It’s been a while since I’ve checked in with Big Preg at Accidents Will Happen, a momblog I dig (as does Christopher). We both have totally profound reasons for this, like: her baby was born the same day as Christopher’s; and her baby calls grandpa PopPop, which is exactly what my babies do. Also, Big Preg is in the middle of writing a dissertation that “cripples [her] with anxiety and depression”, and her pain is actually quite uplifting to me, because it seems to validate at least one of my many suspect life choices.
My reading recommendation for today is Big Preg’s chronology of a typical day with her kid. It’s quite long and very detailed but very funny and a sort of wonderful way of committing to memory the insanity of raising small children. Pictures and videos are just vignettes, and pretty biased ones at that: my wife and I have somehow made a visual record of the last four years in which our children only ever smile or have adorable milk moustaches. We have totally cropped out the rivers of tears and a mountains of excrement that we were—and still are—trudging through.
One of the ancillary benefits—OK, the only benefit—of writing a DadBlog, I thought, would be that if nothing else it would capture some of the awe and misery of each stage of parenting for our own personal recollection later on. It’s important because even if your children don’t fundamentally change—they are who they are at 18 months or 18 years—the routine changes completely. What Big Preg is going through with her kid now will be radically different in six months. All the more reason to record it in detail.
Big Preg wrote up her list because Ramble Ramble did one and sent out the call for others to do so. So I’ll also urge you: read Big Preg’s list and then go write your own.
If you blog it, send us a link. If you just write it a journal… what is this? 1988? Are you still in middle school? Grow the fuck up. It’s the Internet age. Put it online, and don’t whine about privacy. The government is GPS-tracking you anyway.
OK, at the risk of being a spoiler, I’ll leave you with Big Preg’s final entry:
10:00 p.m./12:00 a.m.-4:30 a.m.: Sleep like the dead. Wake up to the dulcet tones of a small voice mumbling “Poopoo, Mark, airplane.” Start over.
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