Tag: dad

New Father Brogging, #029

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It would have been pretty easy for me to do nothing but write about beer all month long and call it a day, but that would’ve been kind of a cop out as far as dutiful brogging is concerned.  Beer is nice, and I’ve been enjoying the fares from Deutschland, but there are still plenty of things on my mind that warrant words, no matter how much I may feel unmotivated to write about them, and when the day is over, it’s more important to me to write out my thoughts than to be lazy, even if it feels kind of forced; this is how seriously I take it to write, sometimes.

Anyway, in this new dad brog, there is one update and there is one observation.  As for the update, things have actually been going fairly smoothly since the last time I wrote about my adventures in fatherhood.  My daughter and I have a fairly consistent routine that’s been making life not too difficult for either of us for the most part, and the days are flying by like leaves in the winter air.  I wake up at 6:30~ish every single day, regardless of if it’s the weekend or not, mythical wife feeds baby, and then I entertain baby until first nap in which I then either really get to work, or if it’s the weekend I nap or sometimes get my jogging out of the way if I’m feeling up for it.  Our nanny takes care of kid for the next four hours on weekdays, or I spend time with her on weekends, and then it’s off to bed by 6:30~ish, to which mythical wife and I try to have some time for ourselves.  Repeat x infinity

However, as we’ve crossed the nine-month mark, naturally nothing stays the same forever, no matter how comfortable it’s been.  And in this particular case, whenever we run into any sort of issue, I can punch it into Google, and the precise query I intended to look up is automatically filled, reminding me that there has been absolutely nothing my kid has done or I have experienced, that millions of parents out there have not already seen.

As indicative in the photo above, that’s my child, standing in her crib.  As her little body and brain have been developing, she’s decided that immediate sleep isn’t something she necessarily needs anymore, and has decided to sit up, and pull herself up to her feet and just kind of hangout in her crib, instead of sleeping.  99% of the time, she’ll spit out her pacifier, piss herself off, and begin crying then wailing, then screaming, which prompts me to have to up and try to reset the whole scenario all over again, before she calms down, I walk out, and then she repeats it 3-4 times, burning us out in the process.

It seems evident that she herself is working things out and is playing a daily game of how many shenanigans she wants to pull in her crib between two naps and bed time, and how much she actually wants to sleep, because since behavior has begun, no two sleep sessions have been alike in how much she fights, how much she wanders around independently and how quick or long it takes before she actually goes out, and for parents like me that like routine it’s been occasionally frustrating.

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New Father Brogging, #028

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Originally, I thought about writing about how teething was the worst thing ever when it came to raising a baby for the first time, but I’m pretty sure my new dad brogs #28, 27 and 26 were probably about the subject of teething, so I figured I’d lay off that topic for a minute.  But it was going to lead up to how parenting for the first time genuinely feels like a bell curve of difficulty, as so many other parents have told mythical wife and I that “it gets easier!” in time, but I’m pretty sure that the people telling us this had long forgotten what the teething experience was like.

Frankly, the first two months or so of parenting weren’t really at all that difficult except for knowing that your sleep habits become more like fragmented shifts, and that your entire life is spent on your tiptoes making sure that your baby is breathing, eating and alive more or less.  But during the daytime, my kid was mostly asleep in the Mamaroo next to me while I worked remotely, and I still have fond memories of simply turning my head and seeing my pride and joy blissfully sleeping while I was trying to maneuver through my work days and pretend like I give a shit.

Once the first sleep regressions hit, the stress ramped up, but settled down fairly soon, once new routine had been established.  As I often say, routine and repetitions are the lynchpins to success, and it very much applies to parenting as well, because once you establish and reinforce, things get easy, that is, until it’s time to scrap everything and start all over again, which I’ve learned is basically the basis of raising a child.

Teething though, that’s stuff of nightmares, made worse by the simple fact that the timeline of it is basically several years, based on the pace in which a child’s teeth begin to come in and grow.  Sure, as they age their pain tolerance begins to develop, but man those first few teeth, and the pain and suffering they put my child through, lord almighty, I’d do just about anything to take that kind of agony away from my kid.  And that’s only four teeth out of the estimate 20 that kids usually have.

But we’re not going to talk about that kind of minutiae of new parenting, as recently was something of a high stress point in my life as a new dad. 

A few months ago, we introduced my daughter to eggs.  It was not a particularly good introduction, as we were met with projectile vomiting, runny diarrhea, and all sorts of skin breakouts.  Embarrassingly, it took more than a day for us to realize the outlier in her diet that suddenly caused all of this, but once we identified that it could potentially be eggs, we immediately took them off the table.

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New Father Brogging, #027

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was at a Target the other day, and while we’re checking out, I hear this little girl at the in-store Starbucks, ordering a caramel macchiato.  Now I think Starbucks’ caramel macchiatos are definitely tasty, but the thing is that this girl was like, ten years old.  And a Starbucks caramel macchiato probably has ten times the sugar and caffeine that a grown-ass adult ever needs in one sitting much less for a ten-year old twig of a girl.

Basically what I saw was a future Karen in the making, with a child already having developed a penchant for froufrou Starbucks coffee drinks, and for her own sake, it was good that the espresso machine was down, but I’m surprised that she or her completely disinterested looking dad didn’t demand to speak with a manager, and she walked away saying she was good instead.

One of my dreams now is to one day sit with my daughter in a coffee shop and have some coffee together.  However, seeing as how I would prefer for her to not start drinking coffee until she is like 17, that’s going to be a ways from now, but I’m willing to wait it out as long as I don’t risk stunting the growth of my daughter and/or make her a slave to caffeine as much as her dear old dad is.

New Father Brogging, #026

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Mythical wife and I were playing some games online with our friends because we’re still very much immersed in pandemic ‘Murica and this is how things are done these days in order to be safe, and as we’re in between games, the topic of conversation goes towards what television shows everyone is watching.  Talking about The Mandalorian and Utopia among other shows, and how some of us might like them, or if they’re not any good at all, etc.

But mythical wife and I haven’t really seen or finished any of them, because we don’t have time.  Story of parenthood now.

We then start talking about video games; mythical wife and I just started playing Man of Medan, and gotten maybe three hours into the game, before we realized it was midnight which might as well have been 3 am for new parents like us, but reality sunk in that we weren’t sure when the next time we’d have a chance to play more of the game, because we just don’t have time, the perpetual story of parenthood now.

Even playing Jackbox games with friends for an evening means not having the opportunity to do another thing that we may or may not have wanted to do with what limited free time we have available to us, because as the story of being new parents go, you just don’t have much of it, because the primary meat of our time is spent raising our infant child and putting her needs first and foremost above everything else.

I do not have a single iota of regret for having a child and I love my daughter more than anything else in history, but as the objective of these new dad brogs go, is to express the realities and genuine thoughts that I have going through my own personal journey as a first-time father, and the reality is that I just don’t have a lot of time, like ever, for myself anymore, and that part is something that’s always going to be a tough pill to swallow, especially in conjunction to our lives pre-children, where we’d sometimes have nothing but time to sit around and literally do nothing at times.

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The precise moment where the Braves fulfilled their destiny

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Top 4th, runners on second and third, nobody out.  The Braves had just taken a 3-2 lead on the Dodgers on a single by third baseman Austin Riley, and were in a prime position to bust the game open and put the Dodgers into a precarious hole.  Instead, in only a way that the bumbling Braves are capable of doing, they turn a scenario that has a high probability to score some runs into one where they commit three outs in mere minutes in a game where every single one of the first four innings felt like Star Wars trilogies in themselves, they took that long.

After Austin Riley got tagged out for the second out of a bang-bang botched run down, and then the Braves completed the colossal fuck up by harmlessly grounding out to end the inning, this is where I knew that the game was effectively over.  I’ve watched enough baseball in my life to recognize that when you give away opportunities to score runs that don’t cross the plate, Murphy’s Law dictates that the opposition will definitively, cash them in instead.  What probably should have been a 5-2 or a 4-2 score to end the 4th inning instead remained at a paltry one-run 3-2 score, which the Dodgers would easily grind away and overcome, while the Braves literally went three-and-out in every single inning except one throughout the remainder of the game.

The fuckup on the basepaths undoubtedly sucked all the wind out of the sails of the Braves, ruined all of their swagger and confidence, and most importantly, planted the undefeatable seeds of impending defeat into their minuscule brains.  The remainder of the game after that tragic sequence was all but a formality, and a contest of when, the Dodgers would eventually take the lead.

Frankly, the only reason why I watched the entire game was that I was hoping that the Dodgers would go to Kenley Jansen to close the game since he’s been pretty awful throughout the season and he would be the best chance for the Braves to maybe make some late-inning heroics as they’ve done numerous times throughout the year, but it turned out that the Dodgers didn’t trust Jansen in this critical game, and instead rode the hot hand of Julio Urias instead to close out the game himself.

Naturally, I’m sure anyone of my zero readers can see through the façade I put forth of being the world’s worst baseball fan when it comes to the Braves, and I spare a lot of words and drivel bemoaning them and deriding them, as if I had the mutant power to tempt fate to prove me wrong with writing, but in reality, there’s nothing more I would’ve wanted than to see the Braves actually not fuck up for a change, defeat the Dodgers and actually go to the World Series against the Tampa Bay Rays of all teams.

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New Father Brogging, #025

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If I had a dollar for every time my kid shit herself while riding in the car, then I could easily get a Chick Fil-A Spicy Chicken Sandwich meal.  Not the classic #1 combo, the spicy variant, which costs more.  With large fries and a large drink.  And a brownie.

Like at this point, it’s pretty laughable how routine this is becoming.  I/we decide to go run an errand, and bring our child, so that she can see a little bit of the world outside of the safe confines of the house.  When we get to our destination, I remove her from the car seat, and do the courtesy sniff test, to which is naturally like getting fierce punch Tiger Uppercutted by Sagat, and then it takes ten more minutes to actually get started with whatever said errand or destination I/we are doing, because I have to change her diaper in the back seat of my car, and pray to god that nothing leaked out and soiled her active clothing, not that her travel bag doesn’t already have a spare outfit in case of emergency.

It’s just funny how she can go days without pooping sometimes, but the second she’s put in her car seat and taken out on a ride, it’s basically automatic that she’s going to blow up.  It also doesn’t matter if she actually poops at home, and creates a false sense of security that the pipes have been cleared, that when you do go out, because it’s like there’s a separate release chamber strictly meant for while in the car that will be unleashed when taken out of the house. 

At least I know that if I’m ever concerned that my child is facing constipation or any strange digestive ailments that result in some backing up, I’ll know exactly what I have to do to increase my odds of helping alleviate her.

It’s naturally a little gross and off-putting at times, the whole notion of babies and poop, but historically Asian cultures are pretty laissez-faire about pooping in general, often citing good bowel movements as indicative of good health.  And since my child is half Asian, the topic of poop will not be off-limits or very taboo; if anything at all, it’s something of a personal trope that I can laugh about, at its absurd predictability.  And maybe one day when she herself is reading through my brog in the distant future, she’ll cringe and wince at the notion of dad putting this all down in writing.

New Father Brogging, #024

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today marks seven months since my daughter was born.  Since then, she’s over doubled her birth weight and creeping closer and closer to ten inches grown.  She’s gone from being a NICU baby that struggled to feed from a bottle to being a strong independent infant that doesn’t need mom or dad to hold the bottle for her to wolf down a full feed in eight minutes.  She’s now eating solids, and has been a very good eater thus far, consuming pretty much everything we’ve put in front of her.

It’s difficult for me sometimes, to not get emotional over every little step she takes and the growth that we watch happening right in front of our very eyes.

But last night was a particularly difficult pill to swallow, as it was the first night in which mythical wife and I both slept apart from our child, as we have begun the transition into having her sleep in her own room.  Monitored, obviously, but sleeping in a room outside of ours.  The reality is that she has basically outgrown the Snoo bassinet that carried her throughout the first six months of her life, and she needs room to turn and maneuver, otherwise it leads to a very grumpy and unhappy fussy baby.  Combined with teething, it led to what was basically the worst sleeping week of our lives over the last week and change.

Gradually working in her crib for naps has proven to be working that she can sleep in the crib, and it’s proven that the crib and its space is proving beneficial to our child’s sleep, so we finally pulled the trigger and had a few test nights where she stayed in the crib overnight, while I slept on the futon in the room as a safety net.  It only took two nights to really prove that she was up for it, and as of last night, we had her sleep in her own room by herself for the first time.

It was hard to not feel emotional going to sleep myself, watching her on a monitor, instead of knowing she were mere feet away, and I would be seconds away from swooping in to get her if there were any sort of discomfort or need to physically pick her up.  I had some unpleasant flashbacks to the NICU days, where mythical wife and I only had the comfort of a webcam that had limited times in which it would be on, instead of 24/7 real-life accessibility as we’ve had over the last seven months.

Ultimately, we know this is for the best, and is the natural progression of growth for children.  Obviously, she was never going to be sleeping in the same room with us forever, and it was only a matter of time before she’d eventually be in her own room.  This was always part of the plan.

Still, it doesn’t change the fact that it makes me all sad and emo-ey knowing my child is growing so fast and it feels like it’s only a matter of time before she’s asking me for $100 at a time so she can buy some frivolous crap, or will eventually be asking me for advice on which insurance plan she should be picking at work.

Seven months have flown by, and it’s going to be hard to not feel a little choked up when I have to pack up and move our $1,200 bassinet out of our bedroom and into storage.  As much as I’ll be glad to never stub my toes on the legs of it again soon, I’m going to miss like hell, the days of our sweet little warm baby sleeping right next to our bed.