It's barely 8 AM and I've already experienced my fill of frustration for the day. Things started out great, but my son's new toy caught his eye this morning, and unfortunately, it was so new that it was still in the packaging.

Still feeling a little tired, I decided that a new toy would provide enough of a distraction for me to start making a pot of coffee and maybe get in a few minutes of quiet time on the couch. Boy was I wrong.

After about 15 minutes of twisting, tearing, and I'm sad to admit, a little swearing (I'm definitely not a morning person), I finally had the toy free from the packaging and in front of him. He was so happy and engaged by the new toy. For about three minutes. Nice.

I'm not exactly sure why, but almost any toy I've unwrapped the past few years has been a similar experience in swear-inducing frustration. The way these things are sealed, wrapped, double-tied and blister-packed, you would think that these toys were a flight risk. What was so special about that one tiny piece of plastic, the one that was neither integral to the toy itself, nor particularly exciting without it, to warrant it's own plastic-covered wire tie - was someone going to steal this one little piece of the toy after deciding that the rest of the parts were not worth the effort?

Utterly ridiculous, and now my son is playing with my cell phone, which has kept him busy for almost 20 minutes. At this point, I can't be anything other than amused. Like I said - I've had my fill of frustration for the day ;)

I like to keep track of different suggestions for fun/interesting father-son activities and bookmark them for future use. I'm planning on updating this blog when I find new links, so here is one I saw while browsing around a couple of weeks ago. I don't see myself doing all of these activities, but I think it is a good list regardless because it includes simple activities that don't cost a lot of money, but are still fun for (hopefully) both father and son.

Top 10: Father-Son Activities

I found the following article the other day, and thought it was interesting. I'm not sure about the details of the study, or any others done in the past on this same subject, but after reading the article, it does seem to make sense.

In my personal experience, I often get discouraged when I'm not the best at something. I know it can be a silly way to judge your efforts, and may mean I'm a bit of a perfectionist, but I feel that my outlook about success may hinder me more than help me in a lot of cases.

I could see, however, that if I focused on the amount of effort put into a project and the capacity for learning and improving as you progress would lead me to a healthier attitude about trying new or unknown things. Especially things like starting a business, which I want to do, but seem to get discouraged because I don't have that 'one great idea'.

While I don't want to be one of those over-the-edge parents who is constantly pushing their kids to overachieve, I do believe in fostering their desire to learn, and desire to be successful and happy. I think this article will be a good framework for me as my son grows up and begins to learn and experience life, and I hope that he becomes someone who doesn't get easily discouraged just because something is hard or unfamiliar.

Give the article a read and let me know what you think.

Link to Scientific American Article

As I sit here drinking my morning tea, trying to wake up, my son is watching T.V. I remember when he was first born, I thought that we would not let him watch TV too much. Then we started letting him watch Baby Einstein videos for a few minutes at a time, which turned into watching whichever 30 minute kids show that was on, but now it's turned into more of a 30-60 minute block of time in front of the TV, especially in the mornings when I'm trying to wake myself up and also get our dogs fed.

I feel bad that he's watching so much TV at this young of an age, but it also keeps him quiet and occupied like nothing else will. Being such a TV junkie myself, I should have expected this, but I do feel a little bad that TV is already a big part of his life this early on. One thing I do like about his TV watching is that Disney channel and Noggin both don't show commercials on their morning shows, so at least he's not going to be inundated with advertisements in addition to the cartoons he likes.

It's nice that we have a DVR so we can tape shows that he likes and put them on any time of the day when he is fussy, which luckily isn't too often. We also make sure that he gets plenty of time reading books and playing outdoors as well. I'm happy to say that I think that he likes to be outside better than anything else at this point, and his books do get picked up a lot when he's playing.

No matter how much or how little TV he watches, I'm going to feel bad. I suppose the fact that this bothers me at all means that we won't let him grow up being a complete TV junkie. Being a first time parent, I guess that is a normal worry (too much TV), but I'd be interested in anyone else's thoughts - feel free to drop me a comment if you have any insight or thoughts on the matter.

Cheers!

...So back to my thoughts on fatherhood (after a nice bit of rambling in that last post).

As I said before, my college days helped prepare me for the lack of sleep that I'm now getting with a 1 year old in the house, another one on the way, and a sick wife to boot. When I look at the number of times that I have forced myself out of bed early to get up with the boy, or have made myself stay up the extra 20 minutes to wash the dishes so my wife doesn't have to, I feel like I have been a super dad (if not a super husband as well).

But all of this stuff is mostly in the background - my son doesn't see me doing these things, and if he could, who would care at a little over a year old? I often worry that my actual 'rubber meets the road' parenting that I do with my son is only adequate, not super. True, the other things I do around the house, in the background, do contribute to him having a better life and more time with a less stressed mother for him. But I also worry that he's going to come to see me as the bleary-eyed, barely coherent person that I often am when I first wake up in the morning, and sometimes at the end of a long day at work.

I think for now, he's probably content with me tossing him in the air, or taking him on a quick wagon-ride around the block, but as he gets older, his interests are going to expand and I'm going to have to step it up to maintain the "Super Dad" label. While some of these things will invariably be fun (camping trips, building model rockets, or any number of other things that little boys enjoy doing), the thought of keeping myself active in his pursuits of learning and experiencing all of the fun things in life also makes me very tired. So very tired.

I think things will be better on the free time and sleep fronts by the time I'll be doing those things with my son (unless my wife and I lose our minds and decide to have a third child right on the heels of #1 and (soon to be) #2). I hope they are, because I'm either going to have to cut out a lot of 'me' time or start doing something to increase my stamina. I might even have to start exercising (shudder).

that's all for now!

I often find myself wondering what kind of father I'll be, especially now that my son is walking around and starting to talk. I never really thought/worried about it much until I got married, but now it seems to consume a lot of my idle thoughts.

Before I met my wife, I never really thought I'd even get married. I've never been the 'ladies man' type, so dating for me was few and far between, with very mixed results, so I figured it would be easier to stay single. My view on children was pretty limited as well.

At that point, I knew that snotty kids were gross because the world (and sometimes you, by extension) was their Kleenex. Not that they maliciously wipe their noses or other snot-covered appendages on you, but with kids it seemed inevitable, regardless of intent. I also knew that kids could be cool too, but never really spent much time around young kids have the aforementioned aversion to snot, but also because I'm always worried that I would be the one to hold the baby wrong and break it's neck or be throwing a kid up in the air into a ceiling fan or something similar to that. It's not like I'm that oblivious to my surroundings, but I'm also incredibly gifted at continually proving Murphy's law without even trying.

In comes my wife. She absolutely swept me off my feet and caught me off guard. I'm not sure why, but I met her at a time where I was sure that I was going to grow old by myself, and also decided that pursuing a serious relationship was not something I wanted at the time. Boy did that change.

This chance meeting also put the wheels in motion for getting me over my fear of snot, although indirectly. My wife has two very large dogs that were pretty fond of drooling and snotting all over things, so after living with her for a while, I kind of got desensitized to it.

My wife has always been a kid person. She's had several gigs being a nanny and a child-care worker at a local daycare facility. I wasn't necessarily against having kids, but even when I just thought they were gross, I didn't actively think about having kids. My general uncertainties about being a dad lasted up until the minute my son was born.

As soon as I stopped bouncing off the walls long enough to actually hold and look at my baby boy, my feelings changed in an instant. I now didn't care about snot, or 'breaking' the baby, or any of the other things that made me squeamish about kids. Here was my son, and I knew right away that I wanted to be the best father I could be from that moment on, but at the same time, the weight of that obligation didn't cause me anxiety like it had before his birth.

Switch to a little more than a year into the future, and we're at my current state of mind, which hasn't changed, it's only matured, in a sense. For a few months after the birth, I was so wrapped up in the excitement of being a new dad, that all of the challenges didn't daunt me a bit. Reality has a way of slowly creeping back in, however, and i started to realize that being a great dad sounds great in theory, but it takes a lot of thought and effort as well.

I still love my son as much, if not more, than I did when he was first born. But now my drive to become the best father ever has some competition from work, family/home commitments, etc, so finding time to be a super dad seems harder now that I've been back in the fray for a year. My wife is also pregnant with our second (yay!), and although she is not nearly as sick as she was with the first, she's still out of commission for part of the day, especially in the mornings. That means that I'm now taking on more day to day things that she did (and I subsequently took for granted) like washing dishes/clothes, keeping things relatively tidy around the house, and getting up with the boy in the mornings.

I'm not much of a morning person, but I am a big night owl, so my bedtime is not conducive to me getting up early. Luckily, all the partying in college has really helped me out here since I can still go to bed late and squeeze in some time to catch up on work, think of new ideas to go into business for myself (and the research that goes along with it), and just generally getting some nice 'quiet time' to myself to play video games or pursue other hobbies that aren't so easy when the kid is awake. I can't keep myself going on as little sleep as I was used to in college, but I can still hold my own, and I now recognize my hard-partying days in college as the training that was necessary to get me to this point.

Hello all,
I'm not normally a blogger-type person (not being terribly creative is one of my barriers), but I'm going to give it the old college try and see what happens. I had to pick a subject that I'm excited and passionate about, and 2-3 things immediately come to mind. I enjoy music, video games, and absolutely adore my family (wife, Dalia & son, Elijah).

Given that there are tons of both music and video game-related blogs, websites, etc, I decided to focus this blog on my family, and more specifically, on my new role as a father (my son was born a little over a year ago).

So without further delay, I present my first blog post! Hopefully I will keep the posts fairly consistent, although given my predilection for writing far more concisely than I tell stories orally (if you ask my wife), I hope that my brevity will not be a turn-off. Who knows? Maybe my gift for rambling on and on about things in spoken form will carry over into my written communication as well. God help us all if that happens :)

Adios!

Brandon, aka Cool Daddy-O