With my Lilly at a restaurant on vacation.
How many times have we, as parents heard this from our tiny humans? I know that it is a daily question in my house, but why is that? Are our parenting roles the same as they were in the 1950s? I don’t normally start out my blog posts with so many questions, but I don’t claim to have all of these answers and I’m not sure that anyone really does. I don’t think that my wife has countless, better answers for every question, nor are my answers better than hers, but she always gets asked the questions.
With my Brenn at the beach.
My wife and I are very even in our duties at home. She doesn’t like to cook, so I cook but hate to clean so she does that. I think that it is different in my house because I’m usually the mean one, when asking to play the video game, I want to make sure that they’ve already finished homework and their snack, their stuff is ready for their evening soccer or dance class and that they had a good day at school, followed with an absolute stop time for them. My niece told my brother a few months ago that she loves coming over to our house but she prefers when just Aunt Lauren is there because Uncle Mark has a lot of rules. I’m not sure if it is my military background, but I believe that we have rules for a reason. My wife and I balance each other out in many aspects of parenting and home life in general.
I went on a road trip to see my mom this weekend and took the kids with me. We have a sick kitty that has a feeding tube right now, so Lauren had to stay home and take care of her. I never even thought twice about being alone with them (until the car DVD player broke, but I fixed it), I am as much of a parent as my wife. Lilly’s hair may have been worse for wear, since that isn’t my specialty, but everything went off without a hitch. We hit a lot of traffic in both directions which isn’t ideal and Lilly had to pee with no exit in sight so she learned to pee on the side of the road in between the doors and use a napkin to clean up. We learn a lot from each other. She told me the other day that she loves me, but loves momma more unless I am making her food or we are juicing together.
A successful road trip!
We each have our special times together. We both love having our alone time with our kids, and we try our best to make special times with the kids. My son loves watching sports with me, Manchester United and the Redskins are our favorites to watch on TV and he knows so many of the players. He has gotten more into baseball and has really enjoyed the live sports that we have attended since moving to the DC area with baseball being his favorite, and most kid friendly! My daughter and I have a daily ritual of making juice together. She comes running when she hears me get the juicer out and loves putting the fruits and veggies in and turning it on and watching the juice come out, next step is getting her to try some of it.
With it being 2017, there is no defined mommy task or daddy task and there shouldn’t be! With all the different types of families out there with grandparents involved, single parents, step families and kids having two moms or two dads, we all need to be blended and be able to do it all whenever necessary.
I’ve taken my daughter to dance class and my wife has taken my son to soccer, we are one unit! Whenever it is possible, we show a united front to the kids. The most important thing is to love your kids with everything you have and give them a sense of family, no matter what it is made up of.
Stay strong out there dads! be sure to check out my full blog at www.allgoodinthefatherhood.com
