Dummies & Diapers

I recently read about the brilliant Spoon Theory and while I am not sick I felt it was easily applicable to my current situation with a 2 month old, colicky baby. Obviously I am not comparing being ill to having a baby (I love my little baby girl and I am pretty sure noone ever said that about their illnesss), but the idea of having a finite amount of spoons resonated with me.

Spoons however are not really that geeky, so I came up with my own version of the theory.

Life with a colicky baby is like playing oldschool D&D. You roll your character and based on your stats you have a certain amount of hit points. Once your hit points reach 0 it is game over.

Here is my stats sheet:

© Mistel 2013

Every morning you start out with full Energy Points, but each task you do takes away a certain amount of points. Want to go grocery shopping? Roll a D20 to see if your baby gets hungry midway. You rolled too low, ouch, baby lands a critical wail at you in the middle of the supermarked. You loose 4 Energy Points!

Want to vacuum? Roll the die again to check against your luck. If you roll high enough the white noise from the vacuum cleaner will lull your baby to sleep so you only loose 1 Energy Point.

Baby is crying, roll the die against your ability in baby decoding. Result: 1... Ouch critical failure, you thought the baby was hungry, but she wasn't now she is in hysteria and it will take 1 hour of walking back and forth singing to her before she calms down. You loose 5 Energy Points.

One of your friends ask if you want to meet up for lunch. Preparing to leave the house includes feeding and changing your baby. You loose 2 Energy Points for that and another 1 for packing the changing bag and walking back and forth to the cafe because you have to take an extra long route  as the pavement on the route you normally take does not accomodate a pram.

Your Energy Points got to -3, because you had to change diapers 3 times during the night? You will have a negative modifier for tomorrow... it is going to be a loooong day.

I hope my geeky version of the Spoon Theory helps non parents understand how it is to have a baby. When I decline a lunch invitation, it is not because I don't want to hang with you, it is simply because it is only 11:30, my Energy Points are already at 2 and I am fresh out of potions ;)

The mother of all games

When I was 12 years old one of my favourite computer games was Scorched Earth. I played it religiously for months even though I rarely had anyone but the computer to play against.

For those who haven't had the pleasure of gaming in the early 90th, Scorched Earth was the predecessor to artillery strategy games such as the well known Worms series. The goal is to shoot down your opponents using a variety of weapons while battling obstacles such as wind and terrain. One of the more frustrating things with Scorched Earth was that if your tank got hit, but not killed, the power of which you could shoot with was diminished making it impossible to reach your opponent if they were just a bit away from you. This could be mitigated by buying batteries to replenish your power, but most of the time you would just sit there waiting for the computer or opponent to finally take you out.

Scorched Earth was nowhere near as advanced and polished as the later games in the genre came to be, but it was intensely satisfying to take aim, shoot and be rewarded with a big explosion.

But hold on, why am I suddenly talking about a 20 year old game you wonder? Well, I have realized that some parts of having a newborn baby is kinda like playing Scorched Earth. I am thinking of diaper change here.

If you have never changed a diaper on a baby before you might not be able to relate, but if you have you will recognize this scenario:

You place the baby on the changing table and remove the diaper. Suddenly their behind transforms into a deadly weapon aimed right at you. While you are cautiously trying to clean your little one, they in turn are wiggling their bottocks trying to calculate wind speed and velocity.

Most of the times we parents manage to finish the cleaning and changing task before they get the right angle down, but I bet others like me have experienced a couple of game over situations where you find yourself needing a change and shower after the ordeal.

The reason for writing this blogpost today is that my little beloved baby owned me good this morning with a fully powered up straight hit from with her deadly combined pee and poo ammunition.

It was quite yucky and I will spare you any further details, however luckily I didn't explode like the tanks in Scorched Earth and at least now I know my little daughter is already on her way to becoming a pro gamer!

(Oh and there are points for those that gets the reference in the headline!)