List/Grid Tag Archives: New Parent
Lessons from Baby’s First Christmas
For the holidays, my husband and I took our 11 week old daughter, Peanut, to the U.S. to meet my family and our friends there. I tried to anticipate how to help Peanut adjust to a complete change from her daily routine of being mostly at home with me. What I was not prepared for, though, were some of my reactions. I have a difficult time still fully comprehending that Peanut is her own albeit…
First Night Away: German Christmas Markets
For our first overnight outing, we took our seven week old daughter, Peanut, to the Christmas market in Aachen, Germany. We always said that we are not going to be the parents that bend to our daughter’s every need, but who a re we kidding? We chose Aachen because it is the closest Christmas market to the Dutch border. Instead of taking a day trip by train to the markets like half of The Netherlands…
Parenthood: Early Days
Leaving the house for the first time after giving birth was like slipping into another dimension. I went out of the house for the first time five days after my daughter was born to buy a few button-down tops in hopes of making nursing a little bit easier. My lower back ached and my legs felt cartoonishly heavy. I trudged the streets slowly, bleary eyed and disoriented. I have walked these streets to do my…
Older Fatherhood
It’s the end of the day, and my lower back throbs from bending over hundreds of times. I rub the left side my neck, which spasms from the strain of holding a 20-pound weight clutched to my left shoulder. My knees ache. I’d forgotten how physically tiring it is to care for a 5 month old. When I was 27, a decade before entering the adventure called fatherhood, I was dating a woman who’d become a…
Pregnant Pause: Week 33
It is Week 33! I can’t hardly believe it. I have done more than my share of reading about what to expect at this stage and have asked anyone that will let me about their experience. There is just nothing closer than it happening in your own body, though. So how does it feel for me, you ask? Being pregnant is more painful, exhausting, and distracting by the day. I still cannot believe those movements…
Dad’s Most Important Relationship (It’s Not What You Think It Is)
Fatherhood is an initiation into life-altering relationship. No matter how much parents and grandparents warn us about the changes to come, we don’t truly understand the impact of becoming a dad until it happens. It’s as if we’re looking up at the rope hoisting a grand piano as it fails thinking, “I wonder if that’s going to hurt?” The most important relationship for a new dad, however, isn’t the one with our child. It isn’t…
The L Word
Fear and anxiety dominated the first few months of my life as a father. The practicalities of trying to figure out how to do things I had never done before were a big part of it. You should have seen me and my wife trying to burp Joaquin for the first time. The four week baby care class we took had somehow managed to cover everything except proper burping technique. So Janine held Joaquin up…
Food For Thought
My son is a chocoholic. As an young toddler, chocolate was, in a way, his first solid food. Not that I planned it that way. Like most first-time parents, I tried to do everything by the book. As I introduced solids only the finest organic fruits and vegetables were pureed and then spoon-fed into his little open mouth. And then immediately spit out all over his tray, the floor, and the kitchen in general. Luca…
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