Baby pwning zombies and parental musings at Tobias Buckell Online

Journal Entry

Baby pwning zombies and parental musings

warning, baby stuff ahead. This won’t become a mommy blog, but everyone keeps asking stuff…

Spending quality time shooting zombies with a kid on my lap:

I’ve been playing an hour of Left 4 Dead late each night as I sit near the kids and wait for them to fall asleep after their 9pm feeding. 9-12 is an odd time for me, I’m always sleepy and mentally numb, it’s around midnight that I start to perk up again as an insomniac, and when I get very creative, although since getting sick in November that’s been lost to me (presumably the beta-blockers have affected me a bit).

Over the last three weeks Emily and I have settled into a schedule where she goes to bed at 10-ish and I take over the midnight and 3am feeding/change. As preemies the twins were having to be woken up every three hours to be fed, now they’re trying to find their own schedule. The last week or so they’ve decided tag teaming is fun. One will wake up at 11, the other 12 for a feeding, and then alternate every hour or so throughout the night. So it’s not like I’m mad writing or anything from midnight to 4am, but around 4am it’s safe to stick them in the crib in the bedroom and Emily gets up at 6am with 7 or so hours of sleep and I can catch a 4am-11:30am sleep shift.

I don’t particularly mind the all night midnight shift, I just am not as energetic during it as I was before the health concerns. My hope, actually, is that I can keep being the all night shifter because when they move to being asleep, I can maybe set them up in my office and write as they sleep. Right now I am getting reading and small projects done during the night (some proposals, non fiction work, articles, etc), but nothing that requires mad creativity, which requires some energy and alertness for me.

While we did solve the sleep-for-adults issues, I’m still losing a lot of day-time productivity, and even though on maternity leave, Emily still has to grade and run her class from a distance, and she’s taking grad school classes still, so I am in the process of hunting down someone who can come in and help out during the day (above and beyond family and friends, who have been very helpful, but the nature of twins is that one person will come over to help and sit with one baby, and one of us still has to play zone coverage on the other, so you still lose the time anyway, and everyone comes on weekends or after work). As a result I missed a deadline on a short story in favor of meeting a deadline on a high, high paying freelance project (babies gotta eat, right?).

As for those who wonder about sleep and stress, it’s not all that different from when I’m on deadline. And as for lifechanging, the babies are cool, but since I was never one for partying or ‘hanging out’ because I spent most of my time writing and reading, I’m still in my house Friday night with a book, the difference is that there’s a baby balanced on the other knee.

And as you can see from the picture above, the kids are down with daddy pwning zombies with an assault rifle.

In 6-7 years I’m hoping I can mic them up and get them to cover point, because I’ve played Xbox online, and there’s nothing with faster trigger reflexes and a good bead for a headshot than a 6 year old, and women have even better hand eye coordination, so I think we might be able to create a good team if they’re willing.

I’ll have to get a better A/V system though… hmm..

In the meantime, though, babies are all like “buy daddy’s books:”

Filed under the topic Journal on May 1st 2009 at 3:21 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.

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16 Responses so far

1. Jon Hansen on May 1st, 2009 at 3:31 pm
That’s an awesome pic, dude.
2. Alex Bledsoe on May 1st, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Sounds like you’re adapting just fine, which is what we humans do. Even writer humans.
3. Catherine Shaffer on May 1st, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Love the shameless use of cute kids for marketing purposes. I am not sure that “This isn’t changing my life and I’m getting plenty of sleep thanks” is a position you want to invest in. I’ve not known anyone who said that having children changes your life for the worse, so I would say buckle up and enjoy the ride. I think the zombie pwnage is a great idea. On the other hand, you could end up like Hines, writing books about Princesses.
Also glad to see the babies are still cute. Go cute!
4. Kate Nepveu on May 1st, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Love the pictures. (What’s the kitchen timer in the second one for?)
Good luck on getting extra help to get stuff done. We have to make really concerted efforts with just one baby in the house, so I can imagine the difficulty with two.
5. Tobias Buckell on May 1st, 2009 at 4:04 pm
“This isn’t changing my life and I’m getting plenty of sleep thanks” is a position you want to invest in.
I’m not sure telling me how I should think is a position anyone should invest in around me.
6. Tobias Buckell on May 1st, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Love the pictures. (What’s the kitchen timer in the second one for?)
It’s actually a thermometer and humidity meter. I got it when they first came home, as they’d had trouble keeping their body temperatures up (hence the special care unit stay for them) and so I was making sure the house was keeping their area at just the right temp and were taking their temps as well every couple hours. Now we just keep it there for reference, probably another few weeks, and then I’ll just clip it somewhere in the bedroom.
Good luck on getting extra help to get stuff done. We have to make really concerted efforts with just one baby in the house, so I can imagine the difficulty with two.
Yeah, we both keep laughing that having one sounds like a piece of cake LOL Not that you feel any less imposed upon, but everything takes twice as long or needs both people.
I have a lot of respect for single parents!
7. Matt Forbeck on May 2nd, 2009 at 12:09 am
Glad to hear it’s not been a traumatic adjustment for you. When our little ones were that age, we had to put them all on the same schedule, waking them up and feeding and changing them at the same time. It’s possible to feed two at once if you put each of them in one of those bouncy seats. We also used these styrofoam bottle proppers that kept the bottles on their chests, but they kept knocking them over every time they moved, so it got to be like spinning plates to keep it all right. Sounds like you have it working well for you either way!
8. Jaime on May 2nd, 2009 at 11:20 am
I love the picture of the girls with the book. Awesome. *g*
And I predict they will be kicking your ass at just about any video game by the time they’re six.
9. Wyman Cooke on May 2nd, 2009 at 8:50 pm
The Kooyt! It burns!
Jaime, I think his plan is to have them on his team in CTF or team frag.
10. Mahesh Raj Mohan on May 3rd, 2009 at 2:31 am
Great, great pictures. I’m also glad to read about your adjustments, and it seems like your schedules are working effectively, which is doubly heartening. Go Family Buckell!
11. Suzan on May 3rd, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Your girls are so adorable! Love the zombie battling baby on lap, too. *grin* And my husband thought breast-feeding our son during Buffy would corrupt him…
12. Laurie Mann on May 3rd, 2009 at 9:30 pm
When Leslie was that little, I’d hold her on my lap while I typed apazines (back in the typewriter and APA days). That only lasted a couple of months; she was soon way too squirmy.
Some preemies will sleep reasonable numbers of hours pretty quick. I was surprised Leslie would sleep for six hours at a time by the time she was about four months old, which was a big surprise. A welcome one, but a surprise. She never did sleep 12 hours straight, but did sleep 11 hours by about 6-8 months.
13. Steve Buchheit on May 4th, 2009 at 7:05 am
“Daddy, why do we have nightmares with zombies and this strange, rhythmic clacking sound?” or “Can’t sleep, keyboard will eat me!”
Yeah, might want to rethink some of that, Tobias.
And you know, some guys use kids to get dates, it’s not that bad to use them to push your books. Although they might bruise in weird ways with all those books in the stroller. And the cellphone-based, credit-card swipe-brick shouldn’t be used as a teething device.
14. Kate Nepveu on May 4th, 2009 at 9:58 am
I have no idea how single parents manage. None at all.
I forget exactly when SteelyKid started grabbing for my keyboard and trackball–certainly by six months–so enjoy having yours near your computer equipment while you can . . .
15. Jeff Hentosz on May 4th, 2009 at 11:53 am
“…there’s nothing with faster trigger reflexes and a good bead for a headshot than a 6 year old…”
This may qualify as one of the most important pronouncements made on the internets so far this year. Easily.
16. Mary Turzillo on May 20th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Whoa! I remember what it’s like to keep up with one full-term infant and try to do anything else! How the heck is Emily managing all that? (I long ago concluded that you’re just superman, so I’ll refrain from asking about you.)
Wow!
Incredibly cute babies. I wish I’d asked if I could hold one, just for a minute –

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Tobias is a Caribbean-born SF/F novelist who lives in Ohio.

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