Tuesdays with Sadie: Advice for new dads

So your baby is learning that if she throws food off of her plate it ends up on the floor. This is your lucky day, dad. Your baby has just learned cause and effect. Take a moment to reflect on what a great milestone she’s achieved. This is how human beings discovered things like gravity, astrophysics, and TMZ. It’s a wonderful thing. Now stop congratulating yourself for a moment and sweep up the floor because she’s gotten tofu and raspberries everywhere.
Remind yourself that she’s a good baby. Say it loud because saying it out loud reinforces the concept. Remember, for a lot of human history people actually only read the printed word out loud, thus hearing it twice. Say she’s a good baby again.

Where are her pacifiers going? I mean, seriously, where are they disappearing to? You used to be able to use a ruler to drag them all out from underneath her crib, but now the crib is so damn low that you can’t see if they are there, but they don’t seem to be. It’s logical to conclude that your baby is throwing her pacifiers into an extra dimension or something. She probably did it to spite you and naps and also because she’s a good baby.

Listen dad, get creative, she probably just tossed them across the room like a future major league softball player. You didn’t know she could underhand them that far did you. Query, is it okay to put said pacifier right back in the babe’s mouth? It probably is because you’re a dad. If you were a mom you would boil it or run it under water in the sink for a long period of time. You are a dad and you don’t have time for such trivial things. In your day kids used to walk backwards to school and eat dirt for breakfast or something like that.

Hey dad, watch out your baby is trying to climb the stairs. Lord knows you’re not putting in those baby gates because you think she could figure out stairs on her own. You are either trustworthy or lazy. Can’t it be both? So you wait until she clambers up a stair or two, takes one hand off to look back at you and wave her hand crazily before deciding to make sure that she doesn’t face plant. You spend the next fifteen minutes holding your hands carefully as she climbs up. Guess what? She doesn’t even come close to falling even once. What a waste of your time dad? You can think of a thousand other ways of wasting your time that would have been way less interesting.

Make sure to come up with nap times, dad. This child of yours needs a good nap time. Nap times are sacred things like Egyptian temples and Stonehenge and a really good iced coffee from McDonald’s. Don’t you eff this up you lazy bugger. Make sure to do chores during the first part of nap time because the your baby, good and all, probably won’t fall asleep right away, but you won’t be able to hear it if you’re taking out the trash and recycling and lamenting all the piece of shi- weeds that grow in your yard like, well, weeds. When you come back inside smack yourself in the forehead and say, “I can’t believe I didn’t bring the monitor.” But don’t really be serious about it because dads don’t need monitors. Dads have this crazy sixth sense that tells them when the baby is crying, and they use it frequently to do other chores or wake their wife up and tell them that the baby is crying. It’s super useful.

That’s all my advice today for all the dads out there. If you’re a dad it’s probably a good day to remember to call your father and tell him all the ways that he could have parented you better. Dads enjoy being reminded of all the time they wasted on you as a child. Trust me, he’ll want to hear from you until you start in. It will be like old times.

P.S. Remember that time you saw Wicked and started crying because the music was so effing beautiful and transcendent? You lost yourself some dad points there buddy. That was not dadly. Now pull up your socks, put on your hat, and man up.