A first trip to the cinema

H is nearly 3 and he has a fairly good attention span when it comes to watching movies. As I’ve mentioned before he’s been able to watch whole movies before - namely of course Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back. Although he is also partial to enjoying The Lego Movie, Frozen and Horton Hears a Who.

I figured it’s time we gave him a crack at the cinema. Charlie Brown and Snoopy: the Peanuts Movie was on with a showing in the morning. Let’s give it a go I thought. I also thought this will be ok. I loved Peanuts growing up so I now have an excuse to see movies like this one. I did refrain though from dressing in my Snoopy t-shirt for the cinema outing.

We arrived at the cinema, which is part of a shopping complex, about 15 minutes before the appointed showing. With it being a Sunday morning before the shops were open it was nice and quiet so he got a little run around and play on the Wiggles carousel.

Upon entering the cinema at the appointed time the first thing H saw was a Stormtrooper with a Star Wars poster behind him.

“Star Wars!” went the excited squeal from H. “Daddy we’re going to see Star Wars!”

“No,” I replied gently. “We’re seeing Charlie Brown and Snoopy.”

H was a little disappointed but we purchased the tickets and I had promised him popcorn as well. Of course, that means one small popcorn for each of us because he didn’t want to share with me. By the time we purchased one adult ticket, one child, two small popcorns (both almost as big as my near 3 old side kick) and a bottle of water I’m not getting change out of $50. In fact I’m handing over more! I probably haven’t been to the movies too much in the last few years but it’s getting a bit ridiculous.

We found our designated seats in the cinema and watched the seats around us fill up as the previews rolled. Now, I’m all for designated seats but when there’s only 14 people in the whole cinema there’s probably no need to put everyone in the same row.

The lights of course were down and H asked me if I could turn them on and make the noise not too loud. My alarm bells started to tingle here as we were watching adverts. We got through the previews ok but once the short film, an Ice Age spin off with the squirrel got going, H had climbed over into my lap.

As he started to hook into my popcorn I realised he had pretty much finished his already. Maybe this was the reason. No – he started to ask for Mummy and I knew we weren’t going to make it.

I held on and we made it through the first 20 minutes of the film before he said to me. “Daddy, it’s too scary. I want to go home.”

It’s moments like this I can hear my heartstrings snap and I realise I’ve probably pushed my son too far too early. We packed our bag and climbed over the 14 other people who were packed into the one row with us.

“Sorry, sorry,” I said as we climbed past other families as H, holding it together but obviously distressed, pulled me by the hand.

We got to the exit and I placed the popcorn buckets in the bin and H looked up at me and said in his loudest voice. “Daddy, it’s too scary. Let’s go see Star Wars.”

The Toilet Training Weekend – Pre-training

Last weekend we did some pre-training nappy off time. On a lovely Sunday afternoon I told H he could come and help me in the garden. He was excited by the idea of helping to whipper-snip and mow the lawn, trim the hedges and fix the deck. I wasn’t.

“Come on mate,” I encouraged him. “Let’s take your nappy off and wear some undies.”

In reply to the idea of wearing undies there was a very emphatic “NO, NO, NO!” He was, however, very happy to wear shorts with no undies. Already H has shown more inclination to be a tradesman than his father.

With his plumbers smile and safety goggles on he helped me pull up the rotten piece of decking before supervising me as I put in the new piece of decking. On a number of occasions he told me to stop, as I needed to use the hammer better and not hammer so loudly as it was disturbing his brother. He then decided to enter my shed so that he could wee.

After changing his shorts (still no undies) he came and helped me do the hedge trimming and mowing. H was very happy to climb the ladder and then use my old-fashioned push mower but only without shoes and out of sight of BWM. Up and back he pushed it a few times under my supervision – most definitely doing a better job then his father. He then told me he was finished and disappeared back into my shed - to wee again.

By now it was dinnertime and all the jobs were done. I’d cleaned up the shed (twice) and put everything away. The garden was ready for the upcoming weekend when we decided we were going to go into toilet training 3 day lock-down.

Stay tuned to see who spends more time hiding in the shed – H or his father!

The (Star Wars) sins of the father are visited upon the sons

Warning – contains Star Wars spoilers but if you haven’t seen it yet the you’re probably not enough of a geek (or cool enough) to be reading my blog anyway.

If you haven’t seen the new Star Wars movie The Force Awakens yet you’re probably in the minority now so I’m going to tell you how this movie has affected my life. Believe me when I say it’s affected my life I mean the first thing I told my class at school was we would be counting down the days until the movie was released. I started planning going to the movie with a friend as soon as the release date was announced.

To put it in a simple phrase - I LOVE STAR WARS!

Family history (or legend) says that my parents took my older brother and I to the drive in movies sometime in 1977 when we were just 1 and 3 respectively to see a double feature. The first was some family movie that no one recalls. The second was Star Wars and we kids were expected to be asleep by the time it started. I’ve been told that every time Mum and Dad looked around we were both bug eyed staring at the screen with smiles on our faces.  The second time I saw The Force Awakens I took my Dad as a thank you.

Needless to say Star Wars is in my blood. Naturally it was the first movie I showed to H when he was about 6 months old. I may have done the same to G but I don’t think BWM knows that yet – sorry. Both boys got up to where Han shot first before becoming irritated and needing to sleep, feed or have their nappy changed.

In the lead up to The Force Awakens I may have shown H the trailers as they were released on the internet. I may also have shown him Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back as well. I can add this to the fact that H has an original Star Wars poster up in his room and before his 2^nd birthday I had given him his first light saber – albeit made from pool noodles. When we have light saber battles he always has to have the red one because he says he’s Darth Vader.

As you can see he has, quite naturally, started to become a little obsessed about Star Wars too. However, one day when BWM picked him from his day care centre they pulled her aside and spoke about how he runs up to other children, points his fingers (or stick / toy) at them and makes his best laser gun sound “Pshooow, Pshooow” usually followed by “Stormtrooper fall down!”

It was obviously time to have a few words to him. We’ve never used the word gun around him but he said he was “spraying”. Which is of course a term we use all the time with the hose or with the spray bottle he often plays with outside. There have been many conversations about not using his ‘spray’ because many people don’t like it and also some of the other kids are copying him.

Of course it hasn’t stopped him from running around and yelling “Pshooow, Pshooow” on a regular basis often with stick in hand. Mind you the amount of Star Wars toys and clothing he got for Christmas was great to see, although we did try to hide as many of the guns from the action figures as possible.

So how has the new movie affected me as a parent? I think all Star Wars fans think we have a little bit of the Han Solo scoundrel in us. This meant that when, in my opinion, the greatest rogue in cinema history was impaled with a light saber by his own son my first reaction was to scream “NOOOOOOOO!” even though you could see it coming.

My second reaction was “Geez, I’m going to have to be nice to my sons or I could end up that way!”

What happens now if I keep pushing (sorry) sharing Star Wars on my sons? I think they’re more likely to end up as scruffy looking Nerf herders but if I end up on a Star Killer Base with one or both then it hasn’t worked out so well.

The Return of The Slightly Mad Dad

It’s been a long time between posts but I’ve decided I’m making a comeback. My return to work at the beginning of 2015 saw me let the blog slide away. The demands of a fulltime job, being a husband and father to H meant that time became too scarce for writing my “daddy thoughts” on a regular basis. Writing a blog became something that I would one day want to revisit.

I would love to say the calling of writing regularly helped drag me back into wanting to write this blog. However, I was able to fulfill my enjoyment of writing by having a number of articles on rugby union published on The Roar during 2015.

Many of my work colleagues and the parents in my class last year asked often asked me if I would go back and do it all again as a stay-at-home dad. The answer I gave them was always unequivocally and often overly-emphatically, “Yes.”

So the reason I am back writing is also the reason my comeback to the keyboard has stalled (and I’m still being distracted as I try to write this because someone should be asleep!) has been the arrival of H’s younger brother G.

G arrived in May last year and having a two year old and a babe in arms certainly kept us on the go. Yet when the opportunity to take 2016 “off” from work came about so as I could spend time with both the boys I was always going to jump at the chance.

After a busy Christmas and New Year period today saw also the return of the BWM (Bread Winning Mum – for the uninitiated) as she went off to have a meeting with her boss about her return to work. I figured that if she was going back into her role as the BWM then today would definitely be the chance for a return of The Slightly Mad Dad.

So here it is – the first thoughts of a stay-at-home dad with 2 sons. I look down at G as the waterfall of dribble pours down his front, somewhere I can hear H yelling “What’s her doing?” and I realise that this year is going to be fun and I look forward to sharing our adventures through this blog.

'Manning-up' and being a 'real man'

Last Saturday I felt like a real man and 'manned-up'. Here are a few of the things that I did:

1.     Climbed a ladder to fix a light,

2.     Went for a run,

3.     Cooked steak on my BBQ while drinking a beer,

4.     Wore a check shirt all day,

5.     Used a screwdriver to fix something in my car.

However, these things (and many other manly things I did which I can’t recall or don’t think need mentioning now) are probably not the things that I think defined me most as a man on Saturday.

On Saturday night I had a massive cry. No – nobody punched me on the nose or kicked me in the groin. Nor did my footy team lose - I had to wait until Sunday morning for that to happen to the Wallabies.

No I cried over a book. In fact not even the ending of a book. I cried at the end of the fourth chapter and then really lost it to blubbing with the opening of the fifth. The book is Worse Things Happen at Sea by William McInnes and Sarah Watt which they wrote together just before her death from cancer in 2011.

What made me cry was not about her battle with cancer – I haven’t even got that far into the book. I cried when they told the story of their stillborn son Cosmo. I really, really cried (enough to wake up BWM) when Sarah started the fifth chapter with, “Our second baby was born, and he breathed. Then he cried.”

I experienced a similar moment reading during BWM’s pregnancy with H. I read Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and cried throughout the last pages at the death of mother and baby after their survival through the ravages of the First World War. It was powerful loneliness of the final sentence, “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain,” which really reduced me to a blubbing mess.

When H was born all I wanted to hear was a baby crying. In fact it was only about 5 minutes after he was born, I think I’d even helped to cut the cord and I was holding my son that I realised he was my son and not my daughter. I had missed the whole, “Congratulations it’s a boy,” because I was so happy to hear him crying.

BWM and I have never been through the trauma of a stillborn birth and I it’s very difficult to comprehend the pain that occurs for people when this happens. Pregnancy is such an amazing thing that occurs in the female body. It’s something that we mere males never get to experience physically.

However, it is one that men go through emotionally. This probably makes it even harder for us as males because we like to be able to do something to ‘fix’ things. This is easier when there is a physical job to do rather than being something that needs to be dealt with through an emotional lens.

When BWM and I were first trying to start a family together we lost babies through miscarriage. These losses caused us both considerable sadness but this is slight compared to what some others experience in attempting to have children. As a male I could feel the sadness and disappointment that BWM felt in some respects. However, I never experienced the physical side that she did in the loss of these babies.  Dealing with the emotions of these required seeking assistance to help understand my own thoughts in sharing our loss.

Throughout BWM’s pregnancy with H both of us were somewhat anxious in waiting for how everything would turn out. Our anxieties were not fully assured until after we had undergone a battery of tests and counseling until the 15-week mark of the pregnancy. After that our Obstetrician would regularly say to us, “You’re backing a winner here. There’s no need to worry.” It’s a phrase he is already using with BWM again now that she has reached the same stage of our current pregnancy.

Now that I’m a dad with H I still feel the same anxieties that I went through when BWM was pregnant with him. I know there isn’t anything I can do physically during the next few months as we wait for the birth. It’s a time for controlling the emotional aspects of being a dad and husband and looking after BWM, H and our yet to be born child.

What am I looking forward to most in a physical sense now? It’s listening for that first cry. Once that happens I know there will still be some emotional things to deal with but I’ll be back in the game with the physical part too.

One thing I know that I know I’ll be doing with both H and his sibling – is reading great stories to them. It’s definitely not the last of McInnes and Hemingway that I’ll be reading. In fact I look forward to sharing these with my kids.  I think though I’ll start by reading Cricket Kings and The Old Man and the Sea to them. They’ll make me cry but not in the same way as those other books did and I think it’s good that kids see their dad cry – because it’s definitely part of 'manning-up' and being a real man.