Mateo 8 weeks (22 photos), by Jorli Baker

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The Complexities of Sleep Deprivation

Every day is tiring in a different way when you're sleep deprived. Prior to Mateo being born, I had never really experienced this at all. Since I can fall asleep almost anywhere, with any amount of light or noise level, it's not been an issue for me.

Surprisingly, it's not always so bad. I have my days when the lack of sleep makes me a little loopy/giddy. There are those other days when my patience is razor thin, and I feel like I'm continually apologizing to Steve for being snappy. Right now, my eyelids just feel heavy, but besides that I'm doing fine.

The best part about being sleep deprived is that when you do get to nap for like 20 minutes that can feel like hours. It's really strange.

Day 1 of the Experiment

The No TV for one day a week experiment...
Will let you know how it goes. Month long,once weekly trial begins today.

Dear Answering Machine.. We're Through

I don't remember a lot of significant inventions in my lifetime, but I distinctly remember the day we got our first answering machine. After having it a few days, I couldn't imagine how we ever got by without it. The days of sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring, or being fearful you might miss that all important call were over. Hallelujah. I never thought my love affair with the answering machine would end.

These days, however, I loathe having to listen to voice mail messages. Actually, it's been this way for a few years at least. I once accumulated 34 new voice mails in the course of a busy day, and I asked my then-assistant to listen to them and try to accurately capture the callers' moods, so that I didn't have to listen to the rants myself. I have messages on my cell phone that I don't listen to for weeks at a time, and don't even get me started on my home office land line voice mail... that damn red message light taunts me to no end. Usually there are between 12 and 23 messages at any given time, before I finally muster up the strength to go through and listen/delete them (or not listen/delete them, as the case may be).

It's not that I don't want to talk to people. I do. Especially over instant messenger. Or in person. If I am at my desk, I reply almost immediately to any IM I get. Text messages I also respond to very quickly. At my company, almost no one ever calls you without scheduling it ahead of time or IMing you first to say "hey, can I call you now?" It almost seems rude not to do that first.

And I do enjoy the phone, but only to catch up with old friends. For these calls, I generally make a phone date, so that we actually have time to really spend talking, undistracted. Working from home with an endless amount of conference calls has just worn me out for all other calls.

I never could have predicted that I would prefer people sending short text messages or emails to actually listening to a recording of their voice. Who has the time though? If I see on my caller ID that you called me, and I want to call you back, then there you go - I will. I'm sure part of my frustration is so many of the calls I get at home are unsolicited calls like telemarketers and political campaigns. Land lines like disappearing beacons for telemarketers and political campaigns.

So enough of this confusion. I decided to act. At least people should be fairly warned that I hate voice mail and there is almost no chance I will listen to whatever messages are left for me. I just changed my outgoing home phone message to say, "Hello, you've reached 718-726-XXXX, I no longer listen to these voice mail messages, so please try to reach me on my cell or via email. Thank you and have a nice day!" So far, everyone that has called has hung up right after the word messages. Brilliant! I would have just turned off the voice mail from picking up, but I don't want the phone to ring and ring.

What is worse than breaking your phone?

Just breaking the screen so that I can hear when I get texts and calls but can't do anything!! Aaaarrrgh.

Another casualty of late night feedings. I dropped it on the ground. Who knew the 1 millionth time I dropped it would be the one that sealed it's fate?

Coincidence? I think not.

So I decided today that I'm going to blog a lot more. As an experiment, blog all the time, maybe even several times in a day. (I can already hear my skeptical friends scoffing at this goal, since I have fallen short of similar goals many times before). Whatever, we'll see.

My point is, just after making this blogging proclamation, I discoverd that gmail has the option to let you post blogs directly from your gmail web page. F*#king awesome!!! Since I am constantly on gmail during the course of any given day, this will be a huge help. Whether or not I will have anything interesting to say, that remains to be seen. Not really the point anyway. I just want to start writing more.

Sunday = Football

Today was the first time we had people over since we had the baby. I may be biased, but our baby is pretty awesome. Little M can sleep in even the most extreme noise situations - whether there be a fire truck blaring down the street or 6 extremely loud people chattering while watching a bunch of football games in the apartment (as there was today).

It is wonderful that M is so cool and chill around people, because I don't get out much these days, and it was really nice catching up with friends. I didn't even mind that my breastfeeding status precluded me from drinking anything except a single sip of hard cider.