Mr. Mommy Guest Writes

Over the last year, I've been lucky enough to have the time to work on this blog and other personal writing projects because of my awesome and fulfilling job as an English professor at FRCC and because my amazing and supportive husband has sacrificed his own career to take over as our daughter's primary caregiver. I thought it would only be appropriate to invite him to share his experiences as a full-time stay-at-home dad. This is what he said.

Recently when people ask me what I do and I explain that I stay home with my baby girl I often get rather extreme reactions.  As a stay-at-home dad, it seems as though I am either The Greatest Guy Ever or kind of a deadbeat.  I do not believe I am either and hope I do not portray either role to my daughter.  But sometimes I can't help but feel that I have involved myself in a position that everyone seems to have a strong opinion on and sometimes I can't help but feel a little self-conscious. 

Take for instance this morning, my baby girl and I were running around the lake (well, I had been running, she was still sleeping in the stroller, her preferred exercise technique).  Sometimes on beautiful mornings like this one, when I get to participate in the leisurely activities that I enjoy without hardly any displeasing responsibilities looming over the rest of my day, I cannot help but feel a little spoiled.

As we approached the home stretch of our run just south of the lake along 34, I began noticing the cars on the road and wondered what those people must have thought when they saw us.  I naively assumed that there were only two possible opinions behind those eyes watching me jogging on a Tuesday morning while heading to work, or to school, or to jury duty, or to the dentist, or to the hospital to visit a sick loved one: either a good-natured envious perspective, thinking that it must be so nice for that guy and his baby to be able to enjoy a beautiful morning together, or a more critical perspective thinking that this loser needs to be working like the rest of us and stop rubbing his laziness in our faces. I knew I was simultaneously reminding some people that their day would not be quite as enjoyable as mine and others that their ideas of social structure and family values were being challenged. 

By the end of our run I felt an awkward sense of guilt, even though I knew I shouldn't have.   I crossed at the crosswalk and stopped to change my music to distract myself from this bad mood.  As I scrolled through my playlists I felt that someone was watching me, that someone must be judging me again.  Then I looked up to see an older gentleman smoking a cigar in a two-toned Ford pickup truck; he looked directly at me, smiled, and gave me an enthusiastic thumbs up.

As a stay-at-home dad in Loveland, I understand that some people may have a negative opinion of this choice my family and I have made.  I mean, women are supposed to raise the kids and take care of the house and do the dishes and the laundry and cook dinner and wake up at night to quiet the babies and wipe the butts and change the diapers, right? And men are supposed to be part of the workforce and be responsible for paying the bills and supporting their families with paychecks and health care and coming home to hang up their hat  to say, "Honey, I'm home!" and shower their families with love and attention, right?  Shouldn't children see their dad as a strong bread-winner who sacrifices for his family to keep a roof over their head, because, after all, fathers are better at that than mothers are? Shouldn't daughters and sons see their mothers as a source of unconditional love and devotion and as a comforting caretaker and custodian of the home, because, after all, mothers are more suited for these roles anyway?  After all, isn't it true that most male mammals in the wild are more concerned with providing security and protection than they are raising the children and occupying the home? 

Look, I realize there are societal norms in our country that suggest women are more fit for the raising of children and the caretaking of the house and that men are more valuable for labor and money-making, and for most cultures, these norms have historical and sociological significance. 

But, I also realize we live in the 21st century and every family is different and we are not wild animals.

The truth is, I just feel incredibly lucky to have this opportunity to do what is best for my family. I get to spend quality time with an adorable 9 month old baby girl every day.  The worst things in my day consist of not getting as much sleep or eating a respectable meal as much as I would like or experiencing a diaper fiasco that leads to getting all that poop on my hands.  I once was so tired that I feel asleep at the breakfast table waiting for my daughter to finish her banana and woke up sometime later to her looking at me judgingly while a half-eaten banana peel lay slack in her jaw;  my daily sustenance usually consists of whatever leftover  foul mixture of fruits and veggies and meats she won't eat. But I can't really complain; I obviously get enough sleep and food, and all that poop washes off easily.  And trust me, the highlights of my day will always be more powerful than the low points that can be boring or stressful.   

Even though some people may think I'm a deadbeat and others might think I'm The Greatest Guy Ever, I have to believe that most people understand that I am simply doing what is best for my family and they probably don't react as much as I would like to think.  For all I know, that guy in the Ford pickup could have given me a thumbs up not because of anything to do with me pushing a stroller on a Tuesday morning, but because he liked my beard, or maybe he noticed my new Nikes, or maybe someone he knows was behind me and I didn't know it.  Regardless, his gesture reminded me that I am very lucky to be able to spend so much time with my daughter every day and have a wife that loves her job and supports me. I can't remember a happier time in my life.

An earlier version of this essay originally appeared in the October 2014 issue of The Fourth Street Chronicle.

the blob you’ve been waiting for, and mega-blob too

This is a project that I had been waiting for since I found the post in a blog I frequent back in March, when I was having a serious case of spring fever and the surprisingly mild temperatures made me wish I could just fast forward three months. Too bad it was cold for most of May and the first half of June so I had to wait a little bit longer than I originally thought. But when summer finally came this year, it came in style, thanks to this little number I like to call the blob, and its much older sibling mega-blob.

I have to start with my sources on this one because I in no way take credit for the conception or planning of this amazing project. My only goal in writing this is to express how incredibly easy it was to execute and how much fun my family and friends had playing with it. Pretty much everything I did here came from Leisha over at her Homemade Toast blog.

If you follow the directions on Homemade Toast, you will see that it’s really pretty straightforward. You can find a lot of different tutorials online for how to do this, but most of them involve sealing the edgeswith duct tape, which I’ve heard results in almost immediate leakage. I would also think it would be more expensive, since you’d be using so much tape. What Leisha has come up with, with the iron and parchment, is nothing short of pure genius. I want to emphasize here that melting the plastic edges together is really the only way to ensure a true, leak-proof seal. You can get a few small holes here and there and be fine, but if the seams go, the whole thing is going to lose its structure. I’d hate for that to happen when the kids are running and jumping on it.

The only thing that I think was confusing was what to do with the parchment paper, so I’ll try to clarify that. The parchment is meant to create a buffer zone between your iron and the actual plastic sheet. That's why you draw the line down the middle. Once you fit the two layers of plastic inside the parchment, with the edges pushed up against the parchment's inside seam, the line will provide a guide that shows you how far in to iron, about 2" from the edges/seam. There will still be a couple of inches of paper between the line and the plastic, so you don't even have to be exact; just follow the line as best you can, like I'm doing here:

And here's a video just in case it still isn't clear.

Like most projects, I did a semi-trial run first. Turns out the painter’s plastic comes in various weights that correlate directly with the price of the product. So I purchased a smaller 10’ x 9’ sheet in .2 mil weight for about $4 the first time around. The only other thing I had to pay for was the water itself, so this is definitely an economical project to say the least. The only caveat I can offer with the .2 mil is that it was much weaker at the seams and over time small leaks began to develop where the material was stretched, and it was so thin on top that the girl’s toenails eventually began to poke little scratches and tears in it. This was okay at first, as it kept a perpetual skin of water over the top, but eventually it led to more leakage than we really wanted. So definitely go for the .4 mil if you want an end-product that you’re going to be able to use more than once or twice, or even fill and refill multiple times. I would also note that I do not recommend the .2 mil test version for use by any children over 30 pounds, as the thicker plastic is really necessary to support any more weight than that I would think. Here's a video of the original blog:

I also added a final step of spraying down the top and drizzling on  little eco-friendly dish soap so that the kids would have an easier time sliding around on it.

The addition of the slide was a huge hit, at least until they started getting all soapy and falling on the ladder to climb up. In the future I would put a baby pool of water at the base of the later so that they would have to rinse the soap off before climbing up.

Once I was ready to go all in on with mega-blob I went back to the instructions from Homemade Toast, and this time I followed her instructions exactly, rather than using the thinner and smaller plastic like I did for my prototype. The only thing I did differently is that I did not cut down the .4 mil plastic like Leisha recommends; instead, I used the whole roll! It was huge!!!

I am not kidding you, this thing took over an hour to fill up with water!

But the added bonus of mega-blob is that it is adult-friendly.

And here is a picture of the larger and thicker .4 mil version of the painter’s plastic that I purchased off Amazon for mega-blob. HomemadeToast’s instructions have a link to the product and I looked around and did some research and this is really the best thing. At $12 I still think that it’s a pretty economical project overall.

I have to say, this is one of those rare internet finds that reverses the typically inverse relationship that you find between how exciting and fun a project turns out to be and how difficult it is to pull off. Usually I find myself putting the most work into the projects that are least successful, but in this case it was much easier than I thought and the kids had a much better time playing with it than I ever could have anticipated. But I don’t know why I didn’t think it would be a total hit—it is, after all, a giant outdoor water bed covered in soapy, slippery water. It also looks cool once it’s filled up because the plastic is clear. If I ever make another one I might put some rubber sea creature toys inside or something so the girls can pretend its an inside-out-aquarium. But for now blob versions 1.0 and 2.0 have been quite enough. After it was finished we played with it for about three weeks before I found the time to come inside and write this post.

Happy blobbing, everyone.

what I didn't learn from playing The Oregon Trail

Last summer my husband and I traveled with our then six-month-old daughter on a cross-country road trip that took us through twelve states. Our Toyota sedan was stuffed to the gills, filled with all the accoutrements that come along with traveling with a small child. It was a new experience for the two of us, as we've always prided ourselves on being light packers. Before we bought our house we were somewhat minimalists, moving frequently and typically giving away most of our furniture and starting over each time. Since the birth of our daughter, though, our possessions have effectively doubled. Like many of the homes in the Old Town neighborhood, our house has minimal storage, lacking closets, a garage, and a basement. About all we have is a narrow attic space above the small portion of our home that isn't an addition. Now every corner of the space is overflowing with baby items, a swing here, a stack of board books there, a pile of folded blankets tucked away beside the couch. As my husband and I packed for our trip, deciding what was necessary to take and what it was possible to leave, I couldn't believe how much stuff we would need to make it through the four weeks that we would be gone. It was the first time I'd ever been forced to take inventory of all the things that we use on a daily basis simply keeping our daughter alive. It got me thinking about how much stuff there is involved in being a parent these days, and how much of it we really do—or do not—need.

Here's what we brought: one Pack-n-Play portable crib; four sets of clothing for my daughter: one for the size she was wearing at the time, one in case she grew, one for hot weather, one for cold; a suitcase full of clothes and other essentials for my husband and I, including one blow dryer that according to my husband took up too much space because "ounces lead to pounds"; one teal Bumbo seat; one Ergo carrier, one Baby Bjorn, and one Maya wrap; rock climbing harnesses and shoes; all our running stuff; three swimsuits per person; our laptop and a few work items I was pretending to plan to make time for during the trip; one forty-pound dog and his large Tupperware box of food; a pillow; four blankets; bottles and bottle accessories (drying rack, microsteam sanitizer bags, natural dish soap, bottle brush, formula); one collapsible stroller; one bag of random things including a bottle warmer and nightlight and baby monitor; one bag of books; one small-ish box of toys; baby toiletries and medicines; a cooler; two packs each of diapers and wipes; a diaper bag with extra outfits, bottles, and formula; two folding chairs; one air mattress; six pairs of adult shoes; four pairs of baby shoes; fourteen headbands;  two rain jackets; one umbrella; two Father's Day gifts.

My husband is truly a master of packing the car. We had everything and anything we needed, or so we thought.

But along the way, each time we played the game of Tetris involved in retrieving some essential item from the trunk, I couldn't help but feel as if we had brought too much. In our defense, every single thing we had was either something we truly intended to use or else something that we would need in case of some emergency. The last stop on our trip was a stay with my husband's sister in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago. She's a design student who wants to build tiny houses for disabled adults to live in independently. She and her boyfriend and dog currently reside in a 247 square-foot apartment which the contents of our vehicle alone would have filled. When we arrived there after two days on the road, we bustled in with a tiny mountain of necessities which quickly piled up in the small living space. It was at that moment that the full weight of everything we had accumulated in the last six months really hit me. How could someone so small involve such a huge entourage of things, a quantity of possessions that could easily trump that of four adults?

The hard fact was that it was all pretty excessive. Sure, everything there in some way made life with an infant more easy and convenient, but very little of it was essential. There were a few items we did need. The Pack-n-Play was worth its weight; we only used it a couple of times, but it really allowed my husband and I our much-needed sleep. About five hundred thousand wet wipes definitely saved the day on multiple occasions (two packs was not nearly enough). All the bottles and their accessories of course. And I'll admit that my daughter went through quite a few outfits.

But what we didn't need were things like any of the clothes we brought for ourselves. All of the athletic equipment, not sure what we were thinking there. The second and third baby carriers and wraps. Of course, the stuff I brought for work. The books and toys; the grandparents supplied these as soon as we arrived in town. The truth is we didn't actually need most of what we brought. We had access to laundry facilities, stayed in the homes of family members and used their toiletries with entitlement.

We didn't have everything we needed; we had everything.

Why does it feel necessary as parents to surround ourselves with physical reminders of our responsibility to keep this tiny, helpless little person alive? Maybe because it's such an important job, because failing at it is so terrible a thought that we want to try everything we can to do it better. But I don't think doing it better always means making it easier and having things doesn't always make me feel confident. Maybe if we had a little bit less, we might actually be more.

An earlier version of this essay originally appeared in the August 2014 issue of The 4th Street Chronicle

marathons and mommy mistakes

I was jogging around Lake Loveland yesterday, one of my favorite local runs. It took me six months after giving birth to my daughter to get back to my pre-pregnancy workout routine. I was the kind of new mom for whom the eight weeks of recovery my doctor ordered felt like a life sentence. I thought as soon as I was given the all-clear I'd be back to my morning runs, starting with two miles, then three, then working my way up until my legs and lungs were back in shape. I even considered signing up for the Colorado Marathon in May, just five months after she was born.

Let me pause here to allow space for your hysterical laughter.

Thinking back on those aspirations, all I can do is laugh. Hard. That marathon quickly turned into a half-marathon, then to a 5k, then a weekly walk around the baseball fields at Centennial Park. I learned that it wasn't about getting my legs and lungs back in shape, but rather a whole other set of muscles, muscles I hadn't known existed until that night in December when I pushed a nearly seven-pound human girl out of my body.

All of this got me thinking about the expectations I had for myself before my daughter was born and the kind of mom I actually turned out to be. One of the first baby items that I purchased shortly into my pregnancy was a top-of-the-line (read: very expensive) jogging stroller. I really thought I would be the kind of mother who you would see running my infant all over town, the kind who would whip myself back into shape in a mere matter of weeks.

Things didn't exactly happen the way I had expected. Turns out, being a mom is harder than I thought.

As moms, especially first-time moms, I think it's common to set up expectations for ourselves. As we struggle to form this new identity, often as some kind of consolation for our quickly retreating youth, we try to envision a perfect version of ourselves moving forward. A kind of super-mom who always gives 110 percent, who never cuts corners, does everything not just the right way, but the best way. For me, that meant a natural, drug-free childbirth, at least one full year of breastfeeding, cloth diapers, daily exercise, home-cooked baby food, never fighting with my husband, a baby who sleeps all night long on her back, etc. (insert your ideal baby/mom image here). But so far, I have failed to meet nearly all of these expectations, with the only exception being cloth diapering, which I actually recommend, as long as you don't mind washing poop off of your hands. But these expectations and failures are only the beginning. Beyond this, I have since learned that there are other failures I've had as a mother that I never would have expected. Things I had completely taken for granted before have now become the biggest failures, things I never expected I would be able to possibly fail at.

I expected I would be the kind of mother who would return phone calls from family and friends. I expected to be able to remember to feed my dog. I expected to not dress my daughter in pink every day and assign to her a gender identity at a young age and I expected not to baby talk all of my sentences, even those in everyday conversation with adults. I expected to at least do some laundry, or at least not to use every surface in the house to wipe my daughter's spit up, including curtains, couch cushions, the dog, and so on. I expected to read a story before bed every night, to be willing to turn off the TV (it never occurred to me that limiting screen time also meant that I might have to miss some of my favorite shows). I expected to not shout obscenities in the middle of the night or throw pacifiers across the room. These are the expectations I never would have expected I would fail to meet.

I expected to sleep at least a little bit, or to ever have sex again. Pause again here for your hysterical laughter.

The fact is, what we used to consider normal has become the ideal. It's a perfect day if I can get the dishwasher unloaded, if my daughter doesn't sit in her dirty diapers for more than a few minutes, and if I can pay my husband at least some attention. It's a perfect day if I don't run out of formula or wipes or accidentally leave the back door open over night. Does that make me a bad mother? Does that make me not the perfect mother? When I look at my daughter I see a very different version of life than I expected when I was pregnant. She doesn't get an hour of reading time every day, she doesn't live in a sterile, germ-free environment. She won't be breastfed until she's seven and she probably came into this world in a paralytic haze. But what I do see is a happy baby. A baby who feels safe and loved and confident that her parents are always around.

We finally made it all the way around the lake. Five miles in six months. The old version of myself would have been disappointed. But the mom in me doesn't have time for disappointment. I've learned that my expectations were all wrong, that being a good mom isn't about what you read in magazines or see on the internet. I've learned that sometimes there are no matching socks, and you're just not going to be able to get all of that sunscreen rubbed in. That sometimes it's enough just to have a bedtime routine at all and a properly installed car seat. I've learned that I already have everything I need, strapped safely and perfectly into my (albeit very expensive) stroller. That, for now, is good enough for me.

loving it while it lasts

I recently participated in a discussion on a friend's Facebook page. She was relating a conversation she overheard in the coffee shop on her college campus, in which a young woman bemoaned the weight gain of her best friend, who had become "so fat" she had begun to wear a size medium.  My friend, a once-again freshman who averages a decade of seniority over most of her classmates, had remarked that she was grateful to not be 18 anymore, to be beyond the stage of skin-deep friendship that comes with a transient, childless existence.

                I think it's an important issue, the tendency of women to succumb to fulfilling the stereotypes of a culture that refuses to judge us on anything other than our appearances (not hyperbole—just Google "Miss America Pageant"). This kind of commentary, unacceptable at any age, is all too common in the media and our everyday lives. But I'm not feminist. In fact, I've always prided myself on not being a feminist. I like it when my husband does things for me, opens doors and carries bags, and I even let him pay my bills once in a while. But in this new role I've been given as a mother of a daughter, a little baby daughter who still is presumably young enough to be molded and taught things, I can't help but wonder how and how early we learn to do this. How young are we when we are taught these things? And how can I teach her?

                The answer to the first question is clear on a Monday morning at story time at the Loveland Public Library. Mostly girls, the audience and participants comprise a who's who of local fashion role models under two feet tall. I'm still adjusting to the shock that the baby I had thought for nine months was surely a boy came out to be a girl, and I'll be the first to admit that dressing my daughter has become one of the unexpected joys of motherhood for me. There's just nothing more fun to do with a baby girl than to dress her up in cute little clothes. Why should we care about the message it sends to our daughters when some of their earliest social interactions are preceded by a significant amount of fussing over the way they look? Aren't the matching polka dot tutus worth it? Aren't the leather jeans and cowboy boots? I've seen a necklace on a baby and thought it was adorable. And then there are the tiny pink sparkly Tom's shoes small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. I'll say it one more time to let the cuteness sink in: pink sparkly Tom'ses small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. In a world of sequined headbands, puffy shoulders, ruffled butts, and teddy-bear-eared hoods, doesn't the adorableness of it all outweigh any permanent scars we may be inflicting on our yet impressionable children?

               The answer to question two is a little more troubling. As moms, we want to give our kids the tools to deal with adversity. We want to teach them how to cope with the way the world works. Should I teach my little girl how to judge and be judged? Should I remind her that her best friend has really chunked up in the last few months, or warn her of the dangers of being friends with an eighteen-month-old who wears a 2T? Should I point out that the bald look is very last-season and so a hat is probably the best choice and that she should have done more tummy time last summer because now she’s going to have to run a few laps around the yard before lunch? Should I not use words like "pretty," "beautiful," and "cute" when I'm talking to her over breakfast or getting our nails done? Along with that, should I avoid objectifying other children by Googling things like "hipster babies" (if you haven't done this yet I highly suggest you devote to yourself the 15 minutes of pure joy and amazement it will bring)? Or is there a better way? Should we instead teach them to love their bodies while it lasts, because once their own kids are born they had better have something else to fall back on, if you know what I mean?  Should we tell them, over and over, how beautiful they are? Because seeing is believing means one thing but when you hear it and know it, it becomes a part of who you are. That's what's so great about story time at the library—every little girl is beautiful in her own way. The little girls don't notice one another's outfits, only the other moms do (we'll leave the psychology of how and why moms try to impress each other through their offspring for another day). After all, is it really so bad that tiny humans are adorable and that we celebrate that, that we fall in love with our babies based, in part, on how they look? Leave the scarring and emotional analytics for a later time, once your kids start to get older and lose some of their cuteness. Luckily, I won't have that problem; I'm the mother of the most beautiful girl in the world.

An earlier version of this essay originally appeared in the June 2014 issue of The Fourth Street Chronicle, Loveland, Colorado.