no joke he puked ten second after this picture. #baby #fatherhood (Taken with instagram)
when you are a parent.
when you are a parent:
- it will take twelve hours of being in bed to get six hours of sleep.
- staying up to watch a basketball game at 9:30 pm will feel impossible.
- commercials involving children now make you weep. you’ll also find commercials with kids funny now and “clever.”
- you just won’t care if you have clean clothes on. just as long as everything’s covered and nothing is hanging out.
- you will sing like a complete asshole to get your child to stop crying.
- bowel movements will become one of the most important developments of the day.
- waking up at 6:30 am will be sleeping in.
- you will lie in bed worrying about what if your child stops breathing, starts crying, is hungry, isn’t sleepy, and swear you heard them crying only to get up to find a perfectly healthy, sleeping infant.
- no one will care if you are alive. they won’t even listen when you’re talking if your child is in the room. if your child isn’t in the room, people will interrupt you and ask for recent photos (unless your child is ugly. i’m not sure what happens if your kid is ugly because my kid is outrageously cute - see below).
- you will get a cold every day. sometimes you’ll get two colds in one day.
- moms will say that they love seeing “active” dads, but still glare at you when you’re out in public with your baby and silently judge the way you’re holding him.
- it will take you three hours to watch a movie because you’ll rewind it every five minutes because you couldn’t hear it.
- also you’ll just stop watching the movie because you’ve got much better things to do.
- your house will be a disaster. you might win a skirmish, but you lose the war. you will feel bad about it, but do little. you will try to open the windows and let the wind carry away the dust bunnies, but it won’t work. it only makes it worse.
- you will become a bath jedi.
- you will have a blog, but only use it for photos and videos of your child and occasionally, schmucky posts like this.
- your kid will wake up while you’re writing this and you’ll have to post and hope there aren’t typos.
six months.
liam’s half birthday was yesterday, figured now is as good a time as any to recap and share what i’ve learned in my short time as a dad.
1. you’ll never finish a meal in one setting ever again and even the idea of warm food is almost laughable. furthermore, you’ll really stop caring about what things taste like or how unhealthy they are. if you can eat it quickly and it fits in your mouth you will make a meal of it, even if it means eating chic-fil-a twice in one day (guilty).
2. people with no kids look up at you now. people with two kids still look down on you and patronize how difficult it is having one child.
3. your sweats will become the most important element of clothing you own AND you’ll now refer to jeans and a hoodie as an ensemble.
4. you will gain weight. i gained ten pounds, all of it in back and belly fat (see chic-fil-a).
5. you won’t work out. you will once the first week and then never again. you might have time to every few weeks, but will spend that time crying yourself to sleep because you’re so exhausted.
6. you stop caring about how late or early you’re awake. you push past caring and enter into a strange world of passive submission when you see the clock read “5:45 am” and think “yeah, i might as well get up, seeing as how i’ve already been asleep for almost two hours.”
7. you don’t read the books. you own them all, nice people have given them to you, but you don’t read them. you just google: “how much poop is too much poop” and cry your way through the sites that pull up.
8. before kids, if someone had barfed on your clothes you would change, no question. nowadays, i access how much barf has been barfed on me and have been known to just leave it to dry and keep wearing it.
9. i have an incredibly, supportive wife and we are raising liam together. not a day goes by that i don’t think about how hard raising kids would be for single moms. i have so much respect for single moms. i want to buy you all flowers and clean your house. i’m not just talking about the emotional energy required to be everything for child, but the sheer work load of it all, the chores, the feedings, the being on-call all the time, the chores…seriously i am awed.
10. having a puppy and a baby at the same time is pretty hilarious. it’s also your way of saying to the universe that you’re okay never having sex ever again.
11. support is a huge deal. the friends and family we have are incredible and have made this process enjoyable. we couldn’t do it without them.
looking forward.
SO MUCH TO LOOK FORWARD TO - i can’t sit still today…
1. this sunday at the mount, new pilgrim baptist church is joining us for worship. they’re going to help us get our gospel on. love it. can’t wait. former ute’s point guard tim drisdom will be leading, i’m nerded up on so many levels.
2. just saw on twitter that the civil wars are performing at the grammy’s! i know the grammy’s are terrible, but it’s cool that they asked the civil wars to play. i actually had a premonition about this a week ago so i think i should get partial credit for making this happen (finders fee at least).
3. liam’s half birthday is next week (13th)! can’t believe how much my life has changed since then. for example:
- i no longer expect to sit down and eat an entire meal at once. i expect to eat some of it, get up, fix something, sit down, eat another bite, get up, etc.
- a baby and a puppy are the universe’s way of making sure your lap will never be empty.
- the soundtrack to my life, the song i wake to in the morning (no longer at 8 am) and go to be to at night isn’t from spoon, radiohead or st. vincent, it’s liam’s playpen audio player. this kid has terrible taste in songs that should be played 15-20 times in a row, we’ll have to work on that as he gets older. (side note: i want to invent a docking station for an ipod or spotify so that you can choose your kids play music and thus, save the last shreds of your sanity as a parent)
4. RSL season kicks off march 10th. watch this video and get pumped up.
5. just saw that explosions in the sky are coming to salt lake city on april 7th. i can’t wait.
great, great, great. can’t wait.
a few bits.
1. went to the gym today. they have vending machines now full of chips, candy and monster energy drinks. way to encourage the resolutioners gold’s gym!
2. didn’t get any REM sleep last night, sara either. this kid better shape up and fly right.
3. in november, when our re-elected republican governor is making his celebration speech, with our burning forests in the background, wildly urinating on a stack of text books, we’ll still look at each other and say, “at least he’s better than the other guys…”
4. i’m really tired of inane companies trying to get me to follow them on facebook. chad “likes” charmin toilet paper, kmart, land o lakes butter, and visine eye drops!
5. i accidentally bought fat free pretzels, i’m pretty sure they won’t even compost.
