By tomorrow I will have been a father for 15 months, and a stay-at-home dad for about 10 months. So I suppose that means I have some kind of wisdom and experience to share with some new parents, expectant parents and maybe even couples who are trying to avoid parenthood. Maybe. I’m just a guy. And like most people, I really only have experience raising my own offspring which makes for a pretty small sample size… so what do I really know? But anyway, let’s get started.

1. Every baby is different
As new parents you are going to get buried under a barrage of unsolicited advice from every imaginable direction. Friends, family, strangers, and now including, well, me. Much of this conflicting advice will be useless to you because every baby is different. As different as any two adults can be from each other, that’s how different babies are from each other, too. Babies are people. People have different personalities, preferences, body types, everything.

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Trying to prepare a nice meal for my wife on her first mothers day as a mother, told in Snapchat story form…

It has been seven days since Sasha was born. She is still alive and breathing, and I count that as a success. Though some challenges are different from what I expected, overall it has actually been easier than I had thought.

As the boxes and boxes of baby stuff continued to overwhelm the limited space in our condo over the past month or so before Sasha was born, it dawned on us that it wasn’t going to just be the two of us plus a tiny little baby. The reality of the situation was that we had a new roommate moving in and we needed to make space for a whole person’s worth of stuff and we were going to have to get rid of and rearrange a bunch of our own stuff to make room for the baby. Cupboards were cleared, books and DVDs given away, and the craps table (around which my friends spent hours throwing dice many years ago) was converted into a crap table (AKA diaper changing station). Continue reading →

(Posted @ 2:12am) The first 24 hours. As dawn broke over the city, I nearly cried as I realized it was her first sunrise. Sleep deprivation and overwhelming emotions swirl around causing a mad mix of anxiety and elation. Insecurities and instincts, both the previously known and the unknown kick in. I have no idea what I am doing and yet some things just happen so naturally. Continue reading →

(Posted @ 1:09 am) Sitting on the DASH bus carrying an empty baby car seat is not exactly how I imagined the rush to the hospital to go down. The plan was to wait until contractions were 4 minutes apart before I drove her to the hospital. Enter from the main entrance, or from 6th street through the ER if it was after 6:30pm. Leave the car at the door on the way up to the eighth floor. None of that happened. Continue reading →