girl vs internet

ok srsly i am kinda obsessed with dall e 2

Ok, I’m done, I know everything there is another web development now.

Haha, ok, maybe not. But I have FINALLY slogged my way through the coding bootcamp I’ve been working on for the last year.

At this point I’ve really just learned enough to know that I still know pretty much nothing. The good news is that I can proudly point you to my freshly deployed app and say yes, I got through the entire stupid course and built a FULL STACK WEB APPLICATION.

Admittedly, it’s not much to look at, especially when you compare it with platforms like Shopify, Medium or any of the many services that enable total beginners to get up and running with little / no coding skills, it really looks like nothing.

But I will tell you right now, this was not nothing. A year ago, I knew HTML circa 1997, and had poked at CSS with minimal success a few times. Now I have some decent experience with javascript / node. I can bumble my way around Bootstrap. I know how to build dynamic HTML using EJS templates. Learning how that worked in itself, was pretty mind-blowing.

I learned how to use mongoDB and Express, and even implemented “full CRUD” (Create, Read Update, Delete) functionality for users.

Do you have any idea how much goes in to making a freaking user account????

Not only can users make an account, once they are logged in, users can upload photos! Which are stored in the cloud! Passwords are hashed and salted! Posts are geolocated and cool maps are automatically generated! And much more!

Recently I posted about my 9 month old using the potty and had some friends ask me to share my secrets about early potty learning, so here’s an obligatory long winded personal story that gets in the way of you accessing the actual information you came for. :)

TLDR: Get a copy of the book “Diaper Free Before 3” and read it. 

I first learned about Elimination Communication (EC) at the Postpartum group I attended after my daughter was born. If you’ve never heard about EC, it can seem pretty radical; the idea that even newborn babies can learn to eliminate on cue, reducing the need to wear diapers from a super young age.

So a speaker came to our weekly meetup and introduced the idea, showed some of the positions and gave some advice on how to do it. My newborn was fussing, but I remember one of the veteran moms said she’d been doing it successfully with her first since very young. I was impressed, skeptical, anxious and incredibly sleep deprived. But I took a handout and decided to give it a try. 

Later, I tried holding my 2 month old baby over the sink and making the pee sound. She was not impressed. I tried a few more times and on each occasion she screamed and cried so much I eventually thought, screw this. I was already struggling with breastfeeding, sleep and soul-crushing anxiety; I wasn’t interested in complicating one of the only parts of our days that was working. So I stuck with the cloth diaper service and forgot about EC for the time being.

8 months later we moved to a small city in the mountains and no longer had access to the diaper service. We switched to disposable diapers and didn’t feel great about it. But with no extra help at home I was ready to try anything to make our lives a bit easier. Thankfully, our girl started sleeping through the night around the same time, so I slowly began to be able to think straight again, and remembered that whole EC thing I’d heard about. 

This is when I found the book: Diaper Free Before 3. I bought a used copy from Amazon and it was the beginning of our potty journey. 

I won’t go into the whole method here but will emphasize this book / method is a great tool for people who aren’t “hardcore” EC from birth, but rather more casually interested in getting their kid out of diapers earlier. The first phase (Introducing the potty) is recommended to start as early as 6-9 months; we started around 13 months and had great success. 

Another great thing about this method is that you can TOTALLY do it part time; it’s basically the only thing I’ve found in parenting that still works if you’re not super consistent about it. 

Anyway, the main thing we did is completely simple:

Get a potty

Put your kid on the potty

Pretty simple, right? Of course, there’s more to it, but that’s pretty much the gist of it. The goal is to make sitting on the potty just another normal thing we do with our babies / toddlers throughout the day, just like sitting in a high chair, stroller, bath, etc. Sometimes your baby might not want to sit, and that’s totally fine. My little guy is super active and sometimes has NO interest in sitting, so I never force it. I just give him hugs and get on with the day. Other times he’ll be more into it and just look so incredibly thrilled when he realizes he’s doing a poo. 

Depending on how motivated you are, you can begin to watch for “cues” that your baby needs to go. Some babies are super obvious, especially when they are trying to poo, they’ll have a tell such as grunting or making a certain face. My guy just holds still and sort of holds his breath a bit. It’s pretty subtle, but really easy to catch now that I’m aware of it. 

When I decided to start a family instead of “figuring my life out,” I did it with a not so secret hope of having some epiphany of higher calling after becoming a mom. I figured having children would show me where my true values lie, which would magically direct me towards some sort of cosmic purpose.

Turns out living with, and being the primary caregiver of, two children under three years old is actually a gruellingly full time job with little time leftover for epiphanizing. 

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about my lack of clarity and direction in my creative / professional / personal life and decided that it’s ok that I haven’t become a CEO of my own company or written a novel while holding my baby on my lap. I’m not JK Rowling and I’m not Sarah Lacy, even though I admire what both of those women managed to accomplish while their babies were tiny. 

I have always been stuck in this perpetual identity crisis; I want to rebrand myself every time a new interest sparks, with the label that THIS TIME I HAVE IT FIGURED OUT. But the thing is, I’m just a person with a really wide range of interests. Sometimes I will focus on one of them intently for a long time, ignoring the others entirely. Sometimes I rotate through my interests rapidly. Sometimes I become momentarily infatuated with something only to lose interest entirely a week later. I have always been this way, and I’ve struggled with it a lot as an adult. I think it is the root of my imposter syndrome. 

~~

Anyway, I don’t need / have time to delve deep into my psyche about all this, but I just wanted to share that I’ve decided to just embrace the randomness and try to stop worrying about it. I have about a dozen or more projects or things I want to write about swirling around in my head at any given moment, and if I don’t find an outlet for them soon I think my brain might explode. I might not complete all of the things I start but I just need to start somewhere. 

~~

At the end of a long day managing super fussy, no-napping, post-immunization baby, I pick the toddler up at daycare. At home, I juggle food onto the table with the unimpressed baby balancing over my left arm. 

The toddler miraculously eats most of, takes her small plate back to the kitchen without being asked. Then she takes her stuffed kitty - her best friend - back to her little table.

She’s dressed in a long sleeve black shirt, black and white striped pants. The top of her her crazy curls barely contained in a fuzzy top knot. She sits on her chair, perches kitty on her lap so his chin rests on the table, neatly crosses her legs. Then she just sits quietly drinking milk out of a tiny mason jar, with her black and white cat.

Consider this: I managed to get them both out of the house and into the car by 8am, drove to West Vancouver (about 45 minutes from here) without the two of them melting down, which in itself is something of a miracle. (Driving on the highway, where you can’t easily pull over, is super fun when you have an infant going nuclear in the backseat, since there is exactly 0 useful things you can do about it.)

So, we get to the park where we will be meeting our friends. I feed the baby in the front seat before shoving him into the carrier while the toddler ‘reads’ to me from her seat in the back. Once we are ready to go she whines about various injustices, such as my insistence that she holds my hand while we cross the parking lot. She now also decided she doesn’t want to see her friend, and the baby decides that he is unimpressed about being in the carrier, so he joins in the whining by writhing around and grunting.

It’s at this point that I realize my 2 morning coffees and litre of water has caught up to me. We’re at a fancy West Vancouver park that I know has nice washrooms so this should be relatively easy, right? Wrong. The washroom is closed for service.

Now, this isn't a problem for the children, since one is in a diaper and the other loves peeing in the grass. But mom, who has an infant strapped to her chest and is over the age of what, 6? can’t comfortably pop a squat in the middle of a ritzy ocean side playground while her toddler runs wild. Then I see it: PORTA POTTY.

Dilemma: How does one use a porta potty while needing to supervise two tiny children? I can’t very well let my toddler run free, in a park next to the ocean. I also doubt I have the core strength to hover an adequate distance over the seat with the baby strapped to my chest. Never mind the fact that I’d be bringing my tiny, not-yet-vaccinated baby into a germ covered greenhouse filled with literal poo.

Solution: HOLD IT FOREVER.

Being a mom has forced me to access previously untapped reserves of mental strength in order to not absolutely lose it on my kids on a regular basis, so I just convinced myself I didn’t need to pee for now. Later when my friend and her daughter arrived, I managed to get the baby happy enough so I could ditch him with her while the two toddlers played and I escaped relieve myself in the humid poo filled box unencumbered by spawn.

It was gross, but great, and provided me the opportunity to have the following conversation for THE ENTIRE DRIVE HOME:

I haven’t been writing since my kid was born over two years ago. Now I have two kids and have decided to start writing again.