I'm a stay-at-home dad...well, sort of. I teach 9th and 10th grade English at a local private school and, thanks to a very favorable school calendar, I have the opportunity to spend the summer at home with my 1-year-old daughter. We'll call her the Bear.
At the school where I teach, we usually break for summer by Memorial Day. That's remarkably early for a high school in the Philadelphia area; most schools are in session until the second or third week of June. My sister, a Spanish teacher in the area, often jokes that she'll be celebrating the Fourth of July in school. This past winter, with the seemingly endless barrage of snow, most schools were forced into a longer-than-usual academic year. I'm lucky in the sense that my school, even without the snow, has a shorter calendar than most schools. Additionally, when most schools have to tack on snow days at the end of the year, extending the year even further into June, the multiple snow days we had (Three? Four? I lost count after five.) were essentially ignored and were never made up. Here's how I imagine that administrative conversation went:
Administrator 1: Should we make up all the snow days we had?
Administrator 2: Nah. Let's end at our usual time.
Administrator 1: OK then. On to other matters...
Most people would relish the opportunity to have three months off in between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Fortunately for me, I have that opportunity every year as a teacher. Plus, my summer break just happens to be longer than most, for which I'm thankful.
When I first started teaching and wasn't married, I would use the long summer months to go down the shore, take naps, attend concerts (mid-week too, something unheard of now), work part-time at the Phillies as an usher, go to parties after games, take naps, read books, and travel a bit. Oh, and take naps. Lord, I miss taking naps.
Well, since the Bear came along last May, my "long" summer months have been spent waking up early, not taking naps, changing roughly 7,911 diapers (seriously, how does so much poop come out of such a tiny body?), not taking naps, building castles out of toy blocks only to have the Bear tornado through and wreak havoc on my makeshift city of wonders, slyly giggling the whole time she was destroying my work Godzilla-style, planning and hosting tea parties with Belle, Ariel, and Cookie Monster, and tirelessly trying to keep the Bear from eating our dogs' tails or seeing if she's electrically charged by sticking her tiny fingers in every outlet in our house. Oh, and not taking naps.
Yes, my summers have transformed from three months of good-times-with-no-responsibilities to three months of exhausting-work-trying-to-keep-another-human-alive. And you know what? I wouldn't have it any other way.
A lot of my friends and family have young kids, and there's one thing they all have in common: they wish they could spend more time at home. But, alas, the need to, you now, feed and clothe their kids necessitates full-time jobs. There's a trade-off, it seems, when you have kids. You could spend more time at home and have the kids go through life naked and hungry. Or, you could go to work from 9 to 5, making enough money to clothe and feed the kids, but sacrificing a lot of time and memories with the kids in the process. I'm in the enviable position of being able to have the best of both worlds. Yes, I have a full-time job, a job that I love and from which I get a lot of fulfillment (albeit, as is the case with most teachers, not nearly enough money). But, the nature of my job also allows me to spend a lot of time at home with my daughter for a good chunk of the year. Honestly, I thought about changing careers so that I could make more money, but one thing that teaching offers me that most other careers don't is that opportunity to spend three months a year making memories and messes with my daughter. There's no amount of money that can lure me away from that opportunity. Well, except maybe doing whatever it is that the Kardashians do to make money, which, to me, seems to consist entirely of eating salads and designing socks that no one buys. Nonetheless, I know a lot of people in my position (that is, having kids) might be jealous of the opportunity I have. And I'm not going to apologize for it; instead, I'm going to take advantage of it, because I know not a lot of people get the chance I have. Oh, I'm also going to document it on the internet. So there's that.
When the Bear was born last May, I thought about starting a blog chronicling our time together over the summer, my first summer as 'dad'. But then I realized that one-, two-, and three-month old babies don't really do much. Every entry would've probably been titled "Today, the Bear ate," "Today, the Bear slept," "Today, the Bear pooped," or "Today, the Bear threw up on both me and the dogs." Nonetheless, another school year has come and gone and my second summer as 'dad' has arrived. And this time around, the Bear does more than just eat, sleep, and poop. She just started walking a few months back, she speaks (screams? grunts?) a few words, she eats cell phones, she laughs all the time, and she's curious about discovering the world around her, even if that world consists of our house and the park around the corner. So, I thought the time was perfect to start a blog. Hence, "The Summer of Dad" was borne.
I'm doing this for two reasons. One, I want to share some things that I've learned about what it means to be a dad in 2014 (and beyond). Hopefully, the things I have learned and will learn will resonate with other dads out there. Two, I want to give my daughter something tangible that she can read a few years from now that will serve as a memory for our time together, a time before her memories become permanent.
My plan (for now) is to post an entry every day about what the Bear and I do. I'll also post pictures of our adventures. But, as anyone with kids knows, plans are well and good until one of the kids has an explosive bowel movement and a complete delousing is in order.
I hope you'll enjoy the entries and our stories. Check in every now and again to see what the Bear and I are up to during the Summer of Dad!
Geez, one day into the #summerofdad and she's already taking naps in the grass.
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