Advice for my daughter on her birthday

Some months before my daughter was born, I started writing down (well, writing in emails to myself) things I've learned over the years that might save her some trouble to know. I've been holding onto this for a while now, so I'm putting this out there now so she can read it when she's able.

The rest of this post is for her.

…

In honour of your first birthday, here's some advice from me to you. It won't make sense to you now, but it will at some point. I could just wait and tell you these in person over the years, but I felt it would help their creditability to you by posting them anonymously on the internet.
All of these have stood the test of time and helped me over the years. All I can hope is that some of this might make your life a little better.

Never get the cheapest of anything unless you know exactly what you're getting into. There's a reason it's cheap, and if they could legally make it cheaper, they would.
That said, if it's cheap and small enough, experiment. Sometimes the cheapest option is the one which leaves out all the crap you don't want.

Start a skin care regime by 20 at the latest. You'll appreciate it when you're 40 and people are constantly shocked to find out how old you are.

Never tell someone when you find something is broken. A fair chunk of the time they'll just not notice and make it work anyways. Thanks for letting me stay at your place. As thanks, I baked you some cookies. – oh, I meant to tell you, that oven has never worked since I moved here.

Rocket science is easy – it's rocket engineering that's hard. Anyone with a pencil and a basic knowledge of maths can figure out the escape velocity to get into the desired orbit. The hard thing is figuring out what chemical reaction will get the rocket up to speed. But without exploding the rocket. Or destroying the ground under it. Or what to make it strong enough to bear the strain, but not too heavy to lift. And make sure it goes in the right direction (up). And with a reasonable acceleration to not destroy the payload. And that doesn't include what to do once it's in orbit. Engineering is like art. You never finish a project – you just declare it good enough it and hope for the best.

Dare to be different is easy. Anyone can be contrary. The hard thing is to dare to be the same. It's okay to like what everyone else likes if you really do like it.

Follow you dreams, but remember, someday you'll actually finish them. And then what? Keep in mind what you want to do next. When playing pool the trick is not to just get the ball in the pocket, but to set yourself up to make the next shot as well.

Don't be too afraid of trying something new. The world can take you to wonderful places if you let it.

Just because someone doesn't like you doesn't mean you shouldn't be nice to them. There's no point in being mean to them, and if they're actually a decent person, they'll eventually come round.
Likewise, just because you don't like someone, doesn't mean you should be mean to them. Actually, not being mean to those you don't like makes them that much more tolerable.

You can do anything if you have enough time or enough money. With enough effort a single dedicated person can produce a world-class creation. Don't be put off trying something because you don't have the materials or aren't qualified. And don't be afraid to ask for help from people you trust.

Not everything you feel makes sense. You're just a bag of meat and hormones that thinks it's a person – just like everyone else. Learn to recognise when there's a good reason for you to feel sad, tired, angry or whatever. And also recognise when it's just because your body is just out of whack.

When you're wrong, admit it. Then try to fix it. Then move on. Rarely are the consequences of screwing up worse than the gaping hole of trust denial leaves.

Patience is not a virtue. You can end up just watching life pass you by. Do it now. And if you fail, there's still time to try again later.

Keep a duplicate of all your essential medicines, toiletries and makeup in a small bag. Spontaneous adventures are much more fun when you feel clean and looking your best.

That which does not kill you only sometimes makes you stronger. But it still really hurts and always takes time to recover.

Time spent clubbing till the wee hours is not wasted. Some of my closest friends to this day were met clubbing. And the dancing is great exercise – I'd never been so fit in my life than when I was going out 5 nights a week. Plus, learning to get by with lots of exertion and minimal sleep is invaluable if you ever have a baby.

I'd say Trust your instincts, but that really does depend on having some quality instincts in the first place. That will come in time. Until then, don't overthink things. Your first guess is usually correct, or close enough.
With enough second guessing you can convince yourself anything is true. The scary thing is, everything you think might be true probably is – to some degree. And the thing you thought of first most likely came to mind because it's the biggest factor.

Most people are wrong. The best admit they don't know. The worst just lie and make something up.

And finally, take advice with a grain of salt. Take this advice with a grain of salt. Don't just learn what people tell you, understand it. Use it, discard it or replace it with something better. And when you have something better, pass it on so someone else can use it or perfect it.

You've been amazing so far and I'm sure you'll get by just fine. It's been a delight just seeing the person you're becoming. And I'm kind of jealous for all the good things you've got ahead of you. Happy birthday sweetie!

The next generation

The other day I saw a presentation about designing things for today's youth market – "Generation Y" – which got me thinking what the traits of my daughter's generation will be like?

I grew up in the US squarely in Generation X. The aimless slackers from the 80s built a future for ourselves in the Internet in the 90s. We had the first taste of what the future would be like. It wasn't flying cars and jetpacks. It was instant communication with everyone you know, all the worlds knowledge at your fingertips, and your brain half-delegated into the cloud, accessible wherever and whenever you wanted.

Generation Y grew up with the web already in place, but missing that overall sense of no future gotten by growing up under Reagan or Thatcher. They seem to have much more sense of entitlement. Not than Gen X doesn't have that too — not everyone my age grew up expecting to live in Brazil, Delicatessen or Clerks. But the sense of why can't I have nice stuff? seems pretty strong in today's pop culture.

The meeting of Gen Y's instant gratification with the smartphonification of the internet is the generational change that even the most hypersocial Gen Xer has trouble keeping up with. Where Gen X tried to change the world with technology, Gen Y seems to be building a place for making money and getting nice things, a la App stores and Kickstarter.

So with Generation Y being always on, always connected and comfortable living in public, what's Generation Z going to be like? How are they going to think? What are they going to build that's going be so different that I can't imagine it?

What happens when all you've ever known is that you can hear any song, watch any movie, know any fact, find any recipe, read any book, take any class, at any time with no effort? Do you get lazy with too many choices? Will misinformation drown out the real media and real facts (Are you sure Mark Twain didn't write Tale of Two Cities? My online comp lit class covered him during the Naturalism movement.)

How much effort we spent finding that hidden gem of a song/book/movie/whatever was a blessing for our generation as well as a tragedy. They were hard to find, but once we got it, we really appreciated it. When we got our hands on that album we'd been hunting for ages, we listened to it over and over until we could recite the whole thing end-to-end in our sleep. And there was that movie we finally saw at 35 that would have changed our lives if we saw it when it came out when we were 17.

Will Gen Z be better off having everything at their fingertips? Never missing out on that lost opportunity? Or will they be so blasé about it that they never bother to watch anything more than once, if even that? Will anything have the chance to really impact or will it just be one more byte in the feed?

I focus on this because it's the most obvious trend I can see coming to a point in the next decade or so. There's lots of other technological things I can see coming, but social trends they usher in are much harder to predict. I've always been a little ahead of the game on using internet for communication (I was researching the mobile computing and social networking back in 1995), so I'd like to think I can at least have a chance of getting in the head of my daughter's generation on that front.

But will the mobile internet still be the defining factor on her generation? There are so many things that we appear to be on the crux of. Climate change, alternative energy, bio and nano tech, air travel, economic/political turmoil… All of those are potential game changers. It's hard to picture what could happen, let alone how it's going to affect culture.

Baby sat

Our first professional babysitter went off without much of a hitch.

The biggest problem was using an online-only agency. We could book, but not give any special instructions. And I really did feel that when sitting a kid for the first time, a heads-up about what they're like would be useful. But there was no way to put that info in the booking, and they only contacted me via SMS, with no return number. So there was no way to say the important essentials:

• She's walking and quite mobile, but can't manage stairs on her own yet.
• We use cloth nappies
• Take her to the loo whenever she wakes up – it usually means she has to go
• She will usually fight and complain when going to sleep
• We've no TV. Bring something to read or a laptop or phone.

That alone would have avoided the surprises the sitter had when she got here. Each datum we told her was followed by a bit of raised eyebrow making it clear this would not be a usual sit. Only the lack of TV warranted an Oh no! from the sitter, in that usual English ambiguously mock tone where you can't tell if they're serious or not.

I did spend the effort in the afternoon setting up a guest wifi account so she could get online, but not access our intranet or require us to change our passkey afterwards. But she didn't bring anything internetly with her. On the uninformed front, I too didn't know what we were getting beyond someone with a female first name. I was more expecting a 20 year old net-savvy txt-maniac. Not the I've brought a newspaper grandmother we got. On the bright side, at least she'd seen cloth nappies before. 15 years ago.

Regardless, it went off as we'd hoped. We left the flat and heard not a peep from her. We got home at 1am and the girl was asleep. And when the girl next woke, she wasn't visibly distressed or anxious from having us gone.

This bodes well for future sittering. Though at £50+ for a night I'd really like to keep it to a minimum.

Baby sitter

Tomorrow we're getting our first real baby sitter. Hiring a professional to come in and look after the child while we go off to an evening wedding.

I really don't know the etiquette for this. We don't have a TV. I don't have any computers in the house I'm comfortable letting a stranger use. Do I give the sitter our Wifi key and tell her to bring a laptop or phone? Tell her to bring a good book? She's going to sit in our house for 7 hours – maybe 5 or so after the kid's gone to bed.

Do I provide food for her? The sitter, not the baby. The baby gets all the milk she needs (L's been pumping). Do I leave something for the sitter? Um, there's oatmeal and lemonade and some left-over pasta sauce in the fridge. And help yourself to espresso. Somehow I don't think that'd be too appealing.

And looking at our house from the perspective of a stranger — man it's unevenly cluttered. Yes, it's a bit messy. that we can tidy up. But a lot of things just have no "away". They came into the house after the baby was born and have just sat on a sofa or chair or table, and that's as away as they get. At least through some rather hard work in the past week from L we can now walk from one end of the nursery to the other without having to jump over something (which I can kind of pretend was a makeshift baby gate).

On a similar note, today she found the off switch for the router. She just crawled over and cheerily flicked the switch on the surge protector. Fortunately the PC plugged into it was off, but it killed the internet for a bit. Perhaps it was because I stopped her from pulling the books off the shelves? Regardless, I've got to find a way to have my stuff and her stuff coexist in the same rooms.

Now we are walking

She started walking for real on Tuesday. L gave her the bottom end of a crutch, which she used as a cane. Quite successfully, too. The girl used it to keep her balance while walking, and even tried to use it to help her stand from sitting.

By Thursday she no longer needed the crutch. Which was good, since we lost it. She was standing easily on her own and walking without being prompted. And opening cabinets, because she's not just picking up one skill at a time.

Today, L and I were playing catch with the child. L sat on the floor about six feet away from me, holding the girl, and I'd beckon her over. She'd walk to me giggling the whole way. I'd turn her around, and she'd walk back to L. Repeat over and over. It's really quite fun.

Three legs for elevenses

I tried an experiment last weekend. We were at the park with some friends. One of their kids had a pinwheel on a long somewhat sturdy stick. I wanted to see how the girl got by with standing if she could use a cane.

She stands easily enough holding on to things, but up till then had never stood for more than a few seconds. So I demonstrated to her how she could hold the stick braced against the ground and stand that way. She understood, but not in the way I expected. She held on the stick and stood for a bit. Then lifted the stick in the air, still holding onto it tightly. And she stood for the next 30 seconds or so. Then she took a single step before decided this was too much, and sat down.

Clearly, she understood it was the stick that helped her stand. Though she didn't get that it helps her stand by bracing it against the ground. But, whatever works for her. I need to get a stick like that for her, so she can practice this at home.

Edited to add: Turns out she's done much better since then. I took this shot the next day, but it illustrates this story quite well.