Bye bye my sweet sleep

Oh, what a week it has been. My daughter had a stomach flu of some sorts and it didn't seem to bother her during the day, but was all the more interesting at night. You know that time when you are supposed to be asleep.

I´ve changed and washed her sheets and her pyjamas about six or seven times now, after carefully removing the terror that used to be her diaper and washing her from head to toe. All this in time frames of an hour to an hour and a half. This means that I have effectively missed a nights sleep this week.

That hurts.

I don't know about you, but losing this much sleep really wreaks havoc on my capacity to function during the day. Which wouldn't be so bad if I could sleep a hole in the weekend, like I used to in the good ol' days. But those days definitely belong to the past. My saturdays and sundays start at about seven, when my daughter is sure she had enough of that sleep thingie and continually cries out to tell me about it. Of course during the week my alarm clock is basically telling me the same; No more sleep for you mister!

They say it gets better when they older. But that's coming from the same people who neglected to mention that you won't get any sleep in the first few months ... years ...

But then again. When she's washed and fed again and is curling up in your arms at two in the morning. Smiling without a care. You get al warm and fuzzy and alive ... and enjoying EVERY minute of it, whether you like it or not.

What's your Plan?

My daughter is a very smart little girl. Yesterday she asked me: "What's your Plan for the future, Dad?". Well okay, maybe she didn't literally say those words, since she's only one year old, but still. With those big brown eyes she stared at me and made me realise that there is more to this world than just me. I now have another person to think off. Somebody who I hope will have the best possible future.

And maybe, just maybe, there are even more people that I have to think of. 6 billion of them to be exact. Now I know that I can't take on the whole wold, that makes no sense. But I can give a little bit back. Give a little to those other big brown eyes who have no Dad to look up to, to ask for that same future that I am wishing my own daugther to have.

Thoughts on Thinking

"What do you think when you have not developed a natural language yet?" -- My one year old daughter can look at me, analyse and interpret my actions and act on that, without ever having a phrase or sentence to cross her mind. Not once will she think something like "oh, it's that what he means", simply because she knows no vocabulary or syntax to formulate that sentence. Still she must have the equivalent of such a thought, since she does what I ask of her.

If my daughter can think without formulating her thoughts into words, would it then be possible that all our thoughts are speechless at first and that we have developed a parallel thought process that can turn those thoughts into a natural language?