Tumble Along With Brad

The Father I Want To Be - First Year

A month ago I sent out a tweet asking for topics to write about here, and my good friend Nathan Verrill (twitter) suggested the following.

So here we go:

My son is going to born in roughly 3 months and there is so much going through my head on how my life is about to change. The fact that we are going to have a son was a relief for me, I just don’t feel like I am ready to have a daughter yet. People tell me that raising a boy or a girl is fundamentally the same, but I call bullshit. Raising a girl requires more emotional maturity than raising a boy in my opinion, which I simply don’t have at this stage in my life.

Questions like what type of father I want to be, what lessons do I want to make sure I teach my child, and how will I find the right balance between providing for my family and spending time with my family keep coming up in my mind. These are not easy to answer, and a real ‘answer’ doesn’t exist. The best thing would be to use these questions as checkpoints throughout this adventure that is parenting. If ever I am not happy with the answers that I give, I will know it is time to try something new.

For the first year of my child’s life I just want to soak everything in and help my wife out as much as I can. The two goals I have set are to attempt to teach my son how to entertain himself and some semblance of independence. I know it sounds harsh to want an infant to be independent, but I don’t really expect him to be walking around warming up his own bottle. However, having a sense of self-relience even at a young age will go a long way as my son grows up. I know this next year and three months is going to be quite a trip, and it will be interesting to see what my Year Two post will have to say.

Twitter-Sourcing Blog Posts

One of the biggest challenges I have had getting started with blogging is coming up with topics that haven’t rehashed over and over again. I have tons of ideas that pop up in my head, and thanks to Google Tasks I have been able to keep up a decent number of posts in the hopper. Every now and then, I still struggle to come up with meaningful content to post out there for the world.

A solution I have been trying, and have had some success with, is see what my twitter network wants to hear about. Here are the tweets I got last week when I opened myself up to all my twitter friends:

@barrykirk - Barry Kirk

@nathanverrill - Nathan Verrill

Obviously, this post has been inspired by Barry’s tweet. It does raise the question though, does crowd-sourcing my blog posts out to twitter make me lazy?

Personally, I don’t think so. If there is one thing I am good at, it is having a conversation with someone no matter what the topic is. I don’t want my blog to be just another brain dumb of my views and ideas, I want it to be an on going conversation with my readers. By crowd-sourcing the topics on my blog, this just a way for me to starting a conversation with the community. I have devoted this blog to posts about Interaction Design, Web 2.0 Stuff, and Fatherhood (going to be a dad in about 4 months.) All of these topics have deep and extensive communities, with tons of content already in existence.

My method of interjecting myself into the overall conversations is to see what my peers want to hear about, or maybe what my response would be to something they have written. If successful, I see this as a great way to keep myself involved both in my blog and the community of Interaction Designers, Web Guru’s, and other dads out there.

Searching for My Child's Name

At Christmas my in-laws gave me the following book to help my wife and I search for the name for our unborn child.

The first challenge was where the hell to do I start? The best course of action was straight brute force in the end. My wife and I each picked a colored highlighter and in our free time we are going through the book front to back highlighting anything that sticks out.  I took the approach that Malcolm Gladwell discusses in his book ‘Blink’ of going with my gut reaction. As I skimmed over the thousands of names, I trusted my ‘gut’ reaction. During my search two things happened which I wasn’t expecting.

The names I picked for a boy in general had ancient roots, and deep meaning. I have a hard time convincing my wife and family with some of the possibilities due to certain ethnic groups having a ‘claim’ to it. On the other hand, many of the names I chose for a girl were historic, but generally common.

Many of the names I chose, both for a boy or a girl, could make the child an easy target once they start to socialize with other children. My philosophy is that no matter what, kids will find a way to turn a name into a put down. I don’t want the possibility of simple name calling to restrict the options we have when it comes to naming our child.

As it stands now, I have made it all the way through the book and picked out all the names that just ‘felt’ right. My wife is almost through the boys section, and should have the girls done sometime next week. Once we have picked out our choices, I plan on pulling out all of the highlighted names and saving it in a digital manner. Coming to a final choice will be the true challenge though. I have been thinking that the best way would be to whittle the listing down to a meaningful set, and just wait until that beautiful day our child’s comes into the world. It is my hope that on that day, upon looking at my child’s face a name will naturally be chosen.

Dumb Dog

So my dog decided today that it would be a fun idea to turn a perfectly good bottle of black crafting ink into his new chew toy. Mind you he made this decision without consulting with me first, as I was distracted entertaining a guest.

So there I am sititng at my dining room table chatting away when I hear him making weird noises. I cock my head over to see whats going on and I am presented with the dog with black foam coming from his mouth. Then the rest of the scene hits me, as I take in the spots of black paint that has been flung all over the carpet and onto the wall.

First step was to get the dog outside, as the black foam coming from his mouth was causing an even bigger mess. Luckily, the paint is non-toxic and 3 hours later he is still acting fine. I was able to successfully get all the paint out of the carpet, thank god for water based paints. Loki, my dog, has some new temporary spots, but is on the whole ok.

From a philosphical point of view, I see this as my dog preparing me for fatherhood. My brand spanking new kid will be here in 6 short months. This probably isn’t the last time I will find myself cleaning something out of the carpet, or off the walls. In the end I learned how to have a little more patience with small creatures, and successfully clean a stainable material out of carpet before it sets in.