Tag: dad

My daughters will extend my life by almost three years

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Okay: recent study suggests dads with daughters have tendency to live longer, with each daughter adding on average 74 weeks of lifespan

When this story was fed to me, I couldn’t help but smirk as I often do whenever I read anything related to girldads or being a girldad.  The notion that by virtue of them being daughters instead of sons, my two girls will be responsible for keeping my ass alive for 148 weeks longer than my life expectancy should suggest, nearly three entire years, is amusing to me.  Even more so, that it’s pointed out that sons, add no extra life to their dads, comparatively.

The thing is, the story could have ended with that, and kept it vague, yet still sweet, but in this day and age, where everyone is expected to show their work, when they dive a little deeper, it’s mostly attributed to the notion that when said girls become women, they’re way more apt to nag their dads about health and preventative care, which is the primary reason why they tend to live longer.

I mean it makes sense, since harping on their dad to go see doctors and get checkups and critical milestone tests probably is more useful in the long game versus daring dad to see how long they can go without farting, how fast they can go in the rental car, or can they take a spinning power bomb off the top of the couch.  But it does take some of the sticker sentimentality away from the general headline, but not enough to where I can’t make a brog post about it.

What’s interesting to me though, is that I wonder how much truth this will hold in my particular case.  A lot of the longevity is attributed to what seems like a bunch of out-of-shape dads who view their children as a sudden reason to get into better health and pick up better habits, which would naturally be beneficial to their life expectancy.

I’m no Zac Efron, but I’ve always been consistent and routinely with exercise, and mythical wife has already gotten a handle on egging me to go to the doctor at least for annuals, so the things that my daughters would’ve been expected to drive me to do in order to give me 148 weeks more of living, I’m already doing.  Of course, I want to be around when they graduate schools, maybe get married, or any other life’s milestones.  Maybe there’s another level of physical improvement to reach, probably when they’re not little brats who are sometimes shits about their food, and I end up eating a ton of shitty leftovers on account of not wanting to waste food.

Conversely, there’s always the easy joke about how my kids, regardless of their gender, are solely responsible for taking years off of my life on account of the sheer amounts of stress they put me through with their childish insubordination, stubbornness and constant power struggles.  Maybe that’s something that the study doesn’t account for is that daughters might each give me 74 weeks of extra life at the tail end of my life, but they’re sure as fuck siphoning a lot more of it on the front end.

Either way, let’s choose to ignore all the background noise of this study, and choose to believe that my two little girls are going to be the reason why I live three years longer than I really should be, solely by existing. ❤️

Dad Brog (#147): Parenting will never be easy, vol. 978

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As much as I don’t like to admit it, I’ve been struggling lately in my life as a dad.  I feel like my patience is at an all-time low and just about everything my kids are doing lately is just pissing me off, mostly on account of the colossal amounts of escalating defiance and just plain lack of listening that’s going on with my four and three year old daughters.

Everything from wake-up time, free play time, quiet time, and especially bedtime are these monumental conflicts where I feel my disposition dissolving all the time, and I just end up in a state of agitation, annoyance, anger or all the above.  I don’t like it one bit, but I can’t deny the fact that I’m losing my cool over things at a very frequent clip, and I’m hoping that this is just a stage of life given the ages of my kids, and this will eventually pass and eventually emerge in a state of being that’s not as chaotic, not as frustrating, and not as resulting me being pissed off all the time.

Then again, the whole notion that challenging times will just pass doesn’t change the fact that time is passing, and then I struggle about that notion that I’m letting formative kid years of my children’s lives pass, while mostly in dour moods, which then makes me feel bad about that instead.

There’s actually a part of me that dreads the weekends lately, because there’s usually a lot of time in which I’m on dad duty alone with the kids, and I don’t always know what to do with them.  And the difference is now from when they were 2 and 1 and 3 and 2, is a whole lot more mobility, a whole lot more freedom to roam in the house, and most prevalently, a whole lot more intelligent. 

My kids are pretty smart, and are seemingly endlessly testing boundaries and limits, and doing just about everything that I’m please asking them to not do, they hardly ever listen, and I’m just left exasperated, fried and burned out on trying to figure out how to keep them occupied without having to resort to television, going outside because it’s been cold as fuck lately or something that results in a colossal mess that will make me want to slit my wrists.

Mornings have been challenging lately, because #1 has been deciding to wake up earlier than our routine generally is, and lots of mornings, she just bangs on the door and walls and makes a lot of racket that runs the risk of waking up her sister or others in the house.  I’m usually not done with making breakfast, and I’m already aggravated at knowing there’s a clock over my head at needing to get shit done lest she tornadoes up her room, and that becomes one more task on my endless list of responsibilities.

There’s like a 75% chance that #2 will either: be pissed upon waking up and melt down.  Be pissed at the top of the stairs and refuse to come downstairs and refuse to be carried downstairs, and then melt down.  Be unhappy with what I’ve made for breakfast, refuse to eat and then melt down.  Or any combination, if not all of the above.  I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t even bother to try and console beyond an initial attempt because she won’t communicate why she’s upset, and I just give up and start reading books to #1 who rarely has an issue with breakfast.

But bedtimes, they have become a vastly different type of hell for me on the daily, and frankly have become my least favorite part of every single day as of late.  You’d think that I’d be doing cartwheels at the idea of putting the kids down for the night, so I can enjoy my 1-2 hours of freedom.  But the defiance, having to wrangle and chase down the kids, get them bathed, teeth brushed, dressed and prepped, even before we get into their rooms for bedtime stories.  It’s like a last boss battle every single day, all for a payoff of the pithy 1-2 hours of freedom I get to have these days, and usually the first hour of my paltry me time is really spent decompressing as well as doing cleaning and prep-work for the next day, before I can really turn everything off and try and relax with what little time I’m afforded.

More than likely, I’m just at my burnout point again.  I haven’t really had a real break from being on dad duty in a while; I know I had a kid-free weekend a month ago, but that was away from home, mostly sequestered inside a cabin as a blizzard ravaged the North Carolina mountains, and everyone got sick.  We had to make several long drives before and after in short order, only to come home where everyone was sick, and frankly when a break is structured like that, it’s hardly a break at all.

But it just sucks.  I don’t like where I’m at right now, with how perpetually pissed off I am, with parenting.  My kids deserve better than angry dad all the time, and I wish parenting could just alleviate the pressure just a little bit off my throat to where it doesn’t feel like such an exasperating chore all the time, and more stuff I should be enjoying and relishing in spending time and watching my kids grow and develop.

Dad Brog (#146): What responsibility feels like

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Warning: I’m about to talk about masturbation.  I’m pretty sure that in the 24+ years that I’ve been brogging, I’ve never straight up talked about this before, because I’m demure like that, but let’s be grown-ups here, everyone dude fucking does it, and being honest with myself, nobody reads my shit in the first place, so it’s not like I genuinely have anything to be worried about writing about it.

But jerking off into a plastic medical sample cup in the back of a parking garage, because the instructions I was given was that there’s not a huge window of time after collection to get it to the clinic, and oh by the way, the doctor is only in at the location you need to drop off at on Monday and Wednesday between 1-3 pm, no pressure or anything.

Make no mistake, masturbation is masturbation, but this was definitely into the very definition of the term, collecting.  There was absolutely little pleasurable about it, and it was about as challenging as the speeder bike levels in Battletoads to get into the correct space for any collections to even occur, with a clock over your head, unfamiliar settings, the innate concern of any nosy passerbys catching you, and the fact that you have to release and catch into a little plastic cup.

Don’t get me wrong, the mission was still accomplished, but in this particular case, it definitely felt like a mission and not a euphemism, and accomplishing it was more accomplishing than it should’ve been.

And this is what responsibility feels like, as someone who had a vasectomy in order to do my part in protecting my wife and be an ally to bullshit reproductive oppression.  Three months post-op, is the test to make sure that the surgery kept, and that my swimmers are out of the pool and no longer in play.

I can say now, that I’m verified sterile at this point, which was something I was curious about, seeing as how laughably easy it was for me to have children, I thought even if there were the smallest percentile that a vasectomy wouldn’t take, it would be just my luck that I’d fall into it, and have to go back onto the table a second time.  But no, my results showed no swimmers in the sample, so it’s safe to say that the surgery took, and that the shop is officially closed.

Ironic, and sad, how the want to be responsible and considerate and not reckless leads to being a much bigger pain in the ass than if I were just some asshole content to just spooge all over the place and expect everyone else to have it be their problem.

But practice what I preach, and if I want the world to be a better place, got to try and set examples of doing the things that I believe can make that happen, fruitless battle it may seem, like all the time.

Dad Brog (#145): almost three years to the day

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I have this saying that it only snows once every five years in Georgia, but miraculously, we got snow today.  It wasn’t a huge amount, but enough to give a nice white blanket to the world around us, to where the girls could wake up, look out the window and be marveled by the sight of falling snow a bright white morning outside.

In preparation for the winter conditions, most of the state went into its typical overreaction of shutting everything down, but after the Snowpocalypse of 2013, I’m not going to complain about the state erring on the side of safety and precaution versus thinking it won’t be so bad and ending up being a national embarrassment all over again.  The government shut down, schools closed, dance class closed.  My waste management company straight up said they weren’t coming, with no makeup day planned.  Pest control company was scheduled to come, and they nope’d out, understandably.

But the best was my job, who graciously announced closure of the office on Friday in preparation for the wintery conditions.  The kicker?  Everyone works from home on Fridays anyway, so it’s basically the equivalent of allowing people to go to church on Sunday.

Regardless, with snow having arrived, it was my utmost priority to get outside and spend some time with the girls, since they basically will see snow only every five years for as long as we live in Georgia and the south.  So, channeling one of my all-time favorite Calvin & Hobbes strips, I didn’t wait to have to be coerced and swayed to play some hooky from work so I could play with my kids in the snow, I basically just checked in at 9, got myself dressed and ready for the cold, and was out the door and in the snow with the girls as soon as I could.

And let me say, how lucky we were to have gotten that real good type of snow, that’s perfect for snowballs, making snowmen and being all malleable and perfect.  Getting to build a snowman with my kids is a privilege I didn’t think about how lucky I am to get to do it, considering the lack of opportunities it’s more likely to be in coming years, and it brings me great joy just thinking about how I was able to do such.  And the fact that my house just happened to have an actual carrot and lumps of coal for traditional eyes and noses, how fortunate that all have lined up so well.

I decided to name our snowman “Jon Snow, king in the south;” the girls were not impressed, and balked immediately. 

So I said okay, we can call him Aegon. 

They didn’t like that either.

But my au pair did have a wonderful idea, which was to recreate a photograph from when #2 wasn’t even a year old, when the last time snow fell on Georgia.  And it was from this, did I realize that it’s almost been exactly three years since the last snowfall.  Otherwise, I will never say no when the opportunity to do a timelapse photo.

#2 usually isn’t a fan of smiling for cameras, but clearly the arrival of snow seemed to elicit such a genuine happy response that here we are.  Best snow day ever.

The year-end post, circa 2025

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s that time of the year in which I begin to look back on a year as a whole, and determine whether or not it was a “bad year” or just another year.  Not to sound too pessimistic and nihilistic than I already to and serve as just a reminder, but the idea and fantasy of “good years” seems a bit outlandish and not really within the realms of reality, at least when you look at the type of person I am and the state of the world currently.

So when I try and reflect on 2024 as a whole, I don’t have much good to say about it.  Frankly, with a few exceptions and caveats to coming unsurprisingly overarching blanket statement, 2024 was not a particularly great year.  Other than the obvious results of the presidential election and the inane bullshit that led up to it, there weren’t any epic catastrophes that I was really aware of, but the rest of the year just felt like a death by a thousand cuts kind of year, where there was just way more negative bullshit that nicked and jabbed all year long to lead to where I’m feeling beaten and exasperated with life and the state of existence now at the end of it, than had there been a lot less.

The thing is, above all else, I’ve been pondering on whether this was just a down year, or rather just symptoms of being in my 40s, where it seems like the difficulty of life jumped exponentially, from where it was in my 20s and 30s.  There’s not a day that goes by where I don’t think to myself, when did life become so difficult to where it feels like every single task in every single day begins to feel like pulling teeth?

I have this conversation occasionally with my sister and some of my similar-aged friends, but I’m curious to whether or not this is just a rough patch in all our lives collectively, or if this is something of a rite of passage for all people who hit their 40s, and things just start taking a turn for the worst more often than not.

Being in your 40s means everyone’s parents are now well into their twilight years, and in the landscapes of our lives, death’s presence grows and occupies a larger space than in our younger years.  I think about if every generation goes through this, which they most undoubtedly do, however, the generations of now and tomorrow live in a way more connected world where information is immediate and accessible, so the news, usually bad news, travels quicker, and it’s way easier now to be exposed and be aware of it all, more than it’s ever been in generations past.

Continue reading “The year-end post, circa 2025” →

Dad Brog (#144) – Watch what you say, lest the sponges absorb

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Among the numerous gifts that the girls had received over Christmas, was this little toy nail salon by Melissa & Doug™, propagating stereotypes of Asian business owners in America.  I’m not the type of dad that’s too manly and too masculine to play with whaterver my kids want to play, so I joined them at the kitchen table to demonstrate what I know about the nail salon business, not to mentioned the set does actually give a pretty detailed ordered list of what is perceived as the typical, getting nails done routine.

Naturally, I couldn’t just play with my kids without injecting a little bit of my customary humor into the scenario, so I would jokingly mention that during various parts of the getting nails done journey, this is where we (the one doing the nails) speak in a different language, not mentioning that the speaking being done, is talking shit about the customer right to their face, among their peers, because everyone knows all these Vietnamese and Korean yentas pull this shit and have been doing so since the dawn of the business model.

I nearly lost it when I switched roles with #1, and she was the one doing my nails, and how she would girl-splain to her little sister the order of tasks during getting nails done, and when she got to the part of primpting the cuticles and drying nails, she said “this is where we speak a different language now” and I actually did lose it, thinking back to the moment.

And then I sighed and had to remind myself that I really have to be careful of the things I say around my kids, because they are sponges and absorb everything they hear from their surroundings, and it really doesn’t take more than hearing something once or twice before they do so, and begin formulating how they can use it themselves.

For years, I’ve always referred to the second Christmas tree that we put in the upstairs landing of my home as “the jihad tree,” because it’s the tree where mythical wife has a jihad against any ornaments that aren’t Disney related for the bigger, fancier primary Christmas tree that resides downstairs, are allowed to be hung and displayed on, and I’ve made it my own personal tradition to deliberately amass the gaudiest and silliest and most unwanted ornaments from the discount bins from the year before to be hung on it.

Considering my kids go to school at a Jewish establishment, I figure it’s for the best that they don’t pick up on the terminology of jihads, and worse off explain it to their peers and teachers that we have a jihad tree at home, so it’s been referred to simply as “dada’s tree” instead.

Unfortunately, the worst was when my kids picked up on the slip up of profanity, and I remember hearing on the monitor during their quiet time, my oldest saying the word “fuck” and my eyes bugging out of my head at realizing what she had said.  Or when the kids picked up on “damn it” and blurted it out themselves.

There was a period of time when I, wouldn’t necessarily let it fly, but I would let it slide, banking on the then-notion that they were too young to pick up on it, or its context, but those days are long behind us.  Now it’s onto “oh poop” or other innocuous remarks, where I still don’t really want them to pick up on the context of them, but at least they’re not going to get us as parents a stern nasty eyeballing if they were to repeat them out in public.

Either way, it’s a good thing that they can’t read, much less know that dada has a brog that’s been up and running for 23+ years.  I can’t imagine the day they eventually realize and learn about it, and if they care to read about the journey of my life through my brog, realizing that their dad sure wrote a ton of shit and profanity, even if he tried his best to suppress it in speech while they were growing up.  But one of these days, that bridge will be built and eventually crossed, but I’ll deal with it when that time arrives; probably with a brog post.

I hate to admit it, but I support this

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Yahoo – orange guy vows to end daylight savings time, citing it as ‘inconvenient‘ and ‘very costly’

I don’t hide the fact that I’m not a fan of the orange guy, or really any politics for that matter, but especially since I had children, I’ve always bemoaned how much I loathe daylight savings, and would tongue-in-cheek say that I would support anyone who worked in favor of eliminating it.

All because some farmers in like 1069AD felt it was too dangerous to be out doing their shit in the pitch darkness of an early morning, the whole world had to deal with this bullshit concept.  Don’t get me wrong, farmers and agriculture are undoubtedly important to the functionality of civilization, but I feel like there have been enough studies done throughout modern times that have debunked the real need for it in the grand spectrum of things.

Clearly, those who are not in agreement of the lack of necessity of daylight savings are not parents, or apparently, rich white 1%-ers whom seem to be the ones trying to justify the elimination of it in, citing it as a hinderance to earning potential. 

I don’t get to capitalize on the bonus hour, because I have young children who don’t know what daylight savings is, and neither do their circadian rhythms are, so it usually ends up as a morning where they naturally wake up at 6:45 am because their bodies think it’s 7:45 am, with the difference is that my phone has adjusted for the hour change, and I’m getting up at the same time they are, with the difference is that breakfast is not ready, I haven’t had coffee or a bathroom break, dog hasn’t eaten or gone out, and it’s just a colossal shitshow that takes days of adjustment.

And then the spring forward, not only am I exhausted from losing an hour, the kids are tired and groggy from losing theirs, and everyone has a miserable day, capped off with the fact that there’s school and work the following day and it’s no longer the life where I can just sleep in on every single weekend day of my life like I used to prior to having children.

Screw the farmers, and parents who are afraid of their kids having to stand at bus stops in the darkness, need to work with their communities and neighborhoods to improve infrastructure, or have better thought out locations for bus stops and use their heads and common sense to get out of the way of moving vehicles.

All I’ve always said is that I don’t care if we stay in daylight savings or spring forward, I honestly don’t know the official designation between the two, I just want to outright eliminate the shifting of an hours twice a year bullshit, and never have to deal with it again. And if it makes me an asshole to stand on the side with those arrogant rich white fuckheads, so be it, because I fucking hate daylight savings and want it gone as much as they do.