Tag: dad

2 Under 2: It’s okay to get pissed (occasionally) (#061)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As I write a lot of these daddy brog posts, I try to weed out through a lot of the irrational and hope to ultimately be able to sift out important knowledge and bullet points that I’d hope to be able to impart and share with other like-minded fathers in the future.  Nobody’s ever come to me for advice or opinions, and I’m not about to just willy-nilly give them out unsolicited, but in the event anyone ever does, I’d want to actually be able to have some useful suggestions and opinions to share.

Anyway, for this particular post, this is actually kind of funny: obviously at this current juncture, I rarely have the luxury to be able to write at the very moment the words are formulating in my head.  But I’m so determined to write about particular things that I’ll take down notes or jot down a blurb of what it is I’m intending on writing about when I do have the time, ignoring the very important factor that my emotional state might not even be in the same stratosphere when that time actually comes.

Like this post, where I’m as calm as a hindu cow now, as opposed to the mental state I was in when the idea for this post came to be.  I mean, look at the blurb I wrote:

8/22 – dad brog – it’s okay to be pissed off and upset with a difficult baby.  it doesn’t mean i love my children any less, but holy fucking shit do i get sick and tired of their bullshit when they’re screaming all the fucking time.  i know this is the time to be savoring and enjoying all the moments of their rapidly moving newborn stage, but i’d be lying if i couldn’t wait for the colic, the fussing, shit sleep habits and the endless screaming to be grown out of.  i get absolutely dick done on a daily basis because while my wife is on maternity leave, i work my ass off doing double duty parenting while not pissing people off at work by being afk so much, and when i’m on paternity leave, i’ll just be doing double duty parenting work then too.  i get no fucking time off ever, and it’s hard to keep my mental state above water sometimes.

As the kids would say, he mad.  But as I often believe, things said in the heat of frustration are often the most honest, and even looking back at that wall of text rambling, I don’t disagree with any of it.  And that’s one of the things that I would probably impart onto other future dads, and even moms because frustration doesn’t really have a gender associated to it.

That being said, what I would definitely tell all new parents, is that it’s okay to get pissed off, occasionally.  Because raising kids is hard, often frustrating, and sometimes, all the mantras to remind ourselves to be patient just won’t cut it, and we just need to let ourselves get pissed off and blow off some steam in order to bring ourselves back to level.  I imagine we all want to believe that our children are nothing short of perfection and they do nothing wrong, but that’s all bullshit, they’re going to do things that annoy us and piss us off and that it’s okay to acknowledge such behavior as bullshit and it’s okay to be tired of it, because we get tired of the bullshit of adults, why shouldn’t the same apply to babies?

I believe it’s important to not bottle things in, because little good can come from holding our emotions in for too long, lest we eventually blow up, and then have a word vomit like the blurb above, worse off if it were something in the physical world.  Obviously, little is done in front of my kids as far as my frustrations go, often times I just walk out of the room or tag out to mythical wife, and then I go throw a tantrum in another room or outside of the view of my kids.

As far as my lack of time goes, hopefully that is something that eventually rectifies itself as my newborn grows and settles into a routine, most importantly a structure sleeping schedule.  Because it does get frustrating and does get mentally challenging, when I don’t have the capabilities to turn dad mode off, even for just an hour or so.

But until then, I just want to tell myself and all other new parents, that it’s okay to occasionally get pissed off.  It’s going to happen to the best of us, whether or not we want to admit to it, but it’s human nature, and it’s completely okay.

2 Under 2: Critical mass (#060)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is my general schedule:

  • wake up at 7:20 so I can have ten minutes to let the dog out, feed the dog, take a piss, and get #1’s milk ready
  • Get #1 out of bed and pray to god (1) she hasn’t leaked out of her overnight diaper because she sleeps face down and butt up and no diaper company has figured out how to solve gravity
  • If she hasn’t wet herself and I don’t have to strip sheets, change outfits and give her a comprehensive wipe down, I bring her down to start her day
  • Between 7:30-9:00 I hang out with my kid and pray to god (2) she’s not in a cranky mood and going to whine and fuss all morning like she is at the time I’m writing this down. On weekdays, I’m also technically on the clock as of 8:30, so I low-key act like I’m active at work but I’m just monitoring work on my work phone, and praying to god (3) that nothing substantial happens, but if it does then I have to actually work while placating a toddler for until our nanny shows up or my wife relieves me
  • On weekdays, by like 8:50 I’m in my office so that I can prepare for my workday for a job I’ve completely soured on and want out of. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I have 9 am meetings where often times I’m the one driving them because in spite of the technical competency everyone is required to have in order to have their jobs, I’m the one most capable of actually utilizing WebEx, Acrobat and Outlook. All other days, I may actually have a few minutes to breathe and compose myself on company time, but those are few and far between as I am often playing catch-up on the work that doesn’t get done because I’m often playing dad throughout the workday (despite having a hard paid nanny and wife home on maternity leave).
  • Throughout most workdays despite being on the clock, I’m pulled away multiple times to assist with #2, which are usually burps and diaper changes because mythical wife is doing her duty of pumping so that #2 can eat. However this often puts me behind on my workflow and has a trickle down effect to where I have to make up the time somewhere
  • At some point during workdays as well as weekends, I try and spend some time to begin cleaning the numerous bottles and pump parts we go through in order to feed and provide for #2. If we didn’t have two sterilizers, I would literally never be able to catch up ever
  • At noon every day, #1 goes down for her nap. This is a 2.5 hr window where only one child has to be cared for, provided her frequent screaming and crying doesn’t wake #1 up, to which I pray to god (4) daily does not happen
  • By 2:30, #1 is awakened and it’s back to 2 under 2 time, except now the nanny is clocked out, and it’s my wife and I dealing with things with me back to low-key pretending to have full undivided attention to work for the next three hours and praying to god (5) that my bosses who have no respect for core hours or late afternoon meeting etiquette don’t drop a 4 or 4:30 meeting on my head
  • 5:30 is when I’m officially off the clock, but often times due to my juggling acts there’s always a few somethings that need to be resolved, and I might have to punch in an extra 30-45 minutes to settle things down, provided my children will cooperate
  • 6:30(ish) is #1’s bath time, followed by wind down for a 7 pm bedtime. Mythical wife and I have been having to divide and conquer between two kids here and she’s often caring for a screaming #2 while I’m taking care of #1
  • By around 7:15, we’re back down to one kid, but #2 is still too early to have any routine since she’s more or less in survival mode, of eat, sleep, scream bloody murder, and any order of those three activities. It’s at this time mythical wife and I talk about how starved we are, indecisions about dinner, and how most of the local restaurants we like seem to close at 8 and we’re too late to put in a takeout order because I probably won’t get there by 8, so we eat Chick Fil-A or Zaxby’s all the time if we don’t have any palatable leftovers in the fridge
  • From dinner to bedtime, mythical wife and I play hot potato with #2 because this is the time she’s been getting colic-ky and screaming bloody murder and I’m praying to god (6) she won’t wake up #1, but the majority of the physical caring falls on me since she still has to pump a few more times to keep up with #2’s increasing eating
  • Anywhere from 11-midnight, we migrate up to the bedroom which usually feels like a meat locker now that our HVAC has been replaced, and wind #2 for the night with final feeds and diaper changes and praying to god (7) that there’s no colic or stomach aches and she’ll actually go to sleep before 1 am
  • Once #2 is down for the night, it’s typically far too late and I’m usually so gassed that I’m not even in the mood to hate-stay up late just so I can feel a shred of having two seconds for myself to not be in dad mode, and then go to bed anxious at not getting to have any me-time to unwind and feeling fried because I’m 6-7 hours from starting all this over again while also knowing there will usually be one mid-sleep wake up to feed and change #2, and I pray to god (8) that it’s just one time

If you’ve read this far and have been keeping count, you might notice that there are usually at least eight prayers to god and fewer minutes in the day where I don’t have to be a dad.

I’m sure that last part sounds selfish and gives off the impression that I don’t want to be a dad, which couldn’t be any further from the truth. However, one of the pieces of advice I was given going into parenthood was the importance of not losing one’s identity to it, to which I definitely agree that there’s definitely a balance to try and maintain when it comes to being a parent and being ourselves.

I’m in a stretch where I’ve been incapable of having the time at all to be able to switch off being dad, and having any time at all for myself to be myself. I haven’t run in over a month now, I barely have the capacity to watch any television; only really getting to when stacked on top of less effort baby activities, and most importantly to me, I have next to no time at all to write.

In fact that only reason why this post even exists is that I’ve composed it entirely in a note on my phone, while #1 was literally strapped to my head because she’s having one of those days where if dad’s not carrying her, she’s going ballistic, and I’m up to her current height off the ground at how over her bullshit I am right now, well at critical mass at how fried I am at being in dad mode for so long, and so I just strapped her in and began writing on my phone while monotonously walking in circles. At least she’s not wailing anymore.

Like most topics I write about that sound like they suck balls and might deter other bros from thinking about having kids, this would go into the category of “someday we’ll look back and laugh at this,” but in my case I look forward to the days when I can tell my kids how much they made my life pretty insufferable when they were babies.

2 Under 2: Up there with teething – colic (#059)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

While raising my first child, I determined that of all the rigors that babies and parents go through, was teething.  The times in which the tiny chompers of our offspring are boring their way up through the gums and into the world, to help them level up in terms of foods they can eat and sensations they can experience.  It’s obviously painful and frequent, given that the average child has around 20 total teeth, and every time it seemed apparent that #1 was going through some teething, the days were full of lots of crying, lots of drool, occasional vomiting, and struggles to sleep, leading to some very exasperated parents and one definitely fried dad.

Well, with #2 a little over a month old now, I think mythical wife and I are experiencing yet another new thing: colic.  Basically periods of time when the baby goes completely apeshit ballistic nuclear and is screaming their heads off for an inconveniently long duration, and there doesn’t seem to be an explanation for it.  I mean seriously:

Unfortunately, there is no definite explanation for why this happens. Most often, colic means simply that the child is unusually sensitive to stimulation or cannot “self-console” or regulate his nervous system. (Also known as an immature nervous system.) As she matures, this inability to self-console—marked by constant crying—will improve. Generally this “colicky crying” will stop by three to four months, but it can last until six months of age.

I read shit like this, and my thoughts usually go in the direction of, how long as the human race been in existence, as well as existing in the age of modern medicine and diagnosis, and nobody’s still been able to figure this shit out?

Needless to say, it’s evident that #2 has occasional colic, and when it starts, it’s basically the worst scenario in the world.  Seriously, I’ve never had suicidal thoughts in my life before sitting there with an inconsolable newborn screaming their lungs out and there being seemingly absolutely nothing in the world that can bring them down.  Blowing my head off, or jumping off a cliff seems like a preferable alternative to trying and failing to calm a colic-ky baby back to earth.

And as often times the case during this second go-around, I’m ashamed to admit just how often I lose my cool and let it get to me.  It’s like I know that parenting is excruciatingly difficult, and I did sign up for this, but to me, and by no fault of anyone much less my precious #1, we have comparisons we’re capable of making, and when didn’t go through it so badly the first time around, but are going through it horrifically the second, it creates that space for their to be additional frustration.

All the same, good or bad, these kinds of posts exist to be the real life truth to how parenting really is going for someone like me, and I do want to remember the things that I can hopefully look forward to in the future as talking points to remind my children of in the future when they’re older, wiser, and can comprehend words in the event that they find this shit on their own. 

The daunting reality is additionally the fact that we’re still so early on that teething hasn’t even yet come into play, but considering how #2 has been so far, I can only make an educated guess that I’ll go back to thinking teething is the biggest cancer on the planet again in 4-6 months.

2 Under 2: Fuck Jimmy Fallon (#058)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Mythical wife and I are raising our daughters with some fairly simple rules, one of which being no screen time until the age of 2, in which we will introduce small amounts of screen time of quality kid-friendly content with at least some educational value, and work our way up from there, so they don’t become lifeless couch potatoes by the time they’re age five.  Maybe that’ll happen when they’re seven instead, but hey if we can bilk out two years of life where they’re not parked in front of a screen, then all the better for us.

That being said, we’ve accumulated a lot of books over the last year and change, as books and reading have been among the primary forms of entertainment and storytelling to our first, and will be for our second.  Among the things that brings pride and happiness to me is seeing my first hustle over to her bookshelf, pick out a book, rush back, hand it to me, and then plop into my lap to enjoy some story time with dada, and her appreciation and enjoyment in books is already being established.

However, of all the books that we’ve amassed so far, few make me scrunch my eyebrow and hope that my daughter doesn’t pick it and bring it back, than the books mythical wife picked out by none other than quote-unquote “comedian,” Jimmy Fallon.  Everything is Mama and Your Baby’s First Word Will Be Dada, specifically, because I for one won’t go out of my way to pick either myself.

Why?  Because they’re both complete and utter bullshit.  Spoiler alert, both books are basically 15 pages of either “MAMA” or “DADA” over and over again, with literally nothing other than single contrast words and some singular illustrations.  I’m not saying my children should already be capable of reading The DaVinci Code or anything, but even infants and newborns deserve better than this horse shit.

Let’s be real here, if not for the simple fact that these books are “authored” by, and has the name of Jimmy Fallon slapped onto these things, these shit books would probably rank lower than the bible at being usable for toilet paper.  It truly is a case of how nice it must be to be a celebrity, because an unfunny hack like Jimmy Fallon can literally produce a bullshit no effort stack of cardstock paper, put his name on it, and it will make it onto bookshelves, and I bet if I took two seconds to look it up, these were probably New York Times bestsellers at some point in history, but I’m not going to because I’d rather spend 52 seconds typing this sentence up instead.  He’s probably made more than what I make in a year in salary, on the royalties of this fucking snooze job of children’s literature, which only further feed the angsty narrative of how unfair the world is.

The takeaway of this post is that if any new or impending parents ever read this, do yourselves and your children a favor and stay the fuck away from Jimmy Fallon’s shitty books, especially if you actually love your kids and want their brains to actually develop.  Might I recommend authors such as Anna Dewdney or Sandra Boynton instead as opposed to the guy who could barely keep it together on SNL and often times failed, to not laugh at his own unfunny shit jokes?

2 Under 2: I have already become my mother (#057)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

All through my life, my mom would accidentally call me by my sister’s name, before correcting herself and addressing me by my name.  There were younger points in my life where I would let that piss me off, but eventually it more or less because everyday occurrences, and I stopped really noticing them beyond hearing them when they happened.

It didn’t even take a full 24 hours to pass before I had already called #2 by #1’s name.  It happened more frequently in the AM hours where we were struggling to get any sleep we could.  But by day two of #2’s life, I had already slipped up numerous times, and even the times where I stopped myself from making the mistake, if there was ever any hesitation in my flow of speech, mythical wife would pick it out and know that I was on the verge of using the wrong name again.

Therefore, I have become my mother in this regard, and I can only hope that as their lives progress, they can forgive their dad for being just like halmoni, and roll with the slights as well as I eventually learned how to do as I got older.

2 Under 2: It’s all worth it (#056)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I know it might seem like a lot of the things I’ve written since the arrival of #2 might seem a dour and with a negative lean.  Sleep deprivation, temperamental screaming babies, having almost zero time to decompress and catch my breath, yes there’s no denying the tremendous amount of work and effort that goes into raising kids, especially under these specific circumstances of having two under two.

I’ll be the first to admit, as much as I might regret or feel ashamed of it, of how often I’ve lost my cool, get frustrated, and generally get fried, because I’m human and this is reality of just how hard things can be.

But then there are moments like this specific photograph, of where my oldest is giving my youngest a gentle kiss, after knowing her new sister for all of five days, and all my anxieties, stress and negativity washes away like beads of water off a waxed surface.

One of the biggest concerns mythical wife and I had about having a second child, especially so soon after the first, was the potential for jealousy and the resulting behavior from the first.  We can talk about plans and ideas all we want to try and help mitigate things, but we wouldn’t really know what was going to happen until the day came where we introduced the kids to one another.

And much as my first has often times met or exceeded my expectations, she appears to have welcomed and accepted her little sister with no complaints or objections.  If anything at all, it’s mostly fascination and curiosity at her smaller doppelganger, but no real signs of aggression or animosity, yet.

The above sight was something that instantaneously melted my heart and took my emotions to a place that is seldom seen, which is how I know it’s genuine and perfect, and that in the end, no matter how much stress, hardships and bullshit I might go through or think I’m going through as a parent, this is all worth it.

May my daughters accept each other as not just sisters, but as the lifelong tag team partners I hope they will become, with the blets to prove it.

2 Under 2: If you’ve ever said this (#055)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment
baby’s first bird

This, or anything like this, to me, or to anyone who was expecting a child not their first: “oh if your first child was good, that means the second one is going to be a nightmare”

Fuck you.  Just fuck you.  Why in the fuck would anyone want to put these ideas into the heads of parents knowing that they’re already going to be re-embarking onto the already tremendously difficult path of new parenthood, but knowing that the subsequent children are already pegged to be nightmares?  That fucking sucks, and I genuinely mean it when I want to tell everyone who insinuated this to me, that fuck you.

It has come from friends, it has come from family, and it has come from colleagues, all the same.  I know it’s just conversation, it has no bearing on the fate of our relationships, but fuck you all the same.

I say all this because I am living this.  As much as I love my second child and will continue to love my second child, there’s no sugar coating the genuine difference in difficulty with #2 than there was the first time around.  #1 was a vastly more chill and low-maintenance baby, and I know comparisons are inevitable no matter how much I can tell myself to try and not make so many, but there’s no denying that #2 has been substantially more challenging, and it has been testing my patience on a daily basis since her arrival.

I’ll go ahead and say it, just about every single night since her arrival has sucked.  This is no knock on my child, but because her circadian rhythm is all out of whack and night is day and day is night, when it’s time for conventional sleep is when the most challenges emerge, and mythical wife and I have been pushed to our breaking points numerous times, and I’ve gotten angry and broken way more than I’d like to admit.  Now things have improved slightly since I’m writing things in retrospect at this point, but without question, the first two weeks, every single night sucked, and I burned out repeatedly.

Accurate to this very second, #2 exists solely in three states of being: sleeping, eating, or screaming her head off bloody murder.  There is seldom any moments of normalcy; typically what seems normal or calm are usually precursors to indigestion-related screaming bloody murder, or the next starving like a UNICEF child screaming bloody murder.  Calm is when she falls asleep, but it’s really only a matter of time before the clock gets too close to the next feed, and if a bottle is not prepared in anticipation, it’s going to be eight minutes of agony of waiting for a bottle to warm while she’s screaming her head off the whole time.

Suffice to say, it’s back to being Desmond from Lost, where we exist on these windows of time of 90-120 minutes where she dozes off where we can catch our breath, and if we don’t prepare well, then it’s a punishment of more soul-grating screaming until a bottle is in #2’s mouth.

By no means do have any feelings other than love for my second child, but at the same time, there’s no way I’m not going to document any of the bullshit and how much she’s driven me mad in the first few weeks of her life.  I love my child and I love both my kids, and I love being a dad.  But I also believe in being honest and transparent, and relay the fact that not every aspect of parenthood is a walk in the park.

In fact, I already look forward to the days when my daughters are older and savvy, and I can tell them stories of how #2 was a nightmare baby early on.  Or better yet, when the day eventually comes when I become a grandfather, and I can relay stories to my daughters whom might becoming new moms about how #2 was a ballistic disaster, and that it’s almost ironic payback that she’ll have to endure a crying baby of her own, much as mythical wife and I had to endure her.

I love my daughter.  I love my kids.  But this is reality and in the spirit of transparency and honesty, these are the stories that I’ll tell about it all, good and hellacious