A Dad’s Life: A Balancing Act

When I tell people that I’m expecting another child 22 months after my last one, most people have an “Oh, dear” look on their face and say “It’s going to be rough that first couple of years,” followed up with “well, the good thing is that they’ll be best friends.

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But all I remember is “It’s going to be rough that first couple of years.”

Well, the new baby will be here in eight weeks.  I can’t believe I just wrote that.

Eight weeks to go until another little one joins our household. And this time, it’s a female joining the family. We’ve always discussed having two children, but didn’t really expect it would be this soon. Once this baby is born, our children will be just under two years apart. I don’t know if I’m even fully recovered from the sleepless nights with a colicky baby who didn’t like to sleep the first time around. It’s going to be a challenging year (or two) with a toddler and a newborn baby. At least with the first one, we were able to tag team parenting in shifts with the one baby, but now it’s a game of two on two.

Our toddler is a handful. From what I understand, I think most toddlers are. He runs around wherever and whenever he can, climbs up chairs….and then onto tables, he enjoys dumping all of his toys onto the floor and he can open doors to every room in the house. I’m not exactly sure how we will manage this little guy and then add another baby to the mix. It will be a tough balancing act that I’ll need to master as a dad.

Then there’s the jealousy factor. Until we brought home the baby, our dog Muggsy was the star of the household. Now, the poor dog is getting a lot less attention than what he was used to. Adding another child to the household changes the power rankings considerably. The dog will be getting even less attention and my son will need to learn how share his attention with a newborn baby.

I don’t know how other parents manage the whole fairness issue with multiple children but I’m sure it won’t be too long before I have to deal with it first hand. We’ve already looked at the things we have done for our first child: the furniture and accessories in the nursery, how much we contributed to his savings and taking those weekly pregnancy photos. I feel like we need to match everything exactly for the second one. I know it will be impossible to do this but you have to try your hardest to do it as a parent.

I’m one of four siblings and my wife is one of three so we have our parents experiences to learn from  and we’ll hope for the best. It may be a “rough couple of years” raising two young children but, I know that these two will learn from each other and will hopefully have more loving moments than quarrels. I’m ready for the experience and hope our two children become the best of friends (it’ll also be two extra bodies to shovel the driveway.)

Romy is a first-time dad, husband and blogger based out of Halifax. For more dirty diaper stories, check out his Dad blog, Dad Don’t Lie and follow him on Twitter @DadDontLie