Male Postpartum Loneliness

I saw an article this morning on Male postpartum loneliness. Among other things it suggested that men frequently found themselves more lonely after the birth of their child, and that they could and should seek support groups as a resource. That’s good. The article also mentioned that the loneliness might be a result of said men’s spouses spending more time with the baby and less with their husband What the article failed to mention is how easy it is to remedy that situation. Miss your partner? Jump into what she’s doing. Here are some ideas:

Wipe the kid’s ass. If you’re not the primary diaperer on a particular diaper change then at least take on getting rid of the dirty diaper duties
Take bottles to the fridge during pumping.
Clean said bottles after they’re used.
Co-sleep. Take shifts with your spouse getting the tike to bed at night. Does your wife like to get to sleep early or does she perfer having uninterrupted sleep just before waking up? Be sure to take that shift.
Clean diapers/baby clothes/dishes/pump parts. Put briefly, “Clean!”
Hold the kid. Hold the kid more. Get a wrap, plop the kid in it.
(A brief not on this: I've heard from a variety of moms—and it just makes sense—that when you’re cuddling a kid all day every day, when that person even has their mouth on you a large portion of the day, you know, for food, that you don’t necessarily want to cuddle any more with anyone. But… if the dad’s holding the kid, guess who’s not? Just thinking out loud here.)
Take the kid with you everywhere you go.

Let's focus on that last point a bit more. Turns out you didn’t lose a friend when the kid was born; you gained a new one. Take the kid everywhere. They sleep a lot. It’ll be OK. You’ll meet new people, the kid will see new things and get a wider view of the world. If you need inspiration for where to take the kid with you, here’s one more list

Grocery shopping—they love the brightly colored packaging and people-watching
The feed store—lots of people to talk to, plus bunnies and chicks
The pub—lots of people to talk to again, and things going on all the time. Also, usually a nice cozy temperature and the perfect din for napping too.
The library—The libraries here in San Francisco are chock full of toys and other kids!

Loneliness sucks. Fix it.

Comments

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1. While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero. This is typically explained in the following way. While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare. That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2]. Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector. Its operation is in concept very sim

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog