Being a SAHD - Stay at Home Dad

Being a SAHD – Stay at Home DAD

A peek through the window of stay at home dad of twins, Jay

Ok, ok first: you’re all wrong and I’m totally right about everything!! As long as we have cleared that up we can move forward.

Things you will find in this blog:

•  I love my kids, but by Jesus they drive me fucking crazy

•  FYI this post will contain swearing

•  Not everyone's experiences are the same

•  WE ALL TAKE THE PISS OUT OF OUR KIDS (don't even try to say you don't)

•  This is just fun and contains little insights into the life of a stay at home dad

Here's what I've learnt so far:

There aren't that many of us around.

Little suits that snap up the back are evil. Hide or destroy them. You will not be able to figure them out in your 15th week of sleep deprivation. Buy front-snaps only. It doesn't matter how cute they are. Except for the Pooh outfit. You can keep that one, but only for special occasions.

There's nothing wrong with duct tape.

Get help. Have people visit. One approach is to make it clear to them that they are there to take care of you, not the babies. Another is to give them baby duties. Whichever you do, make it as clear as if you were talking to employees.

Put Velcro tape under the baby wipe box. It stops you fighting with it while you juggle a baby with a poo explosion in the pants. Seriously is it just my kids that have that instant reaction to put their hands down there once those tabs on the side of the nappy get pulled??

Bouncy chairs. Get two. Rock one with your foot while you hold the other baby. They're also for feeding two babies at a time. Insert babies into bouncers, insert bottles into babies. It’s obviously why they were made :)

Sleep and the Lack Thereof.....

The sleep deprivation will be worse than anything you can imagine. I once went 96 hours straight on ahh film project? Yeah we will go with that (AKA:  Xbox game Halo4). Thought it was pretty macho. That was nothing. This kind of sleep deprivation tilts all the way over into mental illness. You will say things you don't usually say, see things in ways you don't usually see them, and probably piss some people off. It's okay. When you start sleeping again, it'll gradually get better. It will. It really will.

It gets easier. It does. I promise. For us, it started to ease when our twins hit around 4 1/2 months of age. As of today, we can count on both babies sleeping from 7pm until 6am. I know right!?!  Holy shit.... eating, and then sleeping from 8:30am until 10:30am.  That's 2 hours. If you're still expecting, 6 hours in 3-hour blocks sounds like torture. If you've got newborns, just hang on to this thought: in a few months, you'll get 6 hours of sleep.

That doesn't mean we're chipper and perky. We're exhausted. We're just not that kind of exhausted.

You can put two babies to sleep by jiggling them in one bassinette, but it takes a while as they keep waking each other up.

And finally we reach the end of this blog for the first week. I’ll leave you with a small picture each week that you might find amusing... if not sod off lol