{"id":46859,"date":"2020-03-21T23:05:13","date_gmt":"2020-03-22T03:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=46859"},"modified":"2020-08-12T23:05:23","modified_gmt":"2020-08-13T03:05:23","slug":"new-father-brogging-003","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=46859","title":{"rendered":"New Father Brogging, #003"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mythical wife and I are currently staying overnight at the NICU right now.\u00a0 No, nothing is wrong with mythical baby, this is just a mandatory pre-requisite that parents of NICU babies are required to do at this hospital before babies are allowed to go home.\u00a0 So ultimately, this is very much a good thing, and one of the last bullet points we have to check off before our baby is actually going to be coming home.<\/span><\/p>\n

When my daughter was first admitted into the NICU, one of the more frustrating things was that we couldn\u2019t get anything remotely close to a concrete timeline of how long to expect her to be here; after all, every single baby is different, and I can\u2019t blame anyone for not wanting to give false hopes or expectations to anxious parents, but it didn\u2019t change the fact that we had no real ideas of how long she was going to be in the NICU, instead of at home, giving mythical wife and I a semblance of actually beginning to feel like real parents.<\/span><\/p>\n

At one point, we were told 10-14 days for a baby as premature as ours was, and then another doctor came along and said that she might possibly be here as long as she was early, which for us was a little over five weeks.\u00a0 During one of the daily visits, one nurse predicted \u201cmaybe one to three more weeks,\u201d leaving me feeling drained and dejected.<\/span><\/p>\n

But it doesn\u2019t matter anymore, because after 16 days, our baby is on the cusp of heading home, with our household becoming complete, and my family all existing under the same roof.\u00a0 At this point, it\u2019s almost feeling like a dream is coming true, because the sense of time during these last few weeks was definitely distorted, and especially with the way the world has become so warped and weird due to the whole coronavirus thing going on, literally changing the way America is running currently.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It\u2019s past 1:00AM at the time I\u2019m writing this, and although I am a little tired, I can\u2019t help but feel this compulsion to be staying awake so I can write all of this, not to mention I\u2019m paranoid as hell with the fact that the safety net of having nurse supervision has taken a step back, and that we\u2019re a day away from having none of them at all, once we\u2019re home with our baby.<\/span><\/p>\n

Every single noise and stir that my daughter makes has my head quickly looking over her to make sure that everything is okay.\u00a0 I know there are weeks and months of sleepless nights awaiting me, so it seems silly that I\u2019m voluntarily forfeiting sleep now, just so I can sit here and write in near darkness, but I\u2019m already becoming a parent in the sense that I want to make sure that my kid is safe, even if it means losing some sleep over it.<\/span><\/p>\n

I think what\u2019s really driving me to stay up and watch my kid is that when the day is over, I want to put in some sort of writing that my one of my only real genuine wants in this world is that I just simply want to be a good dad to my kid and a husband to my wife.\u00a0 Not a tremendous amount of other things really hold much candles to these wants, and it\u2019s not to say I don\u2019t have superficial crap I want or ambitions for myself, but I think if I can accomplish being a good dad and a husband on a regular basis, then everything else should theoretically take care of themselves.<\/span><\/p>\n

Like really, few other things really matter as much to me these days than the family that I\u2019ve built.\u00a0 All through mythical wife\u2019s pregnancy, I didn\u2019t really want much more than to be supportive and not be one of those deadbeat men who can\u2019t take care of the person taking care of their future child.\u00a0 And now that our child is here, I know my life is more or less forever changed in the sense that I am literally responsible for another living human life, and that truly few things can really be about just me anymore.\u00a0 I\u2019m okay with that, and up to the challenge of raising another human being, and I can only hope that my daughter can grow into a well-adjusted, intelligent person whom I hope has a strong work ethic, empathy and a lot of overall positive characteristics.<\/span><\/p>\n

Needless to say it goes without saying that I am 100% all-in on being a dad, and there\u2019s already pretty much nothing I won\u2019t do for my kid.\u00a0 Our house is pretty well-prepped for the arrival of our daughter, the nursery is set up, furniture assembled, bassinets and playpens in place.\u00a0 I put a baby on board sign on my car\u2019s rear window, despite the fact that it refuses to stay up.\u00a0 I changed my imagery on Facebook to reflect that I am in fact, a dad with a child now, and I\u2019m proud to be a dad to a daughter.<\/span><\/p>\n

I always envisioned that I would have a girl, and it\u2019s almost like fate or that mythical wife and I willed it into existence.\u00a0 It\u2019s not that I have any objections to having a son, but I guess that the vast majority of my life I was surrounded by women in my heavily-female family, I didn\u2019t really expect it to be that much more different in my adult life with the family that I cultivate myself.<\/span><\/p>\n

Already, I love having a daughter, and I already have anxieties of the inevitable passage of time and how she\u2019s eventually going to be walking, then driving, then becoming a grown-ass woman who wants to leave the nest, and then I\u2019m going to have to accept the fact that she\u2019ll have men, or women in her life, that will someday potentially be her spouse.<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps that\u2019s why I\u2019m not sleeping just yet, because even now, I can soak in the visuals and the memories of my little girl being just that, a little girl, a warm tiny baby and my first child that I\u2019ll always cherish these moments for as long as I live.\u00a0 Nothing else really matters, at least in the sense of all the other bullshit I typically brog about; no local hypocrisy, the political scene that tends to engulf all other conversation, perceived racism; not even all the sport leagues that have folded for the year, or even professional wrestling which has embarked on this art nouveau journey of performing in empty venues, as not to facilitate the spreading of coronavirus, which is basically the story of 2020 to everyone except for my wife and I, because we\u2019re always going to remember it as the year that our baby girl was born; in the middle of a global pandemic.<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019ll be one hell of a story for our kid to have to come to terms with when she\u2019s older and understands the gravity of the circumstances in which she was born.\u00a0 But until then, my only real true goal is to raise her as best as I can, and be as involved and a part of her life as possible.<\/span><\/p>\n

I just want to be a good dad.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mythical wife and I are currently staying overnight at the NICU right now.\u00a0 No, nothing is wrong with mythical baby, this is just a mandatory pre-requisite that parents of NICU babies are required to do at this hospital before babies are allowed to go home.\u00a0 So ultimately, this is very much a good thing, and … Continue reading New Father Brogging, #003<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[193,192,83],"class_list":["post-46859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-dad","tag-kids","tag-observations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46859"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46860,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46859\/revisions\/46860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}