"Calm down a little bit."

I suppose I should be happy. The nightmare that has been the process of finding child care for Eleanor is over (more on this in another post). We found a place we like, they have an opening and we’re good to go.

We’re good to go, right? Right?

So why do I find myself thinking about the next step, and the one after that? I spent about 24 hours in my happy, peaceful place last week before I began to obsess over Eleanor’s preschool and elementary school options. And then I began obsessing about whether or not we need to move to a new neighborhood, sooner rather than later. And then I began obsessing about everything, from whether people like me to what I’ll be having for breakfast tomorrow morning. Did I mention I’ve been having trouble sleeping again?

Eleanor is starting daycare in a month, and I am starting a brand new job in two months.

***

On Sunday afternoon, as our church small group was meeting (as we do every Sunday), I spotted Eleanor across the room. She was running out of milk in her cup, still thirsty. Suddenly, she became terrified that someone was going to offer her water (no one had, by the way). She began to repeat, “No Water!” over and over. This is a (somewhat) typical behavior for her. The phrase repeated phrase gets louder and louder, and it always ends on a panicked rising note. She sounds like a Dalek from Doctor Who:

Every time she gets like this, it’s like she realizes for the first time how little control over her life she has. She clings desperately to this obsessive idea, this panicked tone. And she’ll keep spiraling, ever upward in tone and volume until she’s out of any control she might have had in the first place.

And all this happens in the time it takes me to cross to the other side of a room.

Her panic makes sense to me, even though I find it hard to deal with sometimes. I have a really independent toddler, one who demands to put on her own shoes several times a day. But we’ve got a perfect storm of a situation in which she is preternaturally self-aware but not particularly coordinated. She gets stuck trying to do tasks on her own while being saddled with a realization that there is very little she can do by herself. Man, that must be frustrating.

***

You know, the good thing about being in therapy for the better part of a year is that you start noticing your spirals before you get too out of control. You remember the tools you’ve learned and you consider returning to therapy, if for nothing else than to just clear your head. I consider the fact that I can consider all this a good thing.

***

I cross the room, pick my daughter up, and I talk to her. I tell her that I’m going to get her some milk but that she needs to take a deep breath and calm down a little bit. I take a dramatic, exaggerated deep breath and blow it out, modeling for her. She does it, too, and she smiles.

As we walk to the kitchen, she says, “Calm down a little bit.”

I think she’s talking to both of us.

Where I’ve been

The last couple of months have been a whirlwind, full of sturm und drang, and signifying much. It’s difficult to know where to start, and what to put on the blog at this point. But with the momentous changes underway in the Holz-Russell house, I feel like I should put an update out there.

Here’s a blast of the essentials:

• Eleanor speaks in full sentences, likes to “make jokes” and loves flowers.
• I got a new job. It starts July 1st.
• We have toured or will tour eleventy thousand childcare centers.
• Katie and I went on our first no-kid vacation. (It was awesome.)
• We tried snowboarding. (It was not so awesome.)
• We dabbled in potty training. We thought we were ready. We weren’t.

Deciding to go back to work has been hard. In fact, I wasn’t even planning on it until my dream job showed up on my doorstep, a job I would have been looking for two years ago if I hadn’t made the decision to stay home and take care of Eleanor. Now that I’ve received and signed the offer letter, I feel like I can announce it: I have accepted a position as Education Technology Coordinator at STRIVE Preparatory Schools.

I’m sure I will spend the next six months (or more) processing this move. I’ve certainly spent the last few weeks processing what this will mean for my family. But I know it’s the right decision. Eleanor is ready to hang out with new people, and I’m ready to get back to work.

It’s funny. I’m sure that a lot of blogs reach this point, particularly those about parenting. Life decisions happen, and they take you away from the snapshot writing captured in a blog. I think that’s why it’s taken me two months to get back to writing. I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that I wasn’t really covering any new ground by writing about my experiences as a stay at home parent. And knowing that I’m moving into a new phase of my life (as is Eleanor) has made me hesitant to commit any thoughts in writing, blog or otherwise. I’m honestly not sure I’ll continue blogging about fatherhood. I don’t know if I’ll have the time or mental energy once I go back to work. It’s been hard to have the mental energy already, just thinking about going back to work and all the preparation that’s gone into it.

I spend a lot of time wondering if my daughter will remember any part of her first two years of life, hanging out at home with Daddy. Will she remember the library storytimes? The weekly strolls through the Denver Museum of Nature and Science? The tickles and pretend naps on the couch or the bed? All the book reading? On demand, all throughout the day?

My wife keeps telling me that it doesn’t matter if she remembers, because we will tell her the stories. I hope that’s enough. Sometimes I wonder if she’ll forget the bonding we’ve had for two years, or if it will be like muscle memory, and it will always be a part of our relationship. God, I hope so.

I have no regrets about staying home the last two years, and it’s taught me so much about who I am and what I value. The reverberations will sound through the rest of my life. However, I’m looking forward to spending most of my day talking to adults again. I miss adults. I miss them. So. Much.

Spending your day with a hyper-verbal, precocious toddler is a precious, unforgettable experience. However, I’d like to have conversations that don't involve naming objects I’m looking at or objects I’d like to build out of Play-Doh, like snakes, balls, kitty-cats, pancakes, etc. My current balance of conversations is completely out-of-whack. Heck, I’d like to talk to somebody about baseball during the day. And I don’t even like baseball that much.

I will start my job in July, and I think I have at least a few more posts in me before that. If nothing else, I must write a post about the search for child care. I feel like I could have a whole blog dedicated to our search. It has been...challenging. Two more months until our world changes again. I have to keep reminding myself that life is a constant state of personal world changing. But these world changes are a blessing, and I know we’re on the right track.

Stay tuned.

“The stars are sleeping.”

It’s becoming clear to me that most of my parenthood reflections lately are centered around language. That makes sense -- I have a language teaching background and my daughter is in the process of acquiring language.

But I never expected the changes in her language to be so dramatic so quickly.

On the drive to a gymnastics class for Eleanor, we listened to a story on Colorado Public Radio about a new study examining sleep in young children. The story itself -- telling us that children’s brains are developing really fast and that connections are consolidated during sleep -- wasn’t surprising or particularly revelatory. However, this fact (from the CU press release about the study) stuck with me:

“They also found that the strength of the connections between the left and right hemispheres increased by as much as 20 percent over a night’s sleep.”

Twenty percent! That’s crazy! But what I’ve seen in the last week at least anecdotally confirms the possibility of this kind of leap.

I’ve been meaning to write a post about more cute, cool things that Eleanor says for the last couple of weeks. I make a mental note every time there’s a new phrase or a new way of constructing sentences. Fast forward to today, and it feels impossible to keep up. It’s incredible. Just the last week has been one of the most astonishing of my life. My wife went back to work after the Winter Break, and I expected to struggle mightily with the transition. And there were struggles, to be sure. A resurgence in explosive, unexplained tantrums is just one front in the transition war.

But the fact is that being able to have real, functional conversations with my 19-month-old daughter has been perhaps the most meaningful experience of my life.

Here are a few of the phrases and sentences she’s uttered in the last week (context in parentheses):

• “Stars...sleeping.” (Gazing at the sky, under the noonday sun)
• “Eleanor eat toast...honey.” (nodding vigorously as she replies to the question, “What do you want for breakfast?”)
• “Wait turn.” (Hands clasped behind her back, waiting for the toy tunnel to clear in the library storytime play area)
• “Mommy sing choir church” (On Thursday night, while Daddy does bedtime while Mommy is at church choir rehearsal)
• “Mommy...here” (She says, all day Monday after Mommy returns to work after the weekend)
• “Papa (grandpa) ship. Mama (grandma) ship. Eleanor boat.” (Eleanor’s spoken desire to join her grandparents on their recent cruise)
• “Ottoman Game?” (Any time Daddy sits in his favorite armchair, near the ottoman Eleanor likes to leap off of into Daddy’s arms)
• “Climbing.” (In response to Mommy saying, “What did you do at gymnastics class today?”)
• “All town” (omitting “through the” which are the words she doesn’t understand in the “Wheels on the Bus” song)

The development speed is dizzying. Because she’s a really verbal kid (no surprise there), I’m getting to witness a brain getting wired in real time. What she talks about and the way she talks about it indicates in the most elegant way how her brain works and what she understands and what she remembers. She strings series of objects together because objects make sense -- she can see them and they can fall into categories or systems. In certain environments, objects exist and processes occur. If we’re at the library, there are books and toys and friends and snacks and turn-taking. If we’re eating breakfast, there are base foods and toppings and the highchair and the pink or purple bib.

If I ever return to teaching in a formal setting, I will hopefully remember this process my daughter is going through. People build on what they know. They will experiment tentatively, but only if they feel safe enough to make mistakes. They’ll keep learning and expanding their schema if they keep having successful interactions with the content.

But academic pursuits notwithstanding, I am so privileged to be a part of this little girl’s life. She is an amazing kid, and she’s almost always soaring through these experiences with a beaming smile on her face. I’ll try to remember that during the next tantrum.

For Eleanor, the stars really are sleeping. Something so beautiful, so way up in the sky, must need lots of rest so they can stay up there and shine so bright all night long.

"Hat coat go car class."

That was one of my daughter’s first “sentences.” While it’s missing all sorts of parts, it’s hard to argue with the clarity, simplicity, logic, and effectiveness in communicating a very specific thought.

The aforementioned sentence was uttered a couple of weeks ago during the hour-long process of exiting the house to get to Eleanor’s second swim lesson. She was very excited, and I could see the wheels turning in her head as she processed the order of events necessary to experience swimming. She paused between each word, pronouncing them carefully to make sure I understood her.

It was a bitterly cold morning in a series of bitterly cold mornings, so Eleanor knew we wouldn’t be leaving the house unless she put on her hat and coat. Once those conditions were satisfied, then it was time to go to the garage. Then we get in the car and go to class.

Simple enough concept, but if you think about the working memory necessary to communicate all these words in a relatively logical order in a short period of time, it’s impressive. Anyone who’s learned a second language and then found themselves in a country where that language is the native tongue can attest to the difficulty of real-time expression. When you’re excited, you’re highly motivated, but you’re also easily flustered. My daughter’s resiliency in the face of impending sensory overload in the pool makes me smile. It also fascinates me.

The sheer number of words in her vocabulary astonish me. If you read this blog regularly, you’ll know that I (briefly) attempted to keep track of my daughter’s new words. I gave up a few weeks ago because I couldn’t keep up anymore. She’s using 3 to 5 new words a day, at least, and that’s been fairly consistent for a couple of months. I need to explain that this isn’t meant to sound like bragging. I find development fascinating, and while I am particularly gleeful to be able to enter into real conversations with my daughter, I recognize the vast differences just among the children I’ve known in my life. Everybody moves at their own pace, and most kids end up in pretty similar places, cognitively speaking.

Book book book bus bus bus moon moon moon stars stars sky walk go mall play shoes shoes shoes socks socks socks (apple)sauce!

These are popular words in my daughter’s lexicon. It is a corpus mostly consisting of nouns, a few verbs and a very, very short list of adjectives. I suspect that in her mind they are all nouns, really. “Go” is naming a thing that happens more than a word conjugated to get a subject acting in some way.

I love listening to the way she uses prior knowledge and phonetic success to build new words. “Book” has led to “Boot.” “Socks” has led to “Sauce.” The fact that the only characteristics these words share are phonemes and part of speech leads me to believe that her unspoken, understood vocabulary is gigantic compared to the words she can say.

I love being witness to this language acquisition process. I used to be a Spanish teacher, so I am predisposed to love watching someone figure out how to communicate. But it’s really special to watch my daughter figure it out. I feel like I’ve been waiting for this moment for her entire life.

It’s pretty cool.

Your grace abounds in the Deepest Waters

My friend, Lanecia Rouse, wrote a beautiful post.  I wanted to share it with you.  Lauren Boyd

Your grace abounds in deepest waters
Your sovereign hand
Will be my guide
Where feet may fail and fear surrounds me
You’ve never failed and You won’t start now
So I will call upon Your name
And keep my eyes above the waves
When oceans rise
My soul will rest in Your embrace
For I am Yours and You are mine
-Oceans (Where Feet May Fail), Hillsong United

Wednesday, December 4, 2013 my water broke.

Its breaking gave way to the birth of my 22-week and 3 days in the womb baby girl, Année Juredline Rouse Tinsley at 4:58pm.  Less than 2-hours after entering this crazy beautiful world, she died resting in the loving embrace of her mother and father.

So here I am approaching the first days of Advent according to the calendar, but in the thick of the last days of Lent in my heart and it seems right.   So I am going to just flow with it and grieve through this dark, but not starless, night.

Once again in life I find myself overcome with questions, an array of emotions and unknowns, as I stare in the face of the great mystery that is life.   Not sure what all of this really means for our journey or where it is leading, and to be honest, the fact that this death could have meaning or life-giving potential kind of pisses me off.

I am wired and have been shaped to search for answers and allow other questions to unfold as I get a glimpse of  the answers I seek. It is typically hard for me to sit with the questions without searching for answers, but not so much in this moment.  I don’t have the desire or strength to do that theological work.

Right now, today, the only desire I have is to sit in my pool of tears and allow Love to do what it needs to do within and outside of my broken heart.  I am thankful for Love’s presence over the past week and since learning of A.J.’s existence within my womb.  And though in the deep crevices of my heart I appreciate we are not puppets in the hands of the Divine, I must confess I am not thankful Love allowed the breaking.  Dare I say I never will be.

My heart grieves and longs for healing with every mother who has experienced the loss of a child inside or outside of the womb.  So many go through this breaking and crashing so silently.  My heart cries.  It is a backwards process and a true tragedy that no child, mother or father should have to endure.  God cries.

So one day at a time I will go through this season with my love, my partner and best friend Cleve and the many others who Love places in our life to be community caretakers of our healing souls as we walk together.   This Advent, I will choose to cling to the hope that after the painful good Fridays of our lives resurrection does come and that grace abounds for me,.  I will sit… at times stand…at times fight…at times walk… but because of the love of God not drown in our pool of tears until it comes.  Until resurrection comes…

I cry…

I pray…

I listen…

I believe…

I wait…

I mourn…

I embrace the silence…

I sit on the mourner’s bench with those who sit beside us…

and yes, I even sing in these deep waters.

*The memorial service for Annee Juredline Rouse Tinsley will be Monday, December 16 at 10am at  St. John’s Downtown in Houston, TX.  If you would like to send flowers we ask that they are sunflowers or yellow in color.  If you would like to make a donation in her honor, we suggest it be to a project that is fostering creativity in the lives of children.  Another way you can honor her with us is by doing something that day that gives you life. Thank you!*

The first tantrum

It was about pants.

My daughter loves to do everything herself, when it’s developmentally possible or not. Little did I know, as a (still) new parent, that this aspect of her temperament would directly lead to a 30-minute screaming meltdown.

A couple of weeks ago, Eleanor woke up cranky from her nap. Aside from crankiness, which makes everything more difficult, her current dislikes include vegetables and diaper changes. We struggled through getting the new diaper on -- it was such a frustrating experience that I didn’t even bother with her pants as I went to the bathroom to wash my hands. When I returned to my daughter’s room, I noticed that she was making a valiant attempt to put on her own pants.

Normally, I would applaud such initiative. But I was tired and feeling the need to get past the diaper changing trauma and on to the next activity of the day. Without thinking about it much, I lifted my daughter to her feet and pulled up her pants for her.

I chose...poorly.

This unthinking decision angered my nascently independent toddler to a level I’ve never experienced before. She exploded in rage -- my sweet, good-tempered, happy and smiley and always active daughter. She ran screaming from the room, quickly collapsing to the floor in the hallway. She kept the screaming fit going through pretty much every room in the house. She’d cry, her arms flailing until she would run into something, which would give renewed purchase to her fury. We finally ended up in the family room, where she picked up a puzzle and threw it to the ground. She dropped beside the puzzle -- still screaming -- picking up pieces and flinging them about in futility. She was reduced to writhing on the floor, amidst puzzle pieces she was too exhausted to chuck across the room anymore.

I tried several strategies to deal with this tantrum. I tried ignoring her -- I shut her inside her room and walked away, only to hear her screams reach an even stronger pitch. I picked her up and sang a song. I tried to read her a book, and then I tried making silly faces and then I tried letting her burn out the anger.

Nothing worked.

Eventually, we walked outside -- it was 40 degrees -- and we started talking about the sad tree and the happy tree. The sad tree is a crabapple in our front yard that never seems to get any bigger. It’s lost all its leaves and always looks a little pathetic. The happy tree is a glorious old linden tree in our backyard. Standing under that tree is one of my favorite things to do, in any season. The leaves turn a wondrous gold before dropping into my gutter.

I told my daughter that touching the happy tree always makes me feel better. I convinced her to follow my lead. It worked, and a smile even creeped onto her face. It wasn’t enough, mind you -- we still had to walk around for another 15 minutes outside until Mommy came home. By then, my crazy firebrand had calmed down. For them (my wife and my daughter), it was like the tantrum never happened.

I’ll never forget it.

Stuff my daughter says (16 Months, 3 weeks)*

Book

More

Milk

Car

Bus

Shoes

Daddy

Ma

Hat

Park

Hi

Bye

Hey

Uh-Oh

Hot

Go

Heart

Ride

Read

Bat

No

*I have a couple real posts coming, but I wanted to document this language development before it got lost in the shuffle of life.

My daughter, the helper

We seem to have moved into a new development in toddler-hood lately: the “helping” stage.

My daughter likes to help me do everything. If I’m putting together a shoe rack, she hands me the pieces to assemble. (Though I may not need the piece she hands to me.) If I am cooking in the kitchen, she pulls out utensils so she can make a side dish. (I may need those utensils, or I may trip over the whisk she’s left in her wake.)  If I’m doing the laundry, she will throw clothes into the hamper, or into the washer. (Usually clean clothes.) If I am putting her books back on the shelf, the shelf from which she has ripped every book down only moments before, she will pick up a book and try to shove it back into place. (I can put every book back in the time it takes her to attempt one). And after seeing me throw a can into the recycling bin, she will put in (or take out) all sorts of things.

I should mention that my daughter isn’t just a helper. She’s a noticer. If something about her environment changes, she investigates immediately. If there’s a new toy in the room, or the furniture’s been moved, or daddy just finished using whatever implement for the first time in a while, then she must explore the change. This is fun to observe, in theory, but it means that it’s difficult to accomplish anything with her underfoot. She’s just exploring and trying to understand her environment, but it can be frustrating when she gets in the way.

It’s a fascinating combination of developments that she’s going through -- she helps, she mimics, and she openly, intentionally pushes boundaries and defies limits.

Last week, I yelled at my daughter. I lost my cool, as she pulled out yet another bottle or cardboard box out of the recycling bin after I told her not to for the 20th time that day. It bothers me that I don’t even know what it was. I’m sure she’s forgotten the evil roar that came out of my mouth, but I haven’t. I probably never will.

I constantly have to remind myself that she is a person with agency. She makes choices, most of which are based on her environment and how other people interact with it. She is intensely curious because she has agency -- for the first time in her life, she can make a choice and act on that choice. It must be incredibly hard to restrain herself.

For example: imagine discovering as an adult that you can fly. Then imagine two others humans, more than five times your size, telling you that you aren’t allowed to fly. These giant adults are very nice to you -- they feed you, play with you, clothe you, kiss you goodnight. You know that the biggest consequence of your defiance will be their disappointment.

That disappointment would mean a lot to you, wouldn’t it? But you’d still fly sometimes, wouldn’t you? I would. I’d figure that my giant protectors would forgive me eventually.

I think that’s how toddlers must feel, and I keep forgetting. And when I forget, and when I’m tired, I get frustrated. And that’s not her fault.

It’s hard not to cross the anger line. I have agency, and I have rules about how my house operates. When something about the environment that I’ve built changes, it’s hard to keep myself from intervening.

Man, I’m no better than a toddler.

The end of storytime?

My daughter and I might be done with library storytime, and it’s forcing me into an unexpected existential crisis.
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve felt out of sorts, out of sync and unsettled. I think it’s because I’m missing Mr. Chufo and the Tuesday morning storytime at the downtown branch of the Denver Public Library. You see, Mr. Chufo got a promotion, which means he’s working at another branch. That’s great for him, and sad for the storytime regulars (and all the newcomers, too, if I’m being honest). But what has me feeling even more out of sorts is the fact that we’ve had to stop going to Tuesday storytime altogether.

My daughter never stops moving. At home, this is a fact I must deal with but can control to a certain degree. But when we get to the library, I have to play a non-stop prevent defense.

Over the course of 25 minutes (the length of storytime), Eleanor will:

• Make a mad dash for the exit (6x) 
• Grab other, smaller children’s copies of the storytime books (5x) 
• Grab other, smaller children’s toys, binkies, etc. (4x) 
• Lunge for the guitar/ukelele while it is being played by the storyteller (3x) 
• Attack the life-sized teddy bear (3x) 
• Beg other parents for food (2x) 
• Leave Daddy out of breath from chasing her and from saying sorry to other parents for the whole 25 minutes (1,000,000x) 

This is (mostly) normal toddler behavior, I gather, though it sure seems like my slightly late walker is making up for lost time during her earlier, immobile months. People like to say, she’s “busy.” That’s absolutely true. She is very good at entertaining herself by reading every book in the house, taking every toy out of her toy chest, every DVD off the shelf, every utensil out of every kitchen cabinet she can reach, etc. (I use etc. here because I’m getting exhausted just listing all the ways that my daughter spends her time). People (including me) get tired just watching her go for only five minutes. Sometimes she literally just runs around in circles.

But this newfound “busyness” has me feeling a bit lonely. In a way, I feel like I’m losing the communities (like the library) in which I felt safe and connected. It might be different if my daughter were talking to me, but she’s too busy exploring every nook and cranny of the reachable universe for a climbing, 33-inch-tall 16-month-old. It’s a hard realization, knowing that we have to establish a new routine, filled with new people and new situations in which I have to be social with people I don’t know.

I spend these days trying not to live in a perpetual state of exasperation. It’s a fun word for a frustrating state of being -- it feels like a combination of exhaustion, a realization that you exist solely to set limits for your curious, speed-demon toddler, and a constant seeking of a moment’s peace where you’re not making sure she doesn’t stick her finger in a socket or wrap an electric cord around her neck (seriously -- I’m not exaggerating!).

***

And then I took her to a gymnastics class. We won’t talk about the ridiculous exhausting afternoon that followed the gymnastic class. That nightmare was filled with a constant stream of reading the same books again and again and deliberate defiance of boundaries, climbing on furniture and running down the street (thankfully, she at least agrees to stay on the sidewalk most of the time).

It’s hard to describe Eleanor’s glee at the gym. She was so giddy she was reduced to guttural screaming as she ran from station to station. She climbed, she balanced, she jumped, she hung from a high bar (by herself!); for 45 straight minutes she never stopped. Watching her not-stopping is pretty par for the course, but living in the joy of her movement was one of the greatest experiences of my life. I have never seen someone having so much fun as my daughter did for those 45 minutes. We were supposed to go through stretching exercises and an obstacle course designed to teach the kids how to do cartwheels.

Yeah, right. She broke free from my grip and climbed the first foam block she could find.

What a relief it must be to a toddler that she can move! She can walk, run, climb, twirl, hang, jump. For the first time in her life, she can really MOVE! She begins her life in a 3D world and takes her place among the adults, in a way. It’s so hard to imagine how huge the transition to walking must be for toddlers.

This afternoon, when I could no longer contain/entertain my not-stopping toddler, we went for a walk. Eleanor ran down the sidewalk as she normally does, but she stopped in front of a neighbor’s house, where a man retrieved a wheelchair from the trunk of his SUV and wheeled it into the house. She stared at what he was doing for a long time.

So did I.

Managing an active child is hard, exhausting, and terrifying. But next time I find myself getting exasperated, I will remember her joy and be grateful for her movement.

Almost a year later

It’s been nearly a year since I started writing for this blog. It’s been nearly a year since my wife went back to work and I had to figure out how to be a stay-at-home dad.

After being asked to write a column for our church newsletter, I thought it would make sense to post a reworked version of that column on the blog, too. You should know that this blog is connected to The Parenthood Journey, a ministry that started at Park Hill United Methodist Church, where my wife and I are members and where our daughter was baptized.

There’s something else you should know: Writing this blog kept me from going crazy.

Parenthood has never been easy, and it started out in traumatic fashion. If not for an emergency C-section, my daughter wouldn’t be alive today, as she had managed to tie her umbilical cord into a knot and wrap it around her neck while still in the womb. It took me a long time to process that horrific moment. At the same time, I was trying to get used to being a new dad. Add to that my decision to drop out of the work force to be a non-traditional stay-at-home dad, and you can imagine the adjustments I experienced.

About three weeks after my wife went back to work, I had a nervous breakdown, or at least as close to one as I’ve ever experienced. I was suffering from a severe cold and sinus infection and this happened to coincide with my daughter’s decision to stop sleeping through the night. I suffered from severe anxiety and a crushing bout of insomnia that I thought would never end.

Feeling out of control in a way I’d never experienced in my life, I sought medical help, started going to therapy and began taking a mild, low dose of anti-anxiety medication. Gradually, I started to get the anxiety under control, and I started to sleep a little better. But I still felt adrift, scared and frustrated by the realities of parenthood, and the reality of choosing to be a stay-at-home dad really hit me.

Just to escape the stress, I started going out by myself on Monday nights. At first, this was about watching Monday Night Football games, because I don’t have cable. Those Monday nights eventually became my refuge, but not because of football.

Not long after I started working through the anxiety, Lauren Boyd and I started talking about a new ministry the church had started, and we discussed ways to reach people outside of church. I had been feeling exhausted and lonely from my days of hanging out with a four-month-old. I felt listless, unmoored from the anchors of a regular job. But the idea of a blog, where I could process my experience of parenthood, and perhaps help other parents do the same, really appealed to me. I started writing.

It started with Eleanor’s birth story. I wrote without stopping for an hour. I edited about three words and I posted it on the new blog. And then I kept writing. And through that writing, I realized that I had a lot to say. And through that writing, I kept my sanity.

This blog has been a blessing. I have enjoyed sharing my parenthood journey, and I hope that it has served its readers as a source of comfort at times and a challenge at others. But most of all, I hope it has been sincere and honest in an age where we doublespeak every idea back on itself until it doesn’t mean anything anymore. I believe parenthood forces us to confront the mirrored selves we present to the world. I don’t believe you can be an ironic parent. That belief is important to me.

A belief in God is important to me, too. And this journey, through the friends I’ve made and the community I’ve become a part of, I’ve realized that God, or at least my receptivity to the search for God, has put me on the path to my better self. Faith in God and in this church home became my anchor in a dark time. The support this blog has provided and the connections I’ve made through the church small group my wife and I started have led me to a much happier, more sane place 15 months into my daughter’s life.

The blog Lauren and I started has been viewed more than 10000 times. We’ve had a number of guest bloggers who have written about everything from breastfeeding to the loss of a child. The blog has been viewed by people who live everywhere from the Ukraine to India to the Netherlands. We hope that it continues to enrich the lives of its readers. I know it has enriched ours.

Thank you.

Are all toddlers engineers?

My dad is an electrical engineer by training. He has spent much of his adult life taking things apart and putting them back together. He’s a tinkerer.
I’m not an engineer, and while I know my dad is deeply proud of me and the man I’ve become, I think he probably wishes sometimes that I’d become an engineer. I had the aptitude for it, as I always did well in math and enjoyed making things, but the pull of languages was stronger.

Now that I’m a father, I’m beginning to think my daughter may fulfill that engineering destiny and make her Grandpa proud, though I honestly can’t decide if I’m just witnessing toddler-hood.

My daughter is an ever-present example of entropy at work. There is no button she will not press, no tissue she will not remove from its box, no book she will not take off a shelf, and no puzzle she will not disassemble. If my wife and I didn’t clean up after her every night, there would be no livable space left in our house. I’m not even sure the house would still be standing, if it were up to my daughter.

Here’s the thing, though. It sounds like an incredible amount of wreckage, if I’m just describing the spaces left in my daughter’s destructive wake. My 13-month-old isn’t just destroying everything in her path, though it feels that way sometimes. There’s something else going here, something constructive, something mysterious.

To incorrectly paraphrase Tom Waits, I ask, “What’s she building in there?”

The mental connections for Eleanor are coming fast and furious these days. I point to a picture of shoes in a book, and she grabs her feet. I ask her what sound the elephant makes, and she purses her lips like a trumpet player (though she can’t quite get the sound right). I set her down on the floor and she starts walking. She uses sign language to tell me when she wants milk, or even when she sees someone else drinking it. I ask her if she wants cereal, and she says, “No!”

I’m having a hard time catching all these connections in her brain, all these constructions she’s building and adapting as she processes more, newer information at an ever-faster pace. In education circles, they’d describe her evolving frames of reference as schema. She’s building physical and communication skills constantly, and they seem to be coming faster and building on top of each other faster than I can track. It’s impressive and it’s an amazing thing to experience firsthand. It’s not dissimilar to being a teacher and seeing the proverbial light bulb go on for a student, but the process is so much more powerful because it’s happening faster and it’s happening to your child.

Do all those engineers out there know something the rest of us adults don’t? That the secret to understanding the world is tearing it apart? That creation comes from destruction? I don’t have a lot of experience being around toddlers, so I suspect that much of what I am seeing is developmental, but I think we can learn something from these engineers, be they electrical or of the two and a half foot tall variety. Don’t be afraid to take things apart and put them back together. You might learn something.

Last week, my daughter started building things you can see. We have this old-fashioned wooden cylinder puzzle that she has been ripping apart for six months. For a while, she had this habit of meticulously removing each piece, one at a time. Then about four months ago, she started knocking it over and pulling out the puzzle base, spilling all the pieces at once. She seemed to figure out the fastest process for deconstructing the puzzle and then got bored with it for a few months. A couple of weeks ago, something strange happened. She started taking the pieces off one at a time again. And then she tried (for a few days) to put a piece back on the base. She kept failing, because she was only using one hand and she kept misjudging the distance between her and the puzzle base. But she kept trying, eventually with both hands holding the piece.

And then she got it, that first piece finally sliding into place. And then she put all the pieces back on. And then she started stacking other things on top of the puzzle, like books, or pieces from other puzzles.

Whatever she becomes when she grows up, I know one thing about my daughter right now.

She is an engineer.

Whatever she’s building in there, it must be pretty cool.

The fallacy of hipster parenting

I have spent my fair share of time making entirely unfair and unfounded judgment calls about all sorts of people that I see around town, and that hasn’t changed too much since I’ve become a parent.

But it’s starting to make me uncomfortable.

Honestly, it’s hard not to grumble about people who appear to have such carefully crafted public images that conform to pop culture stereotypes, the same people who (we’re told) move through life with ironic detachment as their default emotional state -- people who (we’re told) don’t care about anything.

Effing hipsters.

How many times have you said that, or at least thought it? How many lumberjack-shirted, skinny-jean dudes, with their handlebar mustaches waxed to curled sharps, riding their fixed gear bicycles, have you muttered that comment about?

Heck, let’s put this in a parental context. See that woman over there in the lululemon yoga pants pushing her Duallie Bob Revolution stroller? She must be a Highland mommy who believes in attachment parenting and breastfeeds her five-year-old. She’s such a cliche, and you know she has money, and her tyrannical kids must be absolute terrors in daycare.

How about that thirty-something guy right there, overstuffed diaper bag slung over one shoulder, bucket carseat dragging in the crook of his arm, carrying a wailing eight-month-old baby with her pants on backward and cereal in her hair? This befuddled daddy must be “babysitting” today. He sure doesn’t look like he knows what he’s doing. Where’s his wife? He really looks like he needs some help.

We spend so much time placing people in categories and making snap judgments, but I have a question for you: How many of your friends are hipsters? Do you really know any hipsters? You know who I mean -- the people for whom the image they project is more important than anything else. And for that matter, how many of you actually know a mother who fits that Denver stereotype? Or a father?

Me? I don’t know any hipsters. Sure, I see them all the time, but I guess they’re someone else’s friends. When I look around town, seems like there sure are a lot of them...but none of my friends are hipsters. How could they be? I mean, my friends care about me, they like a lot of the same stuff I do, they’re generous, they help me take care of my daughter, etc.

Taking care of someone else voids your hipster cred, which probably means that no one is really a hipster, except of course the people who are, the people we don’t like, the people who aren’t like us. Those people are all hipsters.

I’ve been called a hipster, back when I was a indie-music loving teacher wearing my flannel shirt, goatee and horn-rimmed glasses. Now that I’m a parent, I’ve also born the brunt of the befuddled dad stereotype, too. Being on the receiving end of both judgments in recent years has got me thinking about why people are quick to attack hipsters or parents who they believe fit a particular stereotype.

That brings me to tonight’s subject: hipster parenting.

There’s been a lot of talk about trends in parenting, lately, from the rise of stay-at-home dads to what we stupid Americans can learn from middle class French parents to “elimination communication.”

As a parent of a kid who, let’s be honest, poops a lot, that last one seems so ridiculous that I have a really hard time not judging the parents who promote this method.

Effing hipsters.

And don’t get me started on those guys who run Kindling Quarterly. They have the gall to grow beards and live in Brooklyn and care about being good fathers and creating a space for men to talk intelligently and in-depth about modern fatherhood. They also seem to want to promote cool, expensive clothes made by their friends. This last point, along with the hipster beards, apparently invalidates the space they’re creating, according to a vocal group of haters trolling the comment sections of many an article about the magazine.

The magazine itself, and the responses to it, are chock-full of ideas to analyze, reflect on, engage with, etc. I could write a post here just comparing the comments section of a Canadian news article about the magazine to that of an American site’s feature. Both articles deal with similar themes, but the comments are fascinatingly different.

I bought the second issue of this magazine, and while it was really uneven, I am so excited for its potential. A thoughtful engagement with fatherhood as a concept, with essays written by thoughtful fathers, is an unfortunately rare find among major publications in this country.

Let me be clear about what I think: there’s no such thing as a hipster parent. There are a lot of bad parents out there, who don’t provide for their kids, neglect them, abuse them or just don’t care enough to love them deeply. But if you have even the slightest engagement in parenting your child, there's no way to be ironic and detached about that. So if you want to judge people and call them hipsters because they want to try something stupid or faddish or buy expensive stuff like their friends, you should realize that the vast majority of all parents are just doing the best they can to be parents. The job is too hard to do it filled with irony.

Unless you're just an awful person. And that doesn't make you a hipster.

Because it illustrates what parenting is really all about, and because it features Carrie Brownstein (I'm such a hipster!), I love this Portlandia skit about baby books: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw3bG8SrCM4

People try really hard to be good parents, to be the right kind of parents. They’ll do whatever it takes, even if it seems stupid to other people. Me? I made my daughter cry it out at night and then spent six months having her take her naps in my arms or in her car seat. In the end, whatever the trendy parenting thing is and whatever group you think we belong to, we all just give in and find something that works and meets the needs of our kids. And that’s what counts.