I have a few friends on the verge of becoming new dads, and I started to
think of what I could tell them, what advice I might share to help them in
their own personal journeys into fatherhood.
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| Me and 'Lilli Bean', hand-in-hand |
At first I thought, ‘Well, I really only have that one good piece of
advice… okay, maybe two…’ The next day though, there was another idea, and the
day after that another, then another. So this is, now, a pretty long list
of ideas, thoughts and suggestions that I’ve jotted down. I hope at least one or two of these ideas becomes a little gem of advice that might help out a soon-to-be-dad and perhaps makes their own life as a dad a little easier, their
relationship with their spouse a little tighter, and their own fatherhood
skills a little stronger.
Stay Calm and Parent On
I’m going to tell you not to freak out or overreact, but… you will freak
out and overreact. Hey, it’s the nature of the beast because you are a parental
newbie and it’s always better to err on the side of caution, right? You will,
naturally, be the equivalent of a parental freshman, so you’ll tend to
overreact a lot. Again, this is just the nature of the beast – and better to
overreact, than under-react, right?
I can say these words, that you will overreact on occasion, with some confidence for two reasons:
1. I’ve got two girls who are now 7 and 9 years old, girls I managed to
help raise and not kill, die, expire, or otherwise pass away (yet)
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| Womb for one... That's a baby in there, and she's on her way! |
2. As a new dad, I was probably far worse off than most, having ZERO
experience with babies before I had to deal with one – I just didn’t grow up
around friends with babies, or little nieces and nephews floppin’ around
anywhere around me, so I was even worse off than most in the overreaction department
Now, a new or soon-to-be parent might read the above, get slightly
offended and kerfuffled, and say, ‘That’s baloney, that’ not me. I won’t
overreact!’ And someday, when your second is a toddler, and you’re at Target
with both kids, looking at the new dad with a tiny new baby in a brand new car
seat that’s got a sunshade on it, and an umbrella, and a windscreen with
windshield wipers, and airbags, and an abacus, and surround sound playing Bach, and he’s
putting the ‘sanitary cart liner’ in the shopping cart before he sets down the
car seat into it, you’ll chuckle and laugh at him. Then you’ll look back at what
I just said and say, ‘Oh yeaaaah… Chesak was riiiight…’
Even having just said that, even after reading the above and nodding intently, that you will over react. It’s natural. And it will be cute when you look back at it all.
What do I mean by all this? Well, you’ll probably be nervous enough that you're suddenly totally in charge of this little, amazing, helpless life that you’ll so utterly err on the side of caution that you’ll generally tend to over-compensate; nothing crazy of course, just little things, like buying too many things you ‘think’ you need, or overtly fretting about the baby having a cough or sneezing.
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| Beautiful shot from the Idaho Statesman of Sally and Lillian - who's screaming her head off here by the way. I was there in spirit, at least. |
One example of this slightly over-the-top reaction: when Sally got Lillian home from the hospital and started nursing, she had trouble remembering which breast she had just nursed from. She started wearing a bracelet on the hand that hadn’t been nursed, and changed it with each nursing. By the time baby #2, Sylvia, was nursing away, Sally and I stumbled upon a video of Sally describing Lillian’s nursing system (a video for me, during my deployment to Iraq). We saw the bracelet and just laughed out loud because Sally had, by then, gotten very used to just grabbing her boobs to check, and plopping Sylvia onto whichever one seemed larger - no bracelet needed.
Regardless, when you start to stress, I want you to remember that
absolute idiots have been raising kids for thousands of years and their kids,
even caveman’s kids, turned out fine (and when raising kids, ‘fine’ is pretty
damned good). And you are no caveman! You’re not even a 1970’s parent! You have
cell phones and Internet and all that incredible, valuable advice (and confusing,
overabundance of misinformation) at your fingertips! You’ll do absolutely fine.
So try to chill out.
Babies Cry for Only Four Reasons (usually)
Remember this, because it’s true, but babies cry because they need one
of only four things from you;
1. To be fed
2. To sleep
3. Be changed
4. Be burped
That’s it. If s/he is crying, there is a 99.9% chance that it’s because
of one of those four things. So, that’s the good news.
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| Lillian crashed OUT! Babies little bodies are growing so fast, they sleep all the time. But new parents don't get that luxury as there's generally just too much to do! |
The bad news is that, in those instances were it is something outside
those four things, the baby just can’t tell you what it is, and you – as a
freshman dad – are going to have to guess/estimate/reason it out. For example, your
baby can’t tell you their gums hurt. You (with help from your relatives, your
doctor, websites, etc.) have to figure out that they have teething pain and
then take the necessary steps to try to help remedy it. Worse still, if it’s
something really serious, you won’t know until you (and your team of relatives,
doctor, websites) figure it out. Sylvia had numerous ear infections when she
was a baby, for example, and the only reason we figured out that her hours and
hours of screaming cries were because of ear pain (which would cease only when
the eardrum actually ruptured), was when Sally finally happened, by chance, to
see fluid running out of an ear.
Take Care of Momma
For the non-birthing spouse (be it dad or momma #2), your #1 job is to
take care of momma. Let her take care of the baby because, for the most part,
the baby doesn’t need you too much, as they truly only need the parent who gave
birth and is actually nursing them. (And for two dads, this doesn’t necessarily
apply so they can divvy up the duties, and the doodies, as they see fit.)
When it comes to taking care of momma, that means not just momma but
also the house, the car, the yard, the dog and everything else. Let her do
nothing but take care of baby, while you have everything else. It’s an easy,
clear, pretty well balanced system (that took us a little too long to figure
out).
No Really, TAKE CARE OF MOMMA
One specific word on how exactly to 'Take Care of Momma': my biggest, most ignorant mistake as a father and a dad was becoming SO focused on the baby (then babies) that I did not emotionally care for Sally.
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| Pregnant Sally. Mind you, she was at a Board of Directors meeting for the nonprofit she ran at the time. |
While some pregnant/post-partum
moms ‘get a glow about them’ most of them are pretty miserable. They feel fat,
are retaining water, don’t fit into their clothes, their bodies are out of
control and in general they feel gross and vulnerable. Your job is to make your partner feel better, both before and after birth.
In a nutshell, you need to
compliment the crap out of her. Tell her how beautiful she is, how great she
looks, etc. She’ll tell you that you are full of shit, but tell her anyway –
again and again and again.
Go Easy on the Social
Lots of people have babies. Your baby is amazing to you (as it should
be), but it is, in the grand scheme of the rest of the world, just another
baby. So don’t hammer the rest of your circles with fuzzy, soft-focus, studio portrait
photos of your ‘blessing’, your ‘angel’, your ‘miracle’, etc. Please, I beg of
you.
Actually a great idea from my friend Robin is to set up a private social
page (on FaceBook, a blog, etc.) that those friends and family that you invite to the page can tune into when they
like, rather than get photo-bombed by repeated images of your little
pudge-ball’s first spit up.
Your Fun
As the dad, you now come last in the pecking order. Seriously.
Priorty #1 is baby. Priority #2 is momma. And you, well you come last.
And I don’t mean you come in #3 in the pecking order, I mean last – like DEAD LAST. Your needs come after baby,
momma, the house, the car, the dog, the yard, etc.
That means that your activities, all those fun things you used to do,
are now curtailed. They aren’t cut off and aren’t necessarily lost forever, but
they are certainly curtailed because, as a dad, you just won't have the time available for you to do your activities like you used to.
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| Me, taking a break from a party we were hosting to give Lillian a bath (granted it was her first birthday and she was covered in cake). |
Now, you may have dad friends who are bragging about going out drinking with
their buddies all the time, or still getting in 60 ski days per season, or
taking off on long bike/moto rides, but just know that these dads have a name. They
are called douchebags.
They are also called dads that will be absent from their
kids lives, until the kids turn 14 and those dads suddenly think that they can
hang out and do ‘cool stuff together’. And those dads are wrong, because it’s
too late for them. They were out drinking, skiing, riding, whatever and the
window to be a real dad, and really connect with your child when they need you
the most, is gone – and it ain’t comin’ back.
So, be a dad and not a douche-dad. Fatherhood is a sacrifice, a fantastic one. And the first thing to go is, both sadly and yet frankly, your fun.
'You Time'
That being said though, you have to try (TRY) to maintain your sanity
and find what time you can for you. Just know that this time is short. It may
be taking a half hour to read a book, or getting in a quick run, or just
sitting by a brook and reflecting (or, most likely, napping), but take time to
get away and clear your head.
But generally, in the list of priorities, ‘dad time’ is now something
like number 764th on the list.
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| Sally getting ready for a date night. |
'You Two Time'
As challenging as it will be, you also need to find a way to get some
‘you two’ time in. Find a trusted sitter (no small task with any kid, but
particularly with babies), lean on a family member, or find some way to get out
of the house and have a lunch, chat over coffee, go for a hike/walk/stroll, or
go out for a movie (well, maybe not a movie as you might fall asleep).
Better still,
get baby out of the house and head back to the bedroom for some intimate time.
And by ‘intimate time’ I don’t even necessarily mean sex, but even just touching, cuddling, maybe
trade massages, etc. But, hopefully also sex – for both your sanity.
Use Clear Communication – and Then Communicate Some More
Due to time constraints, the nonstop and never-ending daily demands put upon you and
your spouse, and delirium caused by lack of sleep, you’ll have to get used to
being really pretty explicit in your communications with your partner. Don’t
leave things hanging – make them definitive. And once you’re done, wrap up the
conversation you just had.
Sally and I had to start completing our conversations and closing the
loop on all of them, almost like you might do in a business meeting. For example,
one of us might say something like, “Okay, we just talked about changing our
nightly schedule and we’re now going to alternate putting her down so the other
one can get some ‘me time’, right? And we said that you’d have [these nights],
and I’d have [those] nights, correct? And we’re starting this tomorrow night, is
that what we just agreed on?”
A critical communication element to get used to is confirming who has/is
watching the baby. Let’s say you’ve appropriately prioritized your new
baby-centric home and you want some ‘you time’. You might say, “Well, I just
changed her, fed her, put her to bed, cut the grass, changed the oil on the
truck, cleaned the chicken coop, did our taxes, and did seven loads of laundry.
So I’m going to take about half an hour and just chill out, okay? So, you’ve
got her if she gets up, right?”
And when you ask those questions, ensure that you get a ‘yes’ answer
before moving out.
The Grind Will Get You
Generally, no single day with a baby is that hard (unless that baby is
sick – then it’s pretty much a total bitch). What is hard is everyday with a
baby. The constant grind of doing the same things over and over again, day
after day is what wears you down: feed baby, burp baby, change baby, walk
around/play with baby, feed baby, burp baby, change baby, put baby down, feed
baby…
And you may feel like your brain has turned to mush because you’re just
not using it at a very deep level, an issue that’s especially challenging for
career-focused individuals. I once met a new mom who was a well-regarded
psychiatrist who was used to working 14-hour days and just crushing her job.
Suddenly she was a slave to the mundane baby cycle of bed ‘em, feed ‘em, change
‘em, burp ‘em, bed ‘em, etc. She felt like she was suddenly no one special
because she had so identified herself as that hotshot psychiatrist for so long
and now she felt like ‘just a mom’.
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| Sleep... precious, precious sleep... |
Of course being ‘just a mom’, is a huge deal, a magnificent sacrifice,
and will be so very, very worth it in numerous ways down the road. But when
baby is young, and all those rewards are years away, you can start to
feel pretty bummed out sometimes about that finely-tuned brain of yours, honed
by decades of work and study, which is suddenly not being used at the same depth as it was previously.
This is why finding some time for yourself and you and your partner is
so critical.
Another note about your brain and your work: if you will be a working
parent, get used to half-assing both work and being a parent. You can only do
one really well if you’re not doing the other. So if you are doing both, just
know that you won’t be able to be the dedicated, go-get-‘em worker bee you once
were due to the demands of parenthood. And know too that you won’t be the
ultimate uber parent that you always thought you could be, because you’ll still
have to work 40+ hours a week. Accept this, move on, and just do the very best
you can for both work and family.
Shop Used
Contrary to popular belief (First World belief at least), babies do not
have to be that expensive. Yes, you need some things, but you don’t need that
much, honestly. Clothes yes, and bottles, and all those little things – but
remember that people all over the world raise children without bottle warmers,
nursing chairs, crib cams, and baby monitors and all that STUFF that you’ll see
in Babys-r-Us gift registries and some of those awful parenting magazines (and
most are totally awful as they are very negative, extremely reactionary and
filled with headlines like – ‘47 Suffocating Dangers Lurking in Your Baby Room
RIGHT NOW!’).
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| The girls checking out some books, and toys, at a consignment store. |
Plus, baby stuff is big business, so that means that there is plenty of
it out there. So shop consignment stores, ask your friends with slightly older kids for hand-me-downs,
and check Craigslist because there is plenty of baby stuff out there to be had
for cheap. I would even bet that you could get a kid from age zero to two years
old without having to buy anything brand new, not a single thing, and
do it relatively easily too.
To this end, and to get very specific for a moment; don’t buy too many onesies. You’ll think, ‘Well, we can’t
have too many!’ but… you actually can, because all your friends and family are
thinking exactly the same thing. They will buy you some and you will get
them as gifts and presents from friends that drop by and say, ‘It was SO CUTE,
I just HAD TO GET IT.’
And before you know it… you have a huge stack of onesies
that you don’t know what to do with. You’ll have ones that say ‘My Aunt is a
Firefighter!’ and ‘Go Spartans!’ and ‘Grampa Loves Me!’ and ‘Whoopsie!’ and
‘Stanford Class of ‘36’ and all sorts of cute, cute, crap. And then you will
eventually start to find brand new 6M onesies at the bottom of the stack (the
one that says, ‘Don’t look at me – that smell is coming from my daddy!’) – when
your baby is now nine months old. I can't even tell you how many times we passed along to parent friends some brand spakin' new kids clothes, simply because they got pushed down to the bottom of a pile of other ones.
Storage
That being said, I think it’s inevitable that, as a First World parent,
you’ll be deluged with STUFF (please note; all the stuff will seem manageable up to about
six months, starts to get annoying and exasperating at about a year, and
becomes just insane by the time you get to baby #2).
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| Lillian, with an early batch of 'stuff'. More, so much more, would come later. |
You see, your parents will want to buy things for the baby, you will get
many things during a baby shower, excited friends will want to pitch in and buy
cute things (like… more onesies), you’ll nervously overcompensate and buy too
much yourself, etc. So, you’ll need some storage for this stuff, especially if
you plan on having more kids down the line.
At one point, between babies, I had storage bins that went from our
garage floor literally to the ceiling. I had bins for Sally’s various stages of
pregnancy clothes, her post-partum clothes, clothes and things for 0-6 month,
7-12 month, 1T, 2T, etc. So buy your bins big, and make sure they’re stackable.
Weight Gain
I think most dads gain weight when they have babies. Why is this?
Well,
you’re tired all the time, so it’s easy to order out for dinners more than you
used to (going out to restaurants is not easy, as it’s now far more
logistically complicated with a baby in tow, but you’ll probably go out more
often too, since you’ll want to get out of the house).
You’ll also be less able to workout and will be less active (BTW, if you
are ever looking for good, hard, super quick in-home workouts that don’t need
equipment, search on ‘Hotel WOD’ and check out a variety of in-home ‘Workouts
Of the Day’ that might take no longer than 20 minutes with a warm up). I think
I hit about 235, and I’m normally about 220 – and still trying to ‘get back
down to 215’.
Booze
Booze was also a challenge and something that I started taking advantage
of a little too much, especially with baby #2. Consider that I was working for
a start-up, traveling a lot, in the Army National Guard (good bye one quarter
of all weekends!), my wife traveled a fair amount with her job, it was baby #2
(more on that later), and we lived far from any family support. That alone
might explain why I started drinking more. But it also became something of a
crutch.
I’d finish work everyday, and come dinnertime I would just become
absolutely useless – pretty much ready to pass out and go to bed right then and
there at 6PM. But, as tired as I was, it was also one of the busiest times of
the day (in contrast to Life Before Kids, when that time is for fun or
relaxing). So it was easy to start drinking beer, which I found gave me a little
mental pick-up, while also imbuing me with lots of good carby energy. Soon I
was drinking 4-6 beers (if not more) a night. But, an important caveat here,
this was with baby #2 – and I’ll get to that more in a later post.
Breast-Feeding and Sleeping
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| Sally nursing Lilli Bean on a camping trip. |
I think these are two of the biggest decisions new parents have to figure
out: are you going to commit to breast-feeding and all the benefits therein,
and what will be the sleeping situation for your baby.
I won’t get into the breastfeeding debate here as it’s just too personal
an issue, but will say that Sally and I were both committed to this for our
kids. To us, it just made too much sense. After all, that is what breasts are
actually FOR. Further, it was much nicer for late-night feedings to have Sally
simply rollover and give a baby her breast than it would be to get up, heat up
a bottle, etc. The same goes for feeding a hungry baby on a plane, in a taxi,
in the mall, etc. It’s also less stuff to have to deal with too. It’s what
breasts were made for, and how babies were made to feed. It’s also probably
about 10-12 times more efficient than formula, when you consider all the time spend buying and mixing formula, washing bottles and nipples, etc.
For sleeping, you have to figure out where your baby will sleep. If you
are committed to putting the baby in their own room in a crib, then you’ll have
to suffer through a couple of nights of ‘cry it out’, whereby you leave the
baby in there (screaming) all night long until s/he starts sleeping on his own.
Sally and I decided to not go this route and instead just had the baby in the
bed with us (or in a co-sleeper attached to our bed). For us, this was just physically easier to
have the baby right there next to us (especially for nursing), but there are people who
feel strongly each way. And the down side of our method was that we always had
a kid in our bed for a long, long time…
Part 2...
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| Me, settling into daddy-hood with 11-month Lillian. |
The rule of thumb of blog posts is that they should be no longer than
700 words. Well, this post is approaching 4,000. What can I say but that it
turns out that I had a lot to share, hopefully some of which might be of help to
some dad or mom out there someday.
And as if this weren’t long enough, there’s still more yet. I’ll follow
this up soon with a quick (well, relatively quick – certainly not 4,000 words)
list of little ‘pro tips’ to offer up as well. So, stay tuned future dads…
