Tag: famiry

This is why I always have worry when I skip town

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the weekend, mythical wife and I went out of town.  It was a pleasant trip, in spite of the fact that one reason for going was a memorial, but it was still nice to see a close friend despite the circumstances.  The other was in part to a family member’s milestone birthday, and we had a nice little lunch to commemorate.  I spent a tremendous amount of time behind the wheels of cars, and in no help from the insufferably miserable traffic conditions of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and with each visit I make there, I grow more and more resentful of the whole goddamn place and look forward to leaving.

Anyway, we get back to Atlanta after taking the early flight out which meant we’ve been up since 4:30am, and I come to discover that while we were out of town, my microwave stopped working, my Keurig went kaput, and #1 has a death rattle of a cough going on.  I don’t blame anyone for any of these maladies occurring, but it just stinks when negative things occur not on my own watch, and it feeds the general anxiety I have about leaving my home, even though I desperately need breaks and time off.

It’s not that I could’ve done anything differently to prevent shit from breaking, and everyone in care of my home did more than they really had to in order to circumvent busted appliances, but all the same I went the rest of my Sunday back home in this hazy anxious state that feels regret for skipping town, regardless of the fact that I wouldn’t have been able to prevent anything differently.

My awesome mother-in-law already gifted us a new Keurig, which she obviously was under no obligation to do, but the busted microwave sucks, because I feel like I know what the problem is (magnetron) and the part itself is not expensive, but from what I’m researching, the general consensus is to get a repairman on the job, which seemed most likely the case to begin with because I have a built-in unit, and the magnetron is almost impossible for someone who doesn’t know what they’re looking for to access.

After just a few hours back home, and hearing my daughter coughing up a lung, I took her to urgent care in order to get some medications started.  Not that I hold any resentment over it, but such eats into the small reprieve from parenting I get in the day, which means I got no real break at all, despite my fatigue from getting up at ass o’clock.

And to top it off, the sink was full of crap, the dishwasher was never emptied, and I’m just already fried and frustrated with the constant feeling that I have to do fucking everything, and by virtue of not being present at home where I can usually stay on top of the bullshit minutiae and chores, I suffer the pain in the ass of having to do it all at once in order to feel caught up to things.

It’s like, I have a birthday coming up, and I am planning a little bit of solo travel during it, but all I really want, other than for everyone to be safe and my kids to be well taken care of it and remain healthy, is to not come home to a fucking disaster zone, like it seems to feel like every time I leave the house for any indeterminate amount of time.

There’s already a minimum tolerable state that my house fails to meet on a regular basis because I just get burnt out and throw in the towel at being the only person to give a fuck about the general cleanliness of my home, and it always goes to shit every time I leave the house, and nobody but me seems remotely concerned about it, and despite the fact that I’m deserving and entitled to getting breaks too, sometimes it doesn’t seem worth it if a shitshow is waiting for me when I get back, because then any sort of relaxation and good will built up from a break is immediately dunked on by having to resentfully fix everything that went to pot in my absence.

And this is why I sometimes feel like I should just never leave home, and it’s really a fucking shitty feeling to feel.

Thanksgiving musings and perspectives

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For the Thanksgiving holiday this year, my house trekked north back up to Virginia to spend some time with my side of the family.  Such was always something I was pretty ambivalent about in the past, but ever since I had kids, I do feel that there is some importance in having them have connection with my side of the family, not to mention try to build relationships with the litany of cousins they have, as I did growing up.

Overall, it was a very good trip, and I’m happy to have spent a good bit of time with my sister, cousins and parents, but most of all, I was happiest that my kids got to spend time with their cousins and my family members and be able to build relationships and connections with family that they don’t get to see too often.  My happiest memories looking back on the trip were seeing my kids playing exuberantly with their cousins, and I’m thankful for my niece, nephew and the kids of my cousins all being so good to my children, and I’m optimistic that they can have a similar upbringing to my own, where the cousins all were pretty tightly knit growing up.

However, an introduction like this doesn’t happen if there weren’t some things that weren’t positive, and unfortunately for this holiday there were some bad things that definitely put a damper on things.

Firstly, to cut to the chase, I hit a deer while driving, and my car suffered a nasty crack on the bumper as well as the headlight assembly.  I was driving along a road that I’d driven thousands of times in my life while living there, and I’d never seen deer on this stretch of road before.  I was probably going no faster than 25-28 mph while accelerating when the deer popped out of a grassy median and it was so bang-bang fast that I was a good 200 feet past and continuing before it really registered what had happened.

The thing is, while on the drive up, I distinctly remembered having a thought about just how many dead deer I had seen on the shoulders all over I-85 in southern Virginia, and how I really should keep my guard up while driving at night on this trip.  But as I said, this was a stretch of road that was long developed, not very close to any real wooded areas where deer might like to reside in, and where I’d never seen deer before in my life.  So my guard was definitely not up at this moment in time, and it just figures that would be when my premonition came to fruition, and I plastered the poor animal.

I replayed the moment in my head countless times at this point and the thing is, I’m not mad at the deer or the species as a whole, like I might’ve been in the past for putting me in this situation.  Northern Virginia is an endlessly developing area, and it’s a no brainer that the constant sprawl and development in Fairfax county and surrounding areas are displacing the wildlife all over, and next thing I know I’m hitting deer in a place where I’d never seen deer before in my life.

What I am thankful for is the fact that nobody in my car was hurt, and to my knowledge nobody behind me appeared to be hurt, as I was the first car in the line of cars turning onto the road, and it looked like there were plenty of braking going on behind me.  My kids were little zombies watching the iPad, so they didn’t notice anything but the sound of impact and the bump of me running it over, and didn’t seem to care because they were too busy watching Little Einsteins.  This wasn’t a conversation that I would’ve wanted to have had, so I take it as a win, on all accounts.

Additionally, despite looking pretty nasty when I originally did stop, when I got to my cousin’s place, we were able to pop the initial dent back out, which was a big victory, as it was pushing the wheel liner into contact with the tire, and there was initial talk about cutting it off in order to remain drivable.  A little duct tape and a few zip ties, and my car was safe enough to have made the return trip to Georgia, to where its repair is now on the table in coming weeks.

Here’s the thing though-as much as something like this probably would have tanked the entire trip for me in the past, I realized that there were so many other victories to be had given the circumstances, that the main L taken that will cost actual money and likely aggravation of playing car Tetris or a rental didn’t seem so bad.  Plus, when I got back to my cousin’s place, dinner was ready, two beers, a fire pit, reminiscing with my cousins while hearing the sound of my kids having a blast with their cousins really rescued the night and I like to think that this was all one of those, you know you’re maturing, kind of scenarios.

Also, waking up to the worst news possible of hearing of a passing of a loved one to my brother’s family really does knock everything else into a genuinely thankful perspective, on Thanksgiving.  Pretty much nothing can top that as far as bad news is concerned, but again, trying to find the silver lining in bad situations, given the circumstances of the departed’s final days, there’s probably a modicum of relief in knowing that they’re no longer in any pain or having to fight the good fight any longer.

As sad and heartbroken I felt for my brother’s family, it really did help put everything else into perspective about the things that myself and everyone else could genuinely be thankful for.  My kids were safe and unaware of the deer situation, most everyone in my family was in good health.  I got to spend some time with my parents with my kids, and I’m glad that my kids have interactions and memories with them, because I can count on one hand how many times I’ve seen a grandfather in my life.

Even the whole car debacle afforded me a bonus good memory, because when I took the car on a shakedown ride to make sure it was safe at highway speeds and cornering, I took the opportunity while I was alone to pop by a close friend’s house to say hi and wish them a happy Thanksgiving.

The drive back was long, and doing Richmond to Atlanta was the longest stretch that my kids had ever had to endure in the car, but equipped with a lot of snacks and an iPad full of downloaded shows, they did great.  My only gripe is the feeling of being a glorified Uber driver, since I have to focus on driving, and none of my adult passengers can get their heads off of their phones to actually converse or be remotely the types of passengers to help a ride not feel so long.

But as a whole, I still look back at Thanksgiving positively.  My kids had a great time with my family, and I was happy to catch up with everyone who came to dinner, and I can only hope that future family gatherings in the future will be as good as this one was, but hopefully with no more deer incidents.

Dad Brog (#140): Disney Trip 2024

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Being both passholders as well as Disney Vacation Club, it goes without saying that my family spends a good bit of time going to Disney World.  Personally, I’m pretty long past over most anything in regards to The Mouse, but my wife and kids still enjoy it a lot, and there’s not much I won’t do for them, especially when I have little idea what to do with my vacation time in the first place.

However, the big story of this last extended Disney trip was Hurricane Helene, which I didn’t even know was bubbling up in the Gulf of Mexico until two days into the trip, when suddenly everyone in person and on social media are talking about this megastorm that’s forming, and how it’s not only going to wreak havoc on Florida where we were, but appeared to have Atlanta firmly in its crosshairs, leading me to feel all sorts of anxiety about shit happening to my home while I wasn’t there.

Fortunately for us, the storm conditions didn’t really come into play until the last day of our trip, to which at that point we were pretty bushed and fairly content to spend more time at the resort than more time at the parks, and it didn’t really affect our trip.

In fact, other than watching some serious winds from the safety and comfort of our resort, not only did we avoid the storm in Florida, much to my relief, Helene kind of banked hard east, which we all know by now, really fucked the western parts of Appalachian North Carolina, but as far as Atlanta was concerned, really managed to avert disaster.

It was interesting driving back, because as we traversed from Orlando back to Georgia, there was plenty of evidence of the carnage that Helene brough, even as far central as I was coming from, with trees down all over the shoulders and sides of the road, and pretty much every billboard in the state was stripped and barren.  Piles of sawdust on the shoulders indicated where trees actually affected the highways themselves, and this was the case all the way up into Georgia, and right before getting to Macon, it all kind of stopped, and this was presumably where the storm banked hard east, and miraculously swerved past Atlanta.

Insert ironic joke about how not even category-4 storms don’t want to visit Atlanta.

As for the rest of the trip, I wouldn’t exactly call it a vacation; I knew this was most likely going to be the circumstances going into it.  It was a trip, and there was a tremendous amount of work involved, wrangling the little monsters of mine, who are bursting with excitement and curiosity and the want to run around and explore the vast World of Disney, and as is often times the case, the lion’s share of labor falls to me to do, and I don’t really get to have the same sense of vacation, relaxation, recuperation and entertainment as everyone else does.

There were really only two things that I wanted to do that would have been self-serving and when the trip was done, I didn’t get to do either of them.  Between kid wrangling, the time it takes to do absolutely anything at all, and the weather coming into play, there simply wasn’t any space for anything for me to happen, and the fact of the matter is that as much as I love my kids, if there’s any chance at all for me to not go completely sour on Disney World and the Disney brand, there have got to be some kid-free trips lined up in my future where I can actually relax, unwind and not be a dad for a fucking minute.

I kind of knew what had happened was going to happen, and that it really wasn’t going to be that much of a vacation for me personally.  But my kids and their safety always come first, and trying to keep them in a modicum of line is also high priority, and it’s often times frustrating when trying to stick to good habits while on the road is challenging, and even more so when I don’t really have anyone but myself to rely upon to handle the load of keeping an eye on my kids.

But the girls seemed to have a good time in spite of the weather and some of the challenges experienced while there.  They got to ride a lot of rides, eat a lot of junk food, spend some time with me at the pool, see a lot of characters, eat more snacks, and watch a whole lot of television at the resort and while in the car, so as long as they’re happy, I can take victory from that.

I just wish that I didn’t have to feel like I have to be the one who constantly has to sacrifice everything, because I already feel like I’ve sacrificed just about everything that makes me, me, and there’s really nothing left for me to sacrifice left, except for whatever it is that prevents me from being a complete husk of a living organism.

Dad Brog (#139): the days are getting longer

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I realized that it’s been a while since I did a dad brog, and in spite of my insistence that they weren’t intended to be solely sounding boards for the gripes and complaints I have about the challenges of parenting, there’s no denying the fact that the vast majority of the 138 editions of Dad Brog before this one probably were.  Parenting is hard, yo, and anyone who says that it isn’t is either not as hands-on or present of a parent as I am or they’re rich and/or lazy and have others doing the parenting for them.

That being said, let this be a dad brog that isn’t going to be just one gigantic bitch-fest as much as it’s just catching up on the life of being the parent that I am, because as I’ve stated before, this series of posts doesn’t have to be nothing but complaints and gripes, because as hard as parenting is, there’s plenty to love about it as well.

There are lots of times in my life where I sometimes and just watch my kids being kids, and there’s still a sense of disbelief that one, I have kids, and two that I somehow ended up with two girls.  Some might find it hard to believe considering they’re four and three and therefore I’ve been doing this for a while now, but I don’t know, I’m not going to imagine that I’m the only parent out there that feels this when they look at their kids, no matter how old they are, and it’s during these little moments where I sometimes just smirk and chuckle at the combined absurdity and satisfaction that the existence of my own children bring to my life.

Both kids are in school five days a week now, as opposed to the three-day part-time school schedule they had the year before, mostly on account of the school no longer giving us the option for three-day anymore, so my wallet is definitely feeling the pinch and will continue to feel it for another year, before it gradually starts getting better when #1 begins elementary school and #2 the year afterward.

All the same though, as much as I bemoan the financial burden of private schooling, I feel that the results speak for themselves; my kids are both sharp and intelligent and bright, and I’m often awestruck at some of the things they say or demonstrate that makes me go wtf, at how much they’re developing.  #2 has demonstrated a really great memory, and she has routinely been whooping my ass at the variety of memory card games we play, at her ability to recall the positionings of matching cards.

Just the other day, I was being lazy and was dicking around on my phone a little bit while around my kids; #1 rushed off to the bathroom because she’s fully potty trained now and more often opting to use the actual bathroom instead of the children’s potty we have in the kitchen, while #2 is still working things out.  I started to get up to go help, and she immediately shut me down and told me, “keep looking at your phone, I’ll be okay,” and I was just left there with this flabbergasted look and feeling on my face, where I couldn’t be mad at basically getting shut down by a four-year old, but also low-key called out for being on my phone.

Needless to say, I put the phone away after that.

Staving off boredom is basically the name of the game for me as a parent now, and we’re at the stage where the kids don’t really want to play with toys or read books as much as they want to do physical activities like run around, play tag, hide-and-seek and just burn energy.  It’s frustrating when it’s nuclear summer outside still, and I have to be very mindful of letting my kids play outdoors at the peak parts of the sun and heat, and I’m very much looking forward to the full changing of seasons, to where I might be able to let them go outside and play more, so we can all get a win in that regard.

And inevitable as it is, the kids’ bedtime has begun stretching longer, which means that my window of non-dad downtime has been getting smaller, much to my dissatisfaction.  Whereas we used to have the kids up in the bath by 6:30, in bed by 7:00pm, we’ve been adding 30-40 minutes to the routine now, and by the time the kids are down in bed, it’s nearly 8:00pm if not past it a few minutes now.

Obviously, this was always going to inevitably happen, but it just means that my window of time in which I reset the house, tidy up, clean dishes, pack lunches and anything else, before I can really sit down and relax, is basically becoming non-existent.  I’m lucky to free by 9pm, and if I have any ambitious preparation for the following day, then 10pm more likely.

But it’s really not the end of the world, because I realize these days, I’m so stripped down of everything that used to make me, me, that when I have free time, I don’t know what to do with in the first place anymore.  And with so little time to do anything even if I could, I just don’t; as fatalistic and depressing as it might sound, I’ve gotten to the point where it’s just kind of acceptance and I’m not really mad or depressed about it, it’s just something that I hope that when one day when I inevitably do have more time, I might be able to reclaim some of the things that I’ve had to put on back burners or in storage while I focus on being a dad first and foremost.

My kids are always priority #1, and everything else is a distant second.  The best part is that with their increasing potty control, I’m growing more trust to take them out with me, even if it’s both kids and I, because they’re really not going to learn how to exist in the world if they don’t go out into it, and two-fold, it helps stave off the perils of evil boredom when I can have things planned for them to do with me.

Either way, as I had hoped, in some respects parenting will never be easy, but in many other respects, it really has gotten easier, as my kids have aged.  When I no longer have to worry about any pooping accidents or malicious wetting incidents, I will have even more trust at bringing my kids out more often to see the world around them, and even more will be easier when I don’t have to always be mindful of where the closest bathrooms always are.

I wonder what it says that I relate so well to mommy bloggers

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In the connected world we live in full of prying digital eyes and ears that seem to exist solely to collate information for algorithms and targeted content, I was fed this blog article from some mommy blogger, talking about how lonely it felt being everyone’s B-list friend.

It was a headline that I immediately knew what it was going to be about before I even started to read it, but like a masochist I clicked on it out of curiosity to see how someone else felt about this fairly accurately named affliction.

And unsurprisingly, I feel as if this entire article could have been written by me, except with a little more feminine eloquence and emotional neediness.  But I definitely felt this article so very hard, and the examples of where they were resultantly made to feel B-list resonate so much with me, especially since becoming a parent, and transitioning into the inevitable zone of I have kids and lots of my friends don’t, and the gradual position of not only being excluded by everyone, but also no longer even considered for invitation.

I’m seldom mad or upset about it, that just seems to be the way life is for people who age and people who have children, but one thing I’ve always said is that there is tremendous power and consideration in the act of the ask alone, and although I know and most everyone knows that asking me do something is nine times out of ten going to result in a no I can’t, I always appreciate the ask, because it makes me feel like people still think and consider me.

Honestly though, even before kids, I felt this way a lot of the time, mostly because I was the sad-sack single guy for eternity, and I get that nobody always wanted an odd-numbered wheel on their activities.  Things improved a little bit once mythical girlfriend-now-wife came into the picture, but now that we have children and have stepped onto a less-adjacent plane of existence as most everyone around us, going back onto the B-list feels more prevalent than ever.

But going back to the article, it clearly hit home hard enough to pop the synapses in my brain to want to write about it, because it was that thought-provoking.  I don’t think it hurts me as much as it hurts the author of this post, but I see, I acknowledge and I can relate to so much of this.

Frankly if I’m being honest here, the only people in my life that I don’t feel like put me on the B-list are my children.  As much as I bemoan the workload sometimes, feel like I’m overwhelmed and tired of being a parent at times, when the day is over, my girls are the only ones who don’t make me feel like I’m B-list ever.  When they have bad dreams and wake up at night, they call for me.  When it’s the morning and they know it’s time to get up and have breakfast, they know it’s me.  When they’re distressed and need a hug and snuggle, they come to me.

This isn’t to say I resent everyone else for making me feel like I’m B-list.  Everyone else just has their own shit going on their lives, and it’s easy to take a self-sufficient machine like me for granted.  I feel like everyone else already does a lot of the time, and I don’t always feel comfortable expressing such opinions too often, so it’s just the norm.

I agree with the author that it’s not good to measuring self-worth by the effort others put into our relationships, but at the same time, it’s also kind of impossible to ignore the scales of relationships and when those around us are putting us into the B-list.  It’s always easy to say one thing, but doing them is a whole different matter, and in this particular case, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to struggle with chessboard of where we’re positioned, because frankly I think it’s human nature that everyone does, and those who don’t are either blind or lying.

All the same though, going back to the title of this post, I wonder what it says about me, that such thought-provoking mommy content is what is fed to me, and resonates with me so much.

Dad Brog (#135): Frustrating realities of my life sometimes

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Prior to going on vacation, I saw a deal for some HexClad cookware while I was at Costco.  As the person who does the vast majority of the cooking in my household, HC stuff has been interesting to me, and I admit that there’s a bit of bait that I bit as far as its immense target marketing that they tend to do, but all the same, I am interested in the product, but the ridiculous price points on their products always kept me away.

But Costco was selling something like a seven-piece set, which would have allowed me to replace my existing pan set, as well as give me a wok, something that I’ve felt might make some of my cooking life easy at times, and it was for a fairly reasonable $379 or around that.  I found the price to be appealing, but seeing as how I was about to go on a vacation with the family, I felt that I should hold off and see how much damage we would do before dropping $400 bones on something that I didn’t technically need.

After the trip, sure, we did some damage and naturally spent more than I would have hoped to have spent, but I still wanted the pans.  If they worked as advertised, I felt that there was a lot of potential to be had, and might make me more enthusiastic about cooking in the future.  I knew that the promotion was going to go until 6/23, so I figured I had a little bit of time to pull the trigger, and the reality is that the biggest challenge about ending a vacation for kids, is the adaptation back to the daily routine, which proved to be a little challenging, seeing as how the kids spent five straight nights in five different beds, watched a ton of television on the iPad on the long car hauls, and were a little bit rowdy once they were expected to fall back to the normal daily routine.

I finally was able to get to Costco, on June 23rd, and lo and behold, the HexClad endcap was gone without a trace, and it turns out that when they said until 6/23, it really meant that 6/22 was the final day in which the deal was live.

I had missed out on something that I had wanted, because I’d put something for me at the back of the line in order to be a parent first, and a member of the team, and prioritize vacation expenses over something for myself.

Another thing that has held my interest for a while now, in light of me always looking for ways to optimize my physical status, is a MaxiClimber cardio machine.  Yes, like the HexClad pans, they do seem a little bit gimmicky, but I like the science behind it.  I’m not swayed by LeBron James, Lady Gaga or any Kardashians that back it, but the science behind the machine is interesting, and it’s definitely I’d love to try before committing to it, but I don’t know of any gyms that have these not to mention I barely like working out among people at my tiny work gym much less seeking one of these out.

I got some targeted ad about how they’re on overstock from the company themselves, and that they’re selling for $149.  I’ve definitely dropped $149+ on things less productive than a piece of exercise equipment, and frankly $149 is probably cheaper than some of the family meals I had to cover while on vacation.  Needless to say, I was very interested in pulling the trigger, but then there was one question that stood in the way: where would I put this thing?

The sunroom, where my treadmill is, is too full of all of my wife’s things to be able to support another piece of equipement, despite it being the most logical place for it to go.  There’s no room in the family room because it’s been completely taken over by the kids’ toys, books and other belongings.  The dining room we don’t use is also overflowing with tons of shit that I wish we could make disappear, and the only place where something like a MaxiClimber could possibly finagle its way into is the garage, except for the fact that it’s the middle of a Georgia summer and every single day is 95F+.

So that means no-go on the MaxiClimber too, because there’s simply no space in my house to support it.

And this is where a lot of my general daily frustrations lie, in the fact that I have basically sacrificed everything, to the point where I can’t seemingly ever get anything for myself, regardless of if it’s attainable or not.

There’s no space in my own fucking house for anything I’d want, I’ve given up my office so that we can have our live-in au pair, but it comes at the expense of having nowhere in my own home for me to shut a door and be completely alone, and all of my personal belongings that bring me happiness are all stored in boxes and crates in the garage or a closet.

I barely have my own car, since it’s the most optimal for child taxi-ing, and much like my house, I’m paying a monthly note on something where I’m apparently the lowest user, and am typically using the third car of the household which is fine in its own right, but it’s still not my car.

And of course, there’s never any time for me to capitalize on things for myself, and I find myself in a position where I always feel like I’m being taken for granted by everyone in my life, and that I’m always last in line.

“But practice self-care,” faceless people on the internet love to preach; let me say something about that, self-care is entitlement, self-care is privilege – self-care if bullshit. People recommending to others to practice self-care probably don’t have young kids, or they simply have more support than I do.

The amount of randomly targeted algorithm content that is spoon fed to me that seem to be made from random burnt-out moms on the internet that I see, I find myself being able to relate to a staggering amount of them.  A lot of frustrations will organically quell as my kids get older, and I don’t have to always worry about them running off, and I’ll feel like I’ll have more freedom to do things with them outside the house, but that involves waiting, and like some random stranger said on the internet, if you’re always waiting for some condition, you’ll just find more future conditions waiting for you when you check off current ones.

I’d like to live more of life now in the present, but as the way things are, such a simple sounding want doesn’t come very easy.  So I guess all I can continue to do is just dream and fantasize of being rich to where I could live out hypothetical realities where I could have things such as time and space for myself every now and then, because those things don’t really exist in my reality, as sad as it sounds.

Year four of forever

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

And just like that, #1 is four years old.

Throughout my own parenting journey, one of the most heard things I’ve been told is to not blink or take any time for granted, because it’ll all be over in the blink of an eye and the kids will be grown and be pains in my ass before I know it, and I’ll wonder where the time went when they were still in diapers and couldn’t do anything for themselves.

Honestly, I think I’ve done a pretty good job of not taking my time for granted, and I’m so often reflecting on the past and I think in this age where everyone has phones and cameras on their phones and it’s fairly possible to chronicle our lives through photographs, that it makes it easier to have a visual reference to reflect with as we can simply just open up our photos app and scroll through time.  That, and the fact that I’ve also been a prodigious brogger for more than half my life at this point, and I’ve always got the means to not only look back in time and reflect, but to also read my very own words to recall specifically where I was throughout the journey of life.

I’ll often times just stop and watch my kids doing the things they do, and marvel at the state they’re in now, as opposed to when they were babies or infants or toddlers, because it’s just incredible watching someone else’s journey through life, through the eyes of a spectator, and of course being their father, I’ve literally seen just about every single day of their lives.

I think it’s safe to say that I’m the first face they see in the morning, about 99% of their lives, I make the vast majority of their meals, and I put a tremendous amount of physical and time effort into my kids regularly.  There are times in which it feels like a lot of work, but I don’t regret any bit of it, and I take a tremendous amount of pride in trying to be the best dad I possibly can be.  There’s nothing I won’t do for my children, and the only thing I really care about at all is being a good dad.

But #1 being four years old, that’s still mind-blowing to process, even though I know the day is coming.  It’s just so hard to fathom that it’s literally been four years since she came into existence five weeks early, right at the on-set of COVID and the (majority) of the entire (intelligent) world shutting themselves into isolation.  Being born so early, she was whisked away into the NICU and stayed there for two weeks, while mythical wife and I had no idea what was really going on with her health, the world, coronavirus and everything else because so much was going on concurrently right then.

Looking at her now, it’s hard to believe she was ever considered an at-risk baby that had to be connected to a heart monitor for the first four months of her life, because within six months, we stopped referring to her as “adjusted age” and never looked back.  She’s a strong, healthy four-year-old that’s ridiculously smart, thoughtful, and brings joy to my life on a daily basis.

She’s fully potty-trained, never has any accidents, knows all her numbers and letters, has demonstrated some rudimentary reading ability, and I have a feeling math will come fairly natural to her, as she’s apparently understanding the processes of basic arithmetic, even if she doesn’t know what the words addition or subtraction mean yet.

She remembers damn near everything, and is so quick to remind me of when she thinks I’ve screwed something up, and seems to be able to recall things from the past now, which shows her budding brain being able to store and recollect memories, and even going to sleep, she always remembers to remind me of what she wanted for breakfast the night before.

Not a day goes by where she and/or her sister isn’t the brightest light of my entire day, whether it’s by making me laugh, something sweet they do or say, or just the happy peace I feel when I watch them doing kid things.  So I’m happy to do whatever it takes to bring happiness to their lives… like taking a cake decorating class, so that I could make my child a triple-layered chocolate cake with buttercream and a dark chocolate drip ganache.  But even if it’s basically pure trash food, it’s also a symbol of growth for my child in that her original severe intolerance to eggs has dissipated over time, and she can at least handle having it in baked goods or cooked into things.

Still not going to give her a straight up omelet or scrambled eggs, but considering I still can’t eat those things without considerable punishment, who knows if she’ll ever fully grow out of it, or be as limited as I am.  Only time will tell, and hopefully there will be many more decades of years to bear witness to what happens next.