Author: bperica

Those First 20 Months

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Don’t run. Don’t run from this. I know, you had these grand plans. Fatherhood doesn’t mean those plans have to be scrapped. Modified, perhaps. Delayed, most likely. But scrapped? No.

Impending fatherhood can do some crazy things to you. A part of you might want to tuck tail and run. We are selfish beings after all. In the moment, it is all too easy to see the coming changes as the way you are going to lose your freedoms.

I won’t lie. Some freedoms disappear. Some just temporarily. Some other freedoms for a little while longer. But as you wade deeper and deeper into fatherhood, those freedoms will come back. Normal will be erased, redefined, and can slowly return to something resembling a healthy, balanced lifestyle.

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You won’t get to help complete her first puzzle.

But first there will be dirty diapers, lots of them. Also, there won’t be sleep, at least not restful sleep. Your life will be interrupted by a baby and within that interruption, there are hundreds more interruptions, coming at the worst moments after just two hours of sleep, or at 4 am, or in the middle of a book, or in the middle of a job when you are facing a deadline. And your checking account will take a hit. Even if you get a ton of gifts at multiple baby showers, you will think there is a leak in your bank. And in the toughest moments, you might mourn the old you. Where did that carefree you go? You thought you had to be responsible before? Huh, you will say out loud, I wish I could talk to that old me and let him know how easy he has got it.

You could just remain that person. After all, many people shirk the mantle of fatherhood. I don’t recommend it though. I have only been a father for 20 months, but just in case you decide to take even just the first 20 months off, here is some of what you will miss.

Your daughter’s first smile. Her very first laugh. Her. First. Laugh. Isn’t that amazing?

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You won’t get pictures like this.

You won’t get to teach her one of her first words. You won’t get to cheer her on as she makes her very first army crawl across the living room.

You won’t get to pick clothes out for her. You won’t get to dress her in a new outfit for the very first time.

You won’t get to look at her in awe and start to see her become something that resembles a little of you and a little of the woman you loved long before your daughter was even in your imagination.

You won’t get to hear her say dada for the first time. You won’t get to hear her say your actual name for the first time, like I did today.

You won’t be able to scoop her off the ground after her first fall. You won’t get to have a hug from her. Those hugs, well, there is nothing like them.

The firsts don’t end at 20 months. They keep on going and going and going. Never in my life have I heard someone speak highly of a father who skipped out on those firsts. Can you even be a father if you skip this? Maybe. Eventually. But that road back is going to be a lot more challenging than just sticking this out.

If you could talk to your future self, say twenty years down the road, regardless of that person’s decision, I am confident he would say the same thing. You should be a father and a husband first. You will find out that all the other titles, adventures, and stories out there, although great they can be, will fade away once you embrace the most important role you will ever have. Father.

Dads Saving the Day

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I saw these videos of dads who have saved the day and had to share them on here. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but number 5 is a very solid effort. The first time I watched it I thought the dad was sprinting after the girls on the Little Tikes car, because putting two girls on a car like that and pushing it down a hill just seems like a bad idea. But the dad is actually saving another kid from being run over by those girls. Another great video, number 2, which is the most casual, but still quite impressive, save on the list.

Watch the videos from Buzzfeed here.

I saw these videos a while back, but I thought of them again on Saturday. We had just arrived for brunch at a restaurant. I was standing and holding London on my left arm/hip waiting for the high chair to arrive at our table. I was looking to my right, when I felt London’s weight shift in my arms. She had started to lunge out of my hold, head first. My right arm swooped around and saved her from sailor-diving into our brunch table. There is no video of it, but there was definitely some daddy-pride in the aftermath of that moment.

Dear Milwaukee

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I know it had been a while, but I loved our very brief reunion. You reminded me that it is very easy to gain weight living in Wisconsin. With all the cheese curds, beef sticks, delicious beer, and six-year aged cheddar to eat, when would I ever find the time to work it off? It’s hard keeping up with your diet. By the looks of it, quite a few of your residents agree.

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Thanks, Wikipedia.

Driving over your Hoan Bridge still scares me a little bit. I think of the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis every time I drive your span and then I think about what I would do or think during the long, long drop to the frigid waters of Lake Michigan. My face would probably freeze in a really stupid look and it would remain that way until I hit the water. Thanks for not collapsing.

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One view from the old commute.

I was reminded of the commute I had to an old job, specifically, just how damn beautiful it was. And yes, I took the Hoan Bridge because the view is worth it even though the bridge itself looks brittle. No, it wasn’t like driving up the coast of an ocean, but it was damn near it as long as you didn’t pay attention to the weather and focused on that strip of water that looks like it was pulled from the Caribbean and placed right there off the shore just for you.

This leads me to the weather. I had not forgotten that your weather can suck, but maybe it wasn’t the freshest memory in my head. After last weekend, you’ve remedied that. It was cloudy all weekend, windy, highs in the mid 50s. Honestly, I’ve seen that weather from you during nearly every month in the calendar. I remember a July 20th that felt like the middle of March.

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The beginning of a dynasty. Horizon League Champs 2010. I am in the upper right, arms outstretched.

Oh, and back to that commute. It took me to UW-Milwaukee, where I helped coach swimming for two years. I returned there to see some of the swimmers who were swimming at the time I was coaching and it was just perfect. These swimmers are now professionals (accountant, real estate agent, attorney, doctor), husbands, wives, and even some parents. I got to stand around and drink crappy beer with them (thanks for that awful taste in my mouth, Miller Lite) and share stories with one another about adulthood, but also about our brief, but fantastic stints as UWM swimmer and UWM coach, respectively. Sometimes those two years feel like peak career for me. That is ridiculous, I know. But still, do you know how many coaches coach for decades and never win a championship, never see their swimmers annihilate whole championship heats at conference? I saw both at UWM.

Milwaukee, I want to thank you for inexplicably plucking me from Colorado and setting me down on the shores of Lake Michigan. What a different land you are…from your cuisine, to your crap roads, to the stunning blues of the lake. It all combines to make you one sweet, little, big city.

The Onion: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

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In the aftermath of another mass shooting all The Onion had to do was change the location names in a previously published article and republish it. Voila! In case you missed it, here it is: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.

I’m also posting links to a few other important articles and then one great video from Jon Oliver.

“It’s not about mental illness: The big lie that always follows mass shootings by white males.” From Salon.

And this wonderful post by a gun-owning Australian who writes about a conversation on a bus with a Southerner:

I explained how Australian gun laws worked and how they had changed in recent years. No semi-automatic rifles unless you were the primary landholder in a rural area. All assault style weapons outlawed. No handguns unless you were a member of a gun club and went through a rigorous screening process.

“Gee,” he said, “I wish we had that. But this country is too far gone. The guy robbing my house has a colt .45 and so I need me a colt .45. If he’s got a pump, I need a semi-auto 12 gauge.”

Read the rest here.

And the always fun comparison of deaths from gun violence versus deaths from terrorism.

And last, watch Jon Oliver go off on those who use every mass shooting event as an opportunity to talk about mental health like they care about it and then do absolutely nothing.

This is mostly a blog about my journey as a father and a husband. Sharing my stance on gun control is absolutely relevant to my original intentions when creating this blog. Thus, you might see more about gun control on here in the future.

SAHD Convention

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I found this good recap of the Annual At-Home Dads Convention, recently held in Raleigh (last year it was in Denver). I agree with nearly everything in the article except for this:

“Minivans are cool now. They’re all tricked out.”

Read the whole article here. 

Music Class in my Active Wear

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After music class this morning, this video is absolutely spot-on.

SAHD Guidelines for Music Class

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Yesterday was my first music class with London. I need to write some things down so I remember them for the next nine classes to come…

Try as hard as you can to act like there is another dad in the room. You are the only one, but be as comfortable as if there were three other SAHDs present.

Try not to sweat when you’re feeling like all eyes are on you because all eyes aren’t on you. It just feels that way because you’re the only SAHD there. IMG_7217

Just in case you do sweat a lot like yesterday, wear a darker shirt. Yesterday you wore a light blue shirt and within ten minutes you had a band of belly sweat visible on your shirt and by the end of the class it was impossible to hide the fact that you were pitting out.

Don’t drink a venti iced coffee from Starbucks right before music class. Trying to pee while holding London is not as easy as it once was. And yesterday you had to do it twice, right before class and immediately afterward.

Take pride in the fact that the first toddler on toddler assault yesterday was not London’s doing, but don’t forget to corral her if she starts winding up for a nice slap across the face, her customary greeting for babies.

If the opportunity arises, share London’s age. From past experience, I know there has to be someone there wondering why there is a three-year-old acting like a sixteen-month-old. Well, let them down gently, it’s because she is sixteen months old.

Also, be kind to anyone if they assume I am babysitting. Just because I am a dad and I am here with my daughter does not mean I am babysitting. I am parenting. No parent should feel like they are babysitting their own kid.

Do not assume a child’s age. Yes, he or she might be significantly smaller than London, but they might be six months to a a year older.

Just try to fit in. Try not to think of yourself as the pariah. You won’t be if you remember these things you’ve written down here. Oh yeah, and don’t sweat as much.

Shots From the Nashville Weekend

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We were in Nashville for a wedding last weekend. None of us had been there so it was fun being introduced to a new city and its offerings. One of the first things we tried, that I particularly enjoyed, was Barista Parlor. It came recommended to me from a friend who had gone to it before and it just so happened to be a five minute walk from our Airbnb house. Their cold brew coffee is delightfully smooth. I had several of them over the weekend.

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On the way up to the Fontanel Mansion. London rides in the bus like a big girl. This is so much better than holding her! That sounds bad, but she’s getting heavy and she’s already strong.

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The great room at the mansion. We were the youngest people on the tour of the mansion by 20+ years and the only ones along who didn’t know one damn thing about country music or popular, television variety shows of the early 1980s. Factoid about the vertical log in the exact middle of this photo: Chuck Norris signed it. Strongest log in the house, the tour guide told us.

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Not the first time I’ve been in a shower like this, but the first time I’ve had my picture taken while I’ve been in a shower like this. It’s worth documenting once.

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When family selfies go well.

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When family selfies go horribly.

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Had to get some weenies at I Dream of Weenie, where they also sell Professional Weenie Handler pins.

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Nashville was showing off the morning after the wedding. We had a great time walking around downtown. Our biggest gripe about the entire downtown area and other parts of Nashville is parking. Whoever owns Premier Parking in Nashville is making a lot of money. $16 to park for two hours? C’mon, this isn’t San Francisco. On our way to the airport yesterday we stopped by Opryland to look at the botanic gardens. No way that was going to happen because once we arrived we saw that parking was $23. Nice try, Opryland.

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Panorama from the pedestrian bridge in downtown Nashville.

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Other than the cost of parking (and almost anything along Honky Tonk row) Nashville really impressed us. We would love to go back again. Friendly people. Great food and coffee. Of course, good bars too. And a river going right through the middle of a city can only make things better.

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We were all over with traveling by the end of yesterday, but especially this little gal. She did so well! Our next family trip is to Breckenridge for another wedding and then a week after that we are off to Milwaukee for a much-needed reunion with the Brew City and an opportunity to introduce London to family and friends!

Ten Insults SAHDs Hear

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I read this great article yesterday. A stay-at-home dad writes about the ten insults he hears as a SAHD.

All of them are so accurate and pretty universal. I think I have heard eight out of ten. I have yet to hear, “It must be nice not to work” and “Seriously, you change diapers?”

Great read. Here’s the link.

What Makes You Happy?

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With encouragement from my wife, I am very slowly reading The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. I have enjoyed reading about Rubin’s year-long journey to a happier life.

The book includes a nice mix of practical and philosophical advice for a happier life. In Screen Shot 2015-09-06 at 11.59.48 AMthe last chapter I read, Rubin spent a fair amount of time writing about what makes her happy. She kept asking herself, am I happy doing this? She asked her readers, what makes you happy? In response, Rubin and her blog readers concluded that what truly makes them happy is not always what they wish made them happy. For example, Rubin might be happiest being at home reading a book without interruption, but in her mind she is tormented by the thought that she might be happier on a hike even though she knows perfectly well that is not going to make her as happy.

Since reading the chapter I have been thinking about what sort of activities make me happy. At this point in my life, being able to do something without interruption makes me happiest. It does not really matter what that something is. If I can sit down and watch a movie without interruption, I am thrilled. Read a chapter of a book without being interrupted? So refreshing and invigorating. Refinishing an end table for our living room without an interruption? This actually give me a strong sense of accomplishment, which combined with the effort it takes to refinish furniture, gives me a lasting happiness that helps me through the menial tasks of SAHD duty: diaper changes, bottle service, dishes, laundry, house-cleaning, etc.

So, today, I set out to do a few things without interruption. One, go to Novo Coffee and read a couple of articles in Vanity Fair without interruption (done). Two, write a blog without interruption (currently in progress). Three, go home and eat lunch while watching an hour of television without interruption (coming soon). Four, work on refinishing an end table without the worry of being interrupted (also, coming soon).

Time for number three.

2 Good Documentaries

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I regularly write movie reviews on a Facebook page I created a few years ago. When I feel like it, I’ll post them here as well. Both of the movies mentioned below are currently on Netflix.

Pantani: The Accidental Death of a Cyclist

The common cycling saga one hears about in the US is all about Lance Screen Shot 2015-09-04 at 1.24.48 PMArmstrong’s rise and fall, but this doc focuses on a cyclist who I’m embarrassed to mention I did not even know. Pantani raced in an age where every single team in the Tour and the Giro doped.

Had he been able to continue cycling, there does not seem to be doubt in people’s minds that he would have far exceeded Armstrong as the most successful doping cyclist to ever live.

The guy was a machine, seemed like he was made to ride a bike in a way that Armstrong never was. As soon as he hopped on his mom’s bike for his first training ride it was clear to his parents and his first coach that he was a prodigy. They were correct. But going pro turned out far more challenging than Pantani expected. The length of the rides were not a problem. The climbs were not a problem. The major challenge came when Pantani was introduced to the seedy underbelly of the cycling world at that time. This documentary follows Pantani’s arc as a professional, from his meteoric rise to the sudden, sad denouement.

Point and Shoot

This is a zany documentary about a zany kid who got his MA in IR from Screen Shot 2015-09-04 at 1.25.19 PMGeorgetown and then decided he hadn’t done anything cool, wasn’t a man, didn’t know crap, so he rode his motorcycle across the Middle East, came home, and then went back to fight alongside friends he made in Libya against Gaddafi and his army. Oh, and he was also imprisoned for five months during Libya’s civil war.

The guy is unique and he knows it. His moderate to severe OCD also plays a prominent role in his journey as would be expected. It’s a fascinating tale and it makes for one wild ride.

Buy Me A Beer

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No one knows what it is like to be a stay-at-home parent unless they have
done it themselves.

Maybe you watched your kids for a long weekend so your spouse could get a break. Maybe you watched your kids for a week while your spouse was away. Maybe you actually used all your paternity or maternity leave after your child was born. These are all great things to do. Necessary, in my view.

IMG_1018_43927But doing all of those stints with your kid doesn’t give you enough experience to know what being a stay-at-home parent (SAHP) is like.

There is an end you can see in all three scenarios mentioned above. Of course,  for SAHDs or SAHMs, there is also an end, but well beyond the horizon and out of sight. As a SAHD, I’m not yearning for the end of this job, but until you grasp the permanence of staying at home, you haven’t gotten a taste for the real thing.

And then you must prepare yourself because that’s the tip of the iceberg. There are so many challenging aspects of stay-at-home parenting. I have mentioned some of them in previous posts: limited adult-to-adult communication, a decent dose of isolation, the fact that you’re not making money, and facing the stigma associated with being a SAHD, which is certainly one thing SAHDs have to deal with a little more than SAHMs.

So why am I writing about this? Well, it’s long overdue. I have talked to too many people since becoming a SAHD who have never been a SAHD or SAHM themselves who imply that they know what it is like. Yet, we don’t do this in conversations with other professionals (and yes, I’m implying that I’m a professional and, once again, if you don’t get that, you’ve never been a stay-at-home parent) like doctors, accountants, or teachers. We don’t assume to know what daily challenges they face because we once used an epipen, did our own taxes using TurboTax, or completed a math problem on a chalkboard for an audience, respectively. So why do so many people assume they know the day-to-day ups and downs of SAHDs and SAHMs because they spend the weekend around their kids?

Because they assume it is easy. They assume it just must be like the weekend over and over again. How hard can that be?

I think the real problem is that being a stay-at-home parent is not viewed and talked about as a real job by enough people. Too many people talk about it as a hobby. I cannot tell you how far from the truth calling this a hobby is. Hopefully, I’ve conveyed that from time to time on this blog.

Next time you find yourself talking to a SAHP, treat them like a professional, understand that they work 80 hours a week, and buy them a beer because they don’t have a paycheck.

I Shot A Wedding, Here Are Some Of My Favorites

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Last week I had the pleasure of shooting my sister-in-law’s wedding. The first time she told me I was going to shoot her wedding, she was not even engaged, so I knew whenever the big day arrived I would have some sort of responsibility. Of course I took the photos for free. In fact, this being the first wedding I shot, I think that helped. I felt like there was barely any pressure and maybe that actually helped with having confidence. Today I wanted to share a few of my favorites from the beautiful backyard wedding. The above photo is of a sign my wife painted for the entrance to my in-laws’ backyard.

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Before things got underway last Saturday I took pictures of the beautiful venue. My in-laws had a beer garden in their backyard. Can you believe it? And great beer on tap.

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Found this girl cruising through the yard. Cute as ever.

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Once it was time for the wedding to begin I took up a great position where I was able to see Kendra come out of the house. Only her parents and I could see her because she had not yet walked around the corner of the house. I took so many shots of this moment.

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It is a weird thing to be given permission to photograph a private conversation, to get as many great photos as you can from a deeply personal moment. This was the first time I have ever been tasked with shooting such a moment. From the look on Kendra’s face, I know Tim was saying something touching to his daughter, something for her ears only, yet I have twenty pictures of the moment. The words I will never know, but the pictures will be seen by many. I find the difference intriguing.

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Not quite confident enough on her feet to be a flower girl, London makes her grand entrance with assistance from Kate. My beauties.

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In this series of photos, Kendra’s parents walk her down the aisle. I probably took fifteen to twenty shots during this. Tim’s expression does not change one iota from shot to shot, it is frozen in this fatherly, stoic, and proud gaze.

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Of all the photos I took, this is my favorite. The groom, Jake, has an expression of joy on his face that I have never seen before so I was so happy to see that I had caught it.

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The newlyweds. The purple wedding. The perfect backyard for a wedding with a two-week notice.

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The happy couple with their Max, also sporting purple.

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The groom serenades his bride. Good sock game.

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By candlelight and the flashlights of four to five cellphones.

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Under the big top for a little more music and drink.

The Selma Snub

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Going into the awkwardly long, movie award season, I remember Birdman had most Screen Shot 2015-08-19 at 4.23.34 PMof the momentum. Having seen it, I was not that surprised. The movie is shot in such an innovative way. The story was interesting. The acting superb. But the ending, the ending left something to be desired. Most people I have spoken with about Birdman mention that they walked out of the theater angry, confused, and generally wondering, what the hell just happened there? It seemed like the three positives I mentioned already, the cinematography, story, and acting overshadowed the overall effect, which was meh.

Come Oscar night, one could see the award for best picture coming a mile away, the meeting of it and Birdman was inevitable. At that point in time I had not seen all the Oscar favorites, Selma among them. I was extraordinarily late to Selma, having just watched it a few nights ago, but now I know just how badly that movie was robbed when it came to the award for best picture.

Selma is a movie that instantly grabs ahold of you and shakes you, it makes sure you are watching, it pleads with you to remember what you are seeing, and it begs you to not look away. It is powerful, important, and artistic. As a whole, it works in ways that Birdman and other movies from last year did not.

As I watched, I kept asking, how was this movie so drastically overlooked? Why is Oprah not in more movies? Because in this movie she instantly conveyed powerful emotion without even speaking in most scenes. What did Birdman have that this one did not besides Michael Keaton stomping through Times Square in his whitey tighties?

I can think of a number of things Selma has which Birdman did not. To borrow from MLK Jr., it has the “fierce urgency of now,” a story, unfortunately, quite relevant to today’s ongoing racial tensions and institutionalized racism. It evoked an important sense of disgust for a big slice of this country’s past. I think as Americans we occasionally have to be reminded of how blacks were treated then and how they are still victims today because of the color of their skin. To learn the latter, all that is required of us is to turn on the news or read a newspaper. For the former, sometimes it takes a talented director like Ava DuVernay to bring the events of Selma to the big screen in such a way that haunts us for hours and days to come. And, hopefully, longer.

Hollywood is selective about what trends it chooses to buck. The trend of the white, male director seems to be a lasting one. The trend of making the majority of movies for a male target audience ages 16-25 is here to stay. These trends should be bucked in favor of bringing back a more important trend, that of awarding the Oscar to the best picture of the year, not just the trendiest.

The House Is Not For Sale

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The last time I had a garage sale I priced every item, including the house. There were no takers that day. And on Saturday, when I finally had another garage sale this house was not for sale.

Instead, this garage sale was one in a series of steps we needed to take in order to finish the basement. There is a lot of stuff down there that we do not use and no longer have a need to hold onto, such as English class notes from UW, which I mentioned a couple posts ago.

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Ready for the deals!

Saturday was a huge success for us. At the end of the day we did not move that much stuff back into the basement. The majority of goods we sold and then we had one carload of them left for Goodwill.

Among the items, which did not sell, is a dining room table with two leaf inserts and six chairs. Interested? Leave a comment because this thing is going up on Craigslist for a sweet price. There were some leftover books, a few from my grad school days at DU. It wasn’t all that surprising to know the demand for The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security is not that high, but why not try? But my two copies of Goodfellas on DVD (one of them unopened!) didn’t sell either. Are people insane? Have they not seen this movie? One of the all-time best. Watch it. Tonight.

One of the puzzling things about garage sales is what sells and what does not sell. A sturdy, still-in-good-condition wingback chair from the American Revolution did not sell, but someone bought Gone In 60 Seconds (eww, 24% RottenTomatoes score) for a dollar? This does not make sense. And that chair, well, it’s not quite that old and it found its way back into the basement. I had a collection of Pepsi cans for the last 16 years. It was a set of 24 collector cans from the release of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. They sold for $3 after pricing them down from $10. Although when I was 16 and collecting these cans I had a fantasy of selling them for a couple hundred dollars sometime in the not-too-distant future, but by 10am on Saturday, selling them for three bucks was one of the best moments of the day.

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Tired now. Ready for a snack!

After the early rush of professional garage sale shoppers, who show up early or even before the sale starts, lump everything they want to buy in a pile, and then ask you what you will part with it for, there was quite the lull. I think we didn’t have any interest for an hour. This cute little lady came by with her push toy looking for some deals. She found some shade instead and a granola bar.

After the lull, the stragglers seriously impressed. One of them bought my Pepsi cans, size XXXL standard issue sweatpants from the University of Wyoming athletic department, a Starbucks shirt from my barista days, and Unbreakable on DVD. One big ticket item was left, my mountain bike. It was time to clear space in the garage for my next bike, which will not be a mountain bike. Plus, these are just some of the repairs the bike needed: new rear tire, new rear wheel, new disc brake pads, new bike seat, some spoke fixing on the front wheel, and a thorough tuneup. After a few hours, I did not think it was going to move. Right about the time we were thinking of packing everything up it sold. I was a little proud of the bike in this moment and of how I had kept it together for so long, even when it meant using gorilla glue to hold the spokes in place.

Now that the bike was gone and it was going on 12, we started packing up. A couple lucky shoppers got an old digital camera for free and a copy of Command and Conquer: Generals for nothing!

But still, the table and chairs remain untouched. Someone still has yet to get that lucky!

“Do you get to stay home with mommy?”

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For over a year now I have been telling people that I stay at home with my daughter. Response to this news falls into two categories.

First response: dismay, followed by an awkward pause in the conversation while IMG_6356recipient of the news digests what I have told them. Their inability to register that there are such people as stay-at-home dads (SAHDs) is obvious on their face and the direction in which the conversation now moves. They typically switch the topic, pointing out London’s cute outfit or smile, etc.

I get this response mostly from older generations. Just the other night after a meal out, I was standing outside of the restaurant holding London. An older woman started talking to us. She was admiring London. The conversation was going well. I love talking with strangers who want to hear about London. Staring at London, the woman asked her, “Do you get to stay home with mommy?”

“No, she gets to stay home with me,” I said it as proudly and happily as possible and looked at her for a reaction. I saw it. A band of confusion moved across her face like a TVs signal being interrupted. God bless her, she tried to recover, but it sure seemed like she had never met a stay-at-home dad before. I also get the feeling that these people assume my role as a SAHD is strictly temporary.

Second response: surprise (but not as much as the people in the first response), excitement, support, and curiosity about meeting a SAHD. Usually these people immediately tell me how awesome it is that I stay at home with my daughter. They tell me that I am doing a great thing. Unlike the first group, people who give me the second response do not assume I dislike this job or am just doing it for a short period of time. Not surprisingly, people in this group are younger and, because of their response, much better to talk to after the SAHD genie is out of the bottle.

Consider this a public service announcement. When you meet a SAHD today, next week, next year, or whenever, give them the second response. You might make their day and make a new friend.

The Next Book For London

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The next book I read to London has impossibly big shoes to fill. What can knock Screen Shot 2015-08-11 at 4.39.35 PM4,100 pages of Harry Potter off the top? Well, it isn’t Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything or ASHONE for short. That’s right, I went full nonfiction science writing for the next book. I needed a change of pace and I am quite sure London won’t notice, except for the expanded vocabulary in Bryson’s work compared to HP.

I love Bill Bryson’s writing. Somehow I had owned ASHONE for ten years and had never read it. London and I cracked open the book a couple of weeks ago, validating my purchase of this book in a Borders (remember them?) in Longmont, Colorado all those years ago. We are only a hundred pages in, but I’ve found that I am not enjoying this as much as his travel writing. There just aren’t as many opportunities in science writing for Bryson to add his signature humor. That said, it’s still an excellent book. Bryson makes the hardest of subjects accessible by writing about them in the common tongue.

One of my favorite passages early on in the book is from chapter two:

…it isn’t possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn’t come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be almost ten thousand miles away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the period at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over thirty-five feet away.

I absolutely love reading about how huge space is. And this is just our solar system.

I always think about God when I think of space, its scale, its never-ending mysteries, because for me, space has always been one of those things in which I see the presence and power of God. Pure awe.

I’m looking forward to the rest of this no-longer-dusty Bryson book.

DVDs $1, Stories Are Free

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This house and its occupants are prepping for a garage sale this week. London’s help is extremely limited to nonexistent. She takes a long time examining every little thing we hand her, so she won’t be determining what we are getting rid of and what we are saving. She is most helpful when she decides to take a long morning nap on a Sunday so we can dig through the basement for potential hot ticket items.

We found lots of things to sell yesterday and just as much to throw away or donate. I discovered I had three copies of Goodfellas. (Hey, if there’s one movie to own several copies of it’s that one.) I have a DVD player to sell, but I can’t seem to locate the power cord or the remote. I am finally going to sell my Star Wars Pepsi can collection from one movie, which was both the most anticipated movie of all time and the most disappointing movie of all time, The Phantom Menace. But this can collection? Pristine. Complete. It represents a lot of work. It represents a lot of soda drinking.

For some reason I still had the majority of my class notes from the University of Wyoming. I chucked them all, but kept a few stories to possibly share on here. I threw out two boxes of old New Yorkers, magazines I had been saving because there was at least one tantalizing article in each magazine. I had lofty visions of getting to all of them some day, but having so many magazines and books I want to read around the house can really stress me out. It almost leads to less reading because I see the stacks everywhere and just think, I’ll never make it, why start now?

So, to those stories. I’m going to close this post with one. Please note, these are not my words. It was an assignment in an undergrad writing class for which you had to use a minimum number of sources to build one story or essay using nothing but quotes, a literary collage. And, here it is…

What I recall isn’t pain but a sense of jarring reversal, as of all motion, sound, and light encountering their massive opposites. I felt grass and dirt against my cheek, and sorrow that Dad was shot, and confusion that I couldn’t reach him. (1)

As I saw the last blue line of my native land fade away like a cloud in the horizon, it seemed as if I had closed one volume of the world and its concerns, and had time for meditation before I opened another. (2)

I shut my eyes, the old morte settled its grip, and the next country gathered itself under my feet. (1)

The grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise. (3)

I waded ashore with measureless relief. The bank was an even slope of waving knee-high grasses and I came up into them and turned to look back. It was a wide river, mistakable for a lake or even an ocean unless you’d been wading and knew its current. Somehow I’d crossed it and somehow was unsurprised at having done so. (1)

There came into view a man, or so it seemed. (4) He had a blue coat and a long brown beard; his eyes were blue and bright, and his face was red as a ripe apple, but creased into a hundred wrinkles of laughter. In his hands he carried on a large leaf as on a tray a small pile of white water-lilies. (4)

“This is what we all find when we reach this country. We’ve all been wrong! That’s the great joke. There’s no need to go on pretending one was right! After that we begin living.” (5)

The words uttered by the person without, affected me as somewhat singular, but what chiefly rendered them remarkable was the tone that accompanied them. It was wholly new. I cannot pretend to communicate the impression that was made upon me by these accents or to detect the degree in which force and sweetness were blended in them. They were articulated with a distinctness that was unexampled in my experience. But this was not all. (6)

“We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised.” (7)

It (the words) imparted to me an emotion altogether involuntary and uncontrollable. When he uttered the words my heart overflowed with sympathy and my eyes with unbidden tears. (6)

He sat down on a rock and swung his feet in a stream–it was deep and swift; it would take him in a moment. I seized his arm. Please, I said. Soon, he replied, which makes better sense under the rules of that country than ours. Very soon! he added, clasping my hands; then unable to keep from laughing, he pushed off from the rock like a boy going for the first cold swim of spring; and the current got him. (1)

Is there a single person on whom I can press belief? No sir. All I can do is say, Here’s how it went. Here’s what I saw. I’ve been there and am going back. Make of it what you will. (1)

 

Sources:

(1) Enger, Leif. Peace Like a River. Atlantic Monthly: New York, 2001.

(2) Irving, Washington. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories. Penguin: New York, 1978.

(3) Tolkien, J.R.R. Return of the King. Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1955.

(4) Tolkien, J.R.R. The Fellowship of the Ring. Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1954.

(5) Lewis, C.S. The Great Divorce. Harper: San Francisco, 1946.

(6) Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland. Oxford: New York, 1994.

(7) Hebrews 6:12. Bible.

 

Blogging Away Resistance

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You may have noticed that for a while in the late spring and early summer I was writing a lot on here. Every weekday I would sit down and write something. I was going strong. I was practicing my craft and sharing whatever came to mind. Traffic to the blog steadily increased too.

And then nothing.

Two-week and three-week blocks would pass without me writing anything at all. And when I wrote, the posts weren’t so much related to raising London at all. There were a few book reviews and a little something about Jon Stewart’s last show.

Some of this absence is explained by some summer and spring trips. We are once again free to move about the country with no complications other than those standard hiccups that come with a baby (even though she wears 3T clothing, she’s still technically a baby).

The rest of the absence can be attributed to me thinking it is healthy to take a break from writing every so often and then just a dearth of ideas. The writing break I’ve always been a fan of. It is healthy, but this break has been unhealthily long due to this creeping feeling that I am just contributing to the noise, that is, the saturation of our world by parenting blogs.

I have been having an internal debate about what is worthy of writing about. There is a part of me that wants to write as much as I can on here. And there is also this part that just does not want to spew forth words just for the sake of it. There is a part of me that realizes the stupidity in having a blog about fatherhood. There are thousands of them out there. And there have been billions of fathers before I became a father. What do I have to contribute to fatherhood that has not already been contributed? Is there anything original for me to unearth, create, or ideate?

Well, for a while now the part of me that answers no to that question has been winning the debate. And I think that is the resistance Steven Pressfield writes about in his amazing work, The War of Art.

Coming up with words to share on this blog is moderately difficult for me. But giving into resistance and batting away those words while admonishing myself for ever thinking they were worth putting out there is very, very easy to do. This is the “War of Art,” and it is so unbelievably hard to be in when you think of yourself as a creative, whether you are drawing, writing, painting, sculpting, photographing, or whatever it is that you create.

I have not written these words anywhere else. Sitting down with my computer now and explaining my absence was as much for me as it was for the followers of this blog. I hope it means I return to regular blogging, but even as I write this I fear the next time the fuel gauge reads empty. That thought alone is almost enough to put a halt to the journey right this minute, but I am not there yet.

Pressfield writes that resistance will bury you. Okay, maybe I was a little buried there for a while, but for now, for now I am above ground.

#JonVoyage

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On Thursday, Jon Stewart will host The Daily Show for one last time.

I started watching Stewart long before I agreed with him on anything. I watched because the show was funny. I watched because Stewart’s show can actually be informative. I watched because his Bush impersonation was both horrible, but also so accurate, like Bush if he was in South Park. I watched because some of what Stewart or his correspondents were joking about challenged my beliefs.

And I watched because of the interviews. As much as Stewart denies it in discussion after discussion, his show is sort of a news show at times, not necessarily because it is striving to be, but because all the rest of the “news” shows on TV do a poor job for the most part. One of the best examples of Stewart posing questions that everyone else on TV is afraid to ask was his relatively recent interview with Judith Miller, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, formerly with the New York Times. If you’re not aware, Miller played a pivotal role in reporting on the Bush administration’s justification for going to war in Iraq. The interview was one of the most awkward moments I have ever watched on the Daily Show, but it was also one of the best. Click here to watch it in full. Below is a CNN mashup of the interview, not nearly as good as the uncut version, but you get a feel for the atmosphere and Stewart’s persistent questioning and Miller’s persistent shirking of any responsibility.

No one on TV interviews like this. Not one person on the big three networks, nor on any of the cable news channels. This, among other reasons, of course, is why anyone who watches TV loses something great this week.

#JonVoyage