New Moms, go get your groove back! The following is a guest post from my good friend Emily Baker. Emily is a new mom working through the struggles of balancing taking care of a new life and her own life. So I’m officially out of the “you just had a baby” window. My baby is four and a half months old now and growing every day! He seems a lot more like his daddy’s mini-me than he does the tiny mysterious alien that we brought home from the hospital.

Baby steps The following is a guest post from one of the best and most influential writers in the game. The best new moms I know, and doing it all with twins. Of course I’m talking about my wife. When you make the decision to have children it’s a major step in your life. You are making the conscious decision to bring a new life into this world, nurture it, guide it, and hope that at the end of the day you raise a half decent human being with as few issues as possible (admit it, we all have some sort of issues).

I yelled at my baby, and it was a turning point It’s Friday night and the mood is right. No not like that. As a parent, it’s time to unwind from a long week of balancing work and the babies and maybe even veg out on some Diners, Drive Ins, and Dives. Don’t judge. Over Guy Fieri’s yelling about flavor town, you just barely register the beginning of whimpers. Whimpers that you know will soon turn into clucks, and then shortly full on wails if not treated.

Pokemon Go taught me to be a better father If you haven’t heard of Pokemon Go yet, just go outside. You’ll probably see hordes of teenagers roaming around looking for the pocket monsters on their phones around real world landmarks. Ok, you might see me as well. The game is good for more than just setting download records, inflating and then crashing Nintendo’s stock, and social ineptitude. There are many lessons to be learned about parenting from the game as well.

My baby stopped breathing At a month old, I thought I pretty much had life with the twins figured out. We still weren’t getting more than four hours of sleep at any time, but the three to four hour intervals were becoming more frequent. The boys were also beginning to be in sync more often during the night, meaning we had to wake up less often. More than getting more sleep, we were beginning to get used to life with five to six hours of sleep a night.

Introducing the Pokemon Go Half Marathon I’ll admit it, it’s a bit weird for a 31 year old new father of twins to be obsessed with a Pokemon game. Yet, somehow this game without any game mechanics, goals, or objective has captivated me. Blame it on my obsessive compulsive quest to capture them all in the original series back when I was just slightly too old to admit to playing it.

Software, like children, is often a balancing act How managing software development prepared me for raising children Software development is a game of inches. Ok, that may be more apt for football or horseshoes. Much like child rearing, it’s the little things in software that make a big difference. It may not seem obvious, but there are a lot of lessons to learn from development that can make you a better parent.

Essential lessons the first week working with newborns at home I went back to work this week after two weeks off with our newborn twins. Everyone said before that life would change and boy did going back make me notice. I realized quickly that there is just so little time in a day and every minute with the boys is precious. I also started prioritizing time at work a bit better thanks to a new appreciation for what is important.

How to Train for a Marathon with Twins Training setup At 7:00am on a Saturday after getting six hours of sleep, though broken up into three hour segments because of the two week old twins I now co-habitat with, the last thing I want to do is get out of bed and go running. But because I signed myself up for the 2016 Chicago Marathon in October before realizing how my priorities would shift, I had no choice.

Back Off Mommy Mafia “You all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it ok for guys to call you sluts and whores.” — Tina Fey, Mean Girls Mean Girls is one of my favorite movies not just because of the excellent writing, directing, cinematography, and acting, not to mention original score, but also because it imparts so many life lessons. In this case, moms need to stop shaming other moms and piling up pressure on each other, because it just makes it ok for everyone else to do the same.