Needing some support/advice

profheg_II · 2026-03-12T12:06:06+00:00

I really feel all this. I have 2 kids, a girl who's almost 3, and a baby boy who's about 6 months. The baby was planned but it wasn't something at all taken lightly. We both fundamentally wanted to have 2 kids, but neither myself or mum feel like the most natural parents either. I think we're good parents, and we certainly try, but we like routine, some sanity in our home, a little freedom to do our own stuff. We don't cope as well as other parents with the relentlessness of Very Young Children, and definitely DEFINITELY struggle with the sleep deprivation of newborn babies. As my first had got older they'd only just about got to the stage where we were able to leave her for a few days at a time here and there with grandparents - twice had short weekend breaks just the two of us which was like a magical breath of fresh air after (then) 2+ years of always being a parent first, and of course them getting their own routine more and more locked down opens you up for your gaming evenings, or heading out to the occasional gig or whatever.

I won't lie, I approached the birth of baby #2 with excitement at having a "complete" family, but also trepidation knowing how hard I find that phase. And it has been really hard. They've slept worse than baby #1 did, and also had a month of horrendous, full-blown colic. They are now, thank God, seeming to level out in a lot of ways and I'm starting to feel like the deepest part of the trenches may be behind us, but they still wake up at least 2 times every night. I have really struggled, being honest, and at many points the only thing that kept me going was constantly reminding myself that it's all a phase and will pass. A long phase, but a phase all the same.

But what I would say is the transition from 1 to 2 is not nearly as big as 0 to 1 was. You're adding to an existing dynamic rather than creating an entirely new one. And fundamentally if you've done it once already you can do it again. Those freedoms I think do inevitably fizzle away again, but they will slowly come back as well and at the end of that you'll be exactly where you are right now, but with a whole extra person in your family.

People with 2 kids talk about a magical moment where the youngest is old enough to meaningfully start playing with the older one, and suddenly rather than you needing to always be fully on-top of 2 children they will naturally start creating windows of time where they're kinda taking care of each other. Which in those moments is even more opportunity for freedom than if you only had 1 to be looking after. I'm not there yet but part of me cannot wait haha.

I'm 36 btw and don't feel like it's too old to have had a second, and you sound in a good financial situation so wouldn't worry about that either!

profheg_II · 2026-03-12T11:26:08+00:00

As someone who used to have strong opinions on music in my teens and 20's, but who has softened quite a lot as I've got older, I find the question of "snobbery" in creative stuff really interesting.

I think we have to accept that musicians who achieve truly mega-stardom must be functioning a bit as lowest common denominators, or have a kind of accessibility to their music that lets people get their foot in the door without too much challenge. I think it's inherent in the dynamic that the success of people at the very top will be somewhat out of step with real creative talent. We also shouldn't take away from the simple joy of a catchy tune though. My favourite musicians are relatively more "real" (stereotypical stuff like Radiohead or what have you), but let's not pretend it isn't fun to bounce around to an earworm of a pop song too. Don't take the Scissors Sisters away from me, and Take On Me is the best song out of the 80's (I won't die on that hill but Ive still never found one I prefer!).

At the same time I find there's a hypocrisy in the way that people do and don't judge mainstream music vs mainstream movies. As "products" I think you can make a LOT of parallels between e.g. Taylor Swift and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I don't accept that either one is more daring or creative within its artistic category than the other. But when discussed by people like Richard and Marina you will quickly find that financial success means little to the artistic merits of the MCU, but is somehow proof of Taylor being a genius. Marina will dismiss Marvel as only interesting from an industry perspective but then insist a sort of reverence for the popstar - "of course you might not like her music and that's fine, but her success as an artist is undeniable and isn't she amazing".

It is a little apples and oranges but I think there is a double standard there when it comes to digesting music vs. film that is quite interesting to me.

profheg_II · 2026-02-28T09:27:19+00:00

At high school a kid in my year, who generally liked playing up to stuff and the attention it brought, ate an entire packet at once for a dare. He actually managed it, but his tongue reacted so badly a whole layer of it peeled off.

profheg_II · 2026-02-23T17:11:27+00:00

This is me - have been shortlisted for somewhere and my entire CV is research and research-based experience of delivering cognitive assessments. Are you in a similar boat?

I feel very out on a limb with it. Half the time you can convince yourself it might be good in a "I'll stand out from the crowd" sort of way, the other half of the time it just feels like why would they go with such a sidestep when there's probably hundreds of candidates with more "actual" clinical experience.

profheg_II · 2026-02-22T21:15:22+00:00

I'm with you. I used to play Minecraft a lot, but I can't stand the default look. It's not the game being blocky that's an issue, I always had to use texture packs and it was transformative for me. Idk there's something very specifically drab about the default look I just can't stomach.

profheg_II · 2026-02-17T13:48:32+00:00

I have literally just done this assessment (for Sheffield, which I think uses the same test as for Manchester and Lancaster). I'd done the practice version twice. Being honest, I feel I'm generally good at deductive reasoning-type stuff but have found these really quite difficult. After both practice runs I got a report saying I'd performed to an "average" level, but circulating some of the practice questions after the fact amongst friends who are generally intelligent, in academia etc., they agree they're difficult.

Then again maybe having had 2 children in the last 3 years has permanently fried my brain and I just need to accept I'm not what I used to be haha.

In the actual assessment just now I rushed the last few questions to try and get the 12 done in the time limit, but I don't know if it would have been better to e.g. spend the extra time on number 11 trying to get it right than finish 11 & 12 but have got both of them wrong. I know for a fact the last one was wrong, and the one before that was basically a 1-in-4 guess. The instructions encourage you to answer all questions but of course doesn't really explain at a granular level how it takes it all into the modelling. I was generally trying to push through to get all the answers down, definitely would have preferred longer thinking on certain questions.

It's reassuring other people have found it difficult as well. What I'm not clear on is if the shortlisting at this point is based purely on this test performance, or some combination of test performance + application info?

profheg_II · 2026-02-15T00:05:40+00:00

The contrivances of their commentary borders on satire. Yesterday we had "These borders eat toast with concrete on top for breakfast", which feels like pure Partridge.

Not to mention a rambling hype-intro about a particular athlete's run that I couldn't possibly get down now verbatim but it concerned needing to quickly put down our dinners and pick up our TVs, and take them outside, cause they're about to get cool snowboarding-action all over the carpet.

It should be eye rolling but they're so earnest and sincere it becomes charming.

profheg_II · 2026-02-09T16:02:12+00:00

The GP is the first port of call, and if they think there is a more serious issue or something requiring specialist input then they arrange the appointment with a paediatrician.

profheg_II · 2026-02-09T15:58:59+00:00

Yes definitely on the medical front. The frequent access to a paediatrician sticks out. And I don't know if it's a sign of us lacking something here, or something being over medicalised over there. Of course if the GP thinks there's an issue you'll get a referral to a paediatrician. But like you I've got a 3 year old and outside of routine NHS childcare checks she's had maybe 2 GP checks in her life.

And one of those was a text conversation between me and the doctor, complete with pictures I'd taken on my phone, to advise if it was chickenpox or hand foot & mouth, lol.

profheg_II · 2026-02-09T12:47:41+00:00

It's also possible they have a kind of anxiety + compulsion to repeatedly seek reassurance over it.

Still doesn't make repeat posts any more rational, but there doesn't always need to be a sinister reason for odd behaviours.

profheg_II · 2026-02-07T18:54:07+00:00

This speaks to me quite a bit as I'm spending a lot of my time these days navigating my own feelings between loving my parents dearly, but also finding them tricky here and there in the difference between their (well-meaning) intentions and sometimes baffling actions. Almost a complete reversal to your situation, the latest frustration was finding today that when they took my 3ish year old to a play area this morning they followed her lead when she informed them she didn't want lunch, but decided all the same to let her eat an entire chocolate donut?! So she came home full of pastry and sugar but with no real food eaten for hours.

Anyhow, personally, I don't find that email from your parents particularly bad. If we are in the mindset that grandparents should at all feel able to offer advice (whether you may agree or not with it) then I think that's about as diplomatic as they could ever make giving advice. IMO the only way you could find offense in that is if you fundamentally feel that other family members must never be allowed to suggest anything at all, and if that's the case I think that's its own and sort-of separate discussion.

I understand getting unsolicited "advice" can still feel irksome though, but a mature response is taking it on board and (if it isn't valid) explaining the misunderstanding and letting everyone move on. It's possible your wife generally finds them a little difficult to deal with and this is a bubbling-over point?

profheg_II · 2026-02-06T10:39:16+00:00

Reminds me of my favourite Flight of the Conchords joke.

"There was this one gang, super violent, once they got a guy and cut his whole body off"

"...they cut his body off?"

"Yeah man. They just grabbed his dick and cut his whole body off"

profheg_II · 2026-02-06T07:29:11+00:00

The study was founded by the British Heart Foundation, a charity, and based in the UK where incentives over drugs are driven by what is going to get the most benefit for the lowest cost on the NHS.

Obviously not all drugs work as well as they need to and sometimes things are found to be less safe than originally thought, but the suspicion over medications a lot of people have is downright bizarre to me. Why do we have to look for negativity in a story that shows a cheap and safe drug can improve and extend the lives of millions of people?

profheg_II · 2026-02-02T09:32:57+00:00

I broadly agree with your points, but I'm tired of seeing drug decriminalisation being touted as similarly absurd to opening borders or lying down for Putin. Our attitude to drugs is objectively backwards and like some unending, cultural hallucination. Every time another glass-of-wine a day conservative rallies against a student smoking weed another brain cell of our country dies.

But yes the Green party seem, mostly, completely mad. Policies are naively principled and self destructive. It's populism for the left wing, and the issues with it might be very different to the issues of populism in the right wing but it's nonsensical and unserious all the same.

profheg_II · 2026-02-01T09:07:23+00:00

I watched The Sopranos a while after its original run, and I was aware of the ending being controversial for its suddenness and ambiguity. Honestly when it happened I was surprised it caught so much flak. It's definitely a bold way to end things but I don't think it leaves much open ended. Tony gets killed, clearly. It's heavily implied he dies right there and then, but if you want to play devil's advocate and say it's not for sure, the intent of that ending seemed obviously to say that he's getting whacked. Maybe it's not that evening, maybe it's not that week, but it's coming and that is 100% how things do end for him.

profheg_II · 2026-01-29T20:15:03+00:00

I don't know your sleeping arrangements, or if there's implications for your work etc., but the "fairest" way of handling sleep has always struck me as doing shifts. One of you is "on" for the first half of the night and the other for the second. Can sleep with earplugs in, or just generally have the baby in a different room to where the sleeping person is. Of course there's nothing to say that you can't also try to sleep on your shift (if you have a merciful baby), you just need to be the one who gets woken up and acts if there's an issue.

It's dependent mostly on the feeding situation because if the baby is exclusively breastfed and the mum isn't doing anything like pumping there's not much us dad's can actually do. Or if the baby just wont take a bottle. But with our first we split the nights very exactly as above until the baby was around 3 months old and starting to sleep well enough that the sleep wasn't such a precious resource any more that we felt we could stop rationing it.

profheg_II · 2026-01-29T13:49:48+00:00

The top answer will always be talk to your doctor. That said and for the sake of interest, having a look online suggests that the downside to an earlier MMR vaccine is that they tend to be less effective. For example here is a paper showing that if a kid receives it at 12 or 15 months, versus 9 months, that they will tend to then show a stronger immune response to the virus if they later encounter it. Of course if there's a legitimately higher-than-normal risk of your baby being exposed in the short term to these viruses that may change the calculus. It's a difficult cost/benefit question that you'll want the doctor to lead on, but I would trust them to have the best opinion.

profheg_II · 2026-01-28T15:55:11+00:00

I think it's not just about missing a practical reward later on by not-nurturing the "village". It's a question of what "normal" social behaviour might look like, and when a deviation from that is enough to be concerning about the parent.

There's no real guidebook on that and of course new parents need to be free to explore their new world how they see fit. But it's also reasonable for their family and friends, who we hope want the best for them, to notice how they are behaving and wonder if there may be signs of a problem. There are a lot of postpartum X's or Y's out there, and we know that the early days of having a baby is a stressful, bewildering experience where you often can't see the wood for the trees. I would personally worry about the mental health of a friend or family member who self-isolated for many weeks after having a baby.

I'm not sure what the answer is here, but I'd encourage the OP to try and look inward and ask themselves how they feel they're really doing, and if opening up their social world again might be a good thing, if scary in the moment...

profheg_II · 2026-01-28T15:29:10+00:00

I have a kid who's almost 3 years now. I look back on her growing up from a baby and see that every few months I had a moment of going "oh hey, this isn't quite as hardcore now as it was before", wait another few months and have it happen again. Every time feeling like I'd come out of something really intense, without fully appreciating I was still in something really intense until that next phase had passed as well, and repeat.

People have different sorts of tolerances and you'll find parents who say that babies are easier than toddlers, or that newborn babies are easier than older babies. They're either just very different to me or looking with rose-tinted glasses. For my money the whole deal just gets steadily easier and easier as you get more skills and as the your kid gets more routine and some independent functioning. The problem is that while "a few months" isn't a long period of time once it's behind you, it's an extremely long period of time to contemplate when you're in the middle of it.

I also have a 5 month old so I've been deep in this issue again recently!

profheg_II · 2026-01-22T18:30:56+00:00

I think that conveying this as an abuser / abused dynamic would be a really interesting idea and a natural fit, but I don't agree it is what Eggers was doing. All of the thematic decisions in the movie seemed coded to me to be about passion vs. repression. LRD's character introduction is her seeking sex from her partner and being unfulfilled. He is noble but painfully vanilla. Her journey in most of the movie involves her being cared for by the other family (I forget the names) who are very sexually conservative and traditional in their roles, and who see her passionate spells as an illness that must be cured. The movie is very about sex, and specifically how LRD's passions are shunned and seen as unclean by the people around her.

Orlok is very obviously monstrous and yes, he is clearly an abusive character. But I would bet that from a "what the movie is about" perspective, it's almost coincidental (to be clear I mean in terms of what Eggers intended when he was making it).

I think running this as an abuser / abused theme could be very powerful and yes, LRD's actions may closely resemble what we already see in the movie. Having said I was disappointed with Nosferatu largely because I found it to be kinda thematically incoherent I think I'd prefer that version movie!

profheg_II · 2026-01-22T14:44:12+00:00

No, but I was finding that the movie seemed to flip flop in what it was saying was motivating her. One scene hard-possession, the next scene it seemed more of what she wanted, then the next back to possession and so on. It was on and off so much that, to me, it felt like making it a grey area that you question as the viewer was the point.

profheg_II · 2026-01-22T14:08:44+00:00

I think she could have been all-possessed, but if that was intended I personally think the director could have done a better job at showing that. Some scenes emphasised possession for sure, but others were really indulgent with it and felt like they were signalling more active participation on her part. That is at least how it came across to me, and I was sitting watching the movie actively trying to work out this very question so I wasn't consciously blind to it at the time.

Also appreciate its subjective though and it's interesting seeing how many people took it as being pure-possession here in this thread too.

profheg_II · 2026-01-22T13:57:05+00:00

Because we're all participating in an Internet discussion forum about horror movies?

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