A Blog is Born.

I have a sense that this 1st blog is actually 12 months overdue. That Baby James is 3 weeks off his first birthday tells me this.

My strong need for symmetry and order and things in their place would have had me blogging from James’ birth, maybe even earlier as I finished working as a middle school teacher a month or so before he arrived in the world. However, the ‘yin’ that is my need for order and routine is balanced with its own ‘yang’, i.e. that I procrastinate like a champion and that I don’t always hit my targets.

But, that was the old me. I have turned over a new leaf. Started afresh.

I’ve been a House Dad for a year now and all in all I’ve enjoyed this new occupation. But in that sentence lies the downside. I’ve viewed this new role as a job and not so much as a vocation or something else on a deeper spiritual plane, you know what I mean, ‘the role of the primary carer is the most fulfilling and rewarding of any role as you guide a new born …’. I don’t always regard what I do like that. There has been a certain ‘maleness’ that comes out in me where I think about what I’ll do after I’ve stayed at home with the kids, but then I realise that that might be years … 4, 5, 6 … longer even depending on how many My Sweet and I have.

I’m writing this as Baby James potters around me and he’s just tottered up to my leg with his water bottle to see what I’m doing. He needs a nappy change so I’ll attend to that and then I’ll return…

… I’m back. Changing nappies has never been a favourite task but from time to time its not too bad. The worst is when he goes through a ‘stage’, (I now call any change of behaviour in Baby James a stage and that way I don’t get too hung up on trying to explain why he does strange things) like when he decided to investigate the area inside his nappy while I was changing him. There’s only so much you can control with your own 2 hands, one holding both legs and the other cleaning and changing, so if his two hands suddenly appear on the scene it can get messy, but hey, that was just a stage. Lately he’s taken to twisting in all directions while said nappy change is happening, again that adds a messy dimension to the experience.

But I’ve digressed, although not in a bad way. Actually its not a bad segue. I think one of the reasons I’m blogging is to give an outlet to the thoughts that go through my head on a daily basis. I frequently find myself talking to myself in my mind, thinking of things that I need to do as the domestic engineer, making mental notes to self of things to tell My Sweet when she returns home from a day at the office or coming up with solutions that I think might solve any number of local, state or international problem (I am a man after all and solutions are what we do).

So that’s it, my current life in a nutshell. Now, what’s the plan? Well, I hope to blog nearly every day. I’ve got a list of memories from Baby James’ first eleven months that I don’t want to forget and in fact I have this nostalgic streak, so I guess I’m going to record these memories for him and me and if you find them interesting, well for you too. What else? Well, I’ve always liked the idea of writing a journal and I suppose that’s exactly what a blog is, so, this is going to be a journal about the life of a bloke who’s at home raising his son and the fun and games that go with.