should be “home”. We will return to Canada on April 11th 2012. For a long time we have wanted to make Canada our home, at least for the foreseeable future. But ever since we first set foot on Canadian soil in 2005 we just cannot seem to shake Japan. We’ve never lasted much longer than a year before going back. Needless to say, this is costly: bank account-wise as well as psychologically. That said, I am looking forward to 3 months in my adopted country. I always have fun there, and it will be great to start another round of babycare.
Winter is Coming
Remember back a few months ago when I was in the ER with my wife who had stomach pain?
Been in the ER for an hour and a half now. Waiting room is blaring Canucks news. Meanwhile, wife in pain. Gotta love Canadian Healthcare.
Chad Kohalyk
chadkoh
Yeah, well, it was that special kind of stomach pain that goes away only after nine months.
If I have seemed busy over the past few months, out of touch, always running home after work and often visiting the clinic, you now know why. I apologize if I have inconvenienced any of you.
Anywho, today we went and took a picture:
The baby is healthy and fine, and due January 26th. The ultrasound tech today said she suspects the baby is a girl. Evidence of absence and all. Truth is, we were hoping for a boy. One of each would be grand. I guess there is still a chance. It is early days still.
We already had a name picked out for him: Toma. The Japanese characters (seen left) transliterate as “winter horse”. Pretty cool name. It was particularly cool for a geek like me a couple of months ago when I started getting into Game of Thrones, the tagline of which is “Winter is coming”.
We do have a list of girl’s names, but have not settled on one yet. If you have any suggestions feel free. The rules are: 1) it must be Russian/Eastern European, 2) it must be able to have decent Japanese characters associated with it.
I am looking forward to round two, even if my wife has been suffering from morning sickness a lot worse than usual. For those curious, take a look at some of my previous posts on parenthood and my thoughts first time around.
Wish us luck.
The March
My daughter and I have this little tradition. After our bath, I wrap her up in her hooded bath towel and we walk to her room humming the tune to the Imperial March.
DUM DUM DUM, DUM DA DUM, DUM DAD DUM
Once we get to her room, she throws off her towel and does a little naked jig.
I like to imagine Vader doing the same after getting out of the shower.
End of paternity leave and a lesson on negative support
After six months of being the primary caretaker of my 8-month-old daughter, I am returning to the workforce. Tomorrow I hand off most daily childcare responsibilities to my wife, who had her last day of work today. I learned many things over the past half-year; as much about myself and my relationship with my wife as about my child. One of the most important only really sunk in after I became a full-time papa. I would like to share this lesson with other new fathers out there, whether you are taking paternity leave or not. It is primarily about the management of expectations, but is deeply connected to teamwork, communication, planning, endurance and support.
Marathon, not a sprint
In the couple of months following the birth, my wife stayed home to watch the baby and recover. I worked full time but made an effort to be home as much as possible to free up my wife’s time so she could have a break. I wanted to give my wife as much support as possible, so she could simply hand off the baby the moment I walked in the door. On weekends I stayed home with the baby and encouraged my wife to go out: shopping, coffee, foot massage, whatever she needed to do to recharge. I had an image that caring for an infant was taxing, and knew my duty to provide as much support as possible. At least, that is what all the new daddy books said.
Once I took over, when the baby was only a couple months old, I learned the opposite side of the equation. Truthfully, taking care of a baby over short periods of time is not that difficult. It is caring for a baby over an extended period that is fatiguing. It is a marathon, not a sprint. This requires an immense amount of mental endurance. For comparison’s sake, paid labour, on the other hand, tends to concentrate work in an 8 hour blocks of time, 5 days a week. Childcare is 24/7, my son! Furthermore, for paid labour your workplace is separate from your home. In childcare, you live at your desk. This adds to the general stress level geometrically (freelancing from home sort of approaches this, but not quite).
Watching a marathon on tellie, most men are confident they can run faster than the marathoner at any one point of the race. But you cannot match the mental toughness that is required to continue running for 42km. Moreover, stay-at-home parents also have a million other things to balance: childcare is a like a marathon being run on a tightrope. This makes spousal support all the more important.
Pulling the rug out
When novice tightrope walkers train on a medium height rope, helpers on the floor hold long poles vertically, moving in to give the walker something to hold onto if he looks like he is going to fall. Every time you offer to take the baby, vacuum, wash the dishes, bath or feed the baby is like providing a handhold for your spouse to grasp and catch her breath. The easiest lesson can be found here: in this race, there is no such thing as too much support. However, I learned an even more valuable lesson once I became the tightrope walker myself:
“Negative support” costs much more than “positive support.”
Let me unpack that statement. Consider the following: every time you provide a single piece of support, you are awarded +10 points of positive support. Additionally, every time you back out of a single piece of promised support you are docked -100 points (negative support). Note the difference in scale. A marathoner has to plan his milestones carefully to properly attribute the scarce resources of his endurance. He has to take account of up hills, downhills, hairpin turns where runners tend to crowd, etc. Any support is always a bonus, no matter how small, but retraction of expected support is a terrible tax on mental endurance. The worst thing for a struggling tightrope walker is to find a handhold suddenly no longer there. If that handhold was critical to the walker’s plans, the results could be disastrous.
(Note: Negative support is different than a simple lack of support, which is worth zero points, but increases in negative value incrementally over time.)
My advice to spouses of stay-at-home parents: Never back out of something at the last minute. Keep your spouse constantly informed as to your plans so they can plan their daily milestones accordingly, adjusting their allocation of endurance if need be. Say what you are going to do, and do what you say. Good communication should already be one of the foundations of your marriage. This should go doubly if a baby is involved.
Other lessons learned
Paternity leave has been an amazing experience, and I recommend it highly. Traditionally, fathers are expected to support their child by financial means: going to work and bringing home cash. The truth is, newborns are not expensive. Taking care of your baby is an experience worthy of a short-term cut in salary. For me it was inspiring, lonely, invigorating, frustrating, wonderful and stressful all at the same time. I hope to share more lessons learned from my experience over the next few months. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to ask.
Skeletor says: “Soon, Greyskull will be mine!”](http://www.tumblr.com/photo/1280/sb1/446441158/1/tumblr_kz8bc72NRd1qb1cd3)
We got on babieswithlasereyes!
Laserfication request…
Baby: Sasha (in utero)
Parent: [sandbaggerone](http://sb1.tumblr.com)
Skeletor says: “Soon, Greyskull will be mine!”
Source: babieswithlasereyes
My child deserves this shirt. Though, considering her crawling recently, I think she has gained a couple more DEX points.
Source: akky
The Baby Staring Problem — Or, am I supposed to punch this old lady in the mouth?
When you are a child, and you are staring at some person for being drunk or dressed funny: your mom hits you. If you are down in the pub and some bloke starts giving you the eyeball: you hit him. That’s the rules, refined over generations. However, another rule (well, more like a derivative corollary) that you learn elsewhere when you are a kid is: Don’t hit old ladies. This is the root of my cross-cultural conundrum. Let me explain.
When I am taking my baby out in the baby carriage for a brisk walk, maybe to purchase some fine meats or visit the local confectioners or even to simply enjoy the kôyô, the baby carriage is invariably invaded by gawking grandmas. Often, without asking, old women will stick their entire head into the carriage to get a far-too-close view of my child. They do not wait in strategic areas like a hunter near a stream where deer congregate. They do this while I am full-out walking, oblivious to my hurried gait and my over-attentive keitai fiddling. Ignorant of my attempts to ignore.
Is this some sort of age-right? Like the right to elbow while boarding trains, or to wear leopard print capes? It is like they are feeding off the energy of the young, like some sort of parasitic photosynthesis.
Younger women do not do this. According to the observational data I have collected over the past four months the baby-staring phenomenon is limited to women over the age of fifty Earth years. Elderly men try to sneak a peek, but do so at a safe distance from a not-so-subtle angle, easily obscured by a strategic placement of the body. Frustratingly, there seems no similar simple technique for baby-staring obachans.
Is baby-staring even done outside of Japan? I have never raised kids in my home country. I have no internalized rules about how to react to baby-staring. It is obviously a blatant violation of personal space, similar to the inexplicable impulse to touch the belly of a pregnant woman. Can’t they see that I have places to go and meats to purchase? Must I set up a barbed wire enclosure around the baby carriage to ward off the elderly? Or should I just be done with it and punch them in the mouth?
This middle name will be the death of me
- Me: Do you think we should give her a middle name?
- Her: I thought you didn't want to do that.
- Me: I know, but if we go overseas she will be the only one without a middle name.
- Her: Okay, we should give her a really Japanese name though.
- Me: Like "Sakura"?
- Her pulls face: No!
- Me: How about "Karōshi"?
On discouraging our future daughter's fashion trends
- Wife: What if she is into boy bands?
- Me: I will practice b-boy dancing in the living room with my balding head and a T-Shirt that says "Johnny's" on it. I will also fawn over her idol trading cards that she bought in Harajuku.
- Wife: What if she is goth?
- Me: Then I will greet her in the morning at the kitchen table with my newspaper wearing a spiked dog collar.
- Wife: What is she is a gyaru?
- Me: I will have to get a MASSIVE fluffy keitai strap, put some bronzing on my skin and dye one strip of my hair platinum blonde. I may hang some beads from that strip of hair.
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