{"id":46867,"date":"2020-03-29T23:13:01","date_gmt":"2020-03-30T03:13:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=46867"},"modified":"2020-08-12T23:13:41","modified_gmt":"2020-08-13T03:13:41","slug":"new-father-brogging-004","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=46867","title":{"rendered":"New Father Brogging, #004"},"content":{"rendered":"

The last time I wrote about my plight of being a new dad, mythical wife and I were staying overnight at the NICU as the last milestone necessary in order for our kid to come home.\u00a0 That being said, baby is now home where she belongs, and thus begins (really) the rest of our lives, and the start of our lives as a family unit.<\/span><\/p>\n

Honestly, it hasn\u2019t been as tragically difficult as people love to expound that new parenthood really is.\u00a0 Sure, we\u2019re operating on the NICU\u2019s general schedule of feeding every three hours, so that our premature child can gain weight as efficiently as possible, but I imagine this is something that my body will get used to as time progresses, not to mention the fact that as baby grows and develops, she won\u2019t need to be on this kind of timeline forever either.<\/span><\/p>\n

So mythical wife and I get up at 2:30 and 5:30 in the morning each night to feed our baby, and slog our way through the motions in the AM hours.\u00a0 I get up at around 7:45 to make sure that I\u2019m logged into work on time, but then I go ahead and take care of the feedings at 8:30 and 11:30, while I frantically do my best to do work-related things in between.\u00a0 Yes, I am still working from home, and it is truly an unprecedented brave new world we\u2019re all operating in these days, and I often have anxious thoughts about the future of my own career, as I wonder if the longer all of this goes on, the more expendable my team\u2019s work will become perceived.<\/span><\/p>\n

Work aside, being a dad is pretty great.\u00a0 I don\u2019t mind the dirty diapers and the demanding schedule, because I have a beautiful daughter that I enjoy just sitting and watching sometimes, wondering how her features are going to grow in, and despite the fact that she had more of my features at birth, I can see glimpses of lighter brown hair, and there\u2019s no mistaking the large eyes she sprouts whenever they open up, that definitely come from mommy and not from me.<\/span><\/p>\n

I love changing her outfits and seeing her in the large varieties of adorable baby clothing that we\u2019ve purchased in advance as well as inherited from the generations of cousins ahead of me.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been peed on and I\u2019ve witnessed various catastrophes of soiled diapers, but they\u2019re no big deal at all.\u00a0 I refuse to be a stereotypical dad that can\u2019t handle changing diapers or think I’m too macho or manly to do things that people tend to associate as being \u201cmom work.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, it kind of makes me a little sad whenever people have given me praise over my indifference and enthusiasm for doing things like changing diapers or bathing my kid.\u00a0 It speaks volumes of the amount of men out there that don\u2019t do the littlest things that instill love and affection for their children, and if there\u2019s one thing that I want to accomplish as a dad, it\u2019s that my kid grows up knowing that I love her more than anything, from the big things to the little ones.<\/span><\/p>\n

Eventually, we\u2019ll hopefully get to a comfortable rhythm as it comes to living with a child in tow now.\u00a0 As much as I want to use this additional time at home to catch up on cleaning and making the house as great as possible for our kid, or I want to be a lazy slug and watch television and movies in between feedings, I just don\u2019t feel like I ever have the time.\u00a0 Three hours sounds like a lot of time, but given how much of it I spend cleaning bottles or pump parts or straightening things out for the next feeding\/changing session, then I feel like I don\u2019t have enough contiguous time to do anything productive or enjoyable, so I usually dick around on my phone or watch YouTube videos instead.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In the world outside our own, coronavirus is still running roughshod all across America.\u00a0 At the time I\u2019m writing this, the United States has long past taken the \u201clead\u201d as it comes to being the country that\u2019s worst hit by the pandemic, with the most amounts of people afflicted and most amount of people who have died from it.\u00a0 Meanwhile, Italy is mostly on the mend in spite of their laughable lack of preparations for it, China, where the disease originated has slowly begun to get better, and South Korea leads the world when it comes to testing being done within the country in order to best contain and combat it better than anyone else.<\/span><\/p>\n

In spite of the global concerns over bringing a life into the world in the midst of a pandemic, ironically, our baby couldn\u2019t have come and left the hospital at a better time.\u00a0 Had she been born a mere three days later, then only parents would have been the only ones allowed to see her, or any other baby, and the hospital put the clamps down in terms of screening in order to get in, and even I had to recuse myself for a week while I was feeling under the weather.\u00a0 But because of the timing in which she was born, she\u2019s was at least been able to be visited by grandma and grandpa on her mother\u2019s side.<\/span><\/p>\n

My parents however, are now up in the air in light of current events.\u00a0 As much as I want to fly my mom down to visit, I don\u2019t want to put her in the scenario of having to travel through airports around a bunch of people I don\u2019t trust to be good about social distancing, and put her into a sardine can with wings full of people who probably would be carrying.\u00a0 As for my sister and dad, they were tentatively going to be coming down for Memorial Day, but who really knows what the world is going to be like then?\u00a0 Given the fact that some states have outright cancelled the rest of school for the year, there\u2019s obviously going to be a ripple effect on how it affects everything else, from travel, commerce to tourism.<\/span><\/p>\n

Anyway, I need to get to a point where I allow myself to write less, if it means writing more frequently.\u00a0 Not everything I write needs to be a verbose novel, and there was once a time in which I declared \u201cblurbs,\u201d when in the manner of a brog, probably were more appropriate short and sweet posts to begin with.<\/span><\/p>\n

But being a dad, yeah I\u2019m digging it.\u00a0 I was nervous at the start, but now I know that I\u2019m going to be loving this for the rest of our lives.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The last time I wrote about my plight of being a new dad, mythical wife and I were staying overnight at the NICU as the last milestone necessary in order for our kid to come home.\u00a0 That being said, baby is now home where she belongs, and thus begins (really) the rest of our lives, … Continue reading New Father Brogging, #004<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[176,194,193,71,192,103],"class_list":["post-46867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-murica","tag-coronavirus","tag-dad","tag-famiry","tag-kids","tag-motherland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46867"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46868,"href":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46867\/revisions\/46868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}