It has been about six weeks since my wife and I welcomed our beautiful little daughter into the world and so far the dire predictions from friends and family about wanting to sell off my kids to the circus have not come true. My four-year-old son is taking his little sister in stride and his little sister is excelling at everything except, of course, sleeping for more than three hours at a time.

The nine months leading up to our daughter’s birth was filled with prophecies of doom and gloom about the hardships of adding a second child to our family. We were told in no uncertain terms that having two children was “like having three children”, that everything would be 1,000 times more difficult and that we would, essentially, cease to be human beings and instead be reduced to simple beasts of burden who served the needs and wants of our children like automatons.

But instead of being weighed down with grief and despair my wife and I have actually been enjoying the whole process of having a newborn in the house much more than we did the first time around. We’re more experienced, more laid back and a bit older now. Here are some differences we’ve noticed in our parenting experience between our first and second child:

	First Baby (Son)	Second Baby (Daughter)
Hair	Nope.	Yep.
On Crying	“Stop, stop, stop, please stop! Here’s some food, diaper, distraction, pacifier! Oh, God, please stop!”	“Stop, stop, stop, ehhh… whatever. I have Netflix, a full pot of coffee and an iPhone. I’m cool if you are.”
Pacifier on Floor	Immediate pick up followed by a five-minute scrubbing under hot water. Pacifier would not be returned until it was run through the bottle sterilizer.	Three second rule applies…to when you see it, not when it falls. A rinse with hot water and and it’s back in baby’s mouth.
Mixing Formula	Each and every bottle is measured out and weighed with the sort of precision that would make a heroin dealer proud.	Approximate amounts are okay – similar to what a blind bartender might pour.
Penis	Yes.	No.
Projectile Peeing	Yes.	Much less likely. See above.
Projectile Pooping	Yes.	Yes.
Going Out	“We can’t go anywhere, we have a BABY!”	“Think we could do a three week safari in Africa if we just throw her in the car carrier and tie the boy to the roof of the car?”
On Not Sleeping	Please sleep, please sleep, please sleep! Oh, dear god! Please sleep!	Please sleep, please sleep, ehhh… whatever. I have Netflix, a full pot of coffee and an iPhone. I’m cool if you are.
Going To The Doctor	“He didn’t burp? We need to got to the ER NOW!”	“Are all her arms and legs still there? Okay, she’s fine.”

Our daughter is generally proving to have a much less dramatic childhood that her brother. It’s almost as if our daughter actually read a bunch of parenting books before she was born and decided to precisely follow the baby examples in the book. Our son spent most of his first year proving that every baby book author on the planet had no idea what a real baby did.

That being said, our son is now proving to be a pretty good “Big Brother” and willing helper when he’s not trying to lovingly smother his little sister with kisses, hugs or Transformers.

I don’t like to make guesses about the future too often, but based on the way things are going I’m pretty sure my son and daughter are never going to fight or give us any trouble of any kind at all. I’m looking forward to a calm and relaxing time for the next several decades.

I mean, with two kids everything should be pretty easy now, right?

Here at Spilling Coffee we like to tackle the controversial, complex questions that have plagued mankind for years. In the past we’ve answered such compelling questions such as “What the Heck Is Grain Berry?” and “How To Wash Your Keyboard in the Dishwasher“.

Today, we’re taking on our most important topic yet: Do Double Stuff Oreo cookies really contain double the stuff?

The question posed itself when two packages of Oreo cookies materialized in our kitchen pantry. We don’t usually have cookies like Oreos around the house very often because when we do they seem to magically disappear from the package just as magically as they appeared in the first place.

After testing a Double Stuff Oreo for freshness I simply couldn’t help falling into Old Fogey Mode and began ranting aloud, “Back in my day Double Stuff Oreos had 3 times the cream! No, 4 times the cream, of regular Oreos! The filling was like a sugar-filled pillow and they were three cubits high! Damn kids today and their shorty Double Stuff Oreos….”

It was at this point that my wife decided to test the regular Oreos for freshness. As I observed the two open packages of cookies I realized that I had the perfect opportunity to practice some science. So I did.

Oreo Observations

Part of the problem with easily discerning if Double Stuf Oreos really have “double” of anything is that not all Oreo cookies are created equally. An Oreo cookie essentially has three parts: a top cookie, a cream center, and a bottom cookie. The top and bottom cookies are obviously pretty standard, but the cream center provides some variety in what each cookie looks like. While the amount of cream is probably measured down to the hundredth of a gram during the manufacturing process, the way the cookies settle on top of the cream is not quite as regulated. Cookies look uneven and crooked when peering down at them in the package.

To really measure how much “stuff” is in these Oreos I couldn’t rely on sight alone. Instead, I settled on a consumer grade food scale with the smallest unit of measurement being grams.

Oreo Weights

First, I decided to weigh both a regular Oreo and a Double Stuf Oreo, just to make sure one did indeed weigh more than the other. The scale was only accurate down to grams, but that was good enough for my purposes. Here’s where I encountered my first surprise.

Not every Oreo weighs exactly the same. I ended up weighing five regular Oreos, randomly taken from the package in front of me. Three of the Oreos weighed in at a steady 11 grams while the other two Oreos made my scale waver between 11 and 12 grams for a little bit before mostly settling on 11 grams.

Next, I needed to weigh the Double Stuf Oreos. Again, the weights weren’t exactly the same each time, but most of the Double Stuff Oreos weighed in at about 14 grams, with one Double Stuff Oreo being 15 grams.

Looking at the results we can see that Double Stuf Oreos clearly weigh more than regular Oreos, but the implied claim that they contain double the cream was still in question.

It was time to take apart the Oreos and take measurements of each of the separate parts of each Oreo cookie. Again, the limits of my kitchen do not allow me to chemically separate all the Oreo cream molecules from all the Oreo cookie molecules, so I relied on the next best thing: a butter knife to scrape the cream off each cookie.

As it turns out, the single Oreo cookies without cream all weighed about the same in my experiments. They were all consistently weighed 4 grams, no matter if they came from regular or Double Stuf Oreos.

Now we could do some math, of course. If each cookie weighs 4 grams then each type of Oreo would have 8 grams of “cookie”, leaving only “stuf” to be weighed. This means that a regular Oreo would have about 3 grams of stuf (8g cookie + 3g stuf = 11g Oreo) and a Double Stuf Oreo would have about 6 grams of stuf (8g cookie + 6g stuf = 14g Double Stuf Oreo). So, in theory, everything works out. Actual measurements were needed to confirm this.

I decided to confirm this a couple ways: I would weigh one cookie with Stuf on it and I would also weigh the Stuf alone just as a double-check. Again, the accuracy of this entire experiment was largely dependent upon me taking clean scrapes of cream off cookies with a butter knife, so I wasn’t expecting exact numbers.

So, do Double Stuf Oreos really contain “double” the Stuf of regular Oreos? Check out the chart below and see for yourself!

Yes! The results are pretty clear: Double Stuf Oreos easily contain twice the amount of “Stuf” or cream as regular Oreos!

After properly disposing of all the materials used in this experiment, I was still struck by the fact that it didn’t “feel” as though Double Stuf Oreos had as much cream stuffing as they did when I was a kid. Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to find a 30-year package of Double Stuf Oreos to measure for sure.

Until that time, I’ll just build an Oreo with the sort of cream filling I remember as a kid:

The Quadruple Oreo – Four Times The Stuf!

Like a lot of people these days, I spend a good portion of my day using a computer all day while sitting on my ever-widening ass and not really getting a chance to move around much more than the occasional trip to the kitchen for an extra doughnut or to top off my sugar-infused cream-laced coffee. The few times I do get a chance to actually stand up and walk around usually only last for a few minutes at most while I navigate my way to someone’s office or conference room where the chairs are even more plushy and inviting than my own office chair. Walking around actually seems like a pretty novel mode of transportation on some days, which has had me wondering for a while now if there wasn’t a healthier way to do things.

Just for the Health of It

Of course, I’m not the first person to be wondering if I was sitting around on my butt too long. The New York Times has actually had a couple of different articles advocating standing or walking at your desk instead of sitting but the problems associated with sitting down all day have been documented elsewhere as well. Some of these reports have brought up the notion that simply standing all day long instead of sitting all day long not only uses more muscles and burns more calories, but can also lead to some pretty impressive weight loss.

A board and a few crates gave me a cheap standing desk with more desk space… which I managed to junk up in a matter of minutes.

Weight loss is my primary goal in this experiment. I currently weigh about 280 pounds and I’m about 6′ 1″ tall. According to my BMI chart (25 is healthy) I should either grow and extra 16 inches taller or I should lose 100 pounds.

A lot of people who try a standing desk complain about back pain and joint issues due to sitting down all day. I generally don’t have those problems. Other than being a fat (okay, obese) lump and generally feeling a little too stiff for my 38 years, I don’t really have too many health complaints… yet. That’s part of the reason why I’m trying the whole standing at my desk thing: to prevent future problems.

I know that standing up all day instead of sitting down all day will take some getting used to, so I’m planning to give this a try for a full month at my office to see if it’s really a viable option.

The Standing Desk

Intrigued by the idea of losing weight without actually doing anything more than standing around all day appealed to me. But to do this properly I would need a standing desk of some sort because, clearly, standing at a current desk and trying to use a computer wasn’t going to cut it. I briefly thought of somehow attaching a neck strap to my keyboard so that I could type as though I was holding some sort of accordion or playing some sort of electric keyboard, but my employees begged me not to be too much of a jerk.

Standing desks actually have a pretty long history and a lot of artists, writers and powerful world leaders have used and have advocated doing most of their work while standing. I mean, c’mon, Donald Rumsfeld used a standing desk and look at where he is today!

The types and variations of standing desks range from beautiful and solid pieces of custom-made furniture to adjustable modern-styled office desks to motorized adjustable desks which can be used for both sitting or standing. The one trait that most standing desks seem to share is a remarkably high price. Adding a motor or any sort of mechanization to a simple standing desk seems to, unreasonably, add thousands of dollars to the price tag. That being said, there is are some somewhat affordable automated standing desks over at Geekdesk.

Making A Standing Desk

Most DIY standing desk projects seem to be built in home offices, but I don’t spend eight hours of my day working at my desk at home. I work in an office, but I still wanted to try a standing desk. That means that any sort of standing desk experiment would have to meet these two requirements:

1. Be relatively cheap and easy: There’s no point in building a complex and expensive standing desk on the off chance that my employer doesn’t like it or wants to take it away (they’re pretty cool about things like this, but you never know).

2. Be temporary: With constant office moves and an uncertainty of me actually liking working at a standing desk, I wanted something that I could take down pretty quickly if I had to.

To make my standing desk I took a lot of measurements about approximately how high up I would have to lift my desk surface when I was standing up to make it comfortable for typing as well as for looking at my two glorious monitors. For me, that magic number was about 14 to 15 inches. It took me a while to find something cheap and workable that would put a desktop surface at the right height, but finally I put together all the pieces I needed:

1. Laminated board (48 inches wide by 24 inches deep) from The Home Depot – $9

2. 4 Plastic Locker Crates from Wal-Mart – $20 (yes, I hate Wal-Mart as much as anyone, but they’re all I could find that were exactly the right height)

3. Bar stool – $32 from Target, only marginally better than buying from Wal-Mart.

Total: $61

Here are my detailed instructions: Put the 4 crates on the desk. Put the board on top of the 4 crates. Done.

They’re not bolted on or tied together or anything. Again, this is meant to be a cheap (and somewhat temporary) standing desk. If I stick with the idea I could see where tying everything together will work better. The computer monitors and other junk on my desk, combined with the weight of the board, has enough weight to keep the whole desk relatively steady. Granted, I really can’t lean against the desk too much or I could shift things, but the crates have a wide enough surface area that things aren’t going to topple over with a quick bump.

One other criticism: my monitors are too low. They were too low when I was sitting down, too. I might go all wild and crazy and try to find another smaller crate or box to put them on in the upcoming weeks.

Just to be sure, here are a few other people who built their own standing desks:

Kyle Cordes – He built a standing desk by adding two wooden stilts to the bottom of his desk. Clever.

Lifehacker – Here’s an uber-cheap “standing desk” though I’d argue it’s really more of a laptop stand than an actual desk. Reach down to put down your coffee or write on a piece of paper is pretty inconvenient in this set-up.

Web Worker Daily – He essentially built his own desk with 2x4s.

I’ve also seen people use a board laid across some saw horses, boxes stacked on a table and cheap metal frame or plastic book cases (with the keyboard on one shelf, the monitor on another). A standing desk seems to really work much better with a stand alone computer and monitor rather than a laptop simply because you have to look down all the time because the monitor seems pretty low when you use a laptop on a stand-up desk.

My Month Long Standing Desk Experience

Day 1
I chose to put my standing desk together during my lunch one Thursday afternoon because I wanted to kind of “ease” into the whole idea of standing all day. So on my first day I only spent about 3 1/2 hours really standing and working, but those hours were interesting. My back felt fine, but I found myself shifting my considerable weight from one leg to another an awful lot after the first hour or so. I was almost antsy. I turned on some tunes and found that I tapping my foot, while standing, help me feel as though my legs were solid dead weight.

I sat down only a few minutes each hour, usually for a reason other than just rest. One time I had to sort through my desk files and it was just more convenient to sit down and another time I had someone come into my office and chat for a few minutes and I felt like an idiot standing there while she sat in the guest chair next to me.

Using this method (crates and a board) I have essentially made a “double-decker” desk so I have a lot more surface area than I once did. I haven’t quite figured out how to configure things.

By the end of the first few hours the bottom of my feet were hurting and my calves were tense, but I was otherwise pretty okay. I found that I had some trouble getting used to the idea that this was “work” and not just some novel new thing to play with. By the time 5 o’clock rolled around I found that the idea of standing and working was feeling comfortable and almost natural, if not for the fatigue I felt in my legs.

Day 2
My first full day of using a standing desk brought me to a realization: I like using the standing desk, but a short 5 minute break every hour or two is also helpful. To that end I went out to Target and bought a bar stool, so I can sit back and relax from time to time, but never more than a few minutes at a time. I even ate lunch standing up today and found it to be pretty comfortable. If anything, I use the bar stool’s lower bar to rest my foot on as I shift back and forth. My feet still hurt, but generally my back is okay.

My office is out of the way at the end of a long hallway, so the other people in my office don’t regularly see me at my desk. But now the buzz is around that I have a standing desk so everyone is stopping by to look and ask me what it’s like in the same tone of voice one might use to ask a serial killer what human flesh tastes like.

Mentally, I’m finding that it’s almost more natural than sitting down. I’m definitely more focused on getting things done, but I’m not sure if that’s because this is all so new or because I’m standing up. I’m more apt to walk around and ask a question of someone in my office rather than using the phone or email.

Next week I’m in a lot of all-day meetings, so I’m not sure how much real standing desk time I’ll get. It might be kind of good for me to slowly transition into this change.

Week 2
As I mentioned before, this was the week when I had a lot of meetings and events that were actually outside of my own office, so I didn’t really spend a lot of time standing at my desk at all. I sat through several long software sessions in conference room and I have to admit that I found myself needing to stand up after sitting still for an hour or two. I’m wondering if standing up at work all day will eventually make sitting down for even relatively short periods of time (less than an hour) less comfortable.

On Friday of this week I did end up spending most of my day in the office and it was still quite a task to stand for most of the day. I think it’s a stamina thing, as I can feel my body getting a little tired from “working” all day. Next week is a full week of standing for me, so that will be interesting.

Week 3
This was my first full week of standing at a desk. While I’m pretty comfortable standing and working, I’m still finding that my feet and legs are getting tired pretty quickly. I’ve adopted a “sit for 5 minutes” every hour rule, just to give my body a little bit of a rest. I was hoping to be able to go a little longer, but so far that simply hasn’t happened.

I’m definitely not feeling as tired as night as I once was, which is a good thing. I guess standing all day does count as some sort of exercise because I can feel the muscles in my calves becoming a bit more tense after a long day.

I’m also learning some tricks for making a standing desk a little more workable:

Move around: standing still all the time is still not great for you, especially if you’re standing with locked legs and a rigid back. I’ve learned to shift my weight and sway my body a little bit (music helps) just to keep myself from getting stiff while standing. I’m not exactly dancing, but I’m not standing still like a statue, either.

Bend your knees: Again, more to do with movement, but I’ve learned that if I bend my knees ever so slightly my whole body takes a different (and somewhat more relaxed) posture. It keeps me feeling “looser” during the day.

Shoes count: I have to wear dress shoes during the day and they aren’t nearly as comfortable as the running shoes I can wear on Fridays. I’m strongly considering a “gel mat” of some sort if I keep doing this.