London and acid reflux

My daughter London...weighs 9lbs 8 oz and is 23" long. he said again, she is going to be TALL! lol

he felt around and did a couple things to see what he thought and right away she spit up, even tho it had been like an hour and a half since she had eaten so right away he knew thats what was going on. he gave me a perscription for a drop to give her twice a day and said that should help. ill google it before we use it but it was onyl 3 bucks so i just had it filled. 

My worst nightmare

Four hour work week questions

I’d quit working at England logistics and suddenly my car would be in an accident and would be totaled.  We only have liability and so the car would be a total loss.  We’d have to suddenly get another one with a car loan or pay cash, which both would drastically lower our monthly income and we may not be able to afford even just food for groceries and may drawn down our savings significantly. Permanent impact on a scale from 1-10, 2 as we’d just buy a beater or a cheaper ngv that cost significantly less in gas costs.  Not likely to happen as we’re both pretty cautious drivers.

We’d have to start eating our food storage since my/our business wasn’t making enough money to buy groceries and then the economy would implode and we’d have no food to eat when we really needed it and we would’ve been pissed/scared we didn’t just play it safe and stay at the job. Permanent impact on a scale from 1-10, 3 as we may not eat all our food storage and we could use the bishop’s storehouse to offset some of the costs of food if needed and we could build up our store again with a few months of dedicated savings.  Not likely as we could cut back our costs and could find part time work.

We’d have some major medical issues with London or ourselves and couldn’t afford to pay for anything since the hospital bills were so high since we didn’t have health insurance.  Permanent impact on a scale from 1-10, 4 as we’d have to declare bankruptcy and that’d damage my credit history.  Once done though we could rebuild it and be back to good credit standing in 3-5 years.  Possible to happen, but not likely as we all seem to have a pretty good clear bill of health.

Any business wouldn’t bring in enough income to pay our rent and we’d either be late on it or we’d have to dip into savings again to pay for everything.  Eventually when all these things hit at once we wouldn’t have any money to pay for anything and we’d have to move back home, with mom and dad of course paying for the cost of the move out of their own pocket.  Permanent impact on a scale from 1-10, 3 as we could quickly realize we’re not making enough and are uncomfortable with the drawdown of our savings and so I’d go back to work and so would Ashlee.  May happen and is the most likely thing to happen out of all the things mentioned.

  Outcome/benefits of more probable scenarios of leaving England would be that I could wake up when I wanted with my wife and kids.  I’d be able to always get adequate rest.  I’d be working on things that I wanted to be working on and dealing with people I’d have a lot more control over with who I’d be dealing with.  Ashlee may be able to help me work on the business. I’d be able to build synergy with people/businesses that I’d like to build synergy with.  I’d be more fulfilled since I’d be doing what I wanted and not what my boss or his boss wanted.  I’d be able to work from a logical point of view instead of ignoring reality on many things.  I could institute failure in my business and for my employees.  I’d quickly learn what works in business and what doesn’t, whereas now I only know a bunch of theory.  I’d be able to hire other people and help them get ahead in business.  It is possible that one or more of the businesses I work on would include working with my family and friends, which would be awesome to do.  I’d have more confidence.  I’d be able to prove the haters wrong.

      If I got fired today I’d immediately go through all my business ideas myself and with family and pick which ones would be best.  Then I’d validate them.  I may even ask family to invest a small amount of money into the most promising ideas if they wanted in.  If I had to get back to work as a credit analyst I could do so as I’ve already been offered jobs for just such a situation and I’d probably get hired back on at a company that had much better health insurance anyways and so I’d probably come out ahead anyways.

    

    I don’t have my fyf.  I don’t know if any of the ideas I have will actually make money as they’re untested or I’m in the wrong season of the year to start them, those that are seasonal being businesses that require manual labor and that I be there.

“What we fear to do the most is the thing we most need to do.”

     

      Financially I’m not going anywhere fast at England.  They’ve already told me that I’m not getting any more raises beyond that big one I got a year or so ago aside from the yearly increase one I’d be getting going forward.  I didn’t get hired on for the position of credit manager that I’d be perfect for.  They’re not looking to increase my position at that company.  Emotionally I feel like I’m not meeting my potential at that job.  I feel intimidated by people who are no further ahead in what I feel would be progress business wise from coworkers to friends or family.  Emotionally I’m also missing out on spending time with all my family that I’d really like to be spending with them.  We’ll see what happes physically, but I know I could be working out a bit more like I’d like to get into the shape I’d like to and at my current job I don’t have the time I’d like to dedicate to doing just that due to traffic jams, money, and time and location constaints.

TV update

You may get to my point where you come in on Monday and hear people talking about all the football game outcomes from the weekend and you remember that football is actually on and that you don't care that you missed it.  I had my first child born this last week and we had to go to the hospital to put her under observation for high bili levels.  Being in the hospital a couple days last week watching tv was just a reminder how huge of a waste of time it is and how pointless it is and mind numbing.  It is striking to watch tv once you haven't in a long time lol.

I’m going waste time right now cause I want to and can though I know its not good for me by writing this blog post.

I had an interesting conversation with my brother about the businesses/lives we’re currently leading.

I’m a wimp.  This morning I was at least and was very uncomfortable about it.  I didn’t realize I was being one until I was talking to my brother about it hours later.  What I’m referring to specifically is that I was learning some things about how to get inside my customer’s head and the wimp/victim inside of me was saying, “I’ve never been a great salesman.  I’m not sure this stuff will work for me.  I’m not going to be successful in business.”

How lame is that!?!?

As with all addicts, I consider myself to being addicted to being an employee and being small and not successful in business and to those previous thoughts I had, one of the first very crucial steps is to recognize you have a problem number one.  Number two that it is a big problem.  And number three that I’m the only one who can deal it and me alone.

Lucky for me I have conversations with my brother and wife and dad and others that help me see this stuff that I’m doing/saying to myself and can help me change it before it does more damage that it already has.

I know this is going to be a very uncomfortable thing to admit again and again in the future that I’m a wimp in business and need to replace it my inner herculean beast, but I already know what the alternative is if I don’t, i.e. being crapped on as an employee and with no equity to make the getting crapped on portion bearable, and that is not acceptable to me and I won’t stand for it.

That was a big part of my brother and I’s conversation, i.e. making excuses for not being successful in business.  He’s got a girlfriend.  I’ve got a kid on the way.  He’s working out (tired) and so do I and so we don’t want to expend even more energy on things we know we need to do.  I’ve already cut out having a tv.  He’s doing bomb.com things with his health and personal introspective life.  I could keep on going, but the point is we’re always going to have many easily available and seemingly legit excuses (lies) we’ll be able to tell ourselves for why we’re not successful.  I have another kid.  He gets married.  Interest rates are too low.  Interest rates are too high.

I don’t want to admit that even blowing just 3-4 hours on weekend playing my mom’s ipad mini is an issue even though I hardly ever play video games.  I don’t even have my own financial freedom yet via cash flowing assets or a hoarded pile of money that even with the most extravagant amount of spending would not be dented.  Why don’t I?  Cause I don’t want to be accountable for the time I’m spending on that stuff and do things I know are better.  I also don’t want to admit that I’m vastly exaggerating the amount of down time I really need when I do stuff like that and simultaneously want to be successful in business.

One thing I’ve had rumblings of is that I don’t want to be constantly checking out doom and gloom stuff as far as finance goes.  I know its going to come crashing down.  I don’t need to know the minutiae though of how rising interest rates exposed the London Whale fiasco and subsequent speculation about what fiasco is being hidden by the even bigger interest rate rise we’ve seen since.  That is one self truth telling thing I’ve had rolling around that I haven’t vocalized till today.

Instead what I’d really like is to be analyzing my own businesses growth and financial numbers.  So there I go.  I’m going to stop checking out finance stuff all the time.  I need to detox from it.  What I’m going to do is only run a custom macro I have saved in my excel to find out what I really need to for my investments and that will be it.  I’m going to do this detox for a month and see how life is.

Hypnobabies

We're expecting our first child.

As part of our post indoctrination life, I say "our" cause Ashlee found this one, we've come across things as it pertains to childbirthing.  One of those things that is not mainstream and not really anti-indoctrination is hypnobabies.

  And let me clarify that when I say "really" cause sometimes I feel like indoctrination is not only purposely teaching false/misleading things to people, but also purposely not teaching them things they ought to know about.

The other day I mentioned we were doing this class to my mom and she had a "oh..." kinda moment.  That "oh" is something we all know/think when we think of hypnosis.  It is the thought of people up on a stage crowing like a chicken and taking all their clothes off and doing crazy/funny things that they can't control or that they're doing just to be funny or "you're getting very sleepy".

Contrary to popular belief most of us are hypnotized everyday.  Via wikipedia...

Hypnosis is "a special psychological state with certain physiological attributes, resembling sleep only superficially and marked by a functioning of the individual at a level of awareness other than the ordinary conscious state."

A couple easy examples of this are watching TV and driving.  Yup.  After two minutes of watching TV your brain waves switch from Alpha to Beta waves.  You know hypnosis TV watching when you see...the mouth open and blankly staring unblinking at the TV screen.  Time flies by while you watch.  Voila!  You were hypnotized.

As for driving, some call it highway hypnosis.  Basically its where you're on auto pilot and you get to your destination and you don't remember hardly anything of driving.  This happened to me all the time when I'd drive back on those long drives from Utah to Idaho to go to school.  Bam hypnosis.

Really Hypnobabies, and hypnosis in general, is just getting deeply relaxed.  May sound too simplistic, but its true.  Hypnomoms have faster and easier births.  

The class is great cause they teach you about all these things you had no idea about.  For example at the turn of the 20th century, i.e. circa 1900, almost all babies were born at home and with the assistance of a midwife.  I want to say the percentage was like 97% at home with a midwife to 3% at a hospital.  That percentage now has completely flipped.  

For disclosure we are having our child at a birth center run by midwives and we gladly embrace the blessing to have a hospital right down the street should there be an emergency and we need to transfer.

What I really love about the class is the focus on healthy thinking and addressing the cultural "scariness" of having a baby naturally and not in a hospital.  I'll be honest I felt like every woman was doomed to a pain and torture inconceivable to the human mind while having a baby, when in fact this isn't the case.  I know I know I'm gonna get haters who say...

Its crazy though cause in Hypnobabies they talk about many women having little to NO discomfort at all when having a baby.  Pain isn't even there for them.  Just this last week our instructor was telling us about a lady who was doing hypnobabies at the hospital for her birth.  She was hooked up to the monitor and apparently a TON of activity, i.e. uterine muscles going nuts, was going on and it surprised/shocked the nurse that the mother was completely calm and relaxed.

We did a breathing exercise.  The one we all know.  "Hee hee whoo.  Hee hee whoo."  We did that for 1 minute on our first day.  I about passed out.  It causes you to hyperventilate.  The ideal way to breathe is actually deep relaxing breathes where you actually get enough oxygen to your muscles.

Turns out having a baby on your back with your legs in the air is possibly the worst possible position to give birth.  Not only cause gravity is no help at all, but the birth canal is longer.  Longer birth canal = longer birthing time.  Just a duh moment for me.  I hadn't really thought about it till the class.  Duh...

There are a lot of crazy things about the drugs used to in inducing labor I hadn't known previously.  Some of the makers of the drugs say to NOT use them to induce birth cause they're actually meant for treating ulcers.  A quick google search brought this up for me and corresponds to what we learned in class with proper citing being done on the class material.

In August 2000, the original manufacturer of Cytotec, G.D. Searle & Co. (Searle), sent a letter to over 200,000 OB/GYNs in the country stating the possible side effects of Cytotec when given to pregnant women, such as hyperstimulation of the uterus, uterine rupture, fetal bradycardia, amniotic fluid embolism, death of the mother, and death of the child. Subsequently, ACOG wrote a rebuttal to the FDA regarding Searle's letter, claiming not enough evidence and scientific studies warrant eliminating misoprostol's use to induce labor. Searle, however, found enough evidence in its trials of misoprostol for the treatment of ulcers to issue the letter. Searle also stated that the company did not intend to study or support the use of Cytotec for induction of labor or cervical ripening.  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2684033/

We've learned about not clamping the umbilical cord till it has stopped pulsating because the cord/placenta holds much of the child's blood.  Clamping at the typical less than one minute after birth literally stops the flow of blood into the baby and they have 30-40% LESS blood than they would otherwise have.  http://www.webmd.com/baby/news/20130711/health-highlights-july-11-2013 Crazy that this is even a practice.  Hopefully though this trend gets reversed.

One of the things I liked best is the talk of where pain/discomfort comes from in birth.  They talk to this a lot in class and so I wouldn't do it any justice here.  Basically though it comes down to physical comfort, physical settings, expectations, and fear.  Fear being the biggest factor, which leads to stress, which leads to adrenaline production, and once the adrenaline is there...game over for an easy birthing time.

There are so many crazy things they teach you in the class.  I would highly recommend the class if for no other reason than...the good reasons!  The class empowers the mothers and takes out the fear of childbirth for the mom and dad.  It teaches them positive/TRUE things about birth and their bodies.  They give the birthing mother an affirmation cd.  That thing is legit even for non-mothers lol.  "Babies are born on their birthday, not when a doctor says."  Love that one if for no other reason to stick it the pompousness of a doctor dictating when something should or shouldn't happen when both the baby and mom are happy and healthy.

There is a lot I know I'm missing and so maybe I'll update this post or write another one later on, but ya there ya go.  My little Hypnobabies blurb.  Hope you liked it.

When does the spirit enter the body?

This is a question that has been asked recently by myself and others. So I pondered on it. I think it happens on the first breath of the child. Here are some of my thoughts. For starters I think that things can be created first as a shell and then have them go “live”. This would be like a computer being built, but not operable until you have an operating system actually using the physical tools of the computer. Or a car that finally gets gasoline and a driver to make things go. I think our bodies are probably the same and there are two reasons why. My first clue is in the Book of Mormon, 3 Nephi Chapter One verses 12-14. 12…and behold, the bvoice of the Lord came unto him, saying: 13 Lift up your head and be of good cheer; for behold, the time is at hand, and on this night shall the asign be given, and on thebmorrow come I into the world, to show unto the world that I will fulfill all that which I have caused to be cspoken by the mouth of my holy prophets. 14 Behold, I acome unto my own, to bfulfill all things which I have made known unto the children of men from the cfoundationof the world, and to do the dwill, eboth fof the Father and of the Son—of the Father because of me, and of the Son because of my flesh. And behold, the time is at hand, and this night shall the sign be given. Now this might not be too compelling since it really is possible that Heavenly Father could be the one saying these things, but from the overall readings of the verses I have to think it is the Savior talking. If it was the Savior then I don’t know as if He is cooking in there for 9 months. My other clue is that often we hear of Adam getting the “breath of life” and “We will put into him his spirit”. A child gets its first breath once the semi-seal covering its mouth is dissolved when it first comes into contact with air for the first time. Hence why people can safely have their babies in water since they don’t breath until that seal is broken. So I think that the baby’s spirit is received into its body at around that moment. Like the hymn “O My Father” says, “truth is reason”. I’ve heard several first hand accounts of people saying something very different as far as feeling goes when a child is born. Almost like a still quiet and that they can just feel something different. If you’re LDS this would more specifically be referred to as the veil being parted or very thin. So there it is. My theory is that the spirit enters the body right at the very end. Now some may question about abortions and my thoughts is that our bodies are temples and that they are sacred vessels and certainly destroying those would carry grave consequences. Also I think an additional punishment might be affixed if that temple was destroyed and thus prohibiting/blocking the mortal journey of someone who is supposed to come here, though their spirit might not actually inhabit the body when it is destroyed. Another thought I have, and may very well be possible, is that the Savior spoke to Nephi the night before He was born cause He has that type of power and can put His spirit in and take it out to communicate with Nephi if He wants. If I have anymore thoughts/ponderings on this I’ll try to remember to do an update. It is also possible Heavenly Father knows that a baby will make it full term and not aborted and would then have its spirit deposited into its body from close to the beginning. Let me know in the comment section below what you think!

countdown to babyness

Video Games and Rated R Movies

Ah yeah its time to talk about video games if only briefly though. The other day my wife, my brother, and I were driving to watch the 7th game of the World Series and we were talking about stuff when my brother said he was impressed about me returning a certain game due to the amount of cussing in the game. I said I couldn’t take all the recognition as my wife had gently guided me in the right direction. What followed were lame excuses from yours truly for why it was fun and ok to play those games. My wife then said that the games were worse then rated r movies cause they have more violence and more cussing and hot chicks with big boobs then rated r movies. The logic was and is undeniable and has officially been duly noted.


Why this even matters is cause I am a Latter-day Saint and don’t watch rated r movies. I was being a hypocrite by playing those games. That is why it matters. The point is…this story is just another example of why it is a good thing to be married. I get free coaching from a beautiful girl.