the foco dad
a stay-at-home dad muses about raising his two children
Category: Fatherhood
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It’s race week! Time to panic, I mean, spend all week trying not to panic about the upcoming race even though I’ve spent the last three months gearing up for it, which, this year, is a big one––the Horsetooth Half Marathon. If you know anything about this race, you know its distance isn’t really the…
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Trump’s party and their “Christian” message is probably creating more atheists and agnostics than any other point in American history. I’m making an assumption here, an accurate one, I think, but certainly not one for which the necessary studies have been conducted. What leads me to conclude this about Trump and his party are the…
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Last year was the first time Dan Orlovsky’s son, Madden, was on ESPN live for World Autism Awareness Day. I remember coming across the clip on Instagram and it immediately stopped my scroll. I watched it multiple times. I wept. I recognized in Dan the pride he has in his son. It was so touching…
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I wrote the following into the One Line A Day journal I kept for London. March 5, 2019. On the morning drive to pre-K you said you “love hugging God.” Then you started to look out the window and pray, “Dear God, I love you so much.” And then you blew God a kiss. The…
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I just had a weekend with London. We finally concluded the Hunger Games movies with viewings on Friday night, Saturday morning, and Sunday afternoon. At one point during the viewing London told me, “This is what happens in chapter 25 of the book.” Things like this happen when you hang out with London. You think,…
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Cognitive Dissonance is defined as “a mental phenomenon in which people unknowingly or subconsciously hold fundamentally conflicting cognitions. Being confronted by situations that create this dissonance or highlight these inconsistencies motivates change in their cognitions or actions to reduce this dissonance, maybe by changing a belief, by explaining something away, or by taking actions that…
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I am not a devoted hockey fan, but if it’s the Olympics or the Avs in the playoffs, I’ll watch a match. So I was Sunday when I saw Jack Hughes’ golden goal just 1:42 into overtime. To see the excitement of the team was absolutely contagious. I replayed the final minute of the match…
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Denver has a pulse. I have found myself missing the beat of the city lately. I left it with relative ease in June when we packed up everything and moved to Fort Collins, but now that we have had time to settle into our new house and new hometown, I spend a lot of time…
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I do not once remember my parents implying that the key to happiness is money. They expressed that money is important, of course. It pays for a roof over your head, food on your plate, a car in the driveway (or other means to easily get around town), and, if you’re lucky, it pays for…
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Catastrophizing is a bad habit I have developed since becoming a father. I am no idiot, I know where it has its origins: London’s nearly 4-month-long NICU stay and all the things I witnessed during that, all the scares and setbacks we have had with her since then, and the ASD and ADHD diagnoses. Not…
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I run out of patience with my kids when I don’t run. It was years ago when I realized that running had become an essential ingredient in my self-care. I had not run for several days and I had a short fuse with everybody. In the middle of yelling at the kids I was chastising…
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After 15 years in Denver, having parked in a wide variety of places all over the city, and in front of my own house, I took a hard hit to my passenger side corner panel in June. I was fast asleep, it was 12:30, prime sleeping hours for an old ride like me, when a…
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I keep a note on my phone called Quotable. It’s been there for years. Sometimes I add to it once a week. Then months might go by before opening it up and adding another great line or passage from an article or book. The quotable note is often referenced by me to jumpstart a post…
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No one tells you that looking at pictures of your kids from years past is going to hurt so much. It really came as a shock to me when I first registered this response. I heard so many maxims and accepted truths about parenting, especially the oft-repeated it goes by so fast. I always felt…
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When my inbox notified me of a response from the most popular swimming website in the world, I felt like a big door had just opened. This was my break, or really just the evolution of my freelance writing career, which was gonna take off following this gig. I just knew it. The owner and…
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Successful birthday parties for a child on the spectrum are rare, at least they have been for us so far, having just celebrated London’s 12th. The first parties, the preschool parties, don’t count. Those are the easy ones, where everyone is invited. Parents hang around too. Maybe you have a cooler of juice boxes next…
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Being a sibling of a child with special needs is tough. I think about Camden’s voice being stifled and smothered from time to time by London’s voice. Not that she is trying to be rude. She loves a good chat. She loves sharing facts. She loves asking questions. Hang around for an evening and you’ll…