Tag: dad

New Father Brogging, #013

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes, I feel like that guy from Lost, Desmond I think his name was.  The guy who lived in a bunker or some remote cabin, and had to keep entering the numbers into a computer every 100 minutes or so, or else some indeterminate bad thing was going to happen.  If I recall correctly, as I never really watched the show past the first season, and had to kind of catch up on it through reading synopses of it on Wikipedia, it was his negligence at entering the numbers at one point is what led to the plane crash that put all the show’s survivors onto the island in the first place.

But instead of risking a gigantic electromagnetic pulse being released, I’m at the perpetual mercy of my daughter’s feeding schedule, which has shown to be a feed every single 90-120 minutes, depending on if she can actually manage to nap in between in the first place.

Unsurprising, with my life more or less in repeated 90-120 minute chunks of time, one can imagine that it’s difficult to accomplish much in between.  Especially considering that anywhere from 20-30 minutes of that chunk of downtime is occupied by the time it takes for her to actually drink all her milk, resulting in really, an hour plus of time in which I don’t have to be feeding her.  Not to mention the fact that, as she is but a small baby, she commands an extraordinary amount of attention, lest she cry or become fussy.

Needless to say, there are some days in which become very mentally and physically challenging, when I know it’s a delicate and difficult balancing act between doing my actual job’s work, and being the attentive and hands-on dad that I wanted to be.  It’s these days where I struggle to not grow too frustrated, and feeling like I have no real time for myself, because this is what I signed up to do as a parent, and something that I need to remember that it’s never just about me anymore, especially now, but I can’t help it sometimes, and still have days where I’m just grumpy and short.

Unlike Desmond from Lost, the chances of earth-shattering catastrophe isn’t likely if/when I let too much time lapse between feeds/naps, but given the wailing that my daughter is capable of when she’s over-tired or over-hungry, and it might as well be capable of making parents feel like their heads are going to explode.

Regardless, I know this is something that will eventually pass in time, but the whole point of writing out things like this, is so that I can always remember the things I think during the whole timeline of raising a child for the very first time, and perhaps one day, some random person will get into my writing, and read this, and if they’re going through the exact same thing, know that they aren’t alone, and that the things they’re experiencing are very likely not exclusive to them.

New Father Brogging, #012

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is a portable apnea monitor.  As my daughter was premature, we were not given a choice on that she was required to have one in order to be discharged from the NICU.  Understandable initially, as she, like many premature babies had shown the tendency to have episodes of bradycardia (low heart rate), and it was nice to have a safety net at home to know if something were going wrong at any point.

How it worked was that our baby had two nodes strapped to her chest, that fed into an eight-foot cord, which was hooked into the monitor itself, which gave real time pulsing green lights indicative of her heart rate.  At any point if the baby registered more than 20 seconds of a slow heart rate, elevated heart rate, or shallow breathing, a piercing beep would emit from the monitor, along with the illumination of a red light next to whatever icon indicated the event.

The beep was soul-piercing to hear, and the red light was looking at the eye of Sauron.

At first, we’d experience events a few times a day, as we learned as parents on how to be parents and how to hold our child, feed our child and generally handle our kid in the optimum manner to avoid putting her in situations where she’d be at higher risk of triggers.  But as babies tend to do, she began growing rapidly, as mythical wife and I started to gain experience with handling her, and eventually the number of events began reducing to nearly nothing.

As time passed, the necessity of carrying around a box the size and weight of a school textbook and the long, tangly cable that ran with it began to grow increasingly frustrating, especially to me, as we as new parents, wished to expose our child to more of the world, and not just keep her in bassinets or the Mamaroo, but it began to feel like a literal ball and chain.  The number of events were next to nothing, and I was eager to find out when we could be without it.

During a visit to the pediatrician, we were told that two months no events, and then we’re good to go. 

Two months??  I was pretty livid.

Continue reading “New Father Brogging, #012” →

100 Days

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today marks 100 days since the birth of my child.  All jokes aside about my Americanization, it’s always been important to me that my kid hold onto facets of the Korean part of her heritage.  Her middle name is Korean, and mythical wife and I have every intention of having her learn some Korean eventually, so she can communicate with the elders on my side of the family among other worldly benefits.  But also to recognize Korean traditions like baek-il (백일), because they are most definitely a part of her as they are all other Koreans out there.

In Korean culture, the first 100 days of life is a celebrated occasion.  Historically in the old world, 100 days meant a lot to Koreans, because it genuinely was a milestone for a baby to survive that long, due to disease, famine, harsh climates and other various factors that worked against their survival.  To this very day, 100-day celebrations are commonplace to Korean culture, in remembrance of tradition and history.

Obviously the advancement of technology and medicine throughout time have diminished the underlying concern over the 100 day survival of modern Korean children.  However in 2020, the year of my child’s birth, America is dealing with chaotic civil unrest and the highest mortality rates of a global pandemic on the planet.  It certainly feels closer to the old world than the modern one, when you look at it that way.

But social commentary aside, today is still a joyous celebration for my family.  My kid has made it 100 days, and given the state of the world right now, that’s more of an accomplishment than it really should be.

New Father Brogging, #011

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Throughout this week, mythical wife and I have introduced a baby monitor, so that we can put her down at a scheduled time, and still be able to keep eyes and ears on her from elsewhere in the house, while we try to reclaim a little bit of time for ourselves.  At first, it felt almost alien, having some free time back, and initially I used them only to do chores and tasks that tend to fall to the backburner on most days, but then when I’d finish those, I realized that it wasn’t yet 11 pm, and I actually had some free time back on my hands.  It was kind of nice.

Today, my daughter let out the most high-pitched shrieks I’ve ever heard come from her.  Worse off, we heard them first through the baby monitor, so they occurred with neither parent in sight.  I tore up the stairs and into the bedroom to get to my child as fast as possible, and hearing them in person was the most soul-piercing sounds I’d heard in my entire life.  I picked her up out of the bassinet and held her to my chest immediately.  Moments later I was in the most tears I’d been in since her birth, because no parent should want to hear such horrific sounds emanating from their baby.

Fortunately, everything seemed to be fine; maybe she was having a bad dream, or maybe it was the fear of awakening without the use of her arms, since we have her sleep swaddled.  Maybe a combination of both, or maybe she was overheated, since the bedroom tends to warm up throughout the day.  But either way, because nobody can speak baby, we’ll never truly know to why she was in such a frenzied panic, but all I do know is that it was one of the most frightening experiences for me in recent memory, and I’m still admittedly a little shaken up by it, regardless of if everything is fine.

Continue reading “New Father Brogging, #011” →

New Father Brogging, #010

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A thought that often crosses my mind is that I can’t believe the world that my daughter was born into.  And then I feel really sad about it, despite knowing that she very well won’t remember any of this stuff, but one day she might read about it in history books or any sort of resource that outlines the happening throughout history.

It’s bad enough she was born right at the very start of when coronavirus came into the United States and was shortly declared a global pandemic, literally changing the landscape of the world where the vast majority of educated people began to take shelter in their homes, to minimize the spread of a new disease.

But in a way that can only be described as amazing, a global pandemic still managed to get pushed into to the backseat by the more recent civil unrest that’s boiled over on account of the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, and very recently George Floyd in Minnesota, with the latter being pretty flagrantly executed by a white police officer, when his neck was low-key crushed under the knee of the cop.

As I’m writing this, all across the country, there have been countless protests, many of which escalated into riots complete with looting, and there are hundreds to thousands of people who have been physically harmed, gassed, tazed or impacted by some form of crowd control.  The police are widely viewed as the enemy now instead of the agency that’s meant to serve and protect, and it’s times like this in which I’m kind of glad that one, I don’t live/work as close to actual city-proper Atlanta as I used to, and two, add the staying home as yet another ironic benefit to there being a fucking pandemic.

It’s a very sad and scary thought to think of this being the world that my first child was born into, and I feel like the generations before her have already let her down in fostering a world that’s supposed to be safe and better for the future.

Continue reading “New Father Brogging, #010” →

New Father Brogging, #009

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today was quite the day, and not in a particularly positive manner.  I had a day in which I was mostly stressed out on account of the fact that I just felt as if I were kind of losing myself because I just didn’t have any time for myself, because I have to spend so much time in the day doing the same things over and over again, all pertaining to the obvious care of an infant child. 

Obviously I know what I signed up for, and that this was to be expected, so it leads to a tremendous amount of guilt over the fact that I felt such feelings in the first place, so then I try to compensate for my selfishness by trying harder, but then getting similar results and triggers that compounds my frustration, creating this unfortunate cycle of feeling exasperated.

Currently, my child is dealing with a lot of reflux issues, which is pretty common for babies similar to mine, so on a day like today, I’d been thrown up on several times.  I do not fault my kid, as she is still a baby and has little control over these such things, but it is disheartening to get thrown up on all the same.  Additionally, she’s in this current state where she’s either actively eating, or is fussy unless she’s being held.  In either state, she requires hands-on attention, and when either mythical wife or I are providing such hands-on attention, we have no capabilities of doing anything else really.

I’ve become somewhat adept at doing some things one-handed to where I can at least kind of dick around on my phone while nursing or trying to coax a baby to relaxation, or I can watch television, and I’m surprised at how fast we’re going through things on Netflix these days.

But what I can’t do are the perpetually mounting tasks, daily chores and routine dog relief while on baby duty, much less anything I want to do for my own gratification, and as I watch the minutes tick away into hours, and then suddenly it’s only a few hours left before the day’s end, and all of this starts all over again, and then I mentally feel defeated, and that I’m losing myself because I just can’t find the time to do anything at all, whether it’s necessary tasks or personal ones.  Either I feel like the chores are going to overwhelm me, or I won’t get to do anything for myself ever again, and both lead to me feeling negative.

Continue reading “New Father Brogging, #009” →

New Father Brogging, #008

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been called a racist more times than I should probably be comfortable with, in my life.  It’s not something that I’m proud of, I’m just merely stating the fact that plenty of people I’ve interacted with in my life tend to think that I harbor some racist beliefs.  I’m not going to argue about the semantics behind such, but when the day is over, sure, I might find some humor in dark jokes, or race-related topics, but I genuinely don’t dislike my fellow man and woman, for no sole reason than the color of their skin.  I typically grow to dislike my fellow man and woman, because I think they’re toxic personalities, and not the color of their skin or what box they check off under nationality on any sort of legal documentation.

The thing is, I think I get tagged as a racist as often as I do, because I’m pretty frank and candid when it comes to talking about race, stereotypes, and calling bullshit or double-standards on behavior when it comes to race.  Like take for example, America has become this country that’s so riddled with white guilt and apologetic to the black community, that the African-American community has somewhat of an immunity when it comes to criticism, because a large portion of America is afraid to step on the toes of black people. 

Unfortunately, it’s a tale of two extremes, and for every two people who are overly cautious around black people, there’s a closeted or not-so closeted bigot, that absolutely abhors black people, and actually acts on it, discriminating like slavery never was abolished.

However, in spite of the PC bulletproof vest that the black community tends to have against white people, other minority groups don’t have the same luxury.  Asians and Hispanics especially, are treated like this third-tier group, and not only do they endure all sorts of criticism from white people, black people love to clown on Asians and Hispanics as if their entire demographic never endured discrimination in their entire lineages.

Continue reading “New Father Brogging, #008” →