Things Learned By A SAHD In Lansing

As I said in Wednesday's guest post, there have been a ton of great blogging dads I've enjoyed meeting this year, and one of the most incredible has been Chris of Stay-At-Home Dad In Lansing. In fact, if you're a blogging SAHD (or really any blogging dad), and you haven't bumped into Chris, I'd be surprised because he's a huge community builder that seems to be everywhere. In addition to this and his blog, he maintains Book Dads, a site dedicated to reviewing fatherhood-related books, along with a another site, Barefoot Books aimed at encouraging children to read. He co-hosts the weekly radio show, Band of SAHD, and can be found on Twitter (@tessasdad) regularly re-tweeting links from other dads or on their blogs leaving thoughtful comments. Of course, Chris's diverse involvement may have something to do with his interesting and eclectic background which includes working as a cook, appliance salesman, teacher, child abuse prevention educator, sportswriter, recreation coordinator, communications manager, and private investigator--oh and he ran a skate board shop and respite care business ...at the same time. Frankly, I'm in awe of the guy. And yet, Chris is proud to say that being a SAHD is tougher and more rewarding than all of these other jobs. Here's some of what he's learned.

Some Things I've Learned Since Becoming A SAHD...

On July 4th, my daughter Tessa turned 15 months old, which means that I've been a stay-at-home dad now for 13 months. I was home for the 8 weeks of maternity, but I don't consider that my official start date as a stay-at-home dad. That was more like the training program or boot camp so to speak. Let's call it boot camp, since I was basically systematically broken down into a shell and rebuilt into the man I am today.

Over these past 13-15 months, I've learned a lot about myself. Since I'm so unbelievably blessed to have been asked by the Godfather of the Dad Blog to write a guest post on The Lunchbox, I'm going to show off some of the things I have learned over that time.

* My daughter would rather play with the toilet paper on the roll, than play with the hundreds of dollars worth of toys she owns.

* Poop can go airborne. The positive of this is if successfully dodged, it allows you to think you might be Neo from The Matrix.

* Sometimes you really don't want to know the answer to the question: "What's in your mouth?"

* A few things which can cause a huge meltdown in our home: closing the dishwasher door so a certain little person can't pull out all the silverware, putting up the gate to keep said little person out of the kitchen and asking if Tessa wants cheese only to find out we're out of cheese.

* I really like depriving myself of things! (Per doctor's orders I have to say 10 repetitions of this 3 times a day)

* A house with a baby/toddler is impossible to keep clean. Think Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain.

* I didn't think it was possible, but there is someone more obsessed with boobs than me (although for different reasons I would imagine).

* Taking pride in one's personal hygiene is vastly overrated.

* When mommy is happy, everyone is happy (Again, I have to repeat this daily per doctor's orders.)

* The bathroom is no longer a sanctuary, but a maelstrom of subterfuges meant to emasculate and demoralize you.

* I can throw tantrums too when I'm tired, hungry and/or wet. Wet? Don't ask.

* Contrary to what you might think, getting kicked or hit accidentally in the stones on a consistent basis over an extended length of time will not cause you to develop a superhuman immunity to that kind of "attack."

* Reading is not always fundamental. Repeated aloud readings of Goodnight Moon may be enjoyed endlessly by your little one, but could cause one to participate in self-mutilating activities like eye-gouging or head-banging.

Now for the obligatory cute and adorable item to close out these kinds of lists...

* There's nothing better in the world than reading Goodnight Moon to your daughter for the umpteenth time only to be surprised at her looking up at you with a big smile and saying her first, "Dada Dada!"

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The Pirate And Dawn Of The Girly Girls

With the number of dads who blog growing, I am constantly meeting new fathers who are all-around impressive,and I'm pleased to have one of them guest posting today. *Seth, The Didactic Pirate, has been sailing the blogging seas for just over a year, and over that period, he's already earned a solid reputation within the dad community. There are two things I have to point out about Seth that I admit to having mixed feelings about. On one hand he's a fellow DC Comics fan whom I'm envious of because he's been to Comic Con. Yet, on the other hand he also teaches English (writing and rhetoric) at a large college, which both scares and intimidates the hell out of me. (I can only imagine the number of times he's wanted to reach for a red pen to correct the way I slaughter verb tenses or any number of other egregious such errors.) Regardless, I'm sure you'll enjoy Seth's guest post as well as his regular writing as The Didactic Pirate. (*pseudonym)

Dawn of the Girly Girls

My wife came home yesterday with new swim goggles for our eight-year-old daughter. They’re Spiderman goggles, and they’re totally excellent. They’re sleek and shaped like the ones Michael Phelps would’ve worn in the Olympics – if he’d been even more awesome. They’re red with a black webbing design, and, they say Spiderman on them, and the packaging says when you wear them you get that tingling Spidey Sense whenever danger approaches. (Before you ask: after searching online, I learned that sadly, they do not make them in adult sizes.)

My daughter Riley loved them right away. “These are totally cool!” she crowed. We ripped them out of the package and she tried them on.

“Do you feel your spider sense tingling?” I asked.

“Of course not, Daddy. We’re in the backyard. There’s no villains here.”

“Ah. Good point.”

We sat on our back porch for a while as she gazed around happily, through the lens of her Spidey goggles. But after a little while, I noticed her mood shifting. Subtle, but discernable.

“What’s up?” I asked her.

“I don’t know if I can wear these at the pool,” she said slowly, pulling them off.

“How come?”

“Well… if I do, other kids will say I like Boy Stuff.”

Huh. Wait. What?

“What do you mean by Boy Stuff?” I asked.

“You know. Boy Stuff. Like superheroes.”

I wasn’t quite sure how to respond. This issue had never come up before, not in a tangible way. Sure, the kid was sucked into the Disney Princess vortex when she was a toddler, but she left that behind a couple years ago, and her tastes have transitioned evolved. In the last year, she’s become a devoted aficionado of super crime fighting. She knows the secret identity names of all past Green Lanterns. She knows her X-Men from her Avengers. And her love for these pop culture cornerstones appears to be an honest, sincere kid love – I swear I didn’t push this on her. She found it on her own. When we’re in the car, she asks which superheroes we should both be that day. When she’s in the bathtub, her action figures are having undersea battles. She no longer dresses up in scratchy polyester Cinderella gowns. Instead, she wears her silver cape and her Action Belt. On occasion, she wields a sword.

What I’m saying is, this is not a Girly Girl. And with all due respect to princesses everywhere, I’m thrilled.

Riley has never been one to let her likes and dislikes be shaped by her peers. She’s shown no interest in things Bieber, Jonas, or Cyrus. And the idea that she might feel like she wasn’t allowed to like something that she honestly did like – well, it really, really bothered me. Especially since this was suddenly about acceptable gender roles. Much as we like to say that we’re not shackled to such outdated stereotypes, we still are. Of course we are. We let girls kick ass… but only if they can look cute the whole time, and not kick ass too much. And it’s same for boys. We all know showing vulnerability and honest emotion on the playground is the fast track to a good pummeling. I have no patience for that crap, any of it. But I know that as Riley gets older, these influence will invade her world, and be out of my control.

So this was a surprise, this sudden concern about how her love of “Boy Stuff” would be perceived by others. Forget about the fact that superheroes are for everyone, duh. My daughter had just crossed the line into the realm of gender politics, which was making her feel self-conscious.

Not to mention putting a big potential damper on her future crime fighting career.

“Well,” I said cautiously, “tell me this. Do you like superheroes?”

It would be fine if she didn’t, of course. It would be ok if this was where she told me that she didn’t really like that stuff at all, but only pretended to for my sake. Sure, my heart would be crushed FOREVER, but that’s cool.

“Yes,” she said, “of course I like that stuff!” She seemed momentarily indignant that I would question her devotion to heroes, and to the ongoing fight for justice in the universe.

“Well, isn’t that all that matters? Shouldn’t you get to like whatever you want to like?”

Her brow wrinkled. “But, what if they make fun of me?”

“Who?”

“Girls. And also boys.”

This was a real concern for her. I could see it in her face.

I chose to downplay the issue, trying not to make a big deal out of it. I didn’t ask if there’d been some incident at school this past year, kids who made fun of her for leaping around at recess pretending to be SuperAwesomeGirl. I kept it simple and casual, telling her that boys and girls were allowed to like whatever they wanted, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with that. And anyone who said otherwise deserved to get pounded by super hammer fists of fury. (Just kidding. But I did try to be as clear as possible about the first part.)

She seemed to mull it over for all of .35 milliseconds before getting distracted by something else. We moved on to other topics. It was yet another discussion with my daughter where the only person left to ponder the impact afterwards was me.

The next day we went to the pool. It was relatively crowded with lots of little kids around her age. I handed Riley her goggles, and she strapped them onto her head without thinking. She dove under the water to test their durability, and popped back up. I noticed a couple girls around her age, or maybe a little older, looking at her. I chose to believe they were looking at her goggles out of jealousy. They probably wanted to fight underwater crime too. I wanted to tell them they could-- they could battle evil and still maintain whatever level of socially-accepted femininity they chose to embrace.

My daughter dove underwater, squirmed around in some sort of imaginary aquatic battle, and then popped back up again, spitting water.

“These are SO COOL! Do I look cool?” she asked excitedly.

You bet you do, crime fighter.

Seth can also be found navigating the waters of Twitter @DidacticPirate, and he's also a contributing writer at Dad Revolution.

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How To Get A Role In Mad Men

Like umpteen million other people, my wife and I have wished we could be characters in Mad Men. Thanks to a "lucky break" we got our chance. Watch.

Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab!

Yeah, and we've got our drinks ready and the DVR set for the premier.

By the way, as the stay-at-home dad, I've also daydreamed about a twisted Mad Men episode with this gem--The Lost Script of SAHD Men. It's a gender role reversal take using nothing but actual lines from the show in which Don takes care of the kids and Betty brings home the bacon. Read it and other great stuff over at Man of the House.com, the new magazine for today's Don Drapers and sponsor of the first blogging conference just for guys, the Modern Media Man Summit.

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Soundtrack To Friendship

After Saturday's book signing I had the opportunity to spend the evening out on the town with friends. Anymore it's rare that we're able to get together like this. In fact, I can't even remember the last time I've been with them let alone going to a club. But several years ago that wasn't the case as we would go out three and four times a week.

It sounds stupid now, spending so many nights up that late and then forcing ourselves to get out of bed for work a few hours later only to do it all over again that next evening. But being drenched in the laughing, and the commiserating, and and the celebrating and the dancing, outweighed the foggy, hammering hangovers we knew would be waiting for us in the morning. These moments of idiocy (and we were idiots) created a bond between us, and we reveled in the temporary freedom granted us as we escaped from the more confining aspects our lives (specifically our jobs in the increasingly demanding real estate business).

As I said before, that was years ago. Years. It's surreal to mark the distance between then and now in such a vague context, but it's easier to explain things in those terms as opposed to the number of marriages, divorces, breakups, friendship-ending arguments, pregnancies, moves, and job losses that have occurred since then. For reasons both good and bad, our merry band has fragmented according to the edicts of real life. That's how it goes. Nothing lasts.

My friends and I know those days are over, an admission made whenever one of us predicts that sporadic reunions such as this past weekend's, will be "just like old times." And to some extent Saturday did offer moments reminiscent of those memorable nights together. We laughed, we drank, we danced. We were minor idiots (minor in the sense that the utter stupidity of before was blunted by a since-gained respect for the consequences of such behavior).

Yet despite all the familiar fun, it felt different--not for the obvious reasons, but in the sense that everyone seemed like an altered version of themselves. It was as if the last few years had strained out every ounce of the person I once knew, and left them instead with fear, pain, frustration and loneliness, the combination of which formed a tone of desperation in their voices as they each summed up their lives in two words: "fucked up."

I understood what they were saying; I had been there too. Even so, this couldn't prevent the helplessness that overcame me as I watched my friends splinter off at the end of the evening. The feeling only intensified listening to my best friend talk later about her struggles as we sat outside of her place eating greasy, Jack in the Box burgers that always taste like the most delicious food ever in the early morning hours after draining a bottle of vodka together.

Her story and that of her husband's was particularly gut-wrenching because the two of them are the best friends I have ever had. They are the ones who were always there for me and who never let me quit as I endured the darkest period of my own life. Now, however, things were diametrically the opposite, causing me to grasp the drastic level of change that has affected all my friends.

This same thought greeted me later that morning as I rolled off my friend's couch, suddenly reminded like an amnesiac whose memories have return, why l quit smoking, drink minimally and go to bed before 10:30. By the time I left, that thought had dissolved into a poignant sadness, a feeling I have yet to fully escape from.

Driving home, I turned on the CD player. When the music started, it dawned on me that my wife had switched out my disk with a soundtrack to one the Twilight movies. I mention this detail only because, as we all know, no story is worth telling these days unless it in some way involves dysfunctional, forlorn, vampires, and buff, pouty-lipped werewolves; so who am I to buck the trend? Still, despite my disdain for all things blood sucking, I couldn't bring myself to change it to another CD.

There's something about hearing just the right song, at just the right time, at just the right volume that envelopes you in reassurance like a sun-warmed towel that you wrap yourself in after stepping out of cold water. It becomes a soundtrack of sorts, accentuating your current emotional state while suspending you above the circumstances of the present moment. It's an enigmatic catalyst that unexplainably triggers both happiness and sadness together at the same time with a power that demonstrates why music is so adept at accessing the rawest elements of our humanness.

I miss my friends.

I don't know why I'm sharing all this, especially when most people have no idea who my friends are. Maybe I'm doing it to sort things out in my own head, or maybe it's because I feel a need to capture the context of my friends' lives now in the hopes that it will mark the beginning of better days ahead. Or maybe it's because I can't figure out why a damn song with essentially irrelevant lyrics, from a movie I can't stand, causes my eyes to well up as I play it over and over.

PS. To my Canadian friends, I apologize if you cannot watch the video via YouTube; however, props to your homeland for producing Metric, the band that sings this. (You can find the video on MySpace.)

PPS. To my fellow Twilight haters, if you decide to watch this try to endure. I know, I know, but if I of all people managed to make it, you can too.

"All Yours"
- Metric

Other lives, always tempted to trade
Will they hate me for all the choices I made?
Will they stop when they see me again?
I can't stop now I know who I am

Now I'm all yours, I'm not afraid
You're all mine, say what they may
And all your love, I'll take to the grave
And all my life starts now

Tear me down, they can't take you out of my thoughts
Under every scar there's a battle I've lost
Will they stop when they see us again?
I can't stop now I know who I am

Now I'm all yours, I'm not afraid
You're all mine, say what they may
And all your love, I'll take to the grave
And all my life starts

I'm all yours, I'm not afraid
You're all mine, say what they may
And all your love, I'll take to the grave
And all my life starts
Starts now

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