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.