Parenting

The Murder of Renee Good

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Watching the video of Renee Good’s murder is essential viewing in America today. It’s a prerequisite if you deign to defend ICE. And, if you don’t defend ICE, congratulations! You have a conscience.

I have many thoughts about the tragedy, the political implications, the hypocrisy of our “leaders,” and about how I would absolutely love to throw snowballs at ICE agents, but today, I have one reaction. It’s a reaction I have had since the footage dropped. What would an autistic person do in the situation Good found herself in? The answer is easy, they would have likely done the same exact thing. They would have attempted to drive away, turning away from the officer, just like Good did.

You see, anxiety often goes hand in hand with autism. An autistic person can go from calm to high strung faster than any of us neurotypicals. They often do not navigate social situations very smoothly, especially situations that would be already stressful to a neurotypical human. Good found herself in such a situation and I found myself imagining my daughter in the same situation, even though she is only 11 years old. But I was picturing her off somewhere, years from now, living on her own, driving through a neighborhood like Good’s when she becomes entangled in some gestapo ICE-led shakedown. With loud commands coming at her from every direction telling her to stop, telling her to move along, and telling her to back up, she would almost certainly flee from the confusion, the chaos, and the noise. And, what would she get for it? Well, you know how this ends in Trump’s America.

Renee Good’s reaction to the chaos is my daughter’s reaction, simply an attempt to get away from it all. It was harmless to the ICE officer, but DHS (like you can trust anything they say) reports that the officer had internal bleeding from this interaction. Dutifully, Fox News has the report, in their constant attempt to paint Good as a terrorist and J6ers as patriots.

I just keep thinking about how the current situation in Minneapolis and wherever ICE invades next is at the boiling point, absolutely primed for another event like we have already seen. If ICE approaches everyone as if they are guilty, then of course they will encounter more people who run away, drive away, and get away any way possible. Those people who run first from ICE just might have an extra dose of anxiety in them, a few more drops of confusion in social situations, but no ill intent, no hatred. Just kindness.

Good’s voice, seconds before her murder, is full of kindness, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” No derangement. No madness. No anger. Just patience and peace.

Do It Afraid

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“Sometimes fear does not subside and one must choose to do it afraid.” – Elisabeth Elliot, poet.

That is how I feel about writing these days, months, and years since I have not put pen to paper and fingers to keys. I have waited for the fear to subside. As you can tell, it has been a long wait and it would have been longer. But for what? I do not know.

Even stupider, I have waited for ideas to come to me without first sitting down at the desk.

And worst of all, I thought I would eventually convince myself, by taking a long break from writing, that I am indeed not bad at it. That most definitely did not happen. I think I have tired of the waiting. Tired of telling myself, writing, well, that is something I will do when life calms down. I think I have known for a while now that it will not.

Furthermore, my voice will not come to me if I do not share it. So, I will share it, but as Elliot reminds me, I must choose to share it afraid. For now, I have to lie to myself to get my butt in chair. (Thank you, Anne Lamott). You have something worth sharing. People will connect to the story of you and your family. I can build a following if I do this. I do not suck at writing. I will get better, even become good at this. Doing this will improve other areas of your life. These are some of the lies I tell myself. And to some degree, I recognize that some of them are not lies at this point. I guess the evolution that has taken place in my head is that it is better to convince myself of these lies than to go on believing much worse ones that I have spent a decade or longer believing, such as:

  • You are not unique.
  • You are alone.
  • This experience of being a stay at home dad, raising an autistic daughter and a neurotypical son is not unique enough to share.
  • I am not good at writing.
  • This will never make me a dime.
  • After spending 12 years as a dad and caregiver, no one will ever hire me again.
  • I am old and washed up.
  • If my own sister once told me this blog is ridiculous, then I should not try anymore.
  • I should not share because that one cousin called into question my whole education (a BA in English and an MA in International Studies) and approach to life all because I dared to support the COVID-19 vaccines. I should be fearful of pissing off people like him.

Yes, these are all things I have convinced myself of over the years as my writing became rarer, as blank journals stacked up, as keys stopped clacking. But no more. I will believe the first set of lies that, even if they do not come true, at least I will be a better person for having lived like they are truths.

The fear bit, well, I do believe the more I do this the more it will dissolve away. But I must be prepared for it to always be there and to always put pen to paper alongside a well of dread.

A Little More About 2025

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Here is a shorter summary of just some of what this family did in 2025!

January – Love a good run on the first day of the year. A clean slate. Everything back to zero. All things feel new, even though a lot of them aren’t. London turned 11 and made her own Barbie cake! I did not do dry January!

February – I turned 42. We entered the air fryer game. Should have done that sooner. I rented a storage unit for decluttering our house and prepping it for going on the market. My mom and I get drinks at Traveling Mercies, an excellent bar at Stanley Marketplace. Girls trip to Omaha. Guys trip to Steamboat. Guys win.

March – March 6th, the house is listed. The sight of the sign puts a pit in my stomach. London completes her last ABA session. It’s the right time, I think. But at the same time, I feel scared of what life will look like without any of those sessions. The obligatory Great Wolf Lodge trip is scratched off the list. Camden had never been. We did it once for him and won’t go back. 

April – The house goes under contract. Meanwhile, we look all over SE Aurora and Centennial, even Parker, for homes, but go under contract only once, breaking contract the next day. We offer $5k over asking on one house and lose to an offer $50k over asking. I take pictures of our pristine house before serious packing up begins. I get tremendously sad about that. 

May – I wrote about that yesterday. Read it here.

June – London finished elementary school. We moved from one rental in Denver to my parents’ house in Fort Collins, where, surprise, we started looking at homes, hoping to find and close on one by the end of summer. The day before we leave for a California road trip our parked cars are slammed into by a 16-yr-old driver out at 12:30am for “snacks.” My car is later totaled. The minivan is good and we drove it the next day. It was 107 degrees in Las Vegas when we arrived and I valeted the minivan next to Lambos and Ferraris at Mandalay Bay, not joking. There were lots of pools at the hotel, but with people packed into them like sardines. The night walk along the strip was memorable and worth doing one time, but we passed on the $16 coffee in our hotel room, the minimum $150 spend per diner at the steakhouse, and Camden laughed at the thong-clad dancers strolling the street who asked him if he wanted a photo with them.

July – On to LA, which was much cooler and enjoyable. Stayed with good friends. Swam in their pool, not packed with people. Went on to Oceanside and met Kate’s family there. We did it, we went to Disneyland for the day. A team of cast members had to stuff me into Space Mountain so I could join the rest of the family on the rollercoaster. I was taller than the Chewbacca in the Star Wars area and London got to meet Rapunzel. London was overjoyed. We grilled Cardiff Crack, the best. Back in Fort Collins, we took possession of our new home on Kate’s birthday, but didn’t spend the night for a few more nights. We attended the wedding of good friends in Monument. 

August – Unpacking really got under way. The kids started school August 13th and 14th, insanely early. Their first 7 days of school were half days because it was so hot and not every school here has AC. They are attending schools I went to while I lived in Fort Collins from 1991-1999. Casa Bonita and Water World trip with the best people. The Casa really is a fun place! London starts cross country. So proud of her!

September – After I rent a U-Haul in Denver and load up all our things from the storage unit and unload all the things at the house, all of our belongings are under one roof for the first time since February. Both cars in the garage on September 25th. A big day. We meet more neighbors here in less than two months than we did in over ten years at our last house. People in FoCo are more open to talking. They’re friendlier than your average Denverite. The USAF Thunderbirds put on a show here and practice right over the house a couple times. 

October – We took a much-needed mountain weekend trip with my parents at the YMCA of the Rockies. The weather and views were perfect. My kids love the outdoors and the mountains. My parents played a role in that and I am forever thankful for it. Camden turned 8! We threw one of those big birthday parties with pizza, cake, snacks, and games. That’s not much fun at all, but Camden loved it!

November – A late fall trip to Steamboat, where it is in the 50s. I swim outdoors. I dig out our Christmas decorations from a crawlspace, which is primarily filled with Christmas decorations. I run my first Turkey Trot in Fort Collins. It’s a big race and I am happy with my time. We see the northern lights for the first time in all of our lives. 

December – I always love this month. Christmas decorations and lights are up before the month starts. London and Camden both have Christmas concerts. London still wants to visit with Santa at the Gardens on Spring Creek. We attend several excellent Christmas parties and get some time in Denver on a 60 degree day. There’s an early Christmas celebration with my parents before we travel to Omaha for a week. Omaha is mild. I manage to get in 22 miles of running while we are there. We go to Top Golf, the only place I enjoy golf. My father-in-law turns 70. We party like he’s 30. We tell the kids we are going to London this summer. They freak. We come back to Fort Collins and ring in 2026 with dear friends, good drinks, homemade pizzas (one of which I dropped on the kitchen floor), and the kids stay up until midnight for the first time. We all sleep in, sort of, like just to 7:30. That’s late for us. 

Happy New Year!

Closing Day

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How do you sum up a year? I have in the past, written blog posts under the title “The Year in Review,” or something along those lines. I started writing such a thing a couple days ago and I finished today, but it’s too long. I post the whole review and not many people are going to make it to the end. I’ll boil that down to the bones and post that later. But for now, I’ll leave you with my thoughts on May 2025. It was a big year for my family and May was the hardest, busiest, and most emotional month in a year of busy and emotional months.

May 2025 In Review

We sold our house on 5th Avenue this month. The buyers, inexplicably, wanted us to take apart a floating deck we built in between our house and our neighbor’s house to the west. My parents and Kate’s dad were there to help dismantle the deck. We enjoyed our small, but perfect backyard on that wonderful spring evening. We found a home to live in for a few weeks until the kids finish school. It’s in the same neighborhood, within walking distance of our beloved 5th Ave house.

The PODS arrived May 13th, 3 of them. They’re filled on the 14th, to the ceiling. The next day they are taken away and the house is cleaned for eleven hours, luckily, not by me. I take videos of the empty house and record voice memos of what I remember from every room, hallway, closet, and door, crying or fighting back tears in each one.

My last moment in the house is the morning we close. The kids are at school. Kate is at work. I touch the walls in the living room. I pat them. I run my hands across their textured surface. I hug them. I say goodbye to the house like an old friend, a friend of eleven years, eleven of the toughest, eleven of the best. I laugh at myself as I speak to the house and whisper into its walls, telling it to be as nice to the next family as it was to ours, telling it to be a good friend to them.

From the front door, I take one last look about ten times. The house is open concept and has a relatively small first floor so with a glance I see the dining room, kitchen, and living room. I could have stood there for the rest of the day cycling through memories from every corner of those rooms, but it was time to close that door one last time.

At the bottom of the stairs, standing on the sidewalk, I felt so lonely, like I had truly lost a friend. I called Kate and let all the emotions out. I had a mix of feelings: gratitude for this structure I just stepped out of for the last time, a sense of mourning our Denver lives, and a greater sense of fear, not knowing where we would live next, and second-guessing our decision to move at all.

But the day did not allow for much contemplation. I had to unpack and continue our sort of move-in at the temporary house. I had elementary field days to attend. I had a half marathon to run in Steamboat Springs. (Note to self: never train for a race and move at the same time ever again.)

I am grateful for the busyness of the days following our 5th Ave close. They did not allow for me to further mourn or worry about what was next. We just had to continue life as usual in Denver, just with a different place to come back to at the end of those hectic days.

Moving On

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As soon as I carefully took the kids artwork down, picking at the bits of scotch tape holding self-portraits to doors, and taking care not to rip the large piece of paper my son drew a pipe system on, the house felt different. Moving changed from this half-serious idea that has held space in our heads for two years to this real, tactile change involving paper cuts from handling cardboard boxes and sore backs from lifting just a little too much. 

Official-looking family portraits have come down, replaced by blank walls or a photo of a nondescript hillside most passers by would not recognize as Scotland. Old carpet has been torn up and tossed out and now the house smells like Carpet Exchange. The amount of furniture in the house has been trimmed down, making some rooms feel nice, but not lived in. 

Load by load to the storage unit—the first I have ever rented—the home becomes a house, the house becomes a structure. Yet, still there are memories being made, even today, that will forever be associated with this house, which I have called home for ten years, the longest I have lived in one place.

Open house after open house I begin to appreciate our house a little more. The painted walls, the shiplap entryway, the exposed I-beam in the basement so I could attach a pull-up bar, and the immaculate basement bathroom. All projects that we completed ourselves or hovered nearby acting like an overbearing super on a construction site while others did the work. 

The furniture we are keeping in the house has been moved, cleaned, and flipped around like Lego pieces, indeed, revealing long-lost Lego pieces, a vintage Fisher Price puzzle piece that has been missing since my son was four-years-old, and more of those Checkers pieces that I thought we had successfully rounded up. 

The last evidence of our family in the house are some of the most treasured items. No stager will get me to take them down and no storage unit is secure enough for them. It’s my daughter’s framed one-month handprint that is barely bigger than my thumb, resting on my desk. A polaroid of Kate and I taken by an old friend. Two pictures of the family on the beach in Mexico. A kid’s first hand-drawn family portrait. And a large picture of my namesake, Bryce Neff, pictured with his bombing group in the Korean War. All these items and more will find a new structure that will become a house that will, with time, become a home, and God-willing, lives lived in that home will produce an equally wide swath of life as we have seen on 5th Ave.

God-willing.

Welcome to the Pump House: Adventures in Fatherhood and Breast Milk Management

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A version of this post appeared on my blog years ago when London wasn’t even a year old. But I just tweaked it a bit, slimmed it down , and added here and there. I think it’s better now. Here it is…

Never in my wildest dreams, as I prepared for fatherhood, did I think I was going to spend so much time with lactation nurses, reviewing the intricacies of hand expressing (including motions), analyzing breast milk volumes, discussing engorgement, and just how much breast milk one could fit in a chest freezer.

A few hours prior to my meeting with lactation consultants, thinking there were three more months to learn these things, I didn’t even know lactation nurses existed. I knew that some babies were born prematurely, but I didn’t know my wife’s breast milk would still come in just as early as our daughter wanted out at 26 weeks gestation.

So it was that our 109-day stay in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) started with a crash course in breast milk. Within those first days of life for my daughter (London), my wife (Kate) and I spoke at great length with not just one lactation nurse, but several of them about breast milk and breasts, starting with a nurse asking my wife if she was going to pump breastmilk. Partly due to the trauma of the last 24 hours, and partly due to my complete lack of knowledge about breastfeeding, I had not thought a bit about breast milk or pumping. Kate was of a similar mindset at that particular moment, but we were both satisfied to know that there was a good chance Kate’s milk would come in. The early drops of colostrum, the nutrient-dense milk first released by the mammary glands, often come in shortly after the placenta detaches from the uterine wall, no matter the gestational age.

A couple of hours later a lactation nurse wheeled into our room something that looked like a medieval torture device. They were calling it the Symphony. They hooked Kate up to it and it hummed and sucked for 18 minutes. At the end of that first session, we could just barely make out two milliliters of colostrum. A few hours later Kate produced 2.6ml and then later that night 3.8ml. The next day, January 31, marked Kate’s first 24 hours of pumping. She produced 32.6ml that day, or 1.1 ounce. The lactation team handed us a log with the direction that we were to write down when Kate pumped, for how long, and the total volume.

We then received a DVD to watch, which would apparently help Kate get more milk by hand expressing and provide tips to alleviate the pain of engorgement. We were to watch it and return it to the NICU team afterwards. That same day, we popped the DVD into my laptop to watch some before going to bed. One minute into this educational video, the biggest breast and nipple either of us had seen appeared on screen. Kate laughed so hard she began to worry she might injure herself being only two days clear of a C-section. Everything hurt. If we continued watching, we put Kate’s health at risk. I slammed the laptop shut. Tears ran down our cheeks from laughing so hard.

Who knows who is responsible for making this particular lactation video, but may I make one small suggestion on behalf of my wife and all women who have recently had C-sections? Great. Do not make the first breasts on the video also be the largest breasts known to mankind. They should not be comically large, needing 3-4 hands to get them under control. In fact, this video is a danger to new mothers everywhere, they might literally bust open their gut laughing from it, like we almost did.

Thus, it fell on me to watch the lactation video alone, gleaning from it any helpful tips and then sharing them with Kate. She was impressed. It wasn’t like Kate’s breast milk volumes needed any help. Not long after London was born, I was spending part of everyday rearranging containers of breast milk in the chest freezer in the basement—the chest freezer we needed to buy solely to store breast milk. Kate and I would joke that I knew more about hand expressing breast milk than she did so I should print up some business cards and walk around the NICU offering my services to anyone who needed them. Hand Expressions by Bryce. Simple and to the point.

By day of life 57 for our little girl, Kate was producing 1,863ml a day, or 63oz of breast milk. To put that in perspective, London was fed a total of 800ml on day 57, the most she had ever consumed in one day. In fact, it took London a long time to drink as much milk in one day as Kate got from one 20-minute pump. A point was reached where no amount of rearranging the breast milk in the freezer would make room for more. I picked up a second chest freezer at Costco and Kate started to fill that, too.

For the months London was in the NICU we rented a Symphony pump, which at the time retailed for $1500-2500, and kept it in our bedroom. We started to call it the pump house. When at home, Kate disappeared every three to four hours to spend some quality time with the Symphony. As all moms know that schedule wreaks havoc on sleep and work responsibilities, but Kate did an excellent job. I did what I could by waking with her every time throughout the night, assisting in bottling of the milk, labeling and recording volumes, washing pump parts, and then delivering milk to the freezers in the basement. So, at our house, at least two times a night, Netflix and chill was swapped out for Netflix and pump.

As Kate tapered off the pump, we were just filling up the second chest freezer and the lactation nurses understood why Kate was putting an end to pumping. She had developed a reputation in the NICU as a super producer. At London’s discharge, on May 19th, 109 days after she was born, the NICU staff wrote messages to us. One of our favorites from the lactation team wrote, “Your mom was a rock star with pumping. She could have fed three babies in the NICU!”

Next week, London will be six-months-old and I can thaw breast milk from three months back. And right now it’s lunch time for the little girl, to the chest freezer I go.

Do You Love What You Do?

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This was a journal prompt I had almost four years ago. I answered it this way on February 21, 2021…

This is the question, isn’t it? It has been for quite some time, the question that gives me pause, makes me stop in my tracks, that question that forces me to take a good long look at what I do and, more importantly, am I any good at it? My answer for the majority of the time I have been an at-home dad has been, “Yes.”

But there are always buts. That’s the nature of the beast. The nature of any job you love. On a good day I love 80-90% of what I do. If the day is not going well, that number drops to 10-30%.

I consider being a stay-at-home dad (SAHD) a job. People who scoff at that and/or give me a weird look when I tell them this have never been a full-time at home parent with two kids and most domestic duties/responsibilities on their plate. It’s really not realistic to expect to do a lot more day to day, especially if you are also prioritizing time spent with a spouse and children, which, I know, I have the luxury of doing.

There was a time in 2019 to early 2020 that I drove for Lyft. The driving force, dad joke, for this was impending therapy bills for London that could amount to an extra $900 a month. They did for a while and driving for Lyft really helped ease the burden of all those $30 copays. Did I love Lyft though? No, but I do have some decent stories from the experience.

What I have loved more than anything else about being a SAHD is that I see nearly every moment of my kids’ young lives. I have been there for all the firsts. Now that London is at school M-F from 8:15 to 2:00, I have this weird feeling and it simply stems from someone else being in charge of her during those hours. It’s much more pronounced now that she is in FT school than it was at Montview where it was just a three-hour day or 5.5-hour days at kindergarten at Montview.

My three years with London before she went to Montview are years I absolutely loved. That’s not to say they were without struggle, but they were great. We had a lot of freedom. Now I have that opportunity with Camden. Of course, the pandemic has made the last year very difficult, but 2021 is going to be better. We have renewed memberships at the zoo and the DMNS and I hope to have more daytime adventures with Camden, more like the years I had with London, hopping from one museum to another with stops at the zoo and long lost parks in between.

For a long time now I have had this goal of being a SAHD until Camden goes to school either part-time or full-time. There is a possibility of him going to FT preschool [he did not]. If that works then my time as a FT SAHD is going to end I think. I have no idea what I will do next. Sometimes I think coaching swimming might be in my future once again. But collegiately speaking, there are not good options in Colorado. Perhaps something a little more low-key, but I don’t like the idea of that becoming a major chapter in my career arc.

I can predict the future though. Whatever I do next and until my life ends I will be grateful for these years. I will likely look back on them as the best of our lives. It hurts so much to know that they come to an end. I would choose to relive all of this again; all of the strife, the scary days, the difficult and dark days, and all of the loneliness that comes with being a SAHD, just so that I could have my loving 3-yr-old Camden and 7-yr-old London run into my arms again and again, without ever tiring of it. So, yeah, I do love what I do.