Tag: dad

New Father Brogging, #018

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been a little bit in the pits lately, and it’s one of those situations where I think about the things that are making me feel down, and they bring me down more, and starts this cycle of negative thinking that only gets gradually worse and worse if I don’t talk about it and admit that I’m feeling a little depressed.

Firstly, by no means necessary is any of my recent funk on account of my precious baby child doing anything wrong; if anything at all, she’s the one steady and greatest and brightest thing in my life, as should not really be of a surprise, and frankly, my only woes in regards to my child is that I feel guilty that I’m not enjoying my paternity time as much as I probably should.

Sure, I’d love to be able to take her out of the house and go and see things, but in in the coronavirus-addled world we live in, such isn’t necessarily a good idea, not to mention the feed and nap routine we’re trying to constantly reinforce doesn’t exactly make it convenient to leave the house and expect to enjoy ourselves and be back at the bassinet approximately two hours later.  But there are admittedly times in which I feel like I’m failing as a father, by not always having an idea or things to do with my child, and I’m always worried that I’m boring her or not stimulating her enough to where that budding developing brain is actually growing.

I don’t handle with particular stresses very well, and in the case of my house, which has had some recent issues due to the bipolar Georgia weather, I’m frustrated and aggravated at how long and how much it’s going to cost to get things fixed, and if I stop and think about all the moving parts in play, it tends to get me all anxious with annoyance, which doesn’t help.

To boil it down, my skylight issue was an easy solve, since that was basically a $430 caulk job that has prevented further moisture from getting in, but the window issue I’m having, is going to be substantially more, and I’m in this situation where I’m wondering if I had hired an actual window company from the onset instead of assuming it was just a simple caulk job here too, and hiring a handyman, would’ve saved me a tremendous amount of time, money and aggravation, instead of the route that I’m on right now.  But because I’ve already committed, I’m doing myself a favor and not finding out, because if it turns out to be a substantial savings on all accounts, I’m just going to end up way more perturbed than I already am.

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Now that I’m caught up, I don’t know what to do with myself

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For the better part of the last three months, whenever I had a free moment after work or when I wasn’t tending to the baby, I was basically working on getting the brog back up online.  At first, it was manually backing up the old posts, then it was sorting and organizing all of the unposted posts, and then came the arduous task of manually re-posting every post in chronological order.

As I’ve mentioned before, this whole task took approximately 82 days, and a few more to fine tune and tweak things and get ready for the day in which I would let people know and officially open as if I were some grandiose important entity.

But now that I’ve accomplished the task of getting the brog back up, I really don’t know what to do with myself in my free time now.  Since I’m still on paternity leave, my only real tasks are tending to my daughter, but when I put her down for naps, and she goes to sleep for the night, suddenly I have anywhere from 2-5 hours in the day in which is me-time that I don’t really know how to fill anymore.

Sure, I’m still going to be dedicating time to writing and looking for things to write about, but since there’s no massive backlog and queue behind it anymore, I’m back to the days where posts are mostly going to be one at a time, save for those times where I write a bunch of things and put them in the can for a rainy day.  But otherwise, I’m not going to be spending all my time on my site anymore, and I’ve been perplexed on what to do next now that I’ve accomplished the one big thing for myself that I had set out to do.

There’s always a gargantuan backlog of shit I want to watch on television, which would be nice, but I’m a person who really needs to immerse myself into media to really take it in.  Basically meaning, if there’s any risk of possibly getting interrupted, I probably won’t bother starting it, and what with the fact that my daughter sleeps anywhere from 35-60 minutes, there’s no sense in starting any shows which episodes are in the 45-55 minute range, because inevitably I will have to cut it short to get my child, and then I’ll be annoyed (not at the kid) at having to stop early.

So that effectively knocks out hour-long shows and movies, and limits me to 22-30 minute shows, which are fewer and further between save for signing up for a Quibi account and I don’t want to add monthly subscriptions these days anyway.

I can’t really hit the treadmill, because my usual sessions are 32 minutes, but that’s not including the need to change, shower and cool down, and if my daughter wakes up at the short end of a nap, then I’ll be a sweaty monster that has to dirty up my child which I’m not going to voluntarily do, so that nixes that idea.

So far, I’ve just been dicking around on the internet and watching YouTube clips and seeking out wrestling belts to throw my money away further into.  Otherwise, it’s not lost on me that this is the epitomal first-world problem to be having and when the day is over, I do feel a sense of accomplishment that I’ve got the brog back up and it makes me happy, and that I’d rather be in this position rather than the former times in which I’d wish to have my brog back up, and it weren’t, and my thoughts and words would stay confined to my own digital storage.

New Father Brogging, #017

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Cal Ripken, Jr. is considered one of the greatest baseball players of all time, but he was also oft-described as the man of a thousand batting stances.  His tendency to change the way he stood in the batter’s box countless times throughout his career was a metaphor of the game of baseball and how rapidly it changed, and the endless cat-and-mouse game of needing to change things for when things change on you, forcing them to change in response, and so on and so on.  Basically, what it really amounted to was the fact that in order for Ripken to have become the Hall of Famer he is, it required him to be adaptable and willing to change things up, frequently and rapidly.

That’s what sleep training a baby kind of feels like.  Every time I manage to get my daughter to go down for a nap successfully, and then try to reenact the exact same procedure the next time around and it inevitably fails, resulting in a screaming baby that takes 45 minutes to go down for 45 minutes, I feel like a failure of a father all over again, and mentally defeated and fried.  I realize that no trick, tactic or strategy is ever going to work more than one time in a row, and it’s like going to war with Ultron or Cyclopsis the War Zord from Power Rangers, in that exact sense.

I can read everything on the internet and watch all sorts of mommy vloggers, but I think when the day is over, as long as I go into the pre-nap battleground with a mentally clean slate, and keep consistent to the few rules that mythical wife and I have agreed upon for like circadian rhythm and bassinet, I just have to accept that it’s going to be a new challenge each time, and accept that it might be more difficult than the last time.  Considering the fact that anything from indigestion, teething, growth spurts or all of the above can come into play, sleep training ultimately is a constantly moving target, and all I can really do is mentally catalog cues and tendencies, and try to react best to whatever may come.

Just the other day, no amount of holding her was working, and she was wailing for 45 minutes.  Needing to take a break, I set her down in the bassinet, and she was out cold almost instantly, much to my confusion; she abhorred the idea of being put on her back just days ago, and now she was falling immediately??  Just two naps ago, holding her still and rocking her had her passed out in my arms, and it was around this time I came to the conclusion that no one thing was ever going to work twice in a row.

Either way, I think I can easily say that up to this point, five months in, sleep training has been the most difficult challenge of new fatherhood.  I haven’t felt so discouraged and as much of a failure as a parent as often as I have as much as I have during this time, and as calm as I can get myself back to, the feelings of anxiety and self-loathing is always just the next nap time away.

Things that have happened since the brog’s been down

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Shortly after my brog went down in April 2016, I started a document, bulleting things that want to potentially write about, in the event that the site would be back up within like a month or two.  Obviously that never happened, but it didn’t really stop me from adding to the list on a regular basis, even if it continued for nearly four years.

At first, it was a pretty nitty-gritty list, straight to the point and pretty succinct at what I wanted to remember.  But by the time 2018 rolled around, I noticed some patterns and categories in which things caught my attention and warranted notation, and so some categories started to take place.

I’m not entirely sure why I feel compelled to share all of this, but for whatever reason I’m following through with it, and basically this is going to be little more than a massive bulleted list of things that happened between mid-2016 through mid-2020, with probably not a lot of context, but likely some snark and veiled commentary peppered throughout.

2016

  • Pokemon Go came, lit the world on fire for 15 minutes, and then flamed out harder than the FOX Fantastic Four films
  • I became The Burrito King of Atlanta, winning Willy’s Road Trip promotion by visiting 27 Willy’s locations in four days
  • Kobe Bryant retired from professional basketball, but not before dropping 60 in his final game
  • The Golden State Warriors won 73 games and passed the ’96 Bulls’ unbreakable record, but then lost in the NBA finals like chumps
  • The Atlanta Braves retired Turner Field for whiter pastures, by sucking hardcore and losing 93 games
  • Hulk Hogan killed Gawker
  • Went on a European cruise vacation with mythical then-gf, visiting Italy, Turkey, Croatia and Greece
  • Went to Korea for the first time in my life, with my mom
  • The Chicago Cubs won the World Series, breaking a 108-year long drought and endless memes
  • An orange baked potato reality television personality inexplicably won the presidency of the United States of America
  • A fuckton of people died from senseless gun violence

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New Father Brogging, #016

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Prior to the arrival of my daughter, I read a book about new fatherhood, as well as watched a few videos and read some stuff on the internet in regards to new parenthood.  Naturally, there’s a tremendous amount of overlap when it comes to the rigors of being new parents, and they often times make it sound like the sleep deprivation and dirty diapers are the worst things since the Bubonic Plague.

I guess I’ve conditioned myself fairly well throughout the years, to where I can operate on low amounts of sleep and make do with coffee alternatively, so the sleep deprivation wasn’t nearly as hellacious as all accounts make it sound like it’s going to be, and I’ve cleaned so much poop and urine from a lifetime of having pets that poop and urine from my own offspring doesn’t seem remotely close to being disgusting or nauseating.

Needless to say, it’s tempting karma to say raising a child has been anywhere close to easy, because it most certainly has not been, but when it comes to the things that most outlets and resources cite as being the worst things in the early stages, have been basically nothing to me.

I guess I should’ve started reading more books about once the baby has come home, and the things that start to happen after the third of fourth months, because I feel like now, we’re getting to the stage where I’m beginning to become frazzled and unglued at times, because I frankly am not always handling the pressures of trying to placate a wailing baby in the best manners.

Long story short, I didn’t know about sleep regression, and I didn’t really prepare myself to the rigors of teething.  And when they’re hitting simultaneously, resulting in a screaming baby that is in pain and won’t nap, and then they stay up past their nap time and hit their next feeding window and then they’re overtired and mixing in wailing about that and won’t go to sleep and we can’t put her to sleep because then she’ll never be able to go back to sleep when we get to her actual bed time; that’s where I feel like I need to have an arm that’s twelve feet long, because that’s about as much of wrist I want to slit when the shit hits the fan sometimes.

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New Father Brogging, #015

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today, I have started my paternity leave.  Regardless of what coronavirus has done to the world, this was close to the original plan to take my leave, because in a pre-COVID19 world, I work all through most of the summer while mythical wife is on maternity leave/summer break, and when she goes back to school, I tag in with paternity leave, and stretch out the not needing daycare for another six weeks.

Ironically, as I’ve said numerous times at this point, coronavirus has unintentionally given me a whole bunch of bonus paternity time, as I’d been able to be working from home throughout the entire summer, and almost entirely since my daughter was born.  For all the bad it’s done throughout the world, I ironically have to be somewhat grateful for its existence in the sense that because of it, I’ve gotten so much extra time to bond with my child before taking off officially.

And right in time too, because it was made no more clear than the last week or so, that my performance was deemed to be inconveniencing by my superiors at work, and I had a rather uncomfortable talking to about how much they think I suck at my job, despite the fact that we’re in the middle of a pandemic, I can’t get child care no matter how much we might all want it, because my baby was born medically fragile and Americans can’t be trusted to socially distance and remain healthy, so a lot of childcare during business hours still falls onto me.

To the point where I’m actually taking this week with my own PTO, and rolling directly into paternity leave, because I’m over the bullshit and the passive aggressive swipes and friendly reminders, and ready to just spend some quality time with my daughter, without feeling any need to be worried about my inbox filling up or some bullshit virtual meetings to have to attend.

So for the next seven weeks, good riddance to work, and hello to daddy time.

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New Father Brogging, #014

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment
2.5 weeks vs. 16 weeks

It’s been a few weeks since I wrote one of these, not that I had any real intention of making this a regularly scheduled thing by any stretch of the imagination.  But for my own sake of remembrance and for those who want to kind of live life as a new dad with me, I still feel like writing these posts every now and then, so I can one day look back and see where my head was at during this time of my life, as well as hers. 

Plus I occasionally fantasize of my daughter one day as an adult, reading my life’s blathering, and if she’s anything like me, getting teary-eyed at dad’s own words back from when she was but a mere infant.  But that’s completely contingent on the brog still being online 19-22 years from now, as well as her being remotely interested in what _dad_ has to say about things in life and the world.  However, in regards to the former, considering I’ve been brogging for quite literally 20 years, I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch to think I couldn’t keep it up for another 20.

Anyway, to those new dads out there who feel like their worlds are becoming microscopic in the sense that you have absolutely no time to yourself, I can officially vouch for the notion that things to get easier in time.  Believe me, I’d gone through my period of feeling like my world was the size of a lima bean and I’d wonder just how long it would be before I could have 30 minutes to myself.

But over the last few weeks, mythical wife and I have been attempting to do some sleep training with our little infant child, and trying our best to establish a general routine of feeding times and naps, to maximize her growth as well as buy us some bits of time throughout the daytime where she’s sleeping and we can do our own things for 30-50 minutes at a time.  And honestly, so far, it’s going fairly satisfactory, but knowing my mentality, we may have just jinxed it by acknowledging it, and next thing I know, she’ll be going through some other sleep regression stage, and then I’ll be back to being frustrated and fried all over again.

Continue reading “New Father Brogging, #014” →