"The Rising Sun, centre for spiritual renewal"

Okay. This is just too much. Last night I found a flyer lying inside my apartment door. Some eager soul put it through my mail slot to offer me an "open Healing night". (All such concepts in this entry are rough translations from their Finnish equivalents, even though they actually had the word "Healing" in the Finnish flyer.) The "Rising Sun, a centre for spiritual renewal" wanted me to come and get free "energy treatment", "clairvoyant readings" and other essential services. 

For the flying spaghetti monster's sake, I thought I lived in a country where most of the new age kooks remained underground and within closed circles, safely away from the sane population. Oh, and the best part of the advertisement: The group does "mutual planetary light work" of all things. Apparently said procedure has something to do with "helping those in need".  

This kind of ignorance and hypocrisy makes my blood boil. Want to help those in need? Ever thought about doing some volunteer work or donating money to charity instead of conducting a deranged ritual that gives you false self-satisfaction at best? This is exactly the kind of thing I want be sure to tell my daughter about. Not about Rising Sun, the centre for spiritual renewal, but about critical thinking. I want her to know that nothing is true just because that's what the guy said.

Oh, they also do "aura photography and interpretation", "purifying meditation" and serve coffee. Good for them.

Ok, this is it. It's been almost a year since my last entry. My daughter has become a toddler and is by far the best thing in our lives, and we've got plenty of good things. I just haven't had time or the motivation to update the blog, and I've come to the conclusion that if I want to continue updating this blog, I've got to expand my scope a little bit. Or a lot.

Right now I'm trying to work and follow the US election day at the same time. Needless to say, the combination is hopeless. I'm just dying to write my own commentary on the whole election shebang, but I fear I don't know the subject nearly well enough to be opening my mouth. Oh, right, and there's also the work thing. Anyway, I'll try to continue writing, but will no longer confine myself to topics related to parenthood. Expected future topics will include topics related to computers, games, technology, science and skepticism, to name a few. We'll see what happens. It's not like I have readers to please.

4 Common Mistakes To Avoid As An Infant's Parent

1. "I'll just put her in the carriage for a nap. She'll sleep for about three hours, and I can use that time to get some work done."

Wrong. You can't. If you even consider getting something useful done while your child naps, she will wake up at least every five minutes to require comforting.

2. "I'll sit down at the computer to quickly check my e-mail/pay my bills/do something vital even though I'm carrying the baby. She won't mind."

Wrong again. She will mind, because for some reason your child hates every single location in the house where you would be able to do something useful with just one hand. My daughter hates the office for some unknown reason. Bad vibes, I guess.

3. "Thank god she's recently been sleeping peacefully at night. Therefore, I can get some well-earned sleep after this 14 hour workday."

Guess what? Wrong. If I didn't know my daughter doesn't do it on purpose, I'd swear she somehow senses when her parents are really spent, for it seems to cause her to either A) be really difficult to get to sleep or B) go to sleep so easily and so early that she wakes up at about 5 am.

4. "There's no hurry to get the fresh diaper on. She already did her stuff. How much more could there be?"

Sigh. I presume I don't need to elaborate on that.

A Snowball's Chance in Hell

Have you ever tried to catch the smile of a 10-week-old baby on film? It's like trying catch a toast as the toaster flings it into the air. It's like trying to catch a speeding bullet with chopsticks. Don't bother. It is, if nothing else, an exercise in futility.

Don't Live in the Past

One of the great things about babies is that they don't dwell on the past. Nor do they hold a grudge for single incidents. A baby can scream for hours on end on account of gas just to have the whole experience vanish into thin air (pun intended) at the moment of release. Chances are that the baby immediately breaks into a smile, unless something else is still bothering him or her. A father can accidentally scrape her daughter's head on a wall while going through a door and have her forget the incident in about sixteen seconds. That's what I call cutting a struggling Dad some slack.

It's the positive experiences that stick. I guess it's got nothing to do with the inherent nature of positive versus negative experiences, but as a parent one can stop a negative incident from happening again, effectively making it an isolated incident. The good stuff, on the other hand, can be repeated over and over. Talk about a forgiving deal.

(The aforementioned incident involving a baby's head and a doorframe is purely fictional, although it may have happened to a father not entirely unlike the author in a parallel universe not entirely unlike ours. Do not reproduce said incident at home. No babies were harmed while writing this entry.)

Work-at-Home Dad's Dilemma

I knew it would happen. I started working full time at home a little after I heard my daughter was on the way. At first I was worried about how to keep a future toddler out of Dad's "office" when he was working, but then later began to fear the problem may prove to be just the opposite. How in the world do I keep Dad in his "office" when a toddler is charming her way through life in the next room?

Even though she's still a long way from a toddler, I'm beginning to feel it. I began writing this entry because I couldn't make myself start working. When she was born, I was occasionally glad to get a break from her, as newborn babies can be frustrating at times. Now that she's beginning to show signs of comprehension and has started to smile back at us, the task of actually getting any work done is becoming more and more difficult. I wasn't blessed with much self-discipline to begin with, and now the situation seems utterly hopeless. Luckily she still sleeps about 15 of any given 24 hours, so I do get something done. Sadly, I'm pretty sure kids don't sleep more as they age. See? I do know something about children.