Nine Things I Learned During My Week as Solo Dad

Bridget went to Las Vegas for work this past week (at least she claimed it was work ... cough ... blackjack ... cough), which meant I was on my own with Thing 1 (Annabelle) and Thing 2 (Aurora) from Monday to Friday. It was challenging. It was also, by most measures, successful.

But yes, I'd lead with challenging.

Trying to balance work, daycare transportation, reading bedtime stories, potty duty, middle-of-the-night duty, dinners, lunches (why don't toddlers eat lunches?), breakfasts, meltdowns ... the list goes on ... is tricky. If you are a single parent, you are a far, far tougher person than I am. You, simply put, are better than me. But I digress.

Yes, it was challenging, but I learned some useful lessons that I thought were worth sharing. (You, of course, can be the judge of that when you get to the bottom of the list.) In no particular order, here are nine things I learned in my week as solo dad:

1. If you hear your child crying in the middle of the night and you wait several minutes, well, nothing will happen. You'll eventually realize it's all on you. I'm not sure why or how I thought Bridget was going to come to the rescue on Monday night, but, not surprisingly, she didn't.

2. It's incredibly challenging to get the appropriate amount of toothpaste on your toddler's toothbrush with one hand while she's holding said brush. Too little, there's no point in brushing. Too much, paste is everywhere. It was like watching water buffalo mate--or at least I think that's an apt comparison. I've never seen such water buffaloes mate.

3. If you break even the smallest routine, your senses are heightened. I love routines, but they were obviously in the trash this week. I found it exhilarating to eat dinner at 8:30 on Wednesday and take the recycling out to the curb well past 9 on Monday. (That sentence is lame, even for me.)

4. No matter how many times you explain to a 3-year-old why Mommy is away for work, it'll never completely sink in. I heard "Why is Mommy in Lost Vegas?" no fewer than 79 times.

5. No phrase is scarier as a Dad alone with two girls in public than, "Daddy, I have to go poo poo."

6. Grandmothers (and family support) are invaluable. This is obvious in theory, but it's super important in practice, too. Help with daycare transportation, starting dinner, and allowing me to indulge in a mid-week gym trip were just the bee's knees.

7. When one girl is crying really hard, the other girl will start crying, too. You just have to sit there and let the cries wash over you like a cleansing rain. They will eventually stop. Life will go on.

8. Cereal is okay for dinner. Multiple times.

9. Being a solo dad leaves very little time for hobbies, like blog writing, which means you sort of mail it in with a quick list of observations ...

March Sadness

One year, after Syracuse lost in the first round, I sat with my head in my hands, incredulous at what I'd just seen on the TV. I threw my hat across the room in disgust and proceeded to sulk for the next several hours. It led to a spirited argument with my girlfriend at the time. (It sounds like I used to be a real prince, eh?)

Another year, I took a three-hour lunch break (very unlike me) and gorged myself on bar snacks with a couple colleagues. I'm actually not sure I even went back to work that day.

March Madness is, perennially, one of my favorite times of year. I look forward to it, to dust off a well-worn cliche, like a kid looks forward to Christmas morning, consuming game after game, reading analysis after analysis, and feeling a special kinship with Joe Lunardi and his bracketology magic. Selection Sunday, and this isn't really an exaggeration, is basically a holy day for me.

This March, not so much.

In fact, between Thursday and Friday, the two most exciting days of the tournament (and maybe the entire calendar year), I watched exactly three minutes of action. And that's just because Bridget and I were out to dinner when the Kansas-UC Davis game happened to be on at a bar across the restaurant. This year, I hastily filled out a bracket a couple days before tipoff, closed my browser, and got on with my life.

Which leads to me a question: What the hell happened to me? 

Kids is the obvious answer. My attention, pretty much all of it, is elsewhere. Instead of watching conference tournaments, I was watching Doc McStuffins. Instead of Sunday afternoon hoops on CBS, I was swimming in what I can only imagine is an almost completely urine-filled pool with my now 1-year-old princess. Parenting ... it's fannnnntastic! (It is, really.) And that's probably part of the answer.

Another potential answer is that my interests have changed. It happens, right? Every morning, I open up my Timehop app on my phone and see what I was doing that day a year ago, two years ago, etc. But mostly and surprisingly, I've stayed focused on the same things. Sure, fads come and go, but things like podcasts, Bruce Springsteen, running, and college sports have been constants. This past week, no surprise, my Timehop was filled with status updates about brackets, images of mouth-watering adult beverages, and one word over and over: Cuuuuuuuuuse!

That leads me to the third potential answer to my bold question: Syracuse, my beloved Orange, didn't make the tournament this year. (The committee screwed 'em!) It's true that they are the one of the main reasons I follow college basketball, but, in reality, I love everything about the game. The passion of the players. The campus crowds. The rivalries. The iconic announcers. Together, it all warms my orange blood-filled heart.

So what then? Why don't I really care this year? I'm not positive, but my suspicion, though, to get a little emotional for a second, is that it's the first March Madness I've ever watched without talking to my childhood best friend first. More times than I can count, we filled out our brackets together, arguing about the strengths of the ACC vs. the Big East and trying to find this year's Cinderella story. We grew up playing basketball together and loved everything about the game -- playing it, watching it, dreaming about it ...

"It's getting a little dusty in here," as Marble liked to say, so I should probably stop. I just really hope I love the madness again next March. I'm pretty sure my friend would want want that.

A Second Chance at a First Piece of Cake

Annabelle hated her first piece of cake. It was a cupcake, actually. She looked at it, poked it a little, knocked it over, and started crying.

Fail.

For me and Bridget, mostly. We had been so excited about the experience. Our first baby! Her first piece of cake! It was going to be awesome!

But it wasn't. I'm pretty sure she didn't even take a bite.

Aurora gave us another chance, though. And man oh man, did she ever rise to the occasion. Sure, there was a little uncertainty, a little poking, a little thinking. But then it was on.

This is one of those moments when moving pictures are much better than words, so I'll let the next 2 minutes and 47 seconds tell the story:

In full disclosure, I ate the rest (most) of the piece after Aurora manhandled it. It was delicious, moist chocolate cake. No shame.

Our Little Shoplifter

Annabelle keeps a lot of things in her floral backpack. (Kids like to put things into other things, if you didn't know.) She fills her overflowing carrier with necklaces, stuffed animals, fake food from her play kitchen, tubes of ChapStick, original artwork, and crayons.

Oh, and stolen tubes of toothpaste.

We found that last item last Saturday night, as I was searching for a missing flip flop. I didn't think much of it until I went upstairs to talk to Bridget.

"That girl has everything in her backpack," I said. "I just found a tube of toothpaste!"

"Ha. Wait, what kind?," Bridget replied.

"I don't know, a kid one," I said. "Bubblegum princess, I think. You must have bought it for her at some point."

"No, I didn't," she said. "And we were looking at toothpastes yesterday in the drugstore."

Uh oh. Big uh oh.

The next morning, I approached Annabelle, who was busy at work with her backpack. I stooped down to her, looked her in the eyes, and held her hand.

"Honey, when did you get this toothpaste?"

"At the drugstore," Annabelle said. "Yesterday."

"Who paid for it?," I said.

"I paid for it," she said. "I got it for my sister."

I bit my lip. Hard. As you can imagine, the emotions were swirling at that point. She did something wrong because she was trying to do something nice. And at that moment, she knew she did something wrong, which is particularly tough for Annabelle.

"That's so sweet," I said. "But we can't take take things that aren't ours -- from stores or from other people. We're going to have to bring it back."

She stared at me, not really understanding. "Ok ..."

"Don't worry about it, honey," I said. "It's just an honest mistake. We all make mistakes."

So we drove to the drugstore, just down the street. It was early on a Sunday morning, so it was empty. Two women stood chatting behind the front counter. Annabelle and I walked over, hand in hand.

"Hi," I started. "So we got home last night and found this toothpaste in our backpack. We forgot to pay for it, though. We took it for our little sister and we're sorry."

The woman smiled, of course. "Ohhh, it's okay," she said to Annabelle.

"And we'd like to pay for it now," I added, thinking I was in an after-school special.

Annabelle handed the woman $20 and, as she did, I realized how easy it was to make the mistake. Transactions, nowadays, are a swipe of a card or a scan of an app. Why wouldn't she think she could just take it?

We left the store -- Annabelle clutching a bag with the toothpaste inside -- and went out to the car. We talked about feelings for a while and Annabelle said she felt "sad." I told her it was just a mistake and that we all make them sometimes. She said that, next time, she'd ask Mommy and Daddy if she wanted anything at a store.

Will the message stick? Who knows? Kids, especially kids that are 3 and curious, learn dozens of new things every day. This one seemed meaningful, though.

I didn't want to end the experience on a sad note, so we went up the street to the bakery. Annabelle picked out a cupcake -- a chocolate one with a snowman on top -- and paid for it, with a $5 bill.