Tag: kids

Dad Brog (#169): the future brogger

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My youngest’s birthday is coming up very soon, and we let her open a gift early, because boredom is the greatest opponent for all parents and the girls were driving us bananas over a lazy Sunday.  To the credit of my children, they love Legos as much as I did when I was a kid, and I really enjoy putting together kits with my own kids; except when they squabble and fight over who gets to do what, things start to get out of order, and ultimately one will start spite-stealing pieces and sabotaging the progress of the other.

I had to tell #1 to stop sandbagging her sister’s build, because this was a birthday gift for her, and that she did get to have priority over its build.  In response to this, #1 began moping that today is a bad day and that I am sad. 

Then she began stating that she was going to write in her diary that today was a bad day and that she was sad, and mythical wife and I were a little perplexed at where she learned the concept of diary keeping from in the first place.

Moments later, she wandered into the kitchen, and I could hear her get a sheet of paper, the pop of a lid coming off of a marker, and the sound of scribbling as if she were writing something down.  As much as her choice of words were being overly dramatic, I was proud to hear that she was sounding out words and clearly writing something instead of just scribbling the the doodles that manifest in her head, as much as I love every piece of art she draws.

A few minutes later, she brings the “diary” entry shown above to us, and it says:

Dear diary I had a bad day my sister did not share I am sad about that

Needless to say, mythical wife and I were quite amused at the excessive melodrama generated by our six-year old.  I mean she is half-Korean, and if there’s one thing Koreans are good at doing is, is being dramatic.

But naturally, my mind immediately went in the direction that this was basically the formative seed of what would eventually turn out to be future brogging.  It starts with marker on letter paper, eventually it will manifest into keyboard and monitor, and given the rapid advancement of technology, the tech of the future will probably just be able to read her thoughts and manifest words directly onto her future brog where hopefully she’ll have more than zero readers.

But it all starts somewhere. 

Even if it’s from a bad day that she is sad about.

Dad Brog (#168): an odd period of calm

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Even though it’s still summer break for mythical wife and kids, I’ve still been waking up at the same sequence of alarms used throughout the school year, with the first going off at a horrific time that leads with a 5.

Part of it has to do with still dealing with some lingering jetlag from returning from Asia; I’ve been hitting hard walls of fatigue at around 1 pm daily, and by 10 pm, I’m yawning uncontrollably, but I’m fighting it to one, keep myself on track for the kids’ nightly bathroom breaks, and to hopefully get back to my old bed habits.

But also because waking up at the ass-crack of dawn gives me a few hours in the morning of quiet peace; it’s not different from the time in which I regularly awoke during the school year, except now I don’t have to wake any kids up, so that time in which I had been making and serving breakfast for #1, taking a break to Duolingo before #2’s wake-up time, and then repeating with #2 before I headed off to work, I’ve just been keeping entirely to myself, doing my Duolingo with a morning cup of coffee, and then I’ve got this chunk of time of really nothing to do lately before I feel the need to start breakfast, and I’ve actually been utilizing it to do some writing over the last week or so.

Parenting has taught me that no routine lasts forever, and I should be grateful for this oddly un-parenting-like period of calm, and I’ve actually caught up with some of the topics I wanted to write about to where the only thing left to write about is the period of calm itself.

Even work has been uncharacteristically calm, also almost spookily, because my company has had a lot of turnover this fiscal year, and all of the internal clients in which my position supports went gangbusters on frontloading the year to where we’re almost at a point of doing nothing but pre-planning for 2027, barely at the halfway point in 2026.  Frankly, I don’t like how calm it is at the office, because I’ve witnessed more layoffs at this employer over the last two years than I did at six years at my prior, which makes me feel like we’re like a WWE/TKO ecosystem of employment instability, and my biggest daily anxiety is wondering if my name is ever going to show up on the bean-counters’ ledgers as being viewed as expendable and placed on the chopping block.

This is the world we live in, or at least I live in, where calm and quiet is met with paranoia and concern for the future.  What I wouldn’t give to be independently wealthy and to not have to worry about this kind of bullshit.

Next school year, both girls will be in elementary school, and will effectively be on the same schedule, which means instead of needing to be on dad-mode effectively twice a morning before I go to work, I’ll only have to do it once, and then I’ll suddenly have nothing to do until it’s time to go to work.

Going back to sleep isn’t an option, because to me, it just doesn’t seem like it’s enough time to let myself fall back asleep only to be jarred awake by another alarm, before needing to go through the trouble of waking back up again before heading into the office.  More realistically, I can see myself heading out to the office earlier, with the possibility of hitting the gym before general working hours begin because I anticipate it being calm and empty, but then that will remove the 60-75 min reprieve I give myself in the middle of the day to workout, which means I’ll ultimately net work more on a daily basis but this is about as first-world problem as they come.

Or, I can keep that time to give myself like a calm hour at home, and do basically what I’ve been doing this past week, and dick around on my phone and laptop in relative peace, possibly write, and then head to the office, closer to my usual routine.

Who really knows, although I think I already know how I’m going to treat the scenario when it arrives.  But the point remains that gaining any measure of peace, quiet and calm is always jarring and feels awkward, because parenting conditions me to be on edge and anticipating kid-related things at all times, so when things do get to actually slow down, it almost feels alien and wrong.

Dad Brog (#167): Father’s Day 2026

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Year five of forever

Full disclosure, this photograph was taken about a full month before Father’s Day.  This post is being written in advance, by nearly a full month before Father’s Day.  Seeing as how would be abroad on actual Father’s Day, I decided to knock this out a little early, so that it would not be looming over my head as a critical must-do, as my departure date drew nearer, so it was in my best interests to take it early, so I wouldn’t have to rush the photo taking, editing, printing, and writing out the corresponding post.

Plus it’s one of the few things I look forward to more than anything in the world, so why not treat myself for a change, especially with the cesspool of S+ difficulty I deal with in my everyday life generally.

Honestly, I still sometimes look at my kids and I can’t believe that I’m a dad.  My girls are six and four, so I’ve been a dad for a little while now, but sometimes it still feels surreal that I have contributed towards the creation of lives, and my offspring are already both going to be in elementary school together, start of the next school year.

Even when they were tiny little nuggets of babies, it was hard to fathom what the future would look like, and how these kids would eventually be walking and talking, going to school and having their brains metaphorically exploding with all the knowledge and experience they’d be coming into over the passage of time.

Now, we have conversations regularly, they’re always asking questions, and they can walk, talk, run, jump, and they love to play games and do puzzles and draw pictures and build with Legos.  As the current school year came to a close, both brought home little booklets that showed a glimpse of time lapse of their handwriting and their drawing acumen throughout the course of the school year, and it’s amazing to see just how much both of them had progressed.

They’ll always be my babies, but make no mistake, they’re two grown kids that have intelligence, personalities, capabilities and talents already.  And I still can’t believe that I had a hand in making them.

One thing I’ve noticed more recently is the fact that my girls have slowly been phasing out “dada” and been more frequently referring to me as just “dad.”  It hasn’t been a full-on swap just yet, and dada still comes out from them both, although more from #2 than #1, but it has not gone unnoticed by me that I’ve been hearing a lot more dad instead of dada.

The thing is, I never coached or deterred them from use of one name or the other, it has been happening completely organically to my knowledge.  But seeing as how both kids, their first words were dada, it unsurprisingly makes me feel a little melancholy to know that they’re gradually phasing it out of their go-to vernacular.

Continue reading “Dad Brog (#167): Father’s Day 2026” →

Dad Brog (#166): Back in mah’ day

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes as a treat, I take my kids to Waffle House for breakfast.  Or when I’m completely out of ideas of breakfasts for them, I throw my hands in the air and think F it, Waffle House.  Anyway, so I’m at Waffle House, my kids are going to down on a chocolate chip waffle, and out of the corner of my eye, I see a boy, probably somewhere between 11-13 years old.

He’s by himself, and he’s wearing a bicycle helmet.  A few minutes later, I see one of the very-Waffle House servers handing him a plastic to-go bag, that couldn’t have had more than a single person’s food in it, he takes it, walks out of the restaurant, hops onto an e-bike, and rode off, presumably going home or wherever.

Now before this gets too ‘back in my day’-ish, this wasn’t uncommon behavior for me, or any kids that age when we were that age, it’s just that most of the time, we were on foot, because most of our bicycles back then didn’t have adequate storage capabilities outside of dorky wicker baskets that sat at the front of your handles, and the fact that most restaurants weren’t nearly as reliant on take-out service as they are today.  Kids in the 11-13 age ranges back when I was there, were more than likely going to the nearest fast-food burger joint, and if they were taking anything to go, it was in a paper sack.

However, what this line of thinking grew curious about was the fact that the kid got on a e-bike, and after 3-4 pedals to get the bike starting, it was full-motor from there on, and before he could leave my sight, he was no longer pedaling.  E-bikes have basically become actual motorized forms of transportation for those under the age of 16 and legally unable to operate a four-wheel consumer-class vehicle.

I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing yet, but above all else, it is just one of those things that really paints the picture of how big the chasm is between kids of now, to when I was a kid, and especially to those in the generations that preceded my own.  Who knows, maybe having access and experienced with actual motorized vehicles that are expensive, and require maintenance will help build a better sense of ownership and responsibility in the kids of tomorrow.  Or, it’s the first step to heading down the path of Wall-E, where kids no longer have to walk, or even pedal their own bicycles anymore, and they’re destined to become fat immobile blobs of humanity after eating one too many Waffle House takeout meals.

Sometimes my sister and I lament about the differences of the generations, when comparing our kids to our own childhoods.  How kids today simply don’t know how to be bored and fend for themselves in a lot of applications, and how they have access to stuff like e-bikes, motorized scooters, apps to order takeout and services that can deliver all sorts of things same-day and immediately.

Much like our own predecessors lament, I suppose it’s kind of like a rite of passage for when every adult looks at the generation after them and opines, they don’t understand how good they have things.

Whenever I visit my brother, he takes me on bicycle rides, since that is something he’s grown quite passionate about since he moved to his current locale.  It’s something I always enjoy doing with him, and as the old adage goes, you really do never forget how to ride a bike.  But because he has more regular experience than I do, and for lack of an alternative, he lets me ride his e-bike while he takes his regular bicycle.

Shit weighs a ton, and is definitely not the typical bicycle that you dismount while it’s still in motion, leap off and let it come to a crashing halt on its side in the yard of the asshole neighbor, but it’s still a bicycle that anyone who’s ever ridden one can get the hang of in ten seconds.

Motor assistance is a really weird feeling at first, but I definitely see the appeal of it, and I liked having it available whenever I felt like I was really falling behind my brother, but for the most part, I was determined to pedal as often as I could.  I’d always get paranoid whenever the battery dropped from 94% to 93% and I’d be driven to try and pedal some juice back into the battery, but the point remains is that just because I had it, I didn’t really want to use it until I felt like I had to.

When I go on outdoor runs, I’ve been seeing clusters of mostly teens, now that especially school’s out down in Georgia, riding on either e-bikes or e-scooters; and the common denominator is that almost none of them are actually powering them with their legs, and just riding them around like personal vehicles.  I mean it’s cool that they’re able to get from point A to point B with less physical exertion, but not only is it eliminating any potential exercise for them, but it’s like that line from Cars: cars didn’t drive on it to make great time, they drove on it to have a great time.

Some of the best conversations I’ve had with childhood friends have often come on these leisurely, casual journeys, from one house to another, or the woods, the creek or the train tracks.

But before I wrap up this drivel, I’m curious about the people who take their motorized shit onto trails like the Silver Comet Trail, where I like to do my long-distance runs, when trying to accomplish the diminishing number of virtual runs that I sign up for.  It’s always an annoyance having to share with tryhard aggressive e-bikers, but it makes me wonder, if people motor their way for 25+ miles, do they really feel accomplished as those cyclists who actually pedaled the entire distance?

Not that I care, but that’s a curiosity that I wrap this up with.

Dad Brog (#165): Can’t even see the end of the tunnel

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As is often the case with a lot of the time I write under the Dad Brog tag, things are going a little rough these days.  In fact, it’s like the difficulty of my life is currently sitting at a 9 on a scale of 7, and I’m having a hard time of accepting that this is just kind of going to be the state of it, given all the circumstances around me.

Frankly, it’s not so much my children being the source of lot of my general stress and anxiety beyond the usual every day gripes of parenting.  Sure, they can be little shits when they want to, and their listening skills have a tendency to become questionable at times, but in this case, they’re kids.  A six and four year old, being a six and four year old; defiant, rambunctious, playful, but otherwise pretty normal as far as being kids go.

However, it’s my third kid, AKA my elderly dad who is undoubtedly the largest source of my general daily angst, frustration and reason why my mood gets tanked faster than anything else.  Frankly, this wouldn’t be classified as a Dad Brog if not for the fact that my own dad has basically turned into a third child for me, and is about as functional and capable as my six and four year olds, with the exception being that a lot of his inability to function has mostly been on account of his own choices, and not because he’s a six or four year old.

I struggle on a regular basis to not let my frustrations boil over and take it out on my dad, but it’s really fucking hard at times when the things I request and ask of him are never absorbed, never honored, and never respected.  And with the recent diagnosis of early signs of dementia, it’s like he’s got a permanent excuse to be inept and completely oblivious to my life or my needs, and that I’m basically expected to be available at his beck and call, because he can always just chalk up forgetfulness on account of signs of dementia.

What frustrates me a ton is the fact that he put himself in a position to let his brain rot and degrade to its current state, by his own life choices over the last 10-15 years or so.  He lived in isolation, he had almost no friends, he didn’t have any real hobbies, and he basically resigned himself to stop bothering to keep learning things in life.  It’s like he was in prison, except on his own volition, based on the life of low stimuli he put himself into and refused to get out of it.

Whenever I boil over from him blowing up my phone on a daily basis, in spite of me telling him to please not call me during work hours unless it’s an emergency, and he keeps calling anyway, because whenever he gets bored, lonely or depressed from the shit life he bestowed upon himself, he dials me up, and it makes my blood pressure immediately elevate at hearing my phone go off because I know it’s most likely going to be my dad, and I wince like OJ Simpson in court whenever I confirm that it is.  But when we do speak, everything I state or ask or more often than I care to admit, chastise, the response always starts with “no, but…”

Pretty much everything I suggest or try and convey is met with no, but, or some other form of pessimistic nihilism, and if anyone has ever wondered why I might have such characteristics, then this is most likely where I am getting it from.  However, the difference is that I’m still clear of mind and often times police myself, and try my best to not have such a tone and scare everyone because I’m like a big fucking chupacabra that scares people really easily apparently.

But I also get a ton of resistance and questioning from everyone else in my life, be it my own children, and people I work with.  My kids question everything, and not always in the good way, but more like when I ask them to do something they don’t want, it’s always met with great resistance, and feet dragging, and complaining.  Any time I try and flag something as (obviously) needing clarification or push back or some factor that’s coming from a place of pursuing efficiency and less wasted time, I’m the one who gets tagged as being difficult, glass half empty, or just plain fucking negative.

People like to label me as overly negative or pessimistic, but the truth of the matter is that I’m surrounded by it, and I’m the asshole if I become a product of my surroundings. 

And this is where I am currently, sick beyond words at how exasperated and exhausted I am of everyone questioning me, complaining to me, resisting me, and just not giving me any modicum of respect.  I don’t feel as if anyone alive these days respects my opinions or my time, and unfortunately I don’t really anticipate much of this is going to change in the indeterminate future.  I see no light at the end of the tunnel, which is a really shitting feeling to feel, but with my life basically being a glorified babysitter and caregiver, there’s pretty much no time for anything else; believe me, there are a lot of things I’d like to do, like set up an old laptop to be a good emulator machine for a lot of retro games I feel like playing, or exploring the potential gold I could be sitting on with some of the CIB video games that I have, but there simply just isn’t enough time left each day for me to do anything that I want, beyond maybe catching up with exercise, going off brogging a rant, or watching 1-3 episodes of Batman the Animated Series, depending on how much sleep I want to sacrifice.

I can’t really go to bed sooner than I do, because one of my kids is a problematic bed wetter, and I try to take them to the bathroom in the middle of the night to empty out their bladder to reduce the chances of a wetting episode, with it being a cautious game of chicken to not go too early in which there’s a lot of time left overnight for a wetting episode to occur, or going too late, and for there to already being a wetting waiting for me to have to fucking clean up in the middle of the night instead of 6:30 in the morning.

It would just be great if my life didn’t have to be so fucking insufferably hard, all the god damn time, and frankly it would just be great to have something to look forward to, because there’s a real lack of that in my world these days, and so I’m just kind of going through the motions at times, which is really unfair to my kids.

But for reals though, I really need my life to stop being so sucky more often than it is, and get me back to a position to where there’s more to look forward to in the day, than dreading.

Dad Brog (#164): nobody told me there’d be this much paper

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For about the first five years of parenthood, I’ve done my best to keep record of all the artwork that my children have created, be it at home, at school, camps or wherever they’ve been tasked to create something with their own hands.  Regardless of how it looked, it was always awesome, and I’d always take tremendous enjoyment out of the explanations that came from the imaginations of my children, and I always fall in love all over again with just how beautiful of minds kids have before they’re systemically neutered by lame-ass adulthood.

But my god, of all the parenting advice and resources I indulged throughout my journey before and into parenthood, nobody ever mentioned the part where two kids, much less one kid, generate about a small rainforest’s worth of paper in the things they create.

For those first five years, I tried to keep everything that they did, from drawings, gluing things to construction paper, cutouts of god knows what, dioramas, collages and whatever they made, I wanted to hold on to it.  Obviously, I know that’s not realistic in the long run, and for two nights after the kids went to sleep, I’d crack open the giant crate where I’d been hoarding all the artwork, set up my digital camera and some lighting, and I took photographs of everything that they had created; then I’d put them into the recycling bin for discreet disposal.

I thought about perhaps using my kids’ artwork as content for an Instagram account I toyed around the idea of, but haven’t pulled the trigger on account of reluctance and a general lack of time to really commit, but the point is, even if I tossed them, I still kept record of their creations, proof that they were on this earth, existed, and made things with their own hands.

However, my kids are a little bit older now, and school is really producing paper content commensurate to their ages, and without fail, at least 2-3 sheets of paper come home with #1 daily, and #2 brings home a bag full of art assignments every two weeks, and seldom are they in any standardized, easily archivable size.  Furthermore, our au pair is great at keeping them occupied with art and drawing, and they burn through reams of paper almost as fast as they burn through toilet paper in the house.

Needless to say, I’ve gotten to the point where I simply can’t keep up with the paper that my children produce, and it’s basically become drown in sheets of paper, or start tossing things when they’re not looking.

This isn’t a brog post if I chose to do the righteous option and solder forth with hoarding, and today I had to harden my heart as I took stacks of papers and drawings that my kids have done over the last year or so, and put them into the recycling bin.  It kills my soul to do it in such a manner, but at the same time, my mental state goes to the shitter if my house’s state of cleanliness matches the chaos that is often in my brain, and when push comes to shove, if I can’t help myself from time to time, I’m no good to be able to help my kids and family.

My kids won’t notice, but I do, and I can’t help but feel wracked with guilt at the choice of my actions.  Among these stacks were all sorts of drawings that were thought out, explained with exuberance, and in some cases, were probably drawings of our family, or their sister, or something else drawn with love and good intention, and here I am, the asshole dad who can’t stand clutter and chooses to toss them without record keeping, and the feeling absolutely sucks.

But again, as I’m so often reminded by so many people, sometimes I have to put myself first every now and then, and perhaps this is a reminder to myself that I should embark on my Instagram idea and use my chlidren’s artwork as a general basis for content, it might just help keep me accountable to be better about keeping record.

Year six of forever

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Even to this very day, I still sometimes can’t believe that I’m a dad.  I usually have these thoughts in the mornings, when I’m watching my kids eat breakfast, and my mind thinks back to when they were but little babies that drank from bottles, and eventually fed by spoon, and then finger foods, and here they are not only eating with utensils, they have opinions, on what breakfasts I make them that they do like, or if they’re one of their pissy morning moods, and whatever I’ve made is automatically putrid trash.

But sometimes I just quietly watch them while they eat, and I think back to my mom doing the same thing to me, and me thinking “whaaaat???” whenever I caught her staring.  I don’t remember what her answer ever was, if she even answered in the first place, but being a parent myself, I’ve come to understand why she was doing it in the first place, because I have to imagine she was probably thinking the same thing I think whenever I just watch my kids, that it’s still amazing that we have kids and that we are parents; bonus if the kids themselves are pretty good ones.

Today marks year six for my eldest, the one that started me on this path of being a parent, and like I stated above, there are times where I still can’t believe it.  Life as a childless adult feels like such an alien, foreign concept that I’m often flabbergasted when I see people who live such uncomplicated lives for basically nobody but themselves for the most part.  Sure, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the freedom, frivolity and sheer ease of not having to feel responsible for the life of young children, but there are times where there’s nothing like witnessing your own children grow into the world, and feeling somewhat responsible for helping shape them into the people they’re becoming.

Few things make me laugh more than hearing my children using some of the more common phrases that I use, like for example, #1 was getting tired of explaining some Pokémon thing to #2, and she bust out a how many times do I have to tell you, and I lost it right where I was sitting, because there’s absolutely no doubt where she picked that saying up from.  Maybe that’s not the best thing to be picking up to reflect on me, but it’s just an example of just how perceptive and how much of my kid my kids are capable of being, and seldom does a day go by where one or both of my kids don’t bring an avalanche of joy to my heart at some point.

And just like that, my eldest is six freaking years old.

She’s smart as heck, wants to know damn near everything she can about Pokémon, still enjoys reading with dad, and appears to be quite the math whiz, based on the fact that I can count on one hand how many times I’ve seen an incorrect answer on her math worksheets throughout the entire school year so far.

She’s very observant, picks up on everything, and has the marvelously beautiful imagination that only a 5-6 year old can have, whether she expresses it through drawing, coloring or making things out of whatever she can get her hands on; Legos, wooden blocks, MagnaTiles.  I love building things to instruction with her, but it’s most fun when we disassemble a Lego kit, and then she’s free to build whatever she wants, and when she’s done she always has these elaborate backstories to the structures she’s building, and the figures that are living in them.  I’ll tidy up her room in the afternoon, and by the time bed time has come, she’s built an entire town of structures, with origin stories for everyone that’s living in it, and I don’t remember being nearly as imaginative as she is now when I was six.

What I really love is that she still wants to be picked up and carried by dad all the time.  There was one moment I had thought to myself at what age does it seem weird to be doing that, but it didn’t last long because I remembered that there would one day come a day where either she doesn’t want to be held any more, or for whatever reason I’ll be unable to do it, so I put that silly thought to bed, and I’m happy to pick up and carry my kid whenever she asks, because I’d rather get in all my carries and hugs in while I still can.

The point is, happiest of birthdays to my eldest child.  It’s been the greatest honor of my life to be your dad, and I love you (and sissy and mama) with every fiber of my being, and the simple objective of my life has always remained the same, to be the best dad possible to you, always.