Category Archives: parenting

A 4yo who comes down, dressed, within a 10-minute window

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We sure do like routine and structure in this house. We live and die by our shared calendar. Reed and I have a Discord with 26 channels in it. We’re constantly setting and using checklists and reminder functions. We clean before the housekeepers come every other week. It’s kind of A Lot, and while we don’t expect other people to be this die-hard, we did introduce a child into this environment, with all its pluses and minuses. I feel like the living room will never truly be fully tidy for at least the next 14 years. And a child is far more chaotic than fits into the structures we had in place.

When I was pregnant with Locke, we talked about what we would optimize for, to help prepare us for less failure during the first 18 months of sleep deprivation. We decided to optimize for Locke’s sleep above all else. We read Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child as recommended by a sweetie of mine who has twin boys and had to survive that. We decided to live by the book religiously. Locke had a rigid sleep schedule that came at great cost to literally the rest of our lives. We had plans within plans if a nap time wasn’t going to be easy, or if one didn’t go according to plan. Locke now has a deeply positive relationship with sleep, including things like Halloween night when we had decided to let him stay up past bedtime declaring 10 minutes past lights out that he was ready for bed and didn’t want any more partying or candy.

We also got a Mella light clock for his room starting while he was still in the crib. He learned that the light turned yellow 30 minutes before we came in, and green when we came in. We had alarms set to be sure our entering coincided within a couple minutes of the light turning green to have a strong association. That then turned into 30 minutes of quiet playtime in his room, and it being ok to leave his room when the light turned green.

But then we had a child who enjoyed quiet playtime so much that he’d just stay in his room indefinitely, and we’d be late to preschool. So we added in an additional system, a clock with just a minute hand, yellow and green along the outside to match the color change clock, and a red line at the 10 minutes of green mark.

The clock is as described in the blog post. A local map is to the left, and a map of California to the right. Below it is the menu for our lunch with a Japanese family.

So the deal is, that if he gets himself dressed and out of his tidied room before the minute hand hits the red line, we will read a bit (currently the complete Calvin and Hobbes) or watch a LEGO video with him. And so our child, who also puts away his own laundry and often helps fold it, will get himself ready, play quietly for awhile, put his things away, and then come downstairs in a 10 minute window in the morning. He seems to enjoy having so much autonomy, and we enjoy having things run so smoothly. And we all enjoy getting a bit of unrushed, planned together time in the mornings.

Japan 2026

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There’s this woman an ex partner left me for. I had moved to the Bay Area in part based on this relationship, but in 2016 my job fell apart, which led to a conversation about how serious the relationship was, and the answer was that it shouldn’t exist. While he and I are back on speaking terms, the gent was essentially doing serial monogamy under the label of relationship anarchy, and it was a mess. Morgan and I, however, continue to get on quite well. I even signed as witness on her recent wedding to an incredible human named Jeff. Morgan and Jeff were going to Japan this year, and invited us to go family traveling with them. The exchange rate is amazing right now, so we jumped at the chance.

Japan was such a lovely place to bring a kid. While they have a history of doing a better job of helping their kids be appropriate in various social settings, the experience was universally accommodating for our kiddo, too. Our travel companions weren’t comfortable breast feeding in public, and we didn’t see a lot of infants out, but children are generally given a lot of independence counterbalanced with high expectations and guidance. Being there really bolstered Locke’s confidence and curiosity.

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Personality shift

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Something has shifted deeply for me over the last 5ish years, which I think merits calling out for folks who have known me for a long time. I’m eager to hear how this has landed with folks, especially as part of a birthday missive. However, so many things have changed in the last 5ish years that it’s hard to pinpoint a single origin. In this post, I explore some of those things and the impact I expect they’ve contributed to. Here they are in chronological order for when they started.

Relationship with Reed

Reed is a difficult person. He is also, hands down, the best partner I could think of for myself. He is extremely predictable, self aware, and invests heavily in a few choice things. Our lives together are one of those choice things, which means I can offload a lot of cognitive overhead about home, bicycle, self, etc care to him and it gets done better than I’d bother doing it myself. Reed can also be incredibly selfish (again, in a self-aware way). He has the most attuned sense of what “enough” is of anyone I’ve met. He sets goals for what he would like his life to look like, and when those goals are met, he enjoys the fruits of his labor.

Being around this as the main touchpoint of human interaction in my life (we are romantic partners, co-parents, and dear friends) means some of this has rubbed off on me. I have always had high standards, but now I am more comfortable doing something myself or with others than dragging along someone who is struggling in a non-self-aware way. For most of my youth, I had a strong savior complex, which I have worked on overcoming for years. Both my work with GWOB and my relationship with Reed have helped me truly wrap that up. Perhaps too far in the other direction, but all things are oscillations.

Working at Apple

While most of the individuals I worked with at Apple were truly lovely, the company itself has a culture of extreme arrogance. Success has gone to the proverbial head, and it seeps into everything. Even the hiring process is terrible because the recruiters know having Apple on your resúmé is life changing (or was, before this market, phew), and that people want to work there regardless of other factors. Every chance I had to be more collaborative, I tried to take, and I was (mostly politely) redirected to try to find other paths.

I remember trying to explain that an executive coming up with a problem statement that then a bunch of brilliant people came up with in-depth responses to individually, which then the exec picked “the best of”, and then program managers dolled out the work was not actually “collaborative” but a process diagram instead, and it fell on deaf ears. 5 years of that, and not being able to talk to other people about it, sure did a number on me.

Becoming a Parent

I gave birth alone via emergency c-section after a very scary night. Covid meant no guests unless you were in labor, and because I was two months early, they were trying to stop the labor and so wouldn’t admit me as such. After a month in the NICU, we brought Locke home only to discover that Reed had severe misophonia related to infant screaming, and so then I was on the hook for taking care of two creatures who couldn’t fend for themselves and were actually often at odds with each other’s needs. Our agreement that Reed was going to be the stay-at-home parent exacerbated this because it made asking for outside help at odds with our goals and plans. It was the worst 18 months of my life. And in part because Reed is already a difficult person, my care network saw this as a personal failing on his part rather than a disability, which led to even more long-term issues.

This also led to some extreme division of labor — Reed still wanted to help out, but it needed to be in discrete, scheduled chunks that he could prepare for. Which was good in some ways because it meant I got clear time off, instead of always being “on.” However, that shifted us away from the collaborative, flowing parenting style we now actively and intentionally implement.

While I’ve done deep therapy around all this and mostly moved past it, I still have a trauma response to some things, and repairing other relationships is still taking significant effort. Going through this also deepened my relationship with Reed. Now, when something is difficult, we know it’s not as difficult as this thing we did that one time.

Being on Testosterone

I love being on testosterone for many reasons, and have also already highlighted the ways it has shifted my experience of the world in ways I’m less of a fan of. I have a shorter fuse, less empathy on the surface, and less patience. I take up space more now than I used to, and focus less on making space for others. The first I don’t think is a bad thing — I deserve just as much space as anyone else, it’s that now I’m expecting to get it. And I haven’t figured out yet how to balance taking space for myself with my old habits of taking space for others as well. Whether that’s because of an actual biological reaction or “just” the validation, who knows.

Where I am now

Who knows how much any of these, or collection of these, led to my brain issues worked on last year. But I am now less warm and collaborative than I used to be. I miss it, it was aligned with how I’d like the world to be and for people to treat each other. I’ll keep working to be warmer again.

Again, I’d love your insights into how I’ve changed, and how that has impacted our relationship, for my birthday this year. And I have yet to talk about all this with my therapist, so who knows what will change about it as I continue to explore.

Oh yeah, I guess we also went through the collective trauma of Covid in that time, too. That matters as well.

Let them take the risks they can afford

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The title is one of the few pieces of advice my mum gave me about child rearing. It came through pretty clearly in how she and my dad raised me — I’ve even got a tattoo about it, and how it’s not just about parenting but also my approach to security. I’m lucky that Reed and I are also well aligned on this front. Sometimes other parents are pretty aghast at how far away we let Locke get from us, how we let him do mildly dangerous things. Here’s our reasoning: the kid is going to have a bad time while learning, at some point (getting burned on something hot, getting separated from us, etc), so we may as well control as best we can the first time that happens. That’s different than how others approach it: using their control to prevent it happening, such that when it inevitably does happen, it’s when they’ve lost control, and then it can be truly bad.

Here are some examples of our approach.

The stairs he’s allowed to fall down

Our house is a split level, so while it’s two stories high, we have 4 sets of stairs. Some of them are quite steep. So Locke was going to fall down stairs at SOME point, and we wanted to decide which set of stairs that would happen on. Thankfully, we have two steps between two rooms in our house. Yes, it’s on hardwood, but it’s the shortest set we have. So when he was learning to crawl, we decided that was the set of stairs he was allowed to fall down. We did safety protocols around the other sets of stairs, but none around those. He fell down them. He cried. We comforted him. He is now incredibly confident around stairs.

How Locke got down stairs for most of his childhood, after falling down 2:

Getting lost

As Locke was learning to walk, we took him to the zoo a lot. There’s a lot going on there, and lots of space to explore. But it’s also pretty well contained, full of other parents, and there are protocols in place for lost kids. What a great place for him to get lost! The first time he wandered away on his own from Reed (I wasn’t there), Reed discretely followed him for awhile. Locke eventually realized he wasn’t near Reed anymore and didn’t know where he was. He had a whole Experience, which Reed let him have for a bit, and then went to him. There was a lot of validating feelings with “you couldn’t find me, and it was scary!” instead of focusing on Reed not being able to find Locke. Now Locke knows it’s on him to know where we are, and to stay as close as feels necessary.

Do we still keep tabs on him? Of course! But if he runs off for a bit, we have high confidence that he’ll return when he needs us.

Hot things are hot

No matter how many times you tell someone about how something might hurt them, usually folks have to experience it directly before really believing it (this is not just about kids). So while we tell Locke when something is hot or dangerous, we also still let him do things like pour hot water for his tea. Recently, he burned himself on the kettle while trying to handle it. Of course we comforted him about it and made sure it got the treatment the (very mild) burn needed, but we also didn’t fuss about it much more than that. He had learned a lesson by taking a risk he could afford.