Dear XYZ,

Y was born on 8 August 2026. That makes me a dad, which is something pretty incredible to wrap my head around. In some ways, having a kid is one of the most typical things about life — otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this and you wouldn’t be reading it — but yet every individual birth feels like such a miracle in itself. How is it that a sperm and an egg can come together to create a brand new human being with combined traits from mom and dad?

Y’s birth was relatively successful. There was a short moment where there was a possibility that we may have to do an emergency C-section but fortunately we didn’t have to resort to that. C did an amazing job, she’s a trooper as usual. What’s kind of funny is that we found that Y probably had his hand on his face when mommy was trying to push him out, so the pushing took a bit longer than we thought it would, though again, relatively short.

I brought my mom to visit Y at the hospital on the second day. I managed to muster my courage and broached the religion topic which I wrote about previously. While she would’ve preferred a different outcome, she was accepting of our decision. Mom said that she hopes that I don’t have to go through some kind of catastrophic experience to rediscover faith. She mentioned that the testimonies that she hears for rebound Catholics often involve them going through some kind of traumatic event. I think there’s some survival bias here, that many of these returning Catholics have experienced such painful life-changing incidents found solace in faith. The people who led otherwise ordinary lives likely stayed the course. This could explain why those testimonies aren’t heard, or even if they are, they are likely much less salient than the painful ones. This experience has also led me to think about the relationship between life and writing (or perhaps more broadly, art). I’m not sure if I would have the same conversation with my mom had I not put it into writing. In that sense, I have already gained from writing by living more truthfully. Perhaps writing can act as a sort of rehearsal by staging the situation with words first.

Y is absolutely adorable. He makes really epic funny faces and poses. It’s super fun to observe him grow.

As of this writing, Y is on his thirteenth day. In the first two weeks, I think the main concern is getting the baby to regain their birth weight. For those who don’t know (I only found out during pre-natal courses), babies will usually lose some weight after birth and regain it by the second week or so. One of my personal challenges during this phase, as someone who loves to plan, is that Y’s hunger doesn’t really follow a fixed schedule. So things change on a daily basis. Having medical consultative help has been a great source of confidence and reassurance, and so has the occasional questions to Claude for consolidating normative benchmarks and guidelines. Prescriptive science, when applied to medicine and biology, is normative in nature. This means that parents are often trying to fit a shape that is defined by normative distribution. I have some thoughts about this, I think it’s probably the best approach that we know of, but it immediately forces parents to be in a comparative state of mind and to worry about “standards” right after the baby is born — I’m not sure if that’s a good starting mental space for new parents. I might discuss this more in a separate post. Fortunately, we just came back from the medical appointment and Y is now heavier than his birth weight. So in that regard, we’re probably done with this first “quest”.

So far most things have been within the range of expectations — disrupted sleep, less structured time, changing diapers, getting pooped, peed, and puked on. Things have been a lot easier with mom holding the fort in the kitchen, cooking delicious meals for us everyday. It has been immensely helpful to not have to worry about it and know that C’s diet is properly taken care of. I can’t imagine doing this without at least some parental leave. I don’t understand how some working parents are able to survive with little to none of it. Caring for a baby is something that requires time and takes some getting used to. I find myself feeling somewhat tired and thus frustrated at times even when I’m on paternity leave. I can’t imagine people who have to juggle everything all at once in the first few weeks of their baby’s life. I feel like it would be a lot harder to enjoy this time if there are so many other things that require your attention. I’m really lucky to have this time to be with my family.

The last thing I wanted to mention today is that there is a lot of well-meaning advice and pointers that come your way as a parent. I don’t think I know how to properly deal with those yet; I mostly find them somewhat annoying. What I find especially annoying are people telling me all the work that needs to be done and pointing out all of the tasks. I find that kind of… boring and off-putting? Maybe it’s just me being weird haha, but I don’t think it’s super helpful to give such information nowadays in such an information-dense world? I think if the roles are reversed, what I would say instead is to assure the parent(s) that they’ll do a great job and tell them the cool things to look forward to, for instance, the funny little noises that they make and their cute facial expressions.

All in all, glad that things are going well in general. Definitely more to come!

xoxo,
K