ON LETTING DADS BE DADS

This post is sponsored by Disney Baby. I'll be joining the Disney Baby blogging team next month, and look forward to sharing these kinds of stories (projects/ideas/etc) with you over there! Stay tuned for more details!

this is brandon holbrook. i like him.

one of the things i like best about brandon is his hair. and something i've noticed about that hair in the years we've been married is that the more perplexed he feels, the higher up it gets. nervous hands in the hair, you get the idea. would you look at that hair up there? that hair says it all.

when huck was born my mother flew out to help. she arrived a few hours after our cab deposited us at home on a weirdly humid october night. she made the drug store runs, took out the garbage, rubbed my back when i was crying for who knows why (hormones!), ran millions of loads of laundry down to the basement (and made quite a profit one time off the broken change machine, remember that, mom?), she talked me down when i was sure huck's circumcision would never heal properly, and she stayed up late with me on the couch talking about all manner of deep and not so deep things while i frustratedly tried to get huck to latch.

brandon was in the middle of his ll.m program at nyu and dude was slammed. papers, upcoming finals, and  scheduling make up classes for all the days he was missing. he was home with us, he was there and present, but he was overwhelmed. he sort of let my mom take over, which she appreciated of course, having flown from so far away to see her first grandbaby, but it made me feel a little disappointed. 

i was already so head over heels tanked for huck that i knew there was no going back, and i wanted that so badly for brandon. also, i didn't expect to feel so googly over brandon, either. the minute huck took his first breath i fell madly in love with my husband all over again. the man could do no wrong. i was seeing him through fresh baby goggles and he was just the finest specimen. and i wanted to see my fresh baby in his manly arms. i wanted to jump his bones too but also i was really, really sore. and then my milk came in and, uh, i got distracted from that line of thinking for a goooood while. once the newness wore off and the exhaustion set in, i started to feel a little resentful that my brandon wasn't as natural with my huck as my mom was. a girl needs some help, you know what i mean? and stupidly, i expected brandon to help exactly the way my mom had helped and exactly the way i do things. it wasn't going the way i planned.

and then one day, on a saturday morning when huck was about three months old, i caught brandon in a silly little moment with huck having some kind of one-sided conversation, and i realized i needed to stop trying to make my idea of bonding happen for them, because they'd already bonded. in their own weird, father/son, boys are strange, man kind of way. it was sort of the most adorable thing i'd ever seen. 

lesson learned: let's let dads be dads.

because here's the thing about dads:

dads are not moms.

when dad gets baby dressed, baby looks a bit like a disheveled mess. but who cares?

when dad makes breakfast it usually involves chocolate milk. but who cares?

when dad takes baby to the playground, 

baby gets to have adventures mom would NEVER approve of. but who cares? 

(okay, sometimes i care about that one.)

brandon and huck have a standing saturday morning date. they go on a walk to get egg and cheese on a bagel, they check out the playground, they sit at the lincoln center fountains and people-watch. meanwhile, i am at home gloriously passed out on the bed, drooling on my pillow. it's bliss. some saturdays brandon texts me a picture. more often than not i look at it and go, you let him leave the house like that?!?

well, but that's all right.

we'll just let dads keep on being dads. 

because ask any kid and he'll tell you:

dads are the best.