Intellectual Engagement

One of the most difficult parts of being a stay at home dad, for me, was keeping my brain from melting out of my ear. My first two children are 17 months apart and all 4 are within 6 years. For a while I had a LOT of small children around the house. The work isn't hard in the way that most jobs are hard, but it's really really hard to keep your mind engaged. Heating bottles and changing diapers and reading "Little Black a Pony" 200 times per day all while sleeping 4-5 hours a night

My wife is wonderful. She has always understood that taking care of our kids isn't the hard part of my job. Staying sane is. With our younger children she made it easy for my to take night classes at the local community college. I took every class I could in the welding and non-destructive testing curriculum. I can MIG, TIG, and stick weld. I can interpret x-rays of those welds. I can use a variety of methods to check for cracks in whatever metal you have around. I can read AWS code books like I wrote them. I have no need for any of these skills. Learning them and interacting with the students and teachers kept me sane and happy and that was really the point.
I've run a half marathon, become adept at hunting squirrels in East Texas, ridden a 150 mile charity bike ride, twice, assembled a Group 5 rally car from an empty shell and boxes of parts, built a second story two bedroom addition on our house, bought a Vespa and became licensed to ride it,  and experimented with gardening. There are many other things too, and the things I've listed are so much more in depth than even makes sense. For instance, the 150 mile bike rides. You might think that it's just getting a bike and training. That would be too simple.
I started biking on my old mountain bike. It was time to myself and was fun. So I started reading about bikes online. I bought bike magazines. I learned about single speed bikes. Then I learned about fixed gear bikes. I joined online forums on fixed gear bikes so that I could vicariously immerse myself in the culture of messengers and fixed gear bikes. I bought a bare frame from a very small speciality bike importer and boxes of parts from various places. I learned how to put a bike together properly. I learned about training, speed and cadence and varying effort for distance. I incorporated my heart rate monitor from my half marathon training. I rode the 150 mile ride. It was anticlimactic. For the next year I decided that a fixed gear bike was too simple, so I became familiar with vintage BMX bikes. I bought a bike that was as old as I was and nearly as cool. I learned to rebuild coaster brake hubs. I rode again. It was even more anticlimactic. I moved on.......
In the past year I've learned to juggle and have taken up the violin. I finally finished crocheting a HUGE afghan. I'm dabbling with drawing. I'm always reading something, fiction, history, science, and recently philosophy.
My wife has always supported my mental wanderings, though it's not completely altruistic.When I'm happy and sane she can head off to work without a worry, knowing that I am good and home is good and the kids are good and everything will be that way at the end of the day. She loves her job and loves the fact that when she's there she can concentrate fully on it and be the kind of employee that really is exceptional. She loves being exceptional and she's great at it.
We really are a team, and that makes a lot of things easier. 
Friday posts are going to be about keeping my mind going. About keeping your mind going. Whether you are working toward what you're going to do after staying at home, or just keeping sane while staying at home, you've got to do something to keep your brain from melting out of your ear.

Books finished this week:
-Shop Class and Soulcraft - an inquiry into the value of work
   Matthew B. Crawford
-Great Scientific Experiments - Twenty Experiments That Changed Our View of the World
   Rom Harre

Shop Class is a pretty good book. If you shift his focus from fixing motorcycles to fixing your house and feeding babies I really think the same satisfaction for your work can be found as a stay at home dad.
Great Scientific Experiments is a pretty cool book, though if you don't fancy yourself a scientist already then a lot of the experiments will likely blow right over you. I have an engineering degree and the physics involved in several of them was really too much. It was neat to read about some pivotal points in science in the proper context though.