I was young. I was reckless. Backups? We don’t need no stinkin’ backups.

I was writing like a machine. Blog posts popped up everyday…sometimes 2 or 3 a day. I was a partial stay at home Dad with a young daughter who took long afternoon naps. Time was endless. Funny, because at the time I can remember thinking I didn’t have a lot of time and I was soooooo busy. How our perceptions of time can get so warped by whatever stage we are in our life. Oh, to have the time I thought I didn’t have then, now.

It was inevitable that some kind of disaster would strike my fragile, perilous second hand DIY web server, and in 2005 it did. My server died. No backups. Well, some backups, but rather haphazard. At the time I didn’t think nothing of it. I remember thinking, “ah well, I lost a few blog posts, no big whoop”.

Fast forward a half dozen years and an idle night playing on the Wayback Machine provided by the Internet Archive. Hmmm, I wonder…

I type in http://dadventure.ca and what pops up makes me kick myself for not doing this sooner. And for being so damn cavalier about the information I lost.

As I sift through this archive of posts, I am swept back to a time that seems so long ago, yet was so recent. 2005. Just 7 years ago. I am reading posts about moving out of our first house when my daughter was 2. 

Our first house. Her only house.

The reasons are valid: not enough space, a backyard that remains flooded from November to March, no dining room, too much tripping over each other. Yet it is still sad to leave the memories, like walking into this house with the girl the very first time. That moment when her Mom and I exchanged a sideways glance that we both knew meant, “This is it. We’re on our own. Now what?” I never knew one glance could reveal so much information.

This is the bedroom where we first stayed up all night with a sick girl, throwing up over and over and forcing us to cancel a (rare) planned weekend trip away from home that we had both been looking forward to. Another sideways glance. Ah well, I guess this is what being a parent is all about.

Memories of the frustrations of being the stay at home parent of a 2 year old.

Like I said, some days just seem harder than others. The extra struggle trying to get her dressed as she flops around like an electrified octopus, screaming and crying at the top of her lungs. The extra effort of trying to strap a 2×4 into a car seat so you won’t be late for her play group. Trying to play United Nations peacemaker with the other kids, negotiating the landmine of 2 pushcars for 30 kids. The extra concentration required while you try to carry on a phone conversation with a roofer with a human fog horn strapped to your leg bellowing DADDYDADDYDADDYDADDY! And the constant demands for upeee, uppeeee, upppeeeee.

Some days it is all I can do from screaming TAKE ME AWAY FROM HERE! Get me back to the sanity of backstabbing co-workers and bastard bosses. Of impossible deadlines and even more impossible budgets. Take me back to sanity of the real world.

Surviving my first parental experience with puke

Maggie puked on me for the first time. Not a little baby spit up after an over the shoulder burp – but a full-on, gut emptying, projectile spewing geyser. At one point, I swear I saw her kidney come up.

I knew the moment would eventually come and I had been dreading it. Smell is a powerful sense for me, and I don’t do well with foul scent. My wife discovered this about me when we walked into our house once after spending a month traveling in Turkey only to find our freezer had crapped out sometime between Gallipoli and Istanbul. She quickly realized I wouldn’t be much help digging the previously frozen blackberries and chicken out from the bottom of the dearly departed freezer.

Mom was at work today, so it was just Maggie and me – poor girl. She has been sick in the past, but never quite this sick. So I carried her off to the bathroom and stripped us both down. I toyed with giving her a bath, but she was looking quite stunned, and I couldn’t quite bare the thought of inflicting a bath on her when it looked like the only thing she wanted to do was crash. So I wiped her off as best I could, dressed her and gave her some water. Ten minutes later she was fast asleep on my chest. A chest, I must admit, that was a bit bigger knowing that I had handled my first major vomit situation with my breakfast intact.

The voice of the 2005 me. The new Dad me.

I haven’t recovered everything. I know there was more. But what I did manage to recover is better than gold. And now has been transferred to this blog. With weekly backups. Hosted on redundant servers. And tonight, I am hugely grateful to the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine.

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Case in point last week. My son had to spend a few hours in an isolation ward in emergency at the hospital (it’s okay – he’s fine). But during the course of the 6 hour stay he got stuck in an isolation room and poked and prodded by Dr’s and nurses. When he was finished and released, we wanted to reward him with a little something, so I picked up a little Star Wars light sabre for him that he has been eyeing up for the past few weeks. This prompted a “hey, that’s not fair” from his older sister. I tried to explain why it actually was fair, but it seemed to fall on deaf ears.

It works both ways. At 7, my daughter has been doing summer camps this year and having a great time. This has led to some “that’s not fair” resentment from my 4 year old pre-school son.

My kids have this sense that unless everything is exactly equal, things are unfair. But yet, they are different kids – different people with different interests and (at 7 and 4) different abilities. Why would you want things to be exactly equal in those circumstances? Yet somehow, they have this feeling that unless they get exactly the same things and are treated exactly the same, then one is getting more.

It used to drive me nuts when my parents would get me and my brother and sister the exact same thing at Christmas in an attempt to keep things equal, but I understand the temptation to do this now that I have kids of my own and am fighting the “it’s not fair” battle. I made the mistake of snapping at one last week “well, life isn’t fair”. Fortunately, my wife caught me and put a stop to that line of thought.

So, how do you handle the fair, but not equal battle at your house?

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One of things John mentioned in the interview that has resonated with me is his question of who taught you to be a Dad? John says that no one ever talked to him about Fatherhood. No one ever told him when he was a boy that they believed had what it takes to be a good Dad.

It’s more than missing mentors and role models. In fact, I think we have a lot of models and mentors for great Dads around  (and, as an aside, I think there have always been great Dads – it’s not necessarily something new with our generation. I have something percolating in the back of my head about this so called “changing role of Dad” thing that I am suddenly finding irksome, but that’s another post). It’s just that there is not a lot of open discussion about what it takes to be a great Dad with those who matter the most – our sons.

I am not talking about publicly writing our blog posts, or carrying out these conversations over beers or on Facebook with each other, as important as those activities are. We Dads ARE connecting and having those discussions about what it takes to be a Dad. That is happening.

But what John says is missing are those conversations we have with the boys in our lives about what it takes to be a great Dad. It is about arming them with the belief and the confidence that they have the tools within them to someday be great Dads theselves, and then seizing the opportunities as they come up to help them refine those tools.

I am guilty. I don’t think I have ever consciously thought that while I am playing with my son I am preparing him to be a Dad. I am preparing my son for lots of things in his life. How to work as part of a team, how to think for himself, how to solve problems, how to treat and respect women, how to tie his shoes. But I haven’t ever consciously thought that I should be teaching him to be a great Dad.

I can’t tell you how uncomfortable typing that last line made me feel. Like I have just discovered some innate truth that I should have known all along. But the truth is, it is something that  had never occurred to me, beyond consciously trying to be the best Dad/Husband I can be in the hopes that I can model behaviour for him. But what John is saying is, while that is important, modelling alone isn’t enough – we have to be explicit and act consciously if we want our sons to be great Dads. As powerful as our modelling is, we can’t expect that our sons are going to get it just by observing our actions. It is, I think, an important point, and one that I need to pay attention to.

Here is some more from John.

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This is my Dad. Over the years he has taken some friendly ribbing about his enthusiastic Christmas decorations. It got worse once Christmas Vacation was released and we now had a name to lovingly hang on my Dad – Clark W Griswald. My Dad had so many cutouts, lights and decorations on our yard that they actually spilled over to the neighbours yard.

We grew up in a small town, and I have vivid (and sometimes embarrassing) memories of the traffic being backed up on our street Christmas Eve, flashbulbs popping as strangers took pictures of our house. I’m certain the flashes were redundant.

A few years ago, my retired parents moved from the town I grew up in to the town they grew up in. A province away. I thought that would have been the end of the decorations, considering they alone would probably fill a 1 ton U-Haul. But Dad packed them all up and took them and has continued the tradition at their new home.

As I get older with my own kids and spend more time in my childhood memories than is probably healthy, I have come to deeply appreciate this tradition that my Dad worked hard to carry on. Traditions are important. They are the glue that holds family together across time. And as the years go by, I have this feeling of pride in the fact that my Dad brought smiles to many faces, and probably contributed to a few other families Christmas traditions – the Christmas Eve drive-by of the Lalonde house.

Nice work, Chuck.

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I remember how terrified both my wife and I were when we first walked in the door to our house with a fresh, new baby girl bundled in our arms. We both just stood there, shell shocked from the seismic change that had just occurred in our lives, unaware of what having this new baby would really mean or even what we should do next. That feeling does gradually wear off. But it occasionally rears it’s quease-inducing head when we are presented with a new challenge we have never dealt with before. In the early days, it was the basics – first diaper changes, first solid foods, first baths. Today, it’s first day of classes, first time on skates, and first sleepover.

This week’s episode of This American Life, the excellent radio program from PBS, has a story of a Dad who undertakes a first with his four month old daughter – their first walk around the block together. This doesn’t seem like it should be terrifying. But for Dad Ryan Knighton, it was. His story is the first one in this weeks TAL (about 6:30 in in) and it hooked me. Don’t worry. No one gets hurt. It’s just a compelling story of a first for a Dad who experiences life from a different perspective.

Besides being a dad, I do have this in common with Ryan. I have also been asked if I am looking for Mom when pushing my kids in a stroller :).

Ryan has written a book about his parenting experiences called C’mon Papa: Dispatches from a Dad in the Dark

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As a parenting strategy to help your life go smoother, it’s hard to argue with the tried and true strategy of established routines. One of the routines we have with our kids is the evening bath, which we use as the transition to bedtime.

For my 6 year old daughter, her bedtime routine has consisted of a bath before bed every night (save the very rare occasion) since she was a baby. But lately I have begun to wonder at what age does the bedtime bath stop and can be removed as part of the bedtime routine?

An evening bath does serve another purpose other than acting as the starting point in the bedtime routine, which is, of course, hygiene. But the primary reason we (and I suspect most) parents have an evening bath has more to do with routine than cleanliness, and running a bath each and every night is not exactly an environmentally friendly act.

So, my question is – at what age do you/did you begin phasing out the evening bath as part of the bedtime routine?

Photo: Big Fun by Ernst Moeksi used under Creative Commons license

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I can especially relate to the moment he shares with his daughter who, after throwing up on his laptop battling a norovirus, reacts like I could imagine mine doing. Just when you think you know what you are being called on to do as a parent (in this case, make your kid comfortable while they battle a bug), parenthood throws you a small curveball and you realize that you are being called upon to do something else entirely.

I go into my daughter’s room to kiss her goodnight and find her sweating under blankets. Her best friend has lately found other kids he’d rather play with at school, and in her sleepy state that’s the first thing on her mind. Through her dream haze she says to me, “It’s good that he wouldn’t play with me today; I might have made him sick.” Here I’ve been worried I upset her with my reaction to what happened, but heavier things weigh on her tiny heart.

“I just want you to know that I love you, and that my computer isn’t broken after all.”

“Okay, Pops.”

“And don’t you worry about him. He doesn’t know how much fun he’s missing.”

A few lines later, musing about his angry reaction to losing his laptop, he says;

But how could you be mad at her? You might as well be mad at the wind.

Later on, an event happens that puts losing your laptop to a kid vomiting on it into perspective, and presents another reality of what parents are called upon to deal with, in this case it is Jim’s Mother-in-Law. Here’s hoping the follow-up post has some good news with regards to that situation.

This is wonderful writing, and a post that every soon to be Dad should read.

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Our usual morning routine when I drop her of at playschool is like this. After giving her a goodbye hug and kiss, I leave and walk down the front steps of the preschool. At the bottom I stop and turn around. The pre-school has a big bay window in the front of it overlooking the street and every morning there is my girl, standing in the window, smiling and waving goodbye to me.

I begin to walk down the street until I hear a tap at the window behind me. I turn around and there she is, still smiling and waving. I wave back. I go a few more steps down the street, stop and turn around. She is still standing in the window, watching me walk away. She smiles and waves. I smile and wave back. I go a few more steps, stop, turn and wave. She is still there and returns the wave.  We repeat our turn and wave 3 or 4 times as I walk down the street. Sometimes I turn around and she is making a silly face in the window. Sometimes, I do the same and we share a little giggle. It’s a private moment in a public place – a moment of connection and transition for both my daughter and myself and it continues until I am around the corner and out of sight of the daycare window.

We have done our window dance every daycare & preschool morning  for the past 2 1/2 years. Until yesterday.

Yesterday, after I walked down the steps of the preschool, I turned around to wave. She wasn’t at the window. I paused, waiting for her happy little face to appear in the window.  After a moment, still no girl in the window.  I waited a bit longer. Still no girl. Slowly it dawned on me that maybe she wasn’t coming to the window.

I began to walk slowly away from the preschool, stopping and turning every few steps and hoping I would see her face in the window waving at me. But each time was the same – no smiling girl waving goodbye to her dad. After 3 turns to look back, I finally did catch a glimpse of her through the big preschool bay window. She was laughing and running around with her friends, oblivious that her dad was standing on the street looking in, wishing that she would come to the window to wave goodbye.

She wasn’t coming.

I continued walking down the street, occasionally glancing back just in case she had taken up her usual spot and was waving and smiling at me walking away. But she never appeared, caught up in her own little world of friends and play inside the preschool. And I realized that each time I turned around and she wasn’t there, I felt a little bit sadder.

It seems like such a silly little thing to remember – the first time my girl didn’t come to the window to wave goodbye to me in our morning ritual. But for some reason, this little first moment has stuck with me. All day yesterday it kept replaying over and over in my head, implanting itself into some remote memory brain cells. I don’t know why. But it is a first moment that obviously has hit me at some level to make me want to wake up at 5 am and document it here for some future me to look back on and remember.

Maybe I read too much into this little moment. That somehow this is not some kind of sign that she is growing more independent and doesn’t require the comfort of her dad waving goodbye to her to signal that everything is okay and right in the world. More likely she probably just got caught up in her own little world.

But I am going to use this moment as a good reminder to stop and pay attention to those little everyday things and realize that when it comes to parenting, those little things are often just as important as those big milestones. It’s a realization that in the midst of the chaos that is our lives right now, I am experiencing just as many significant firsts as my kids. They may not be as developmentally big as taking a first step or uttering a first word, but they are big and significant in their own little way, even if the reasons why are not always obvious. And maybe they don’t have to be.

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I will not be kicked in the ass by the time police this time around. I will not suffer endless struggles and fights with my kids to get them to bed at 8pm when their biological clock says it is only 7.

I will not put up with 2 weeks of hell as sleep deprived maniacs wreck vengeance on our sacred Mommy-Daddy evening time.

No, this year, we are being proactive and we have begun the transition.

We’re lucky. At 5 and 2 they don’t know how to tell time yet. And we are taking full advantage. Each night, bath begins a few minutes earlier than the night before. Sure, on March 7th they will go to bed at 7 o’clock, but on March 8th when we jump ahead one hour and 7 o’clock becomes 8, it should be seamless for our kids circadian clocks.

Well, that’s the theory anyway. Here’s hoping. In parent life, as you know all too well, things rarely work out as you plan. But we’re still going to give it a shot. If it works, wonderful. If not, well then,  there is always November 1st, when the insanity begins anew.

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Now, in some respects you kinda have to go whoa, that’s a line we don’t need to cross. But on the other hand, and from an educational standpoint, here is some firsthand experience from someone who has gone through it. For example, if you didn’t read tweets like:

“‘let’s get out of here before anything else goes wrong’ jokes doc as he stitches Mr Righty. Ha ha ha“

then you might be unexpectedly caught off guard when your medical team casually crack  a joke mid procedure. Or, as way my experience, begin to talk about how you are his last case before catching a flight to Mexico for his vacation. Dude, you have a laser and my testicles in your right hand – get back in the game! Every time my wife feels slightly nauseous I worry that my surgeon was already mentally lying on the beach in Cancun when he performed the procedure. But I digress…

Kev, here’s hoping that “Mr. Righty” is feeling better. Remember, frozen peas are your friend.

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In a nutshell, Boynton says that as we move through life a significant energy shift takes place for us Daddy types. As we age, our energy decreases – and as someone who has fallen asleep on more than one occasion reading bedtime stories to the kids I can personally attest to this – while at the same time the demands for that energy increase, usually in the form of young kids and increased job demands as we enter our prime wage earning years. When you have an increased demand for a decreasing product, something has got to give and what usually gives is our primary relationship with our spouse. It’s not that we fall out of love, but rather the relationship undergoes a major transformation in the middle years of our lives.

There are times when I get frustrated at not having enough time with my wife to be able to do all those things that first brought us together. But I hold out hope that someday that life will ease it’s way back. It will probably never be the same as it once was, but I suspect I will be okay with that because something richer will be there to take the place of that early love. Our relationship will be deeper knowing that together we survived this incredibly chaotic, roller coaster ride called parenthood.

In the words of Lou Reed, it’s the beginning of a great adventure; an adventure I am not on alone. And once I arrive at the next way-point, I know my partner will be right there with me ready to step off into the next great adventure.

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I suspect that, like many other parents, my wife and I take the responsibility of raising our kids a little too seriously. We are both worriers, so much so that I think we occasionally lose the plot and don’t trust our instincts as much as we should.

Certainly, having small children is taxing, hard work, and some days it’s pretty easy to get overwhelmed with the responsibility of shaping a life. I constantly worry that I might do or say the wrong thing and somehow damage my kids. I’ve always thought that taking care of a kids physical needs: feeding, changing diapers, cuddling, all that kind of stuff, is way easier and less intimidating than cultivating and nurturing an emotionally healthy kid. It’s pretty cut and dry. Kid hungry = feed kid. Dirty diaper = change it. No problem.

I need to lighten up, and apparently I am not the only one. Mary Morgan, the wife of noted Child Development expert and author Dr. Benjamin Spock (Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care: 8th Edition), has recently spoken out that parents today take parenting far too seriously. Says Morgan:

What we’ve done with experts in parenting is to tell people that they don’t know anything, and they have to rely on somebody that’s done this and done that. We undermine some of the greatest wisdom we’ve had handed to us: what we know intuitively. I’m not saying that the experts are wrong. I just think that this attitude has weakened the self-confidence of parents.

On one hand, there is a certain irony that Morgan speaks of there being an avalanche of information for parents when she and her husband are partly responsible for that avalanche. Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care was one of the first mass media publications to address parenting. Yet, I can’t help but think she is right. Sometimes, there is so much information available to us that it is easy to “shut down” and feel more than slightly apprehensive about how we raise our kids. It seems that for each parental piece of advice there is an equal and opposite parental theory that is just as compelling.

Damn you, information age and your promise of infinite knowledge! Give me the good old days when I could live in ignorance about the long term health implications of too much television and let my kids sit for hours at a time in front of violent Bugs Bunny cartoons while stuffing their face with enriched Cocoa Puffs!

I guess the point of this rant is that I need to lighten up and realize I know more than I think I do. I need to stop worrying about always doing the right thing and accept that I will make mistakes. No one is, or can be, perfect. And those who strive for it are doomed to fail. I need to trust my instincts and realize that my kids will be fine in the end. As Dr. Spock himself says, “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.”

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The moment happens in the days pre-internet. Days when the fountain of family knowledge wasn’t a computer in the corner but the encyclopedia, vast volumes of information stored in 20+ odd books sold to my parents by some traveling salesman who passed through our small town.

As a 9 year old, I loved those books. I would spend hours flipping through them reading about the most obscure of topics. Jai-Alai what’s that? Coelacanth? Oh that is cool. They opened up the world to me and I contribute my Cliff Clavin Trivial Pursuit skills to the many hours I spent reading our encyclopedias.

In those days, full colour photos had to be printed on special paper, so all the colour photos would tend to be grouped together on special insert pages. One of these special photo inserts was 3 pages of colour photos devoted to classic and significant cars throughout the years.

One winter night, my Dad and I were sitting around the kitchen table and, as usual, I was reading an encyclopedia I had snagged at random from the set. It was the encyclopedia with the car photos. My Dad, being a bit of an old car buff, shuffled over beside me and asked what I was looking at. I showed him the photos. He pointed at one and said, “your Grandpa had this one. It had a push button transmission. Oh, and this car here has suicide doors.”

“What’s a suicide door?”

“A door that opens backwards.”

“What’s this car, Dad?”

And off we went. For the rest of the night, Dad and I sat at the kitchen table, me pointing at photos of cars in the encyclopedia and Dad telling me everything he knew about them.

And that is it. My Dad and me, sitting at the kitchen table talking about cars. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. But as the years have gone by, that memory and the significance of that time has stuck with me. It was my Dad spending time with me, passionately engaged with me.

It’s a moment that illustrates the primary rule of parenting – make time to be with your kids. Nothing we do as parents will have as much impact on our kids than the simple fact that we choose to spend our time with them. It doesn’t have to be big or extravagant. Just be there for them during those seemingly insignificant moments of the day.

I wish I could know what moments my kids will remember from their childhood, but, of course, I can’t. I don’t know what moments they will pick to remember when they are 40 and have kids of their own. But I do hope they will have a vast collection to choose from. And because of that, I hope they too will realize just how important it is to make the time to spend with their kids.

Thanks, Dad. Happy Fathers Day.

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