At Home with Dad

Another day in the life of a stay-at-home father. I use father loosely since Esme is not exactly requiring a lot of parenting in the familiar sense. Esme seems to run through many stages, with modifications added daily, but a common thread can be found. She can be asleep, but there are a couple different stages of this. She can be Really Asleep, as in out cold and able to calm herself back to sleep, this is reserved usually for night time. She can be Lightly Asleep, where any noise can startle her, and she tends to not calm herself and needs some interaction to lull her back to dreamland, this stage is pretty common during the day. She can be Fighting Sleep, again fairly common during the day, usually after eating, and clearly indicated by the eyelids slowly shutting, than snapping open again with a frown and a noise of some sort. I’ll call Eating a stage, indicated by actively slurping away, no dribbling, just eating. Later in the feeding she can get full but not be “done” and this is a far more dribbling, arms wheeling, mildly annoyed to downright angry stage. Then we have Active Alert. This is a standard phase, it occurs either immediately after feeding or shortly after feeding and a nap. This is a fun stage where we roll around and lift our heads up and make faces at each other. We like to sit up and pretend to stand, occasionally we lie on our bellies, lifting our chest and heads. She does a lot of gurgling and the occasional grunt, especially when she is lifted high over my head and swooped back down to the bed. Active Alert stage is obviously over when everything but the swoop leads to a loud grunt and big frown. If those signs are ignored, then you will go straight to an Angry Stage. The Angry Stage is pretty amusing, and can be frustrating. Fortunately, angry is rare unless provoked. It is basically what it sounds like: crying, yelling, and big, big frowns. Angry calms into Quiet Alert, another standard phase, and this is really neat too. Esme sits essentially still, eyes wide, taking in everything like a big sponge. You can just sense the absorption. As an example, one of the cats would walk by her in a Quiet Alert, and she would look, blink then lose focus. Now the cat walks by and she watches him pass, following the flip of his tail precisely with her eyes. The last distinct stage is Hungry Baby. There is still some rooting and pacifier fixation in this one. She will get a concerned look when she sucks strongly on a pacifier and nothing happens. It tends to correlate with feeding times, of 3 to 5 hour intervals, although we have been tricked. Lastly, we have two stages that usually occur in between other stages but can be their own stage as well. Happy Baby and Fussy Baby. These categorize anything and everything not mentioned above, and basically indicates how easy it will be to move her to another stage, Happy Baby obviously being easier.

Parenting is really only involved during the awake stages, and then it is usually just to guide her smoothly through stages until she is back to sleep, providing good input if she meanders through either of the alert stages. Now when she is really fussy or angry, it can be trying to keep her calm, but it does pass, and then she smiles a big smile when she hears you, or frowns and turns away when you kiss her on the cheek and all is forgotten. This is not the hard part of being at home with her.

The difficulty is being at home. Torn between doing housework, sleeping, or working from the house on the computer. Wanting to go for a walk in the woods, but deciding that it may be a little too much for Esme or me or both. Wanting to go run some errands but deciding that all the preparation is not worth the effort. These are the real parenting challenges. Deciding how to best use your time while Esme sleeps, or how long you should let her sleep before rousing her for a meal. Being at home is complicated, and can be difficult, but it’s not impossible. For all those who have asked “how are you doing being a stay-at-home dad?” I guess that’s the answer. I will add that when I left this morning Esme was nursing and I gave her a kiss and told her I loved her. The big smile she gave me makes me very happy to be heading home in an hour to spend the day with her.