Breastfeeding Dad #2

The single best part of breastfeeding is when mommy comes home. There is nothing else in parenting that equals the joy of a baby realizing that mom is home and it's meal time. Mom is happy, the baby is happy, and I get to slowly fade into the background. From the time mommy enters the door until she leaves again the next morning, the largest most complicated part of my job simply doesn't exist. There is no thawing of milk. No bottles to warm. No bottles to wash. No tying to mentally figure out how long ago the baby ate so how much milk should you heat up. No baby deciding that a rubber nipple just isn't the same as a real nipple, and even though they're hungry enough to cry, they're certainly not hungry enough for a bottle. But try back in 15 minutes.
Then there's bed time. Sweet bed time. We could argue about who is going to get up with the baby, but really, who among us has boobs? Can I see the raised hand of those with boobs? You, over there, the one who worked all day and is so tired she can't find the light switch, yes you. You have boobs and I do not. You feed the baby and I will go back to sleep. In fact this is a wonderful time to demonstrate the fact that I can go back to sleep within seconds of being woken up by a crying baby. I have become a god of the quick sleep.
I don't think I ever once felt guilty about my wife having to wake up to feed the baby. I probably should have, but I didn't. My world consisted of trying to interpret the subtle signs of hunger and then attempting to prepare a bottle before they became a full blow screaming fit. That 7-10 minutes is an eternity, or can be, and getting it wrong more than once in a day can be downright exhausting. Watching my wife just snag a hungry baby and plug it in though, I always felt like she just didn't understand. Her boobs are right there! She could even hold the baby with one arm and hold a book with the other. She could multitask! So jealous. I had to have one hand on the baby and one hand on the bottle, and then just sit. I did enjoy sitting with my babies, I really did, but there were days when I sort of had to get something done and I'd have a baby who just wanted to sit and draw it out for 20 minutes and I was trapped. Trapped! Or the phone would ring and even if I got to it in time I still had one hand on the baby and one hand on the bottle and the phone was....... falling on the floor. Gah! So I never felt guilty at night. She did all the work and I got all of the sleep and the world was good.

Picture of a Baby

Gah! I meant to write a witty post about something at least vaguely related to being a stay at home dad but I sort of lost track of time actually being a stay at home dad. Here's a picture of a baby to tide you over until I get my act together.

The Now

I'm learning  how
To live in the now
To find the great joys of the the day.
A baby that's sleeping
A toddler not weeping
My son saying "Daddy let's play."











Poetry. What should poetry do? I think it should elicit raw emotion in a way that writing stories does not. I think that's what's hard about putting it out there to read. There is no poet that doesn't feel disappointed when the world doesn't end up with their heart in their throat like intended. Oh, and it should rhyme too. I could write a 30 page essay about trying to find the joy in every day with your kids, but it wouldn't really say more than the six lines above.

Back To School

The first day of school is today. Mostly. Three of the four are healthy enough to make it. The fourth isn't too bad, but I didn't want to be the guy who starts off the school year by infecting the whole school. That's just not cool. Instead I've got a helper at home, so we're going to rest and make some chocolate chip banana bread. If you can't go to school then that seems like a good alternative. I hope everyone out there all over the country and around the world is having a good time getting ready for school too. It's always a fun time. New teachers, new friends, new activities. Even when school is old hat, there is always something new.

The Shoes Come In...

The shoes come in, the shoes go out........
So many shoes. School means new shoes. New shoes means that the total number of shoes in the house increases. If something isn't done then you get the situation that you see in the picture. If you think that looks bad, try to wrap your mind around this little nugget of truth - those are just the extra shoes. They're not the shoes that we're wearing now. They're not the new shoes we just bought. They're not any of my good shoes or my work shoes. They're not any of my wife's not inconsiderable closeted shoes. They're not boots. Those are just the shoes that mostly don't fit and soccer shoes and golf shoes and just extras. It was something like 28 pairs. 10 or so were worth keeping. Half of the rest were still in good enough shape to donate. The rest are out at the curb.
I read articles about massive over consuming Americans and I always think they must be talking about other Americans. It might be that they're talking about us. We might have a problem.

Mix it up

I spent most of the summer away from my mixer and I really missed that little guy. I normally don't like to admit that I love the mixer because I think mixing by hand is more manly, which it is. Standing at the counter whisking as fast as you possibly can with a steady whack whack whack as cream turns to whipped cream is pretty much the height of manliness in the kitchen. You make delicious food by whipping it, how can that not be manly? Somehow hiring that job out to a machine takes a little bit of the edge off.
I expect that I might get a comment from my wife mentioning that the mixer is in fact hers, which it kind of it. Ok, not kind of, it's hers. I reluctantly bought it for her because I believed that 95% of those fancy mixers are nothing more than shiny counter decorations and it's quite big and heavy and expensive to decorate a counter. I'm pretty sure that if I got to pick out a big heavy expensive kitchen decoration it would be something like a Ducati v-twin with the exposed timing belts. I wouldn't mind looking at that every morning on the counter. As it turns out, she uses the dickens out of that mixer, and I've eaten thousands of cookies and gallons of ice cream and at least dozens of cakes that have come out of it's bowl. Gradually I've come to embrace the mixer and it's place in our home. It's quite nice to have the cream be whipping while I cut the strawberries for dessert. Saves time, it really does.
I was quite happy to flip the switch and fire up my mixer tonight. It's almost like using a power tool in the kitchen. It's not quite as satisfying as firing up the drill or the table saw, but it'll do.

Breastfeeding Dad #1

There are a lot of things that people get ready when a baby is coming. The clothes and the room and the crib and the blankets and all of the other paraphernalia that seems to go along with having a baby in the modern world. Finding a pediatrician and deciding if mom is going to stay home or if dad is going to stay home or if grandma will be watching the baby or if it's going to go to day care. One of the biggest decisions to be made has to be about breastfeeding. Are you going to breastfeed? If so, how long are you planning to do it? Are you going to need to pump? Do you have a pump? Where will you pump? Will you feel like a cow in a milk parlor when you are hooked up to the pump?
Even though I'm a dad, I'm coming at all of these questions from a woman's perspective for a good reason. In the end, it's the mother that has to deal with the lions share of the issues surrounding breastfeeding whether she stays home or goes back to work. I've read all of the information about breastfeeding being better for the baby and I believe every word of it, but I challenge you to look around at your peers and try to identify which ones were breastfed. Breastfeeding is important, but it's not so important that it's going to change the course of your child's life. At least I don't think so. Whether you do or not is still a choice, and that's a good thing.
We were breastfeeders. Usually I wouldn't refer to breastfeeding a we thing because really, "we" breastfed is about as accurate as "we" had a baby. If you make the choice to be a stay at home dad and your wife makes the choice to breasfeed, you both have really made the choice to enter into a team event. This is about as "we" as parenting gets. In some ways there is nothing more idiotic than one person producing the milk and another one feeding it. Probably the best thing about breasfeeding (other than the health benefits) is having food everywhere you take your boobs, and women take those things everywhere. I've checked. You don't have anything to get ready, you don't have anything to clean up, your body always makes what's needed. It's a perfect system. Conversely, if you use formula, you just make sure you have the food you need. You make it, your baby eats, you clean up. A few more steps, a little planning, but not too difficult. If you're a stay at home dad and your wife pumps though, you've just made things about five thousand times more difficult than either of those options. First your wife has to pump, which I hear sucks for the most part. Finding a place, finding a time, finding somewhere to put the milk during the day that doesn't freak out their co-workers. It's a lot more work that just plugging the baby in, and it's not like you can just get busy and skip it. There's no meeting more pressing that the pressing from inflating boobs that really need to be pumped. So I hear anyway.
So now you've got this milk and it's a pretty precious commodity. It's not like you can just get more if you run out and your body is trying to make about exactly what the baby needs. You get extra ounce by precious ounce. Getting enough gathered in one place so that you can go back to work for a whole day is no easy task. Once it's there, then dad takes over. This nectar of the boobs is equally precious to him. You just can't screw up and lose a batch. Milk is food, it is comfort, it is everything. Don't screw up!
This is getting pretty long. Next week I'll write more about the day to day challenges a dad faces when dealing exclusively with breast milk. I'll also talk about how awesome it is to realize that you don't have boobs every two hours every single night for the first six months. Oh, and this series of posts isn't going to have any pictures with it because, well, it's just not.

Marble Toes

I've got marbles between my toes
They sparkle in the sun
Daddy daddy come see my toes!
Just look what I have done!

Why did you do that? It looks weird
To have shiny marbley feet
I love the marbles between my toes
I think that they look neat

Get out your camera daddy please
And take a picture for me
I want to show Mommy my silly toes
I know she will want to see


This is my first poetry post. I'm planning to do one every Tuesday, sort of a weekly thing. I'm not a good poet by any means, but it's fun interacting with words in a different way. I'll write more about my thoughts on poetry next week. For now I'll just say that the above poem is completely true. Some days are weird.

Alarming

School starts next week and we're getting ready. School supplies, school clothes, school shoes, meet the teacher, the whole nine yards. It's busy, but nothing painful, nothing out of the ordinary. What is painful is getting back to our regular school schedule. In the summer we still have a bed time and that just has to be adjusted a bit to get it back in line. It's not the bed time that's the problem, it's the wake up, and to be honest it's not really the kids that are having a problem with it, it's me.
For the first time in 10 years I got to sleep in this summer. My children have always been early risers. At the first hint to light they were up and around and wanting to come get me and have breakfast. They also had no sense of days of the week. Every day, every single day, was the same painfully early morning. They would have made fine farmers, all of them. This summer they've finally started to slack off on the very crack of dawn. A few of them even slept in until the sun was above the horizon a few times. It was pretty amazing. What was even more amazing was that I convinced them that it was ok to just get up and play quietly for a while and let daddy sleep for a bit. They never play too quietly so I woke up soon after they did, but they didn't know that. I could just lay in bed for an extra half hour or so and wake up slowly. Snuggling in, dozing off, awaking slowly and peacefully. It was everything I thought it could be.
Now it's school time. We have to get up at the right time and get breakfast early so that we can get ready to be where we need to be. I have to drop four kids off at three schools over the course of an hour and it's all got to run like clockwork. None of this getting up and sitting on the couch for 20 minutes, nope, we're up and moving. We're practicing anyway. Practicing setting alarms. Practicing pulling ourselves out of bed and heading right to the cereal and milk. Conditioning ourselves for the rigors of the school year, and it hurts so much. That alarm clock. It's incessant. It goes off at the same time every morning. And I need to hop to it so that I can assist with milk pouring and getting spoons and making sweet sweet coffee. I'm only one day into it and I can already tell that I haven't lost my innate loathing for alarm clocks and regular wake up times in general. Like I say, the kids seem to be fine. They're bright eyed and bushy tailed and ready to take on the day for the most part. It's me that going to suffer at this reentry to the real world of schedules.

End of Summer

Summer is done. Time to get back to structured days and early bedtimes.

Big Waves

Big waves can be really really fun if you have someone to keep you safe.

Paper Bags

We pick up a lot of things at the beach in the summer. Shells, driftwood, various dead things. Usually we just carry them back, but every now and again someone has the foresight to bring a bag. Usually one of the paper bags we get in the summer. Paper bags are awesome, we use them in crafts, we use them to start fires, we save them and use them for projects throughout the year. The kids also do this. I can honestly say that I have no idea what it is that they're doing, but I can also say that I'm certain I did the same thing at their age. Fun things are fun, they don't have to have a reason.

Sink the Baby!

Who doesn't love pictures of a baby taking a bath in the kitchen sink? Nobody, that's who. Babies in sinks are adorable. Even mine. Especially mine.

Dog vs. Cat

My dog always looks at me like she thinks I want to throw her into a wood chipper, while my cat always thinks she's a super spy who wants to trick me with her charming wily ways. Why are my pets so weird?

Fishing

Pretty much every summer we get to have at least one day of fishing at Grandpa's pond. The fish are hungry and there are lots of them. We catch and release and have a good time. As the kids get older they get more independent with putting on worms and taking off fish. We're not quite to the point where I can just sit back and take pictures yet.

Carnival Prizes

You know those giant carnival prizes? The ones that are 12 feet long and your kids think look awesome and if you're honest, you think look awesome too? You might think you want to win one, but you haven't thought things all the way through. People do win them. Then they have to carry them through the carnival. Then they have a 12 foot lizard in their living room. Ride the rides instead. Trust me.