Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Avoiding Dirty Diapers: How to be a stay at home dad and writer...


 I'm currently writing this blog post on my iPhone, sitting in a rocking chair, holding my son, and singing the most ridiculous song to him. I have always been good at multitasking when it comes to writing projects -- a screenplay and novel always in the works, along side a myriad of student essays to grade -- but this is a whole new beast.

After I heard the news we had a baby on the way I sat down and wrote a new book. Mostly just because so many friends and family insisted that once we had a kid "everything would change" and they followed that great bit of wisdom with the inspirational, "good luck getting any writing done."

So now, as I enter my first real week as a stay at home dad and part-time professor, I am also doing my best to continue my writing projects (all while practicing the Continuum Concept), holding Atticus in one arm, typing with the other...

[Some indefinite amount of minutes later...]

Sorry, you wouldn't know it, but I had to break from writing to feed and take my boy to the bathroom. He's three months old and hasn't had an accident in his cloth diapers in over a month. That is too much information, I know, but I share that with you because the same people who laughed when I said I was going to be a stay at home parent and write also laughed when I began potty training him at one week old. I felt that if people in other parts if the world could do it, so could I. And I did.
So here I am, son passed out on my shoulder, now typing on my phone with both hands. I'll slip over to my computer and post this, then perhaps begin work on the new novel I've been researching for a few years or dust off that old novella and see if I can't breathe some life into it. I'd better go now, I may only have a good ten or twenty minutes to write, but nonetheless, just like staying home with my boy, it will be good.

1 comment:

  1. Good luck. They said I couldn't finish the doctorate while being a stay at home dad. Then they said the second kid would surely spell the end to it. They say a lot of things.....
    I used to love singing the alphabet song to the kids - every letter got a different animal name that started with that letter. The kids were using sign language by 1 year old and both were reading chapter books by 5. Unfortunately, our potty training didn't go as fast.
    Ron T

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