I think as more men stay home with their children, the more we come to respect the stay at home mothers of the past, present and future.  This is definitely a challenging job; I have not heard one stay at home father say differently.  We all pretty much agree that this gig is tougher than our previous day jobs.  Not so much skill-wise or physically, but just for the constant, never ending nature of the job.  It is relentless.  You don’t get those unofficial five minute web surfing breaks at your desk, or really any scheduled breaks for that matter.  I catch my breath when the little monster goes down for a nap, but I never know exactly when that will be or for how long it will last, so I have to hustle if I want to shower, or make some lunch, or read the paper, or even, god forbid, write a couple of paragraphs. 

A friend told me that he dubbed this blog the blogsectomy because he claims that after reading it men will be incapable of producing children, or at least unwilling to. He thinks it should be mandatory reading for sexually active teens.  I never actually intended to paint a bleak picture of parenthood.  A baby does signal an all encompassing change to your life.  It is challenging and exhausting at times, but it is also, in my opinion, completely worth all the effort.  Yes, I miss traveling and going out for dinners and movies and those sorts of things, but really those losses are nothing compared to the joy you gain from a child and the love you feel for one.  Couples should, however, go into the baby making business with their eyes wide open.  It is no small task to undertake.  Maybe teens should at least read some diaper changing horror stories before they try sex.  I bet the guys will want to double bag those wieners after reading stories about green diarrhea.

As for writing, well writing time has been hard to come by these past few weeks.  When I’m not writing all I can think about is how I should be.  When I am writing, I think how I need to buy groceries, or put winter tires on the cars, or other chores that need doing.  When I’m writing this blog I feel guilty that I’m not writing my novel and when I’m writing the novel I feel guilty that I haven’t written a blog entry in awhile.  As much as I love writing, I do hate the feelings of guilt it provokes in me.  I imagine this is what it feels like to be Catholic, except they’re supposed to feel guilty about activities that are a lot more fun than writing.  It was one such activity that got me into this write at home mess in the first place.  Maybe someone should have told me green diarrhea stories.

So, this parenting thing ain’t so tough.  My wife (if I’m calling myself Writeathomedad then I suppose I should call her Workawaymom) had to go to Halifax for a business trip last weekend, and Mr. Munchers and I had a delightful night alone together.  We just stayed up playing and hanging out until four in the morning.  It was great fun.  Actually, the experience was the opposite of fun.  His cranky nights are hell when there isn’t anyone to take turns getting out of bed to comfort him.  I was on an all night march from my bed to his room, until I finally just camped out in the glider chair in his room with him for the remainder of the night.  It is so easy to get frustrated when he won’t sleep, but I try to keep reminding myself that it is not his fault.  He had a bit of a cold at the time, which was probably as much to do with teething as anything else, and whenever he lay down on his back mucus would settle in his windpipe, and he would cough himself awake.  We noticed a couple of days later that his first molar had come in.  He had a runny nose for about a week leading up to that.  Snot dripped from his nose like it was a leaky faucet and  I found out that he hates having his nose wiped.  Munchers is like one of those punching kangaroos when he fights off attempts to get at his schnoz.  He’s got quick hands too.  Once he’s got a grip on the tissue or cloth the jig is up.  He’ll shred a tissue with his tiny pincers in seconds.   He may hate having his nose wiped, but he does not have any qualms about smearing his nose across clothing or furniture.  By the time his cold symptoms subsided he had four new teeth, including two molars, and I had a laundry basket full of snot crusted clothing.  I’ve yet to figure out what to use to get the snot out of the upholstery 

In other news, Master Munchers was introduced to snow a couple of days ago.  I took him to our bay window to get a good look at his first snowfall.  Puffy flakes fluttered past the window but he was more interested in looking for dogs out on the walking path.  Munchers loves dogs now, he barks at any dog he sees, or at least tries to bark.  He can’t actually make the “w” or “f” sounds, so he really just yells “oooo” at the dogs.  Honestly, I’m not sure he even noticed the snow.  This was a major letdown for me.  I imagined he would be fascinated by snow, that it would be a wondrous and exciting new sight to him.  But then he hasn’t had a lifetime of seasons from which to acquire the romanticized notion of winter’s first snow that we adults have had.  For him the white stuff was at best an oddity.  I’m still waiting for enough snow to accumulate on the ground, so we can build his first snowman and make his first snow angels.  That way he can start accumulating those romantic memories of snow for his adulthood and I will get the added pleasure of knowing that I’m setting him up for disappointment when his children fail to appreciate their first look at snow.  What a wonderful circle of life.

As much as I enjoy the snow, this year, for the first time in my life, I understand the appeal of places like California.  Right now I’d gladly brave forest fires, earthquakes, mudslides, even crowds of struggling actors for the benefit of not having to wrestle my kid into a winter jacket, boots, mitts and hat each and every time we need to go outside.  Monsieur Munchers runs in the opposite direction every time I pull his jacket out, and I have to chase him down.  Once I manage to corner him I have to stuff him into that puffy marshmallow of a jacket, which isn’t easy because he’s a slippery little sucker and he’s learning new moves every day, like how to drop and roll and how to let his limbs go all ragdoll loose once you do get a hold of one.  It’s like trying to squeeze a pig into a pair of leather pants.  Not easy.  I once thought a year without seasons would be dullsville, but now I see the one benefit that would make the atmospheric monotony bearable.  Pack your bags darlin’, we’re heading west!  (not really)

For decades fathers have used work as sanctuaries away from their wives and children, staying late at the office, or going out for drinks with clients, to avoid the noise and stress of chaotic households.  Centuries before we had offices to commute to, men escaped the sound of bawling children by going off to war.  That men were once willing to risk a spear in the gut to avoid changing dirty nappies should tell you something about how much times have changed.  These days most men want to be more involved in their children’s lives.  The father who pats their kid on the head before leaving for work in the morning and then returns grumpy and hungry in the evening, concentrating more on his dinner or his after work cocktail than his children has become passé.  Statistics show that more fathers are taking paternity leaves from work, or quitting their jobs outright (like me), to stay at home with their children than ever have before.  I’m proud to know that I’m not the only father trying to re-organize his life in order to participate more in his child’s upbringing.

The only thing more frightening to most men than staying home with their wife and children would be a room full of other men’s wives and children.  Enter the drop-in centres.  Local libraries and community centres hold classes and drop-ins for parents and their babies.  My wife had already signed Munchers up for a weekly class and regularly attended several drop-ins, so I felt obligated to attend as well, to maintain a consistent schedule for Munchers.  You would have never gotten me to even try something like this in the past; a room full of mothers and babies, sitting cross-legged on the floor singing silly songs and doing dances, followed by crafts.  Not my bag, man.  I figured I’d go once or twice and then quit if they were horribly cheesy, but it turns out that I actually enjoy these classes. 

The songs are crazy, and rather archaic, with subject matter  like the Grand Ol’ Duke of York and Charlie Chaplin.  I had never heard half of the songs before and I certainly didn’t know any of the actions that go with them.  I don’t understand how all of these mothers seem to know them.  Do girls learn different children’s songs than boys do, or are all of the women in my classes just faking it?  Some of the steps that go with the songs are pretty intricate, ridiculous even.  I think I’d have to study every night for a month to know them all, but it doesn’t really matter.  The important thing is that my son enjoys the songs and dances.  He doesn’t seem to care if daddy messes up the words or the actions.  So, yes, I’ve come to look forward to the drop-ins.  They expose my son to other kids around his age (though he mostly ignores the other kids), they keep him occupied with new toys for an hour or two, and most importantly, they leave him so exhausted that I actually have some slim chance of getting him down for an afternoon nap when we get back. 

On an entirely different note, I went and got Munchers vaccinated for the H1N1 virus two weeks ago and luckily he suffered no ill effects from it.  This was my first time taking our son to get shots; his mother was still home with him for all his previous vaccinations.  The kid is a trooper.  He made a, “what the hell?” face at the nurse when the needle pierced his arm and then only cried for a couple of seconds after it was pulled out.  I’m glad it went well, though I must confess that deep down I was hoping the needle would break against my son’s skin like in that old Superboy comic book when the Kent’s took their adopted alien son to the doctor for the first time.  That would have given me some serious bragging material for the mothers at the next drop-in.

It has been almost a month since my wife returned to work and I took on the role of stay at home parent, and though I feel like I’m settling into a groove when it comes to the parenting, finding time and energy to write remains a major challenge.  My “work” days basically begin at 8:00am when my wife leaves and ends at 7:00pm when she gets home, not that there’s not still work to be done before and after those hours, but if I were to look at the stay at home parenting as a job, those would be the hours.  That’s an 11 hour work day, and then I still need to write in the evenings.  I should put in at least 2 to 3 hours of writing each night, if not more.  I’m finding this schedule very difficult to pull of, but I have to keep reminding myself that other writers have done it, so it is possible.  I think getting the novel completed will come down to discipline and willpower.  Unfortunately, those are not attributes I possess all that much of, so I’m just going to have to pretend that I have both.  Now that I’m getting more comfortable in my role as father, entertainer, and house servant, I need to find ways to start slipping more and more writing time into the mix.  Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy, right?

You would imagine that I could get some writing in while Munchers naps.  I’m hoping some day that will be the case, but right now I actually dread nap times.  I spend more time trying to get him down for his naps than he actually spends sleeping.  It takes me anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to get him to finally go down in his crib and then I’m lucky if he sleeps for 45 minutes.  Munchers has always been a poor sleeper, but just recently he has invented a game to play in his crib: his own version of British Bulldog.  Just when I think he’s falling off to sleep, he’ll suddenly push up to his feet and makes a break for the nearest wall of the crib.  He dives down to the mattress if I reach in for him, and when I take my hands away, he pops back to his feet.  He’ll continue to dash from one end of the crib to the other, dodging my attempts to pick him up, until, to his chagrin, I manage to grab him, or until I just give up.  When I give up trying to pluck him out of his crib he shrieks with joy and dances a little victory jig.  He performs this quirky dance on his mattress with his hands out to his sides; two steps forward, two steps backward, and repeat.  It looks suspiciously like the Ickey Shuffle, an old touchdown dance from the 1980s, but I can’t prove he stole the steps.    

Munchers doesn’t just play his new game at nap time, he’s also come to enjoy it in the dead of night.  I must admit that I find it difficult to hold off on laughing when he does the dance, but as cute as his moves are, it becomes difficult to see the humor in the situation at three in the morning.  The little rascal will keep up the dancing and sprinting from end to end as long as I stay in the room, but if I even turn my back he’ll start to cry bloody murder.  The other night, at two in the morning, I planted myself in a seat next to the crib to see how long Munchers could go before he tired himself out.  The answer was longer than I could stay awake.  I nodded off after 45 minutes while he was still showing no signs of letting up.  As soon as I closed my eyes he got upset and his cries jolted me awake again.  That was the end of that experiment.  He did, however, fall asleep pretty quickly when I picked him up and rocked him after that, so it wasn’t a complete failure.  I can only imagine how much cushier life would be if our son went down for his naps easily or slept through the night even occasionally.  That would be just dreamy.

When Mr. Munchers does finally go down for a nap, I should grab the opportunity to write.  That was the plan.  Unfortunately, his morning nap is usually just long enough for me to shower, brush my teeth, and use the loo, and his afternoon nap, if he takes one, is needed to either make dinner or scrape the food off the floor and walls of our kitchen, as Munchers likes to take food out of his mouth and toss it away when he grows bored of chewing.  If he doesn’t start taking longer naps, my personal hygiene, as well as the house’s hygiene, may have to take a backseat to writing.  I’m sure my wife will understand.

My second week at home alone with our child has come to an end and so far I’ve found this house-husband thing to be exhausting, but also pretty fulfilling.  Munchers is a blast to horse around with.  He’s got such a warm, curious personality, and sometimes I catch a reflection of the world through his innocent eyes and in that moment everything looks fresh and new again.  We’re getting outside for walks and to play in the park nearly every day; a lifestyle that feels a lot healthier than the car-to-cubicle-to-car lifestyle I had been living for the past 5 years.  I’m breathing way more fresh air, being a lot more active, and to top it off, my work commute is now the length of the hallway between our bedroom and the baby’s room.  It would be the perfect job if the salary was a bit higher.  Actually, any pay at all would be nice.

Thankfully Munchers accepted me as his new house sidekick with his usual good grace, but baby and mother still cry most mornings when they part and it is still a heart-breaking scene to watch.  Of course, a moment after she walks out the door, he calms down, distracted by a toy or food and mommy is seemingly forgotten until she swings open the front door much later in the evening.  When he first spots her, a toothy smile spreads across his face, as if he’s remembering, “oh yeah, that person I love so much was gone… and now she’s back!” and then he’s piercing the air with squeals of joy and excitement as he scampers into her arms.  This nightly scene is as heart-warming as the morning one is heart-breaking.  The thing is Munchers was never that sad to see me leave for work in the mornings, in fact, I recall nothing but grins as he and mommy waved good-bye through the front door window.  I would feel jilted, but I actually believe he just turns on the water-works when his mother leaves to make her feel better.  He knew I didn’t need the coddling.  It’s probably a guy thing.

Unfortunately, my flow of writing slowed to a trickle once I became a full-time stay-at-home-dad.  During my first week with Munchers he woke up every morning at four o’clock and stayed awake until eight in the evening, minus an afternoon nap, two naps if I was lucky.  This made for long, exhausting days, and I found I had zero energy left to write with at night.  However, for the past couple of days the little rascal has gotten back to waking up around seven in the morning.  That’s a six hour swing for me: three hours of extra sleep and three less hours of baby feeding, changing, and entertaining.  This has already translated into more vitality at the end of days and my writing output has begun to slowly increase at night.  I’m going to have to get used to writing tired, learn to grind away through the wee witching hours, if I hope to succeed in completing a novel this year.  I should probably take the time now to announce that I am accepting donations in the form of prepaid Starbucks gift cards, if any generous blog readers out there want to know how to contribute to the entirely unlicensed Writeathomedad.com Charity Drive.  Don’t be cheap, folks.  This is for a very moderate to decent cause.

This morning I had one of those nightmare diaper changing experiences that parents tell single friends about when they want to scare them, the kind of humorous disaster typically portrayed in rom-com movies to show how lovably inept the protagonist is.  Munchers pooped his pants as soon as he finished eating his breakfast, which is not unusual.  He likes to go standing up these days.  It makes for a pretty comical sight, him standing there all of two and half feet tall, grimacing and straining, his big eyes bulging.  Sometimes he even braces himself, hands outstretched, between two chair legs.  His pooing faces almost always make me laugh, which I don’t think he appreciates because lately I’ve noticed that he’s been sneaking off into corners for more privacy when he has to do his dirty business.  I’ve got to clean it up, so I think it’s only fair that I be allowed to laugh at him while he does the deed.  Anyway, he had his post breakfast movement and it didn’t seem like anything special.  It smelled as bad as it usually does, but no worse.

I carried Munchers upstairs and as soon as I put him down on the change table he started to freak out, arching and twisting his back, trying to turn over.  He was actually doing a full back arch, like a wrestler trying to prevent his shoulders from being pinned or a gymnast doing a floor routine. Only the crown of his head and his toes were touching the table top.  I had to pin him down with my elbow while I stripped his pants off and unbuttoned his onesie, only to discover that his diaper was overflowing with dark sticky poop that had seeped out the top of the back.  He was struggling so violently that one of his feet slipped out of my hand and fell down onto the open diaper and into the mound of baby manure.  His flailing foot smeared poop all over the change pad before I got a hold of it again.  As I gripped his feet, now slimy with poo, he twisted upside down onto his head, rubbing his filthy bum across my forearms.  I surrendered, releasing his feet and he immediately flipped over onto his hands and knees, sticking his muddy arse up in the air, before pushing up to his feet.  As he stood he brushed one bum cheek against the wall.  Yep, that’s right, I got sh*t on our walls.   

At this point the change pad cover, his socks, pants, shirt, and my hands and arms were all covered in poop, so I stripped his clothes and the table cover off and tossed them into the waste basket.  Then I just started cleaning him up as best I could from a standing position, holding him steady with one hand and wiping him down with the other. Naturally, that’s when the box of wipes ran out.  Luckily a spare box of wipes was handily placed on the shelf above, but the refill pack inside needed to be torn open, which I did, while holding the antsy poop-monster upright on top of the dresser.  Even with a fresh pack of wipes, the poo particles would not come off.  They stuck to his butt cheeks like little balls of glue.  I may have burned through half that pack of wipes in one go.  Once I had his bum relatively clean and a new diaper secured, I tossed all the soiled linens into the sink, disinfected myself by scrubbing a layer of skin off my hands and arms, and replaced the change pad cover.    Right now the little monster is running around the office in just his diaper, happy as a clam in chowder, while I type the experience up while the memory is still vivid.  Now that I think of it, I still need to scrub poop stains off the wall.

After two days home alone with Munchers, my first big revelation is that we have a lot of stairs in our home. We live in a three story house, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise to me.  It’s just that I didn’t pay much mind to the number of steps that actually make up our staircases until I had to traverse them a couple dozen times each day while lugging a wiggly sack of potatoes.  Our little monster can climb up stairs, and I do mean climb (it’s like he’s scaling mount Olympus), but he hasn’t mastered coming down them yet, at least not by any remotely safe method.  At this point, stairs are a one way trip for the wee fella.

Growing up, we had a black Labrador retriever as a pet.  When she was still a puppy, my sister taught her how to use the slides at playgrounds.  The dog learned how to scamper up the ladders and then slide down the other side on her hindquarters.  For the rest of her life that dog would climb any ladder she saw, but if there was no slide to go down she’d be stuck wherever the ladder took her.  More then once she got herself stranded on rooftops and had to be rescued by my father.  His curses testified that it was no easy task to climb down a ladder with one hand while holding a 65 pound package of squirming fur and bone in the other.

My son is beginning to remind me of that dog.  He weighs a bit less, and his coat isn’t as glossy, but his nose is often cold and wet, and like my childhood pet, he has to be carried down every time he scampers up a set of stairs.

My stay at home parent audition has come to an end and the part is mine, whether I’m well-suited for it or not. Even with the two us here, this past week has seen its share of parenting challenges. One incident a couple of nights ago shook us up quite badly. 

The baby woke up crying around three in the morning, like he does most every night. I let him cry for a couple of minutes before I went to check on him, hoping maybe this time he’d fall back to sleep on his own.  Naturally, he kept right on belting out his favourite tune, which sounds like a cross between an ambulance siren and an alarm clock, so I rolled out of bed and shuffled into his room.  To my shock, I found him standing in his crib sporting a face masked in blood.  We frantically began wiping the blood away, searching for the source of the bleeding, but we couldn’t find a cut anywhere.  At this point Munchers had stopped crying and was simply annoyed that a wet cloth was interrupting what could have been a decent  night cuddle.  Once we had his face cleaned up, we discovered a small gash on the inside of his top lip.  He must have fallen on the crib rail and nicked his lip on one of his six teeth, then spread the blood all over his face when he rubbed it.  The whole incident probably only lasted a couple of minutes and it turned out to be nothing serious (his lip wasn’t even swollen in the morning), but the aftermath looked like a gruesome crime scene.  We had to wipe down one side of the crib, his sleeper was a write off, and there was blood smeared all over my shoulder just from holding him.  The experience basically scared the hell out of us, and now we find it impossible to let him cry even for a moment before we get up to comfort him at night.  Who knows, maybe that was the devious little bugger’s plan all a long?

To make matters worse, last week the wee man also got jabbed with two immunization needles (not for H1N1, just the regular one year shots) and they messed him up good.  He acted like a zombie for three days afterward, stumbling about the house in a stupor, and his sleep schedule has been wrecked ever since.  For the past week the little monster has been waking up at four a.m. and refusing to go back to sleep no matter how much I offer to pay into his tuition fund.  Four o’clock wake ups make for long, strange days. Yesterday, he ate two full breakfasts, one at 5am and another at 7am, like a hobbit. 

We’ve been trying to get the boy on one of those consistent schedules that I hear children need since he was a couple of months old, but the kid just isn’t much of a sleeper.  He fights sleep like it just insulted his mother’s personal hygiene or kicked his dog.  Whenever we do manage to get him in a decent routine, something happens to throw him off.  He gets a cold, or another tooth begins to burrow up through his gums, or his favourite sitcom gets cancelled.  This week it was immunization shots that messed him up, next week it’ll be something different.  There doesn’t seem to me to be any consistency to a baby’s life.  Every couple of months they’re either introduced to something new or expected to adapt to losing something they’ve become accustomed to.  We finally weaned our son off the breast nectar and just when he’s come to actually enjoy baby formula now we have to switch him to whole milk, and guess what? He hates the taste.  I’m sure by the time he comes around to the flavour of bovine milk (probably six months from now) it will be time to switch him to 2% milk, or juice, or whatever doctor’s “recommend” for healthy children at that stage of life.  I’d want to bite someone’s face off if I kept getting messed with like that.  Wait, maybe this explains our child’s tendency to munch on our exposed flesh whenever the opportunity presents itself.  He’s just royally pissed off and he’s trying to tell us that he’s not going to take it anymore.  That or those shots really did turn him into a zombie.   

Speaking of schedules… on top of working towards earning that coveted World’s Best Dad mug, I also need to start a consistent writing schedule for my first novel.  My goal is 15 pages per week, which is pretty ambitious considering the all day workout that watching the Munchers is, but I’m going to try this pace beginning this week and see if it’s manageable.  If seeing the misery and tears on my wife’s face as she left the house, and her son, to return to work doesn’t motivate me to write more often then I don’t know what ever will.  I’ve got two children to nurture this year; my son and my novel.  I couldn’t possibly make a mess of both of them, could I?

The Muncher-Monster turned one on Friday, which means my wife only has a week left before she has to go back to work.  So, this week is Transition Week, where I start taking over all the parenting duties while I have my wife here to mentor me.  She calls it a transition but I feel it’s more like a test; a week long audition for the part of a competent parent.  If this is an audition then I’m not convinced I have impressed the casting director so far.  Actually this would be the callback. My first audition took place last month. 

Mommy had to go to a work conference, so I had my first 24 hour stretch alone with the bambino, who was barely, actually not quite, weaned off the breast at the time.  The day went pretty smoothly, aside from the fact that the kid woke up at 5am and wouldn’t go back down without the comfort of a boob stuffed in his mouth.  And because of that his schedule was all out of whack: his breakfast was early; his first nap was early; his lunch was early; and so on.  But really, the only incident happened in the middle of the afternoon when I had to take a pee.  As I was peeing, Munchers suddenly pushed the bathroom door open and made a beeline for the toilet, putting him on a collision course with the arc of my stream.  I cut off the flow of urine just in time and scooped Munchers up off the bare toilet bowl he was already draped over.  I then attempted to clean his toilet-touched hands in the sink as he tried to wriggle out of my arms. 

When my wife returned home the next day I asked her if that had ever happened to her.  I was wondering how the heck I was ever going to be able to take a leak while home alone with the child.  She said, “Oh yeah, I just leave the door open and he sometimes comes in.”  Obviously he can’t fall in the toilet or be peed on because she’s sitting on the bowl, so it never seemed like a problem to my wife.  This clearly distinguished to me the difference between the bathroom habits of men and women.  It seems like the norm for women to leave bathroom doors open while they pee so they can chat with whoever is outside, while men, at least this one, don’t view bathroom breaks as a social activity.  I, for one, am not comfortable using the bathroom with the door open, or even unlocked for that matter.  But closing the door to use the facilities might be dangerous if I’m home alone with our little spider monkey.  God only knows how much trouble he could get into while I can’t see him.  My wife’s solution: simply pee sitting down like her.  I’m going to have to draw the line there.  I feel emasculated enough without having to aim down between my thighs every time I have to urinate.  Maybe I’ll just dress Munchers in a miniature southwester hat before I pee.  What Mommy doesn’t know won’t hurt her.

Today I quit the kind of job I dreamt of as a child.  It was the kind of job that didn’t even exist when I was a child, but I pretended it did to justify to my parents the many hours I wasted each day playing video games and reading comic books.  And somehow, don’t ask me how[1], all that “research” time paid off, because for nearly five years I’ve been paid a very decent salary to write stories for video games.  I got to write about heroes, villains, quests, battles, basically the stuff little boy’s (and big boy’s) dreams are made of.  Then last year, my wife and I produced a little boy of our own and my dreams began to evolve.  The boy, we call him Mr. Wiggles or Munchers, but rarely by his real name, will be one next week and, shortly after that, my wife’s maternity leave will be over.  My wife, by the way, is an actuary, which basically means she’s a lot smarter than me, and that’s probably all you need to know about that.  The way we saw it, we had two choices; either dump our 12 month old at a child care centre every day while we both worked to pay strangers for the opportunity to watch our baby grow, or we could figure something else out. 

I have for years been saying that I’m going to write my own novel, but I haven’t yet; the excuse always being that I often had to work on the video game scripts late into the nights in order to make my deadlines.  My job, dreamy though it may have been, exhausted my creativity at times.  My wife can’t work from home, but I can… in theory, so we decided this was my big chance to write my novel, the caveat being I will have to also be a stay at home dad.  I’m to be a house dad by day and a novelist by night, a domestic super hero of sorts.  It’s not crime fighting, but honestly, I’m intimidated by either one of these challenges individually; together they’re almost enough to scare religion into me. 

Never in my wildest nightmares did I imagine I’d volunteer to be a stay at home father.  I was never comfortable around babies, never even wanted to hold one, until my own came along.  I love my son – he’s been a revelation.  His smile makes my heart squirm like a worm on a hook, but he is also a bit of a rascal.  He decided to start walking at 10 months and now he basically just runs around the house, throwing anything he can fit under the baby gate down our stairs, so he can watch the household items bounce from step to step before crashing to the basement floor.  He chews on everything, including his parents, hence the moniker Munchers.  No one ever told me how much baby bites hurt.  Baby jaws are powerful, even before the first teeth appear; it’s like getting a finger stuck in a car door or something.  I’m pretty sure that in a pinch I could use my son’s mouth to crack open walnuts or a lobster claw.  And they may look cute, but baby teeth are sharp.  It wouldn’t shock me to walk in and find my kid hunkered down in his crib filing his six teeth down to better flesh piercing points with his mother’s emery board.    

In many ways my son is still a stranger to me.  Until today, I’ve seen him for an hour or two in the mornings and for an hour or two at night.  Yeah, we’ve hung together on weekends, but he’s only been completely off the magical, mystical breast-food for about a month and still looks for his mother when he’s really upset.  He’s not above pushing my face away to illustrate his parental preference either. So, we’re going to have to get to know each other quickly if we’re going to be comfortable spending every waking moment of every day together.  Which brings me to another of my worries; the little dude doesn’t even talk yet.  I like a good conversation.  I’ll chat with pretty much anyone about pretty much anything.  For all I know, spending all day with a baby might be like having to share a prison cell with a very short mime that frequently poops his clown pants.  The fact that I have to clean the bum should tell you my role in the prison relationship. 

I can’t shake the feeling that this experiment is going to teach me what real work is like, a concept that is especially scary for a writer.  If this experience turns out to be a complete catastrophe, I’m hoping that it will at least make for an entertaining story.  This blog will chronicle my attempt to simultaneously succeed as a full-time stay at home dad and writer.  I will write candidly about all the laughs, cries, and insights that occur in the months to follow, so stay tuned.    

 

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[1] Seriously, don’t write to ask me how I got a job writing video games – sometimes we just luck into these things.  A love for and knowledge of games helps, as do good writing samples, but some luck is always required.