Tag: dad

New Father Brogging, #021

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As my paternity leave winds down, I naturally feel like the last six weeks have blown by, and that I wish I had more time.  Mentally, I’m not really that prepared to return to work yet, but it’s not like I really have much of a choice if I want to be able to provide for my family, other than to suck it up and get back to it.  But I definitely wish I had more time, without a doubt.

Overall, the last six weeks have been mostly anything but easy, as raising a child is definitely no small feat, and I should be fortunate that I even had the luxury of paternity time in the first place.  As necessary as it most certainly felt to me, the reality is this is something that my company did not have in place when I first started there, which wasn’t even a full five years ago.  I remember the big deal it was within the company, and even getting some national news traction about how when we went full paternity, and thinking nothing of it back then, because I wasn’t even married yet, but having capitalized on it now, I couldn’t be more grateful to work for a company that offers it, because I know that such is not the case everywhere else.

But throughout my paternity leave, my child has grown a bunch, begun eating solid foods, competently rolling over front to back to front, has graduated out of swaddles, and has been teething, chatting a lot more, and we’ve begun trying to get her to sit up on her own strength.  One of my prime hopes was that while I was off, we’d be able to get her into a casting call for some sort of baby company, and put her to work a little bit, and once she actually did get put on a shortlist of candidates, but then they hit us with the curveball that all babies would be required to be able to sit up on their own power.  Bummer

Aside from baby-ing, over the last six weeks, I managed to get my brog back up and running, although it’s an indeterminate time to whether when or if I’ll ever get the pre-2010 archives back up and running, because that’s way lower priority than the brog.  I also had some house issues, when some freakish storms exposed some leaks in my home, which turned out to be a time consuming and costly ordeal in its own right, which really messed me up, and I also found out that my own dad has been having some minor health issues on his own, leading to my sister and I to have some real talks about the inevitable future.

Needless to say, it’s been a time during paternity leave, and it’s hard to comprehend that these six weeks have evaporated so quickly.  Put being on full-time daddy duty 10-12 hours a day, with next to no help and practically no down time for myself, and it’s been very understandable when people try to expound the difficulties of parenthood.

To reward myself and/or indulge in some retail therapy, I decided to get myself a new belt, as well as track down my own belated birthday gift, in this sweet Power Rangers T-Rex DinoZord.  And the belt is mostly as a result of an Amazon gift card my sister got me for my birthday when her own attempt to get me the T-Rex stalled out due to a flaky seller in Japan, and much like Target gift cards, I’m left with a wtf do I purchase, until it came to my attention that Amazon actually had a few people selling legitimate belts.  So now I have a Ring of Honor tag replica, that guys like Kyle O’Reilly, Bobby Fish, the Young Bucks, Hardys, AJ Styles, Kevin Steen Owens, Cesaro, CM Punk and Seth Rollins have held in their histories.

And modeling the belt is my new life-long tag team partner.  As intensive as some parenting might have felt at times, I wouldn’t take anything away from the last six weeks, and I’m sad that it’s likely I’ll not get another massive chunk of time like this to spend with my child for the immediate future.

New Father Brogging, #020

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As many parents of babies go through, I change a tremendous amount of diapers.  It is nothing that has ever worried me the least bit about impending parenthood, and I don’t really see what the big deal is all about honestly.  I’m thinking it has a lot to do with the fact that I’ve been a pet owner for the better part of the last 20+ years, and cleaning the pee and poop of animals has conditioned me to where baby human excrement seems like nothing at all, especially since it’s mostly encapsulated inside of diapers.

Anyway, what I wanted to new dad brog about today was the fact that over the span of the last six months, I’ve gotten to give some pretty good sampling to several baby wipes varieties out on the market, and I think I’ve become somewhat qualified to be able to rate and impart my opinions on my zero readers, in case the day comes in which they are in the market for baby wipes and decide to use my ratings as a baseline to sway their opinions.

I judge based on performance criteria, and not necessarily cost; mythical wife had gone through months of cerebral couponing and deal-hunting to stock up on baby supplies prior to the arrival of our child, so the factor of cost was somewhat irrelevant by the time we got to starting to use all the supplies that we’d hoarded, plus it’s safe to say that at no point have we ever paid full price on any baby wipes.

So the things that I judge baby wipes are on:

  1. Thickness – too thin and you’re wearing excrement; too thick and you might as well be trying to wedge a beach towel into the sensitive areas of your baby
  2. Softness – the softer the better as babies’ skin is delicate and gentle, especially down there
  3. Moisture – too little and you might as well be using sandpaper, too much and you’re leaving too much moisture which could lead to irritation
  4. And most importantly, when your baby has exploded, and you’ve only got one hand free because the other hand is holding their legs up so they don’t dip their heels into feces, how well the packaging dispenses, because I’m convinced that they’re all perfectly engineered to sense urgency and make it impossible to pull out anything other than the entire fucking package when all you need is one at a time

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The cold equations of life

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

There was a sci-fi story I read in high school that I always remembered called The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin.  In short, it was the story about a guy who was piloting a supply ship through space, to deliver medical supplies to a mining colony on another planet.  However, unbeknownst to him, a young girl, hoping to hitch a ride to the colony where her brother was located, had stowed away and was discovered after the ship had launched and was already in route.  She thought the punishment for her discretion would merely be a fine, but quickly learned that the ship had only enough fuel to make it to the planet and did not account for the weight she had added to the ship. 

In other words, her stowing away jeopardized the lives of herself, the pilot and the colonists depending on the medical supplies because the ship didn’t have enough fuel to haul the extra weight and would fall short of its destination and crash.

Initially, the pilot was callously instructed by his superiors to jettison the girl off the ship and continue the journey, and naturally he showed tremendous reluctance at the thought of having to kill someone; but it was a matter of kill one person to save the many people who needed the medical supplies, or jettison the medical supplies in order to save the girl. 

Spoiler alert: they deliberate for so long that it doesn’t even matter; after jettisoning the medical supplies, it turns out that a little thing called physics had already come into play, and they’d been flying overweight for long enough to where the girl needed to be unloaded anyway, due to fuel constraints.  The pilot is mentally murdered by having to push the button on someone’s life, the colonists on the planet do not get the medical supplies, and he is arrested and imprisoned for insubordination. 

Everyone loses.

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New Father Brogging, #019

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s days like today where I really realize that I can never be off.  I’m on paternity leave, but still managing to feel overwhelmed and like I have no time to myself, which I personally think is something that should be essential to all parents new and old.  By no means necessary am I holding it against my child for taking up so much of my time, the whole point of paternity leave is so we can spend all this time together.  But there are mornings in which she wakes up earlier than usual, and the day begins earlier than usual, and the day’s entire cycles are thrown off, and at some point in the day she’s going to be ready for bed earlier or screaming her head off because the schedule’s not lining up and then my blood pressure is probably spiking.

All throughout the day, I’m feeding her, trying to keep her entertained, as well as working on the development of certain physical milestones, such as being able to sit up on her own.  Some days she’s more tolerant of things than others, but then there are days in which she has no desire to lay on her back on her play mat, or no desire to be laying on her stomach working her little abdomen muscles, and is instead screaming her head off in dissatisfaction.  Times like this, the only thing that really placates her is being held, which I’m happy to do, but at the same time I’m wondering if I’m boring my child and wasting opportunities to be stimulating her somehow.  I can only read so many books, and mythical wife and I have agreed no screens for a while, so we’re definitely not going to be parents to plunk her in front of the television, but that limits the options for things to do.

It’s too fucking hot out still, so I’m reluctant to go out on long stroller walks with her, and I really wish that it were like October or something instead, so the weather would be drastically more pleasant to take her out in, for the both of us, and her awake windows aren’t necessarily long enough to really explore going to the pool without making her outright miserable.

So what really ends up happening is that there’s a lot of time spent doing the same things repeatedly, trying to chew up time, which makes me feel like shit that I’m sometimes counting down minutes until the next nap time so that I can get a brief reprieve to do whatever I want for at least 30 minutes, which is usually never anything particularly productive, because seldom do I do anything that feels remotely productive in the span of 30 minutes.

All this adds to my general feelings of anxiety as of late, and leading me to wonder about therapy as I had talked about in a prior post.  I want to be the greatest dad I can be, but there are times where I end up feeling like a selfish asshole for wanting time for myself, and when I get time for myself, sometimes I’ll just scroll through photos on my phone which are 95% of her, and wonder why I’m not having tremendous amounts of more fun with the real thing than wistfully staring at photographs.

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This is a story about pure, unadulterated failure

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As I alluded to in my last daddy brog, I was to have some work done to my house, specifically, fixing up the wood around two very high up windows, so that they would no longer allow moisture into my home.  The day in which that work was to happen has come and gone, and hoo boy, do I have a story to tell, about just how much failure can possibly be packed into a single day of one individual person, being me.

For starters, when it was evident that moisture was getting into my home, I was pretty quickly able to deduce that it was coming from an upstairs window, based on where the water was seeping into parts of my home.  Honestly, this was something that was flagged during my home inspection back before I even came into the home, but it wasn’t listed as something that was critical, but something to look out for in the future.  And the future had arrived, and the seal clearly had worn down to where water was getting into my house when the rain came sideways.

So, thinking it was something fairly minor and maybe a few silicone caulk re-sealing wouldn’t fix, I opted to get a handyman, whom might have a 26-32’ ladder, since my 22’ extension ladder wasn’t tall enough for me to go up there and inspect it myself.  It took a day or two for the guy to show up, as he had cited a child emergency on the first day, and being the new dad I am myself, I was extremely understanding and empathetic to the needs of children first.

When he did show up, we joked about how we both hoped this would be a quick job where he could hop up onto the ladder, slather down some caulk, and be on his merry way, bam, easy $100, but it turns out that it wouldn’t be that simple because nothing in the world is ever that simple.  It turned out that the frame around the window was mostly rotten, and even the ladder coming into contact with a piece of it caused it to immediately disintegrate like Castlevania blocks.

Now this, is the point where I feel like I could have changed history.  Like if I were Cable from X-Force, I could body slide to this point in time and smack myself upside the head and tell me to NOT ask the guy,

Can you fix it?

Because of fucking course he said he could, what handyman is ever going to say no and deny themselves the possibility of getting a job?  And then he quoted be some number that I didn’t find egregious, and frankly I just wanted this shit fixed up as soon as humanly possible, and didn’t want to go through too much bullshit trying to track down a window person to come and re-examine and re-quote song and dance.

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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.