Home-Dadding The Beginning - Dan's Story Part 4

Here is the final instalment of Dan's story. This is an account of Home-Dadding that has covered all bases, from IVF, adoption, the management of family time and finances, battles with social expectations, Home-Dad and working Mum discrimination and (as they say when promoting just about everything) much much more!

If you haven't read the first three instalments, I'll make it easy for you - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

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Then about two years ago we put our hands up again to adopt another child. Once more there was a long processing and approval process before we were OK’d to sit on the waiting list for a further year. Just before Xmas we found out we were to be the lucky parents of a beautiful little three-year-old. She has now moved in and it’s all going pretty good so far. Three; it’s the Magic Number, as De La Soul said.

Third time round I’m beginning to feel like an old hand at this Home-Dadding thing. It’s a great feeling to walk in the to the school grounds with our five-year-old, who’s just started Prep and – unlike when our first born started – see the now familiar and friendly faces in the school yard. I was standing with the other parents at School Assembly on Monday morning thinking “oh my god, my oldest is in Grade 6, but we‘ve still got 9 more years of Primary school to go”, and a small feeling of panic crept over me. But then I remembered I was rostered on to deliver icy poles to the preppies that day and I put aside such disturbing thoughts. I allowed myself a quiet ‘been there, done that’ smirk too, as the assembly was interrupted by several very loud three-year-old boys running around threatening to kick each other ‘in your butt!’, while their Mums half-heartedly tried to hush them up, and my new daughter clung to my leg like a pink and blue limpet .

Yes, there’s a long way to go, but on the other hand, we’ve come a hell of a long way already………..

Home-Dadding The Beginning - Dan's Story Part 3

Here's the third instalment of 'Dan's story'. Go here for Part 1 and Part 2.
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Of course sometimes I’d see other fathers around but invariably they weren’t alone, they’d have their partners, or sometimes their own Mums, hovering close by in case anything needed attention. So when I discovered the Northern Dads Playgroup it was a very refreshing change, that’s for sure.

My new little boy was not one of your can I draw for half an hour then sit quietly reading a book type of kids (you know they’re out there somewhere!). He was more a can I bend it, can I throw it, can I push it, oops I’ve pressed the emergency stop button sort of child. I quickly discovered, especially at the onset of ‘mobility’ and that crazy time between one and two years, that going out to paid work was in fact the easier option.

There’s no doubt being on your own with pre-schoolers for great lengths of time makes you go a little bit mad. However, this is really handy for the kids, who seem to appreciate Daddy skills like singing ‘How Much is that Doggy in the Window’ at the same time as bubbling up some spag bol. As long as it’s in a strange voice, and as long as you substitute Goat / Ant / Elephant for Doggy every so often.

The other side is that when you’re at home full time, you’d be a slack-arse bludger if you didn’t do the majority of the house work too. This was ok, if a little tedious, and would have been a bit easier if my son had learnt to pass me the pegs for the washing without snapping them in half first(!). It did highlight the difference between my opinion of the state of the bathroom (‘not too bad/seen worse’), and my partners (‘filthy/disgusting’). So the solution was for me to clean it every Tuesday, (even if I thought it was ok).

However, having had the responsibility of being at home gives you a fantastic self-confidence in your child-rearing abilities, and does wonders for your organisational skills. Keeping everything cleaned, cooked, washed, folded, and tidied up can be useful in keeping everybody at a less rope-able level, even if it does turn you, yourself, into a bit of a dragon (keep those dirty feet off my clean floor!). For me it also really reinforced the view that there’s no reason at all why women should feel they have to be the ones at home, or indeed the ‘primary carers’. Of course there’d be heaps of women who would never particularly want to give up this responsibility, but that’s another story.

Well, anyway, our little baby got bigger, as they tend to, and I then returned to work part-time for a new employer, and so our little one had two days of child care at this time, which he really liked. Going back to work was a bit weird too. I’d had this life changing experience of being a stay-at-home Dad, but everyone at work just treated me like your average father, who was at work while ‘someone else’, whoever that might be, was looking after the kids. I wanted to run round with a T-shirt saying stay-at-home-dad - show some respect for my child rearing abilities please. What I felt like was a ‘working Dad’ as in ‘working Mum’, i.e. ok, yeah I was at work today but, actually, my main job is not here at all but at home keeping the kids and the house ticking over. Reminds me I forgot to get the meat out to defrost this morning, sort of thing. It did make me realise that being at home with the kids does make you a different type of parent in many ways, with a clear understanding that it is no picnic to ‘stay at home’, and not all Dads get to fully appreciate this.

Final instalment tomorrow....

Home-Dadding The Beginning - Dan's Story Part 2

Here's the second instalment of 'Dan's story'. For part one, where Dan talks about IVF, the process of adoption and his move into Home-Dadding, go here.
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For the first few weeks I felt like an imposter walking round with someone else’s baby. And of course in one sense I was walking around ‘ with someone else’s baby'. I guess no-one truly ‘owns’ their baby, but with your genetic offspring the question never really enters your thoughts. Looking back now I can’t imagine life any other way and our second son is, well, exactly that. However at the time I felt I couldn‘t take credit for all the positive comments I got about him. For example, people would often tell me how cute he was (of course he still is), but I felt sort of weird accepting this. I had no problem basking in the reflected glow of comments about how lovely our eldest was when he was tiny, but somehow with our new baby I didn’t feel I had the right to take credit for this vicarious admiration. Likewise I struggled to find the similarities in looks, emotions, and behaviors, between him and our older boy that would somewhere subconsciously confirm him as our little boy.

Thankfully, as I became closer and closer to him, these feelings slipped away to be replaced by the deep love and bonding (sorry to use that word cos I hate it) that then made him a truly, fully-paid-up member of our family. I started to celebrate all the differences, and accept them all, for making our new boy the beautiful and unique little person that he is.

So there was this aspect of trying to attach with the new baby, while getting my head around the Home Dad thing too. In terms of ‘Home-Dadding’, I found having sole responsibility on a day to day basis was a really daunting experience at first, and I was certainly very conscious of being ‘the only man’ in many of the places I now found myself in. You really notice this when you are at home and out and about during the week, while the majority of other Dads are at paid work. You’re invariably the only man at the sing song at play group, the only man at the Maternal Child Health Centre, the only man struggling to control the cries of the baby at the supermarket. This can have a positive in terms of some Mums thinking you’re wonderful, wishing their husband was more like you etc, but it can be a negative if people think you’re not quite up to the job, and feel they have to let you know how you should be doing things. For some reason middle-aged staff at DIY stores seem particularly prone to this.

For example I was once at the DIY store giving my upset son a rock on my shoulder and along came a helpful middle-aged woman to tell me “he needs more than that!” Another time I was in the checkout queue, baby aged about 10 months and wailing cos I’d had to remove a packet of laundry softener that was about to split apart (he’d splattered one over the counter the week before somehow!). An older woman behind me leans forward and says to baby “ It’s okay, you’ll be alright when you’re back home with Mummy”.

All that hard work crashing down on deaf ears!! These sorts of incidents gave me the impression that I was under extra scrutiny as a Dad with a baby, and perhaps given less credence than a Mum with baby would get.

To be continued tomorrow....

Home-Dadding The Beginning - Dan's Story Part 1

The emails keep coming in regards to the Home-Dadding the Beginning series. I have to admit to having very little blogging time. Things are more hectic now that we are preparing things for the arrival of 'number three' in April. A good thing then that the Northern Dads Group members are writing this series for me!

This is Dan's story (I like to call him FP Dan since he is now the Former President of NDG). It's a ripper post and offers a great perspective on Home-Dadding detailing the IVF experience, adoption and the unique stressors and joys that this can bring to a family. It highlights two things for me -the fact that there are many paths to Home-Dadding, and also that we are very lucky, in this part of the world, to have a number of options available to us when it comes to family structuring and child rearing. The more options a family has the greater the chances of balance and happiness for everyone, I reckon.

I'll be posting Dan's Story in three parts over the coming week. It is a great read, so stay tuned.
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Dan's Story

Hello, my name’s Dan and I’m stay home dad to three kids age 11, 5 and 3. There’s a bit of a story as to how I ended up as the one at home…………..……..

Me and my partner have both worked for quite a while now in the social services field (yes, we’re both ‘nicey-nicey social worker types’) and although the pay is generally pretty hopeless, it does mean that our employers are more flexible with family friendly hours than many (there’s a majority of female workers in social work management). So even while I was working ‘full-time’ at the time of our first son’s birth (he’s 11 now), my employers granted me (on request) every other Wednesday as ‘leave without pay‘ to be at home with him. I’ve always been the sort of Dad who cooks tea, wipes bums and does the washing as well as boofing around with the baby, so the thought of being at home for longer periods wasn’t too scary for me.

Anyway, I’m jumping ahead a bit. After a number of years trying for another child, using the ’usual method’ without success, we thought we might need a bit of help. So we had a short, but emotionally and physically full-on, course of five IVF cycles. When each cycle got increasingly less successful, we had to reluctantly concede that siblings from the same gene pool as our oldest were extremely unlikely. But we weren’t quite ready to give up on our dream of more kids in the family, so we explored other ways of doing things and found out about the Adoption and Permanent Care process, which finds permanent homes for kids from Australia who can‘t live with their birth family.

After a seemingly endless round of assessments and training we were accepted to be adoptive parents. Part of this process stipulated that one of the parents had to stay home with the child who was placed in the family, for at least the first 18 months. This is to give the child plenty of time to ‘bond and attach’ to the parents. The implication is that the child will attach in particular to one of the parents – the one who stays at home.

When we mulled this over, we saw no reason why that shouldn’t be me, especially as with no breast feeding going on, there was no practical reason why it shouldn’t be. A large part of this decision also was the fact that my partner had felt emotionally and quite literally battered and bruised by the IVF process, for no tangible benefit (apart from a useful cooler bag which we had used to take the follicle-stimulating drugs and injection kits home in!). She was fed up with being prodded and poked by umpteen different doctors and nurses and was feeling exhausted, and its fair to say I’d been the keener to look at adoption, and had probably had more energy to follow the process through.

So after we were suitably vetted and pronounced ‘acceptable parents’ by all the(other) nicey nicey social workers we were then put on a centralised waiting list. Very luckily, soon after this, we were linked up with our beautiful second son, who arrived at our house, aged five months. We had been led to expect, by the agency, that any child would be probably two years old or more, so we were initially blown away by our new addition being under one and still very much a baby. We hadn’t forgotten about the sleepless nights and intensity of emotions, but our body clocks took some re-acquainting to it!

I was overawed by the task ahead in the first few months and in retrospect I was not only coming to grips with being a ‘stay-home-dad’, but also with getting to know and to feel attached to our new baby, so no wonder I felt, er, less than blissful.

To be continued Wednesday...

The Love of Lifting my Kids

Home parents are generally 'me-time' poor. All the tasks associated with parenting - the expected and unexpected - leave little time to pursue a hobby or a fitness program or a regular hang-out time with friends.

As you can see in the 'About Me' section to the right, Reservoir Mum and I are expecting another baby in April. April 20 to be exact. You'll also see that I am a competitive powerlifter. It's a sport I've been involved in for a long time and I've always managed to keep at it no matter what came my way - work, illness, injury, change of address, relationships etc etc etc. I have never stopped for any significant period of time. Since the boys have come along, I've been very lucky to have the help of Nanny and Gramps (not to mention an understanding wife) who have kept the kids safe while I made my way to the powerlifting club at 5.30am two to three times a week.

What I have been worried about recently (and the fact that I actually worry about this is an indicator that I live a pretty solid, privileged life) is that boy number three will suck up that final pocket of time and limit my ability to achieve my powerlifting goals.

Well, a man named Gavin McInnes has come along to say 'worry no more RD!'

Instead of keeping my love of lifting separate from the love for my kids, Gavin has shown me how I can combine the two and simply start to love lifting my kids. And what's even better is that I will have a 4 year old, a 2 year old and a baby which will give me a great selection of weight to build my strength with.

I post this exciting and informative video for home parents everywhere.

Home-Dadding The Beginning - Jack's View

Thanks for all the enquiries about the Home-Dadding - The Beginning Series mentioned a few weeks ago.

As promised, over the next few months the NDG Dads will be telling us how the idea of staying home first presented itself. What were the circumstances? Were they happy, depressed, excited or shitting themselves in the early days, how this changed as time went on and whatever else they’d like to share.

The first NDG Dad to spill his guts is Jack. He's a top bloke old Jack. Has good knowledge on just about every subject and is always the first to break a sombre mood with a good quality Dad joke. Jack was the first to complete this course and get the rest of us on to it -


Jack's View

Well, before we had our children, my wife and I had decided that the best arrangement for us would be that we both work part time, and share the care of our kids. That was easy enough for my wife, who is a high-flyer for a blue-chip type company with an enlightened attitude towards parental leave and part-time work, but we knew that it would be a hard ask in my field of work, which is not typically family-friendly.

So around the time my first daughter was one year old, I quit my job as an architect for an established design firm and set up an office of my own in a shed in our back yard - the realisation of a life-long dream, at a manageable scale (at least to begin with).

I now work part-time for the employer who has the best understanding of my children’s needs, and the most flexible attitude towards the hours I work and the time I spend with my kids - myself.

My wife and I share the care of our daughters, with a small amount of outside child care every week. When I am at work, I’m only a few steps from the back door, and well within the range of the baby monitor. I can watch the nappies swing on the clothes line from my drawing board, and stop work at any time to take my eldest to the pool or cuddle my youngest. When I turn off the computer and shut the shed door, my time is my girls’.

My earnings have dropped to chicken feed levels, but my new job has some huge advantages that a more ‘traditional’ arrangement wouldn’t have. Besides the extra time with my kids, I get to keep my skills active and grow my business slowly – a few projects at a time, with the option to devote more time to it when the girls get older.

The new routine takes some discipline – I had to learn to respect the divide between work time and child time (my first afternoon juggling a child over a keyboard taught me that). We also couldn’t have made this arrangement work without at least 2 part-days per week of good quality outside child care for our eldest – with its advantages of social interaction and broader experience, and its disadvantages of childcare bugs and occasional difficult days.

There are some times where juggling the demands of two young children and a small business can be exhausting. But would I go back? Never.
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Check out Jack's energy efficiency blog - www.diagramarchitects.com.au/blog .

The Time Shortage Crisis - Home Dads Request Double-Blind Controlled Trial

As reported extensively in the media, it's been a big week for Home-Dads. There has been a sharp rise in reports of food fights, sleeping issues, toileting mishaps and bad smells.

Increasingly, houses are being overrun by clutter and filth. As Home-Dad Dan(FP) mentioned recently, "You just get one part of the house ship-shape and a pip-sized human pops up like a fricken geyser spraying filth and clutter as far as the eye can see. You know, I reckon these little critters actually shed crumbs."

A sharp rise in children falling to the ground with epileptic-like symptoms has also been reported. Although it has yet to be confirmed with a randomised, double-blind controlled trial, anecdotal information seems to confirm that it occurs more often when the word 'No' is mentioned in a crowded public space.

The continuing 'free-time shortage crisis' is also a major concern. Local government is considering a move to 3A time restrictions for children if they continue to use so much of Home-Dad time. The proposed restrictions will limit children to only 12 hours of Dad time from Monday to Friday, and the standard 24 hours of time every second Saturday and Sunday, depending on post code.

Home-Dads have welcomed the plan. As well as allowing more time for Home Duties it is thought that this will lead to an increase in quality time for parents and a greater opportunity for Dads to bed their wives.

With the approaching footy season, Home-Dad and energy expert Jack has also made the crucial point that this time rationing will lead to more Dads holding cold beers in their hands while sitting in front of their massive Plasmas.