Empathy

Raising Kindness and Caring

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This was originally posted by the Marion & Polk Early Learning Hub here.

One of the Early Learning Hub’s Core Messages is this: Parenting can sometimes be overwhelming. Balancing the demands of work, childcare, financial and emotional stress, may be all you think you can handle. There’s another part to it, but we’ll get to that later. I’d like to focus on this first part right now as it is extremely prevalent in our lives at the moment. You see I am in the middle of day four of my recovery from an appendectomy. I was sick for a couple of days with a nagging abdominal pain last week in the middle of a very busy and stressful time at work. There was plenty going on at home as well and in the middle of it all…my least useful and seemingly pointless organ decided to revolt. So I’ve been forced to rest…to not help…and to not “lift anything over 15 pounds for two weeks”…sorry kids… Continue reading →

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Sibling Love

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Is there anything more sweet and heartwarming than a child choosing to show how much they love and care about someone? Isn’t it even more beautiful when the person their showing love to is their sibling? One of the things I enjoy most about my kids is how much they love each other and the compassion they show for one another. Continue reading →

Grieving In Front Of Your Kids

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The past several years in our home have been filled with so much joy, so many blessings, and so much to be thankful for. And – they have also been years full of grief, pain, loss, and deep sadness. Many times over the past several years we have had to discuss what we should tell our kids about deaths in the family, chronic illnesses, and losses untouchable. Continue reading →

Diverse Books

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If you’ve followed this blog for a while you know that something I feel is extremely important to teach my kids is empathy and being able to take the perspective of others. One of the best ways to do this is through excellent children’s books. Here are a few of my favorites: Continue reading →

1 Year of Blogging!

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Today marks one year since I started This is Fatherhood! I’m so grateful to each of you that takes the time to read this, to my wife for encouraging me and to my kids…the reason for the blog 🙂

To commemorate I thought I would share with you my top five (in my opinion) posts I’ve written in my year of blogging. Please check them out below and let me know if there’s one you thought should have made the cut.

1. Miscarriage

2. Pain

3. Paternity Leave

4. Joy

5. This is Fatherhood

Bonus (it was hard to pick just five 😊): “Boys Will Be Boys”

This is one year of blogging!

This is fatherhood…

Stay-at-home

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I’ve always known that being a stay-at-home parent is a JOB…it’s not easy, it’s not just playing with kids all day…it’s work. Often very fun and rewarding work, but also often stressful, loud and unendingly frustrating. I’ve always respected and admired my wife’s sacrifice of her career to stay home, but some days I get reminded of how tough it can be and how stressful it is.

This morning, while taking time off from work because my wife was sick I received one of these reminders. While my wife went to sleep to hopefully feel better, I was thinking that my daughter was tired and ready for her nap so I laid her down in her rocker and started to play legos with my son at his request. After a few minutes it became clear she wasn’t quite ready for her nap and really wasn’t sure what she wanted. I tried to soothe her and then my son and I tried to play with her for a while to calm her down. This worked briefly but eventually all my efforts were futile. She started really crying and didn’t want anything I was offering. I was thinking she might want to nurse, but it hadn’t been that long since her last meal and my wife really needed to sleep. Meanwhile my son was doing what three year olds do when not directly supervised with legos, which always annoys me since I’m a kid at heart and a just-slightly less strict version of Will Ferrell from the Lego Movie when it comes to legos. My stress level rose and my tone with my son became more harsh.

In that moment I realized my wife does this every day, all day five days a week and does it really well. I knew this already, but in that moment I knew it and understood how difficult it really was.

I am happy to say that I did eventually calm my daughter down, kept my son happy (and from breaking all the legos), and kept my wife asleep. I don’t bring this last part up because I think I deserve congratulations or kudos. In reality I was simply doing my job as a dad and doing for just a few hours what my wife and lots of other stay-at-home moms and dads do all day, every day. It was a reminder to me how awesome my wife is, how difficult her job is, and how blessed I am 😊

This is fatherhood…

Miscarriage

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I haven’t always thought about it very often, but sometimes when I do I feel both sadness and shame and ask myself…”why don’t I think about it more?” “Why am I not bothered by this all the time?” Continue reading →