Welcome, daughter

 

We had our first baby today. One month ahead of schedule.

In the last 24h,

• My wife woke me up at about 03:00 and said she was stressed because she'd been bleeding and having cramps.
• I first said let's wait it out, but she said no -- it felt wrong to her.
• I called the closest hospital, and they said COME NOW.
• We took an Uber to the hospital, hoping it was just hemorrhoid or something. But no, it turned out that her cervix was fully dilated -- 10cm! The midwife said that our girl will be out in the next couple of hours.
• In the birth room, my wife struggled a bit with the contractions, but without much of an issue, our girl was born at 06:14.

We both haven't slept since. Some fresh thoughts:

It helps to know what to expect beforehand, but ultimately, if you can keep a cool head and help your partner mentally, you don't need expensive "birth prep courses". I almost signed up for one, and now I'm glad I did not do it.

On the other hand, I am really glad that my wife and I spoke about the post-partum period in great detail throughout the pregnancy. The shared vocabulary and preferences we built through these discussions resulted in minimal communication issues during labor and beyond. I knew what she needed for the most part, and she knew she could rely on me.

I fully recommend being in the room to see it happen. It is magic. It gave me a different level of appreciation for my wife and womankind in general.

Bonding in skin-to-skin contact with your less-than-a-day-old baby is a feeling that is more meditative, elevating than anything I have experienced before.

There is a LOT to process, and a LOT to do at home.

I feel like I am living the most today. Every minute is purposeful, fulfilling. Tasks that would otherwise seem mundane are satisfying.

Plenty out there about parenting being hard but worth it. This first day definitely feels like that. Mom says it is going to only get harder, but also more worthwhile.

Welcome, daughter!

TIL - Maxima!

 Maxima is a computer algebra system. wxMaxima is probably the most popular and stable GUI frontend. At first, the software feels like Jupyter, but native. It has variables, lists, loops, even if the syntax for some of these can be unusual (for example, x:10 assigns 10 to x, but x = 10 is an equation object). One can interleave math with text, and exporting worksheets to a bunch of formats including HTML is easy.

However, Maxima's game is symbolic manipulation: simplifying algebraic expressions, solving equations, and even doing calculus! The system does math symbolically by default, so that the displayed results are exact by default, requiring the use of the `float` command to get an approximation.

Here's an example session:

 

Here's Maxima factorizing our expressions where possible:

 

Pretty cool!