Both me and my wife are huge computer nerds. We have a 6 year old who is also on computers a lot. We spend a lot of time together, digitally, but also go on hikes and such every other weekend to get some 'fresh air'. As far as small children go, get good at multi-tasking. When mine was a baby, I would rapidly switch between coding and the baby (typically laying on my lap at my desk). Obviously I would take breaks to give the baby full-on attention, but when they are an infant, pretty much all they want to do is eat, sleep, cry, and poop anyway, and the skin-to-skin contact is tons better, IMO, then just putting them in a swing all day. The plus of this is, instead of arguing over who had the baby, it was arguing over me having the baby too much!

Also, play trance while coding, you can bounce him to the beat of the music, they love that :p

When they get a bit older and want to 'help', just give them their own mini keyboard that's not plugged in, it's super cute how they get excited when they 'help' you and get excited :D

His mother thinks I just sit around all day doing nothing when in reality I'm devoting 12-14 hours a day into a project that I hope will one day be able to get me a job.

Something I was told quite some time ago is that it's important not to just be productive but to also look productive. That you are able to show that you have a plan and are able to show where you are in your progress.

Good luck.

Both me and my wife are huge computer nerds

You're lucky. My girlfriend isn't interested in computers in the slightest.

His mother thinks I just sit around all day doing nothing when in reality I'm devoting 12-14 hours a day into a project that I hope will one day be able to get me a job.

Something I was told quite some time ago is that it's important not to just be productive but to also look productive. That you are able to show that you have a plan and are able to show where you are in your progress.

Good luck.

It's hard to look productive with her for the aforementioned reason. She doesn't understand the complexity that programming can reach. If I showed her a textured, rotating cube with shadows and reflections, she wouldn't see anything but exactly that. All she sees with me is someone sitting on a laptop. I've never once gotten a "good job" or "I'm proud of you" from her for what I've created. I feel like this is turning into relationship counseling now lol.

@BHXSpecter, it's nice to have a consistent schedule like that. I am very sorry about your wife and son. May I ask what exactly happened?

My wife was diagnosed with Facioscapulohumeral Muscular Dystrophy or FSH when she was 9. It is a muscle disease that effects the face, upper body, and arms by making the muscles deteriorate. It's not a fatal disease, but it does at some point make the person unable to walk anymore so she is in a wheelchair now. There is a 50/50 chance of it being passed along to your children and unfortunately it was passed on to our son and his was a little faster so he is wheelchair bound now too. Scoliosis is a rather common thing with people who have FSH and we just recently had his back surgery to have rods put in to fix that issue. His problems are compounded though because for some reason his metabolism is so fast that he couldn't gain weight and required a feeding tube put in to give him more calories directly. The thing that we didn't expect at all was in August 2012 he got agitated at school and stopped breathing, but started back up on his own. His doctor assumed it was just a breath holding spell. He started having more of them, but the time it took for him to start breathing again got longer and longer. They did tests and found that his brainwave patterns show signs of possible seizures which they attributed to his breathing spells. Sadly he had another spell and they determined that while he is at risk of seizures, the spells were not seizures after all. So we went back for more tests, this time looking at his airway and found two spots in his left lung of tracheomalacia (sections of your airway that are floppy and can collapse easily. Again they attributed that to his spells and when he had one in mid August 2012 that was severe they put in a tracheotomy tube and put him on a ventilator set to C-PAP to give him constant pressure in hopes to keep the spots open. He sadly had another spell which made the doctors absolutely clueless as to what was going on. So now he is home schooled, in a hospital bed in our front room on his vent playing PS3 and iPad all day. It was all difficult for my wife and me, but the hardest thing out of all this is that we haven't heard our son's voice in 3 years now, but he is still with us and I'm grateful for that.

My wife was diagnosed with Facioscapulohumeral Muscular Dystrophy or FSH when she was 9. It is a muscle disease that effects the face, upper body, and arms by making the muscles deteriorate. It's not a fatal disease, but it does at some point make the person unable to walk anymore so she is in a wheelchair now. There is a 50/50 chance of it being passed along to your children and unfortunately it was passed on to our son and his was a little faster so he is wheelchair bound now too. Scoliosis is a rather common thing with people who have FSH and we just recently had his back surgery to have rods put in to fix that issue. His problems are compounded though because for some reason his metabolism is so fast that he couldn't gain weight and required a feeding tube put in to give him more calories directly. The thing that we didn't expect at all was in August 2012 he got agitated at school and stopped breathing, but started back up on his own. His doctor assumed it was just a breath holding spell. He started having more of them, but the time it took for him to start breathing again got longer and longer. They did tests and found that his brainwave patterns show signs of possible seizures which they attributed to his breathing spells. Sadly he had another spell and they determined that while he is at risk of seizures, the spells were not seizures after all. So we went back for more tests, this time looking at his airway and found two spots in his left lung of tracheomalacia (sections of your airway that are floppy and can collapse easily. Again they attributed that to his spells and when he had one in mid August 2012 that was severe they put in a tracheotomy tube and put him on a ventilator set to C-PAP to give him constant pressure in hopes to keep the spots open. He sadly had another spell which made the doctors absolutely clueless as to what was going on. So now he is home schooled, in a hospital bed in our front room on his vent playing PS3 and iPad all day. It was all difficult for my wife and me, but the hardest thing out of all this is that we haven't heard our son's voice in 3 years now, but he is still with us and I'm grateful for that

I am very sorry. I can't imagine what that must be like going through. I'm sure it gets tough at times, but hopefully someday there will be treatment if there is not already.