Baby Sleep

Generational wisdom says that babies can sense that you are being impatient with them, and they in response become further uncooperative. You end up in a cyclical fight to tears and bedtime becomes a war zone.

But I don’t think this is the case. I don’t think that these tiny little neural networks that can’t tell that not everything is food, can decipher the complex emotion that is impatience… yet.

More than likely, what happens is that our animal brains tend to use that impatience to skip a few crucial steps or focus on only our own desires – that of getting the baby to sleep and for us to get out. Skipping those steps means you forget that babies need soothing, a calm environment and demeanor, and a little bit of play to relax and be amenable to sleeping.

A good example of this comes from the work of software development. Very often, as a software developer, I’ll run into some problem which in the moment seems insurmountable. I can pound at it for hours and it doesn’t budge. The recommended strategies in such a case are to do one of the following –

1. Go for a walk. Go, grab a coffee or lunch. Let your mind wander. Forget about the problem at hand and let your mind decompress. As often happens when you’re trying to remember something that’s on the tip of your tongue, letting go is the easiest way to trick your brain into coming up with the solution.

2. Explain the problem to a fellow coder. The process of explaining the problem very often reveals the hidden bias or flaw in our logic. It lets us review our work and very often even during the very first overview, we come up with the solution to whatever is troubling us. This is why it’s said that the best way to learn something is to teach it. The preparation to teaching it or showing it to someone else tricks your brain into being more critical of the information you’ve received and thinking through its logic deeply.

3. Let someone else take the reigns. If all else fails, step back. Let someone else poke and prod at the code, very often in situ – it’s possible that if you let them work on your system that they’ll reveal an environmental issue or design consideration that wouldn’t be valid if the code were running on their system or a common system. So hand them your baby (pun intended) and let them figure out what’s wrong.

I think you get the drift – all of these are applicable to babies as well. If you’re at your wits end with your baby, hand them to a trustworthy partner and go do something else. Even if it’s something as mindless as washing the dishes. If you think you’re burning out, give your partner the problem to solve and they might shine a light on the issue which was preventing you from the ultimate goal – a happy, healthy baby.

Just 7 days

Hello all, just wanted to pop in and say that I now am acutely aware that there are just 7 days remaining in my stay in India. It’s been a great month and no matter how much I hate the heat, you just gotta love India!!!

In other news, I am the new owner of nitinkhanna.com thanks to the diligence of my brother Nipun. He just pounced on that domain name like it was a glass of hot water and a plate of fruits ( yeah, my brother is not the same!!!). Thanks to him, whenever you all go to nitinkhanna.com it’ll bring you here. That’s not half- bad is it? 🙂

I guess I’ll do something with the website later, maybe host my resume on it with my profile and details. But for now, in these last few days, a rainy Delhi awaits me, both outside the house and within.

Logging out,
Nitin Khanna

Advice

My first few days in Boulder were nice. I was busy and had enough to do in terms of loitering about and meeting people apart from Univ work that it just did not feel odd. But yesterday, when I woke up, it felt somewhat odd. I woke up quite late to an empty house and a knot in my stomach…

All day, despite being with friends, I felt odd. After all, there’s only so much that friends can do specially since they probably don’t know you’re in an odd state of mind…

In the evening, I talked to my brother and in just a few short words, he told me something that holds true to the point that in no time, I knew that everything will be OK no matter what. He said –

It’s just a matter of time,
When things fall in line
and everything will be fine
and that’s just a rhyme!

For some reason, we forget that there are a lot of people whom we think are not approachable or that we cannot express ourselves to them. But we can and should. There’s always going to be help, from friends or family or even some random stranger writing on a Blog…

It’s tough being in a new place completely on your own, even if it doesn’t hit you immediately or you’re not able to express it properly… But it’s not impossible to pass through it unharmed. Just reach out and get someone to hear you out in any way possible!