Fatherhood Archives - An Engineer Met a Teacher

February 17, 2019

Responsibilities of a Father

Somedays, it feels like “responsibility” is treated as a dirty word. In our current sensationalized-news and media-centric environment, the idea of ensuring that we serve, and love, those around us seems, well, outdated. Tell someone they’re responsible for something and you’re just as likely to get a finger pointing at someone else as an acknowledgement.

From a real-life conversation . . .

This all came to mind the other day when walking with some friends. The one said, “I get the feeling Keith goes home and sits down and reads with his kids and spends time with them”. Then, jokingly, they pointed to another friend who’s a dad and said you expect he just goes home and drops all his efforts at the door.

Yes, they were joking about that other dad. I have known dads, though, who fit that mold. These are the ones who invest more time in their work than their family, who feel like video games are more important than quality time with their kids (see this previous post about that), or who feel they have the same responsibility level as their kids.

October 24, 2018

Lessons Given and Learned

Catapult Tower for Knights Prison Rescue

FLASHBACK PROJECT (NOT QUITE SO RECENT)

Way back in 2015, the grandparents (my parents) got our oldest son one of those big bags of Mega Blocks for Christmas. When I say “big”, I’m not talking, “Oh, there are 25 blocks in this bag.” No, this was the 150 blocks First Builders bag. As a one-year-old at the time, he didn’t quite get what all the blocks were for. As he toddled towards the age of two, though, he and his Daddy (hooray for that being me!) built garages to house other toys, castles to peek through to poke Daddy’s nose, and towers that have dared to reach for the sky.

But then, once he reached two, it happened–he discovered LEGOs. Of course, he didn’t start by seeing LEGOs meant for his age range in the store. Nooo, instead, he discovered some boxes of LEGOs that I’d never put together: The Kingdoms Prison Tower Rescue and the Special Edition Knight’s Kingdom King’s Castle. Then he got excited. Then I got excited, because he was excited. LEGOS! My kid’s getting into LEGOs and . . . THIS . . . IS . . . AWESOME! And thus began our project, which was building these two magnificent sets of medieval goodness, which funnily enough leads into the topic for today–perfect!

TOPIC FOR TODAY

The Tower Rescue set is the smaller of the two sets at 365 pieces, and given that my son was only two years old, seemed like the best set to start with. It was amazing to watch him when he first saw all the pieces that were in the box: Not just squares and rectangles and semicircles of different colors, but doors and a princess and a catapult and fire! This was one of those incredible moments when you get to see the world open up before your child and share in the joy and wonder that they experience at seeing something new that they never even expected existed.

OK, so I am an engineer, and as such like to have a logical approach to things. What does the engineer do? Goes right for the first instruction book, to see where to start. What does the two-year-old do? Dives right in! That’s when I discovered it’s possible to simultaneously laugh and be shocked and internally lurch towards telling your kid, “That’s not how you do it!” The great thing is that this was one of those rare instances where, when I tried to get my son to settle down and check out why I was looking at the instructions, he listened. We checked things out, took a look at the LEGO people, and got started building the first part of the set: The tower with a catapult platform (below).

Catapult Tower for Knights Prison Rescue

Without going through the play-by-play, here’s the grand summary: My son surprised me because he did really well. He figured out how to put things in place, and even the right places, based on the pictures and my pointing and guiding. He was super happy to make the catapult tower, and really focused on the building of it. I feel I underestimated what he, as a two-year-old, could do without assistance. But he blew me away, and so there’s the first lesson learned by me: If you give your kids a chance, they’ll show you just how amazing they really are.

Once we had finished building the catapult tower, we took a break because neither he nor I was ready to build the whole set all at once. That’s when I gave him my lesson and words of wisdom:

Look at this tower. Do you see how amazing you did at this? This is just one part of the whole set. When you look at a house, or any building, after this, don’t worry about how to build the whole thing all at once. All you have to do is focus on building the part you’re working on right now, and you can worry about the other parts once you get to them.

See, I don’t want my kid to look at the Eiffel Tower or the Sydney Opera House or even really cool treehouses and feel like he could never make something so incredible or cool-looking. I want him to be in awe of beautiful creations and buildings, yes, but I want him to know that he can make such things, too, one part at a time. I want him to dream without boundaries, and make those dreams into incredible realities.

We did end up finishing the Kingdoms Prison Tower Rescue, and it’s just as awesome as it looks on the box (below, left). He loved playing with the gate, moving the knights around, rescuing the princess, and raising and lowering the portcullis (by hand–he’s snapped two pieces of string that were meant to raise it and lower it using a turnstile). After a couple days, we started working on the other set, which is an incredible 869 pieces (see below right). Starting that set gave me a final lesson learned: Even when your kid does amazing with one set of LEGOs all the way from start to finish, at two years old, his patience and ability to focus runs out at some point. My son’s now happily trotting the second set’s knights around on horseback, merging the king and wizard figurines to make an all-powerful, shiny-crowned wizard king, while I’m assembling most of it. According to the instructions, of course.

Completed LEGO Prison Tower Rescue

Incomplete portions of Knight's Kingdom King's Castle

Knight’s Kingdom King’s Castle, In Progress

January 15, 2018

“Parent” is a Scary Word

I’ll admit that, on some level, I’ve pretty much always thought, “You know, it would be nice to have kids someday.” That’s pretty normal, right? Of course, you can think that for years and years, but after the joy of your wife saying, “I’m pregnant!”, reality tends to slap you upside the head like a five year old cracking open their first pinata.

Wait, though, I wanted to be a parent . . . oh yeah, but my parents were divorced before I can even remember. Since we just saw my Dad primarily on the weekends and during the summertime, I have no idea what it means to be a dad in a marriage and taking responsibility for a kid. Other male role models? I had a few good ones that were just occasionally in my life (teachers, friends’ fathers), but a lot of the men I was around up to and even into high school weren’t what you’d consider stellar examples of their gender, and if married weren’t great husbands or fathers either.

So I can still be a good parent without having viewed a great Dad on a regular basis, right? Sure! I can start with going to those required classes for when you’re having your first baby. OK, breathing techniques for the birth, preparing for the hospital, and–what do you mean that sometimes the baby is taking its sweet time and they have to plunger them out? Wait, I’m supposed to be there to support my wife when she’s having the baby, but you’re telling me it’s not even necessarily going to be our doctor who delivers the baby? Now I’m not only an inexperienced Dad, I’m a nervous Dad who’s freaked out that something is going to go wrong or we’re going to miss the birth signals and have the baby in the middle of the interstate.

And now, as our kid grows up, I know that part of being a good Dad is making sure that my wife is happy too. That makes me a good Dad because I’m taking care of her so she can take care of the kid, and it makes me a good husband, so bonus points. Oh, except you hear about how much things change when you have a kid, but no matter how much you think things will change you’re way underestimating the reality of it. Because, you know, all those things that made my wife happy before will be the same things that make her happy now that there’s three of us, right? If I knew how to type maniacal laughter here, I would do it.

In total, this means I don’t have a good view of how to be a dad from experience, I’m nervous with all the things that can go wrong during and after pregnancy (though we’re into the “after” now), and I get to relearn how to take care of my wife so that I can be a good Dad and a good husband to make a happy family. Uh-oh.

The truth is, I’m still not sure what makes a good or great dad, or if I’ll ever find a way to be one as our kiddo goes from baby to toddler to teen and into adulthood. Have my thoughts of, “I want kids someday” translated into, “I am glad we have a kid today”? Absolutely. I may be on a never-ending road of trial and error, of joys and sorrows, and be scared to death about being a parent, but through it all I love being called “Dad”.