Buy The First Round, Protect the Most Important Person, and Other tips for Expectant First Time Fathers.

One piece of advice I received at an early age was to buy the first round.  When I was about 16 years old, I was hanging out in a bar in California with my brother-in-law and some of his friends.  They were amused by my fake id (really an extra drivers license from one of my older brothers) so they bought me a beer or two.  I mentioned that I didn’t want to be a mooch and that it would be awhile until I made enough money to buy drinks at a bar.  My brother-in-law suggested BTFR:  “Everyone will remember who bought the first round, but nobody will remember how many more rounds are bought or who bought them!”  “Genius!” – I thought.  I used this strategy for most of my early-to-mid twenties.  Two Decades Later, BTFR still proved great advice not in a social setting but in my role as expectant father.  I found this and other tips in the only fatherhood book I read:

Buy The First Round

Sure, in the social setting BTFR seems pretty Machiavellian, but as an expectant father – it helped to establish a true parenting partnership for Lori and me.  If you’ve ever had it in you to treat your partner like a queen (even if you have limited capacity to do so), now is the time to do it.  Sure – you won’t do it forever and like most of us, you hadn’t done it to a significant extent before.  But if you’re ever going to try it once in your relationship, you’ll get the most bang out of your buck during this time.  Cook dinners, rub feet, clean toilets, bathe more, cut your hair how she likes it, wear the ugly shirt she bought you, and say nice things about her friends and sisters.  Just do it.  And keep on doing it as long as you can.  If you have say, 6 months worth of super awesome partner/dad credits, spend it 3 months before baby shows up and 3 months after.  Nobody’s asking you to be super man forever, just know your capacity and plan accordingly.  I always did the cooking and what my wife called the butlering (grocery shopping, dry-cleaning, etc.) so a lot of my BTFR happened after the first was born.

• Whenever L woke up to feed baby, I woke up too.  Even if it was to just sit up and do nothing but chat.  Or read a book, do some work, catch up on Netflix, or practice sleeping in an upright position while feigning the aforementioned activities.  If we’d managed to freeze some milk, I woke up to do the feeding myself.  Bonus!
• For the first months I did ALL the bathing and changing of diapers.  If you’ve never changed a diaper or bathed a baby, pay attention to all the post delivery activity at the hospital.  The OB staff will bathe the baby and change its first soiled diaper.  What more training do you need?  And here’s a little secret:  they shouldn’t really be bathed that much in the beginning anyway and breast milk poops don’t stink.  Seriously!  BTFR!
• Some of L’s friends and family flew in to see if it was in fact a big hoax.  Surprise!  It was for real.  So about a week into new motherhood, I gave my wife and her friends (about 4 women) my credit card and sent them to LaBelle.  I had planned it and had enough frozen milk for about 5 hours.  They didn’t blow up my credit card, so I’m thinking they went for minimal pampering and just spent the day chatting and catching up.  Was I worried about being alone with the baby?  Nah.  But I did worry about the most important person in this whole equation.

Grip it and dip it!

Protect The Most Important Person

For me, the most important person was not the baby.  Everything is about the baby.  The doctors and nurses and the entire familial infrastructure is there to protect and nurture the baby.  Every gift, card, and phone call is about the baby.  Lost in all of this is momma.  It is no wonder that postpartum depression is a very real danger early on.  So I became my partner’s protector.  To get serious for a bit, this is the most difficult thing to establish.  Because while you cannot control biology and hormone fluctuation, you can control instances of what I call friendly fire.  While 99% of this is well meant and purely intended, you’re partner will be bombarded with one message:  You don’t know what you’re doing and you’re going to kill the baby.  This message, delivered mostly by mothers, grandmothers, mothers-in-law, aunts, that one lady at work with 3 kids, and your neighbor’s teenage daughter who has a two year old and is therefore more experienced and competent than your partner, will be disguised thusly:

• “Honey, don’t you think the baby needs to eat more?”
• “Here.  Let me help until you get good at that.”
• “You’re not feeding the baby enough.”
• “You need to change the diaper more often.”
• “You need to swaddle (cuddle, shoosh, squeeze, bundle, bandage, bjorn, sling, swing,) the baby more.”
• “The baby is starving.”
• “Stop, you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re going to kill the baby!”

Imagine this:  You just squeezed out a bowling ball.  Your body hurts.  Biology and hormones are making you wonder what you’ve gotten yourself into and now all you hear (or interpret) is “Stop, you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re going to kill the baby!”  So I kept a close watch on our visits and protected my wife like I’d never done before.  Only rainbows, unicorns, cotton candy, mild Italian sausage, and Johnny Depp movies breached my protective barriers.  Remember, everyone else’s job seems to be to care for the baby.  Your partner’s job is to create that mystical and envied mother/baby bond.  Your job is to care for and protect your partner.  Again, if you’re buying the first round, keep this vigil going for up to a year.

The most precious bond.  Also, a nice manicure!

Practice With Less

You are probably wondering what I was doing around this time.  When Logan was born, I was running my own company.  I was in the office tending to clients almost every day.  But I did give up some things.  Mostly, I stopped exercising as much as I was used to.  But think about it.  Unless a baby shows up in a basket on your front porch one day, you actually have lots of lead time to prepare for your new life.  So start practicing with less.  Time, that is.  If you can barely manage your life, are generally disorganized, have bad sleeping habits, and can’t seem to “get it all in”, you’re pretty hosed.  But you have up to 9 months to fix that.  Prioritize your life and start whittling away the unnecessary bits.  You might have to travel/golf/bowl/exercise less.  You might want to learn how to juggle a schedule or work in the middle of the night.  You know you’ll have less time for yourself, so learn how to maximize the little you’ll have.

Multi-tasking: Finally making use of the talent to put somebody to sleep while practicing my music.

Now What?

Read a book, subscribe to a blog, join a dad club, talk to your pals who’ve become dads.  Educate yourself and train for your new life.  And when you’re ready for a breath of air after that first year, I’ll buy that first round.

Daddy Ninjas!  Do you have any other tips for expectant fathers?

Expectant fathers, what are some of your questions about your upcoming new life?