About nine months ago, when Sasha was just three months old and I was all of a sudden home with her all day, I e-mailed our friends at DaddyTypes.com with the following problem:
“As a brand-new stay-at-home dad, I’m a little mystified about what to DO all day with the baby. I mean, apart from feeding, changing, playing and putting her down for all-too-short naps, there’s a lot of time when she’s awake. Our playtime options are limited (she’s only 3 months old, after all), and I have no idea what to do. Am I missing something?”
DT’s kind readers gave me plenty of good suggestions—read to her, talk to her, and generally just bring her around on whatever I do during a normal day—and those things have worked out pretty well. (Hiring a nanny to take care of the kid also helped.)
But now Sasha’s a year old. She’s walking (a bit) and talking (a bit), and exhibiting a surprising amount of independence. Which makes playing with her a bit of a challenge. That is, she’s awfully good at playing by herself. Just last night, she spent several minutes with her new Fisher-Price airplane (a great gift from our neighbors—thanks, John and Alicia!), inserting its passengers through the hatch door, closing the hatch, removing the passengers from the open top, and doing it all over again. She reads books to herself (in her own language). She crawls up onto the couch, walks along it, descends, and does it all over again.
In other words, there’s not necessarily much for me to do besides oversee all this and make sure Sasha doesn’t pull lamps, boxes and other debris down onto herself. (Of course, when this does happen, I’m there to comfort her.) But apart from endless games of peekaboo—which she initiates by climbing into the windowsill and pulling the curtain in front of her face—I don’t have much of an active role in her playtime. I feel this urge to be more active, but I find myself reading while she amuses herself.
So: Is this how it should be? Am I missing something again?
(Note: Yes, I’m sure the answers to this are on the Internet or in books, but I prefer to poll you loyal Dadwagon readers.)
You sir, need a drinking habit.