Our daughter was 5 months and 20 days old when I took over parental duties.
This is an honest account of what I got up to for those 6 months from June 2013 - written by a Dad.
Edit: I have now been allowed to do this again with our second, Taliesin, so I have continued the blog June 2015 -->
Disclaimer
Please note, this blog does not constitute parenting advice in any way. Please do not attempt to recreate any stunts shown on this blog at home.
The author accepts no liability for any losses or injury caused. yada...yada...yada
Today I embraced my house-wifey side and I cooked Emilia a pizza. From scratch.
I don't mean "I put the toppings on a pizza-base" - type of scratch. I mean that I combined flour, salt, sugar, water and yeast to make the dough before allowing it to rise in a warm, draught-free area before I put organic tomato sauce on top with some mild cheese and herbs and cooked it.
That kind of "from scratch". This is how it turned out (after 1 slice made a successful bid for freedom):
Home-made pizza for Emilia
It seemed to be enjoyed anyway...
I also made pizza for Emma and me which went down well (however less mess was made, so I couldn't tell you if it was as popular.
I woke up last night only because my brain told me that I had brought the baby into bed and was just about to lose her over the side.
I woke up, sitting bolt-upright, frantically searching my side of the bed for a baby that wasn't there. I then checked the floor around the bed incase she had already fallen out. - Secretly praying that Emma didn't find out that I had dropped the baby over the side!
What is really weird is that Emilia has been sleeping in her own cot, in her own room for over 4 months now and not once have I brought her into our bed at night.
What's also weird is that this isn't the first time I've had this dream. Seems to be a weekly thing, every week for the last 3 weeks.
The reason I write about it now is that (apart from the dream) last night was the first night for ages that was no reason to get up. No miaowing cats, no scared dog trying to get away from fireworks by digging under the bed, no crying baby and no disturbance from the chickens. Just my brain, and it took an hour to settle enough to allow asleep afterwards.
Apparently an unbroken night's sleep is too much to ask for! Hopefully, as I've not had any cheese tonight I shouldn't have any weird dreams!
### This is the post I wrote before "what a difference a day makes". Emma has now read it as a draft and said that a lot of people would relate so I'm sharing.###
How do you convey the tipping point of a man who has been broken by the merciless task of looking after his own daughter?
I am REALLY struggling over here.
Emma is working from 0700 - 0000 every day, missing out on bath time and general cuddle time.
She is therefore not able also to do anything around the house or generally help with anything.
If she comes down for a coffee, she will make funny faces / cuddle Emilia for the time it takes the kettle to boil then she's back upstairs til the next coffee break or I take lunch up to her.
When I was working, my shift pattern meant that I would sometimes work 7 night shifts in a row and so I would be effectively useless for 7 days but Emma has been like this for 3 weeks!
I'm also struggling with the heat / humidity. I don't have the motivation / energy to do the housework and am doing the least amount I can to keep afloat instead of actually doing a proper job.
Most worryingly this attitude has slipped into my parenting too. I'm sure that I've put her to bed during the day because I was tired rather than her. Not deliberately, but I've thought I've seen tired signs and put her down, only to have to go back and get her 5 minutes later because she has no intention of going to sleep!
So, in summary, I have no wife, the house is a bomb-site, the animals are lacking in the attention they need, I'm knackered and I think I could be doing a better job with my daughter. Sound like social services need to get involved yet, or just another day as a stay-at-home-dad?
Just 18.5 little hours. (paraphrased from the song a little)
At about midnight last night I wrote a draft of the blog when I wasn't in particularly good place. ( I wasn't going to kill myself or anything what I was feeling quite down about being stuck in the house with very little support from a very busy wife) and, in my eyes, failing as a house-husband.
Today, Emilia and I went out for a coffee with a fellow dad, Rupert, and his son, Jaden. As well as a non-parent, Karl who helped keep the conversation a little away from babies for short periods.
A coffee became 2 and before I knew it the whole afternoon had disappeared, Emilia had eaten all her food and we had to beat a hasty retreat before Armageddon ensued.
My advice to all fathers out there (mothers too, it's an equal opportunities world, after all) is to find a friend. Male/female, single/married, black/white/ginger - just ideally make sure they're local enough to meet up with regularly - and take an afternoon a week to meet up, drink something that's not going to make you incapable of looking after the little one, kick back and enjoy being a parent.
There's no job like it.
In other news, Emma's hit her deadline at work so is reclaiming a couple of hours worked so managed to tidy the house for me this afternoon, I may even see her for an hour or so this evening and a certain sense of calm has returned to The House of Emoey.
I appreciate that the last few posts have been a bit whiny so I have some good news...
Emilia said her first recognisable word on Monday.
I woke up on Monday to the sound of babbling at about 0600 on Monday morning and as I was lying there, enjoying how happy she sounded just talking to herself, she said...
"Dada"!
I know it doesn't mean anything - it's just a series of babbling sounds - but it's strangely warming to hear your daughter saying "dada dada dada" as she wakes up in the morning!
(Also Emma is very upset that her first words weren't "Mama" and is jokingly convinced that I have been training her to say Dada for the last month)
Apparently Mama is harder to say that Dada as it uses more muscles in the face
She doesn't associate the word with me and won't say it on cue (so can't put up a video) but she will periodically just incorporate it into "conversation" with you.
Anyway, just a short note so show that I sometimes have good news on the blog and it's not all bad! In fact, the little ups like these really make up for the days of monotony.
...we apologise for any inconvenience it may have caused.
Honestly, I hope you haven't missed me too much!
There have been a number of reasons for my online silence.
1. My phone is refusing to publish the entry I wrote on it last week. Or to share it with the laptop so I can publish it from there. At the moment it's in blog purgatory. (I was toying with blog-atory but thought it was a little too obscure...)
2. We have no Internet at the moment. Apparently an engineer is on their way but it doesn't help me (or Emma who is paying a daily rate to BT for a wifi hotspot to do her work).
3. Emma has been working late in the evenings and at weekends so I've not had the time. Sorry.
4. I've been organising a friend's stag do which is harder than it appears.
5. But the real reason is that I'm shattered!
The last 3 weeks have been the toughest of my life! (Well, since leaving the army anyway).
The actual work isn't hard. Get up; make a bottle of formula; feed baby with said formula; entertain baby with toys /stories / nursery rhymes / (as a last resort) singing until she's tired then put her to bed until she wakes and repeat. Ad nauseam.
To add a little spice, I feed her solid food twice a day which takes longer to eat and therefore requires less singing as feeding is a form of entertainment in itself.
What makes things a little more difficult is that the day starts at 5am. Her first nap in the morning has recently been at about 9; by which point I'm awake and - as I never know how long Emilia will nap for - I tend to not get too comfortable just I case she wakes again. So I don't go to sleep during the day.
By the time Emma's finished work and we've had dinner, it's 11pm and I'm "chin-strapped".
Normally, Mon-Fri of doing this would be fine but, as I said earlier, Emma is working weekends and so I've not been able to get a lie-in or catch up with my rest.
I think this all started when Emilia had a cold which is why she wasn't sleeping properly. Emma promptly came down with the same cold however because of the lack of sleep I've been getting, I came down with man-flu (it's real and recognised - see here)
So anyway, that's my list of (slightly pathetic) excuses for not updating the blog recently. I hope you have all managed to live full and normal lives while I've been away!
P.S. If there's anything you feel I should be writing about, let me know because I don't think I can do 6 months of: I woke up, I fed her, she slept, she woke up, I fed her.
Since becoming a Stay-at-Home-Dad I've basically stopped wearing a watch.
There's no point. I wake up when Emilia wakes up; I feed her when she's hungry (normally about the same times every day) and I put her back to bed when she's tired.
I had an app on the iPad that I would put timings of when she did certain things (feed/sleep/nappy-change) and it would remind me when the next one was due however it only lasted 2 weeks before I realised i was pre-empting it anyway so it seemed that we had a good routine going.
There are obviously a few times when I need to be somewhere at a certain time but most of those are routine things, like baby-group or similar and they're not overly fussed if you're 10-20 minutes late anyway as they're a drop-in thing.
If it's an appointment, my phone reminds me 30 minutes before I need to leave the house which is normally enough time to check for a last-minute nappy change or bottle, collect everything, dress us both and head out of the house.
Last night i did check my phone when I was woken by a grizzling baby. It was 01:00 exactly! She then spent the next hour and a half refusing to / unable to go back to sleep.
At first I thought it was because her nappy was wet, so I changed it.
Then I thought she might be hungry, so I fed her (she hadn't eaten properly yesterday and was a bottle short by the time she went to bed)
Then Emma thought she might be cold so we put an extra layer on her.
She has a bit of a blocked nose at the moment so we've got a Calpol Diffuser plugged in however it has a built-in night light (well, I say nightlight, it's more like the blinding light of a nuclear explosion) so i unplugged that but then she became bunged up again and couldn't sleep!
Emma eventually took matters into her own hands and went old-school. She wet a flannel, added Olbas oil and left it on the radiator to evaporate. No light and no blocked nose = sleeping baby.
Thank you Emma.
Emilia is now sleeping again. I've decided baby group is a bad idea as she's not well and tired so we're going to have a day of sleeping and reading stories.
Hopefully she'll be better soon and we can go back to normal.
