Seth Meyers knows the highs and lows of fatherhood.
The talk show host has two sons ― Ashe Olson Meyers and Axel Strahl Meyers. From mastering the diaper game to deciphering his baby’s personality, Meyers has clearly learned a lot as a dad.
Here are some of his best quotes about parenting.
On his son’s birth:
“It was just this crazy moment where I exploded into laughing and sobbing at the same time.”
“The weird thing is that you’re just not a parent ... and then you are. It takes your brain a couple hours to catch up to that.”
On diapers:
“I like changing diapers. There’s a beginning, middle and an end, so I feel accomplished. When the baby is crying and you can’t communicate with it, then I’m frustrated. At least with the diaper, I know that it started dirty and now it’s clean.”
On parenting anxiety:
“I haven’t been great as far as being an assistant to my wife, in that the baby will wake up a couple times in the middle of the night, and then I’ve been adding a third wake-up because I have night terrors about where the baby is. I’ve been waking up, grabbing my wife’s face and saying, ‘I don’t know where the baby is.’ Then I just go back to sleep.”
On his baby’s personality:
“He seems like a good dude. He also seems like an over thinker — there’s a lot of furrowed brows, so he’s probably going to be a happy guy 80 percent of the time and then worry the other 20 percent.”
“We can make him laugh, but now we feel like he has a fake cocktail-party laugh, that he doesn’t actually think anything’s funny, but he just sort of throws off this ‘Ha ha ha.’ It seems at 11 months you shouldn’t be so dismissive of us because we know the difference between his real laugh and this new cocktail-party laugh.”
On how fatherhood changes you:
“Most noticeable difference since becoming a dad: I’ve cried hard TWICE at ‘America’s Got Talent’ this season.”
“So embarrassing how I went from a person who did not care about anyone’s children, ever ... and then you have them, and you brag about the same stuff that you never cared about. You tell people ‘he’s got four teeth,’ like they’d care. No one cares, until you have a kid and then you say, ‘Oh my god that’s great, four ― mine has eight.’”
“It’s fantastic. Your life completely changes, but it changes so much less than the mother’s life changes. Mine’s pretty similar except there’s a baby at home in the morning and at night, but I still go to work.”
On Father’s Day:
“I got nothing from Ashe ― no gift, no card, which is very selfish! It’s early, but I’m concerned.”
On his baby name choice:
“A couple of people have said to us, ‘Ashe Olson, do you think people will think you named him after Ashley Olsen?’ And to them I said, ‘No one will think that because I’ve long been a Mary-Kate guy.’”
On parenting in the Big Apple:
“I can also confirm that when you have a baby in New York you pretty much just sing ‘The Schuyler Sisters’ for the first 12 hours.”
