Home of A Dude's Guide To Babies: fatherhood funnies and advice for new dads
by Richard
Sometimes, the only working refs need is over. With a nightstick.
That is all.
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As has become a bit of a custom around here, I’m taking Saturdays to introduce you all to the actual A Dude’s Guide to Babies, the book Barry and I wrote and are trying to sell to a publisher. Still. Yeah, we’re pathetic, but we’re funny to watch in our misery so enjoy.
Remember, Barry talks like this, while I talk like this.
You’re What?
Easily, by a very large margin, the biggest shock to get over is the very first one you’re going to get: when your wife or girlfriend tells you she’s pregnant.
I wouldn’t know. We adopted. But Rick’s wife is going to kill him…
I do know. It’s true, boy, is it true.
We’ve talked to hundreds of dudes out there and every single one of them felt the same way. Most described the feeling of learning they were going to be fathers as something like getting an axe handle to the back of their heads. It didn’t matter if they had been trying to get pregnant for years, trying for days or not even trying. When a woman walks up to you, smiles and says, “I’m pregnant.” it’s one hellluva shock.
Now here’s our first bit of inside information. When she tells you she’s pregnant, you need to get over that shock so quickly she’ll never even know it was there.
In fact, start practicing right now. Go find a poker game (live, not on-line) and start playing. Get the best poker face at the table. Learn to stare down hissing cobras, anything that will help you learn never to show shock on your face. The mother of your baby to be will not appreciate gape-jawed stupor on your mug.
Trust me on that one.
You’ll have plenty of time to digest the news later. The first thing you need to do is trot out your biggest smile, your happiest voice and your twinklingest eyes and don’t stop hugging her.
We’re not really saying you should fake anything. We’re just suggesting that you speed up your natural reactions pretty darn quickly. Why? We’re going to do a little stereotyping here, but we’ve found it to be true. Pregnant women are, well, sometimes, you understand, a teensy bit emotional and shock can easily be mistaken for dismay. And that is not the way you want to start out on your nine-month adventure in gestation.
Even if she doesn’t say anything at the time, she’ll remember that you weren’t instantly as happy as she was and that, friends, will come back to haunt you.
So, since we all want a household of harmony, peace and joy all the time, and especially during those emotional, pregnant times, it’s best to do your part right from the start. Once the initial celebrations are over and you’ve hugged and kissed and jumped up and down, when you’ve got a little time to yourself, that’s the time to uncork your emotions and realize just what you’re in for.
We recommend trying to get a little you time in those early days, so you can wrestle any doubts into submission and get ready to support her as much as possible as her body goes through changes your puberty never even thought of on its worst days.
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Turns out it’s quantity, not quality when it comes to sleep. Well, it is for older people, if they want to keep their minds working at something approaching a place where they can just barely make out efficiency. (Is it wrong of me to make fun of old people when I’ll so very soon be one of them?) (No. No it is not.)
Anyway.
Scientists have been doing a little investigating again. Pushing back the curtain on reality. Finding out those things man was not meant to know. Or, you know, trying to find some way to spend all that grant money. Your choice.
What they came up with this time is that it’s the quantity of time sleeping that helps to make sure older brains are actually working well the next morning. However, said psychologist Sean Drummond of the University of California, San Diego, for those with younger brains, it’s more the quality of sleep that determines if they’re going to be drooling the next day.
Older adults who had slept for more total time the previous night were able to more accurately remember a list of random nouns than older adults who had slept fewer hours. What’s more, regions of the brain important for learning and memory showed higher activation in fMRI experiments in older adults who had slept more hours.
Sleep quality seemed to have no effect on performance, Drummond said. “For older adults, the absolute minutes of sleep they got last night has a significant influence on performance today,” he said.
Remember what I said about the younger folks needing quality, not quantity? Yeah.
. . . in younger folks, the quality of sleep, and not the total amount, affected memory the next day, Drummond found. Young adults who slept in consolidated chunks performed better and had higher brain activity in certain regions than those who woke up frequently during the night, regardless of total minutes slept.
“Sleep last night does impact performance and brain function today, and it does so differently depending on whether you’re in your mid-20s versus your mid-60s,” he said. “Older adults need to get a certain amount of sleep. Young adults need to get that sleep in a consolidated chunk.”
So what, really, does that mean. After all, everyone knows that as we get older, people get less and less sleep. Which could account for Granny nodding off into her hot toddy around 5 the next afternoon. Well, that and the four toddies previous. Kidding aside, not so fast. Turns out what everybody knows isn’t actually so. Shocking.
Contrary to common beliefs, older adults don’t sleep substantially less than younger adults. From age 35 to 85, people really lose only about an hour of nightly sleep, psychologist Sean Drummond of the University of California, San Diego said at the meeting. Rather, the thing that changes is something called sleep efficiency — a measure of the portion of time spent tossing, turning or lying awake in bed. “The biggest, most common, most robust change is that we spend more time awake in the middle of the night,” Drummond said.
The good news, Drummond said, is that disrupted sleep among the elderly is not harmful in and of itself. Rather, it’s the actual minutes of sleep that need to be watched. Tuning sleep quantity may be a way to prevent common cognitive decline that happens as people age, he said.
You know, I think I’m going to start using this right now. The next time my wife, known to me as She Who Couldn’t Let A Perfectly Good Weekend Go To Waste By Actually Letting Me Enjoy Myself, tries to wake me up early, I’m going to mutter something about needing sleep for my brain to work. Of course, then I’ll get dumped out of the bed onto the hard wood floor, but it’ll be worth a try.
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