For a while now, I have wanted to write something for my blog that is geared toward new dads. I found out barely two years ago that I would be a dad. Now I’ve done it twice. As a computer geek, I went to the internet to seek advice, and at the time I did not find very much. I’m not sure if anything useful has been added in that time, as I have mostly figured things out for myself. You may find the same thing to be helpful, but just in case, here are some random musings from my own experience.
First off, children can be hard. My oldest, Joshua, is barely 15 months and he is in to everything. Any cord in the open he will find. He will climb behind objects to find cords. I don’t know why he has such a thing for cords. If you want to know whether or not your house has been adequately baby proofed, I would be happy to bring him over and turn him loose. He’ll let you know in a hurry. My youngest, Caleb, is going to be eating applesauce way ahead of schedule. He is always hungry. At barely 10 weeks old, he’s already taking more than 30 ounces of formula a day and 2 bowls of rice cereal. I guess he’ll grow up to be a hungry man. As I write this, I’m on a plane bound for Charleston, SC, and I miss the guys.
The best piece of advice I believe that I could give a new dad is that no baby has ever died from crying. You want the best for your children, but you can only do so much. There will be times when a baby will want to cry for hours and nothing is apparently wrong. Your frustrations may grow. At times like these, if you have no one else to pass the baby off to for a time, it is all right to lay him down gently and step away for a few minutes. I have found that I liked it better when I was out of the room and my children were crying. That means I know where they are and they are all right. It’s when they aren’t making noise that you want to rush back in every few minutes to make sure that they are all right.
Babies are much more durable than you might think. With Joshua, I knew nothing about babies. I thought that they had to be lying down or held. I didn’t realize that you could do more. A lot of the crying that he did may have been simply from boredom rather than pain or hunger. Hey, women grow up around babies and dolls. We grow up around things we can build of destroy. I just didn’t know. The other night at dinner, we had Caleb lying on the couch when he started crying. I went in to get him, thinking he was hungry. He wasn’t hungry at all, and was perfectly happy to have me hold him upright on my lap while we ate. He just wanted to be with everyone else apparently. Sometimes he likes it when we lay him down or hold him so that he can see what’s going on. Babies can be much smarter than you think.
Remember always that you are the parent. Babies have very strong opinions and preferences, but you have the big picture. Joshua hated to be swaddled (that’s when you wrap a baby up tightly in a blanket while he’s sleeping so his arms don’t move and wake him up), but we had to swaddle him or he would wake himself up constantly. He hated it, but we were the parents and knew that he would eventually stop screaming and sleep. Caleb doesn’t mind it as much, but is much less active and only needs swaddling for long periods of sleep.
Babies can sleep on their stomachs. They actually sleep better that way, although you should never allow this without being there to supervise. They also need to be held. There is a line between spoiling and giving what they need. If we’re busy and can’t hold Caleb, he won’t sleep well at night.
I found that I had a hard time with fatherhood at first. I have been told that it’s hard to go from 1 baby to 2, but from 2 children to 3 isn’t bad. Actually, I had the hardest time going from 0 to 1. Going from 1 to 2 wasn’t bad after the first couple of weeks. I’ve heard that the dad doesn’t always bond well at first. I think that’s true in my experience. The mother carries the baby for 9 months and has that instant bond. For the father, your life changes and you don’t always get much out of it. It’s hard to describe the change I felt toward Joshua all in one moment. When he was about 6 months old, I was really sick one weekend. He couldn’t sit up by himself yet, but could hold himself up if you put him in a sitting position. My wife sat him in bed next to me, and he looked at me. I feebly said “Hey, Joshua”, and he fell in my direction and reached out for me. In that one moment, everything in my relationship with him changed. It’s like he became real to me in that moment when I realized that he knew who I was and still liked me. It’s very hard to describe.
You’ll make a lot of mistakes, but believe me, you won’t screw your children’s’ lives up right away. That takes years of neglect. You’ll get frustrated, angry, impatient, busy, but there’s always a new day waiting for you. Some things take care of themselves. My wife and I fought a lot when she brought Joshua to bed. I didn’t agree that he should be in the bed at all, but it became one of those mother hood things that can’t be overridden without destroying your marriage. I gave her a hard time because he wouldn’t go to sleep by himself. For a long time there, he needed about 8 oz of milk before bed. Then, one day, it just stopped. He didn’t need the milk anymore. He still needs help getting to sleep sometimes, but for the most part it’s not a problem.
I rushed through things with Joshua. I was just in a hurry to get out of that phase of life. I don’t know why. Now that we’ve had Caleb, I’m just trying to sit back and enjoy this time with my children. Now that I know I can handle two of them at the same time, now that I have some experience and knowledge of children, it’s a lot different.
I hope that my random airborne musings on that last 15 months can provide somebody with help and inspiration. Never be too proud to ask for help and advice. Us “veterans” are just itching to give it anyway. And if you have older children, I’ll probably be looking for advice from you before too long.
