Darren O’Connor is a fresh-out-of-the-box dad to one screaming little boy.
He’s on a mission to become the best dad he can be. His blogs and podcasts at
askdad.ie are mostly about the positive things associated with becoming a Dad, while his hilarious
tweets document his parent fails as a newbie. This guy is one for the bookmark (chuckle) list. It doesn’t get more real than this.
1. Getting a child to sleep feels like an investment you need to protect
"One evening I crept into our room, where the child was sleeping, to get into my PJs. I was as silent as a ninja, avoiding all the creaky floorboards and anything else that might make a noise. I’m 100% sure it wasn’t me, but he woke. My wife went crazy. I thought it was a bit of an overreaction. I clearly just happened to be in the room when he was due to wake anyway.
Until a few nights later. After sixty minutes of agitation, crying and whingeing, I finally get him settled. Then my wife carelessly bangs a door and he jumps. The anger rose in me like the fizz of a newly opened can of Coke. “If he wakes now, I thought; she can take him and spend the next hour getting him to sleep because I’ll be damned if I’m doing that again.”
I don’t bother getting into my PJs anymore.
2. You learn very quickly to do everything one-handed
When a baby is clingy and just wants to be held, you adapt fast. Everything still needs to be done, and baby needs to be held. But you learn to open bottles, make tea, clean and even open your jeans to pee: all one handed. I wonder if I could add that as a skill on my CV?
3. Everything smells like spew
Probably because everything has been spewed on.
4. A baby’s cry is perfectly pitched to penetrate your skull
My god. When a child is crying and does that one where he empties his lungs all the way, plus a little more, the scream that follow should be classified as hazardous to your health. It vibrates your brain.
5. Every household job takes weeks to get to
All I had to do was put the 9V Battery into the carbon monoxide detector. The battery was there; the detector beside the battery. It took over three weeks for me to actually get around to connecting the two.
6. Every good intention you had to raise your child ‘the right way’ goes out the window
‘We won’t bring him into our bed lest we give him bad habits’. ‘We won’t use a pacifier’. ‘We won’t sit him in front of the TV’. Let me tell you, to get a few moments peace or a night’s sleep: I’ve used every one of those very handy tools and thrown in a few more for good measure.
7. You will never eat warm food again
Even when there are two of us at home, there’s always something that gets in the way of eating our food while it's still warm. In fact, the last hot meal I ate was Christmas dinner. And that was because my mom cooked it.
Read and listen to more from Darren at askdad.ie.
