By KidsDirect Editorial Team
Confessions of a First-Time Father
Being a first-time father is a rather scary experience. It’s nothing like facing down a grizzly bear with your bare hands or having your in-laws come to stay with no departure date, but it’s up there on the scary scale.
Since I was the youngest in my family, I had no experience with babies. When I was growing up, babies were very little people who smelled funny and were quickly handed to your sister the second they started to cry. Babies didn’t seem like such a difficult thing back then.
The Norman Rockwell Fantasy
When my lovely wife, Leatrice, was pregnant, I had dreams of how my family would look. There I would be, holding my child with my wife by my side. We would frolic and have fun, enjoying the ultimate in family experiences. The three of us would be a Norman Rockwell painting and a Hallmark greeting card all rolled into one.
I soon realized that cards and paintings don’t accurately depict fathering.
Far fewer greeting cards would be sold if they pictured parents with bloodshot eyes mistakenly putting a diaper on a stuffed animal in the crib while the actual bare-bottomed child relieved herself all over the sheets a few feet away. And nobody wants to see a painting of a parent frantically rocking a screaming baby in the fervent hope that she’ll put herself to sleep.
The thing I noticed most once we brought my daughter home from the hospital is that a newborn’s daily activities are very limited. They cry, they eat, they relieve themselves, they sleep. That’s basically it, and it turns out that’s pretty normal for a newborn’s routine. I just never realized how much time those four activities could eat up until we actually had a child. My daughter’s itinerary didn’t have much variety, but her schedule kept all three of us busy around the clock.
Babies Are Miniature Terrorists
I quickly realized that babies can be miniature terrorists. They refuse to negotiate and will extort clean diapers and formula by any means available to them. I tried talking to my daughter about it, hoping I could explain the virtues of not crying so much. I made her an offer I thought was more than fair.
“Sweetheart, if you can let Mommy and Daddy get some rest tonight, I’ll buy you a sports car for your 16th birthday.”
In a true gesture of father-daughter bonding, my wonderful daughter looked up at me, burped, and went back to sleep.
Living With a Baby Celebrity
Another interesting phenomenon about having a baby is that it’s a lot like living with a tiny celebrity. Once your child is born, friends and family descend on your home with cameras, camcorders, and every other piece of photo equipment known to mankind, and the actual parents get pushed out of the way in the process.
“Who are you?”
“We’re the parents.”
“Could you please move out of the way? I’m trying to get a picture of the baby.”
Turning Into Your Own Parents
Having a baby changes you in more ways than one. My wife developed an advanced radar detection system that let her pinpoint the exact moment our daughter needed to be fed or changed. In the middle of the night, our daughter would start crying, and my wife would say, “She’s hungry and she needs to be changed.”
When I asked how she knew that, my wife offered up a full scientific explanation. “Because I do.”
The scariest part of becoming a father was realizing that the whole mystique surrounding parents suddenly made sense. I could feel their old emotions and understand their old fears. It was practically a religious experience. Once, when my daughter was fussing, I stepped back without even thinking and said, “You keep this up and you can forget going out with your friends tonight.”
Then I looked around for my own parents. For a second there, I was pretty sure I’d been possessed.
Eventually, though, your child needs less and screams less, and the nights start giving you something back. I was looking at a picture of the three of us the other day, and I grinned as I showed it to my wife.
“Don’t we look just like a Norman Rockwell painting?” I asked.
She smiled and said, “No. I think we look more like a Hallmark greeting card.”
Who says dreams don’t come true?
If you’re still gearing up for delivery day yourself, our hospital bag checklist for expectant fathers is a decent place to start, and once the baby actually arrives, our tips for new dads covers the stuff nobody warns you about ahead of time.
