Month 3: Trusting the Process
Learnings and observations from my first year of fatherhood
Day 63: Saw a picture of myself from the weekend, and realizing that I’m starting to look like Donnie Wahlberg in that opening scene from Sixth Sense. Maybe I should just accept this as the new normal.
Day 64: She farted. That’s what did it. After 20 minutes of crying, countless positions and moves, a fart soothed her. She’s got gas problems, just like daddy.
Day 65: Some days, the baby breaks you. When your sleep loss accumulates, and her cries are never ending and shrill. When work gets in the way. And when it all hits at once. Today is that day for me. I want to sit in a dark corner or go to the store and never come back. I want to scream at her so she tells me what she needs. But it’s not her fault, what’s the point. I’ll power through because that’s all I can do. There are no days off.
Day 66: Complete 180 from yesterday! She slept through the night. Woke up all smiles and continued to nap throughout the day without any coaxing. Sometimes I think we’re on a hidden camera show and we’re the ones being punked.
Day 67: Celebrated Canada Day for the first time that I can ever remember. We took Baby to a festival, got her a flag. If she was able and into it, we probably would’ve painted her face and sang songs too. It’s weird that as a parent I’m all Care Bear stare with her, projecting these ideals that I’m not even into myself. But she’s a clean slate and I want her to define her own impressions of the world. If I’m into eating massaged cows, it shouldn’t mean that she should be too (she should though, they’re delicious). She’ll discover the troll in her eventually. That, or she’ll quell the troll in me.
Day 68: Baby’s burps sound like the love child of a frog and a grown man.
Sleep strategy #91: We’ve ditched transitioning, it was too hard. Instead we put her down directly and then soothe to sleep. One hand on her chest, your head nuzzled against hers, quietly shooshing her to sleep.
Day 69: Baby started choking from the flow of milk. But mid-cough, she clawed and grabbed her way back to Mom’s chest with this incredible urgency and zeal like this was her last meal.
Day 70: Noticing that her sounds are changing. She recently added a whimper, a yelp, a grunt, a yip, and a groan. There’s levels too, changes in intonation and tone. Her cries have gotten at least 20% louder. The mutant is evolving.
Day 71: So she has finally taken the bottle from me, not mom. And maybe my baby is fancy, but she’s particular. No frozen milk. This one I get, it tastes like shit. And if you wouldn’t eat shit why would you feed shit to your baby? She only takes the Comotomo bottle because it feels like a real boob. The temperature needs to be just right and the flow needs to be fast. She has no patience for the pitter patter of slow drip. I can only tilt the bottle 30°, and I need to maintain eye contact the whole time, cheering her on. She just wants an audience.
Day 72: Our weekly diaper count is at 35. It used to be 70. We’re a Pampers family right now, mostly because they were on sale. Each brand has different lines, but ultimately it’s like toilet paper — Mo’ money, Mo’ plys. You wouldn’t want a night’s worth of doo doo on 1-ply would you? Baby doesn’t, she lets us know.
Day 73: Sucked Baby’s snot out again. We’re on two a day for the last couple of weeks and it’s really helped her sleep. Baby hates it though and she knows it’s coming too, every time. Mom doesn’t have the heart to do it, so it’s on me. Mom just wants to be the one who gives her the boob after, furthering this hero/villain association in Baby’s mind.
Day 74: Sitting on the living room floor, making goo goo eyes with baby. Speaking one syllable utterances, with this awful high pitched voice. Old me is judging new me so hard.
Day 75: Shouts to the Fisher Price bouncer chair! Days ago we couldn’t get 10 minutes without baby sprawled on us like Spiderman. And now, she happily sits on this thing for an hour! It retails for $30, we got it free, I’d pay $500. We take it everywhere with us now.
Pro tip: During pregnancy, parents will want to dump all their old baby stuff on you. Super nice of them, but selfishly they also want to get rid of their garbage. Take it. Take their garbage and store it. You never know what will work.
Pro Pro tip: Don’t be the first to have kids, wait. Wait it out for the hand me downs.
Day 76: Mom has been sending me a daily video log of baby while I’m at work. Today’s episode, like yesterday’s, is baby improving her tummy time and mom narrating passive aggressive jabs about my absence in the background. Cold.
Day 77: Struggling to find that balance of work and home life. I barely see Baby now. My commute takes 1h 20 mins door to door. She’s still asleep when I leave for work and I have about an hour in the evening before she’s down for the night. This was the tradeoff of moving to the burbs.
Day 78: Today, Baby only stopped crying when I left the room. I’m not convinced that she remembers who I am during the week.
Day 79: Over the last week baby would often stare at her hands, maybe not realizing what those little sausages were for. And today, she started jamming fingers in her mouth, sucking on them, self-soothing! Baby does this thing where she sucks her thumb while face palming herself at the same time. She’s going to do big things one day.
Day 80: Having been re-assimilated into society, it’s easy to forget what it’s like back at home. The monotony and exhaustion of Month 2 without the panic of Month 1. It’s Saturday and a part of me is looking forward to the work week as a reprieve. Weird. Mom’s a damn national hero for holding it down everyday.
Day 81: Baby’s on to us trying to fake the boob with a bottle. We’re going to wait her out, she has to eat eventually! We need baby to untether from the boob, so we can untether from her.
Day 82: I spent the weekend rebuilding my credibility with baby, we’re best friends again. Now it’s Monday and everything will be undone. Come mid-week she’ll be back giving me side eyes along with a fast developing resting bitch face. I’m Adam Sandler, she’s Drew Barrymore and this is 50 first dates.
Day 83: Seeing my dad all soft with Baby is such a trip. He’s a classic Asian dad — unapologetic, judgemental, stern, and stubborn. We never got Love You’s and hugs growing up and here’s Baby, breaking down walls and making bridges. Babies bring out the best in us.
Day 84: Circling back to our plan from Day 44, we finally committed to getting her sleeping in her own room. We also added a bedtime routine — diaper, pj’s, drops, [sometimes snotting], milk, story, sleep. It’s only been 3 days, but she’s gone down quietly at 8pm pretty consistently. So far so good. This is step 1 of that sweet sweet sleep training we’re trying to adapt.
Sleep strategy #426: Continually drag a Kleenex from her head down to her chin. It’s magc.
Day 85: Baby’s showing early signs of male pattern baldness. The hair will grow in (I hope), but right now she looks like an old man wearing frilly dresses. I can’t stop laughing.
Day 86: I really hope this baby signing thing works. We’ve been playing a really shitty game of charades for the last month, where both sides have no idea what the other has been trying to do or say.
Day 87: If I smile at Baby, she does it right back at me! I just died. This has made the last 86 days of struggle so worth it. Her new name is Gums, at least until her teeth come in.
Day 88: Funny how i’ll spend 3$/day on a fancy espresso but haggle over the unit cost of diapers. We’re at .23$ per at the moment.
Sleep strategy #1223: Not really a strategy, this is divine intervention. Baby will soothe herself to sleep, sucking on her little digits.
Day 89: It’s been awhile since I’ve held Baby to sleep. I overcompensated and held her for all of her naps today; six hours with sack of potatoes over there, on my chest. It’s the sweetest thing but it really brought me back to Month 1. Now I remember why we’ve been working so hard to get her off of us in the first place.
Day 90: Wired since 5 am from the adrenaline rush of snotting baby again, I experimented with going to the gym. It’s quiet at this time. The meatheads aren’t in yet, it’s just parents and seniors pushing the minimum weights a machine will allow. This is my tribe, I fit right in.
Day 91: Three months deep, I’m realizing that once you cross this line into parenthood, there’s no crossing back. We traded rap music for lullabies, nights for mornings, snowboards for strollers. We’re part of this life now. We’re so entrenched in it that adding another kid or two to the mix would be less of an adjustment than not having kids at all.
Man, I can’t believe I said that.
