12 months: State of the Daddy

I have to admit it. I didn't think I'd make it this far with the blog. It's been a year and five months since I started, and a year and eight days since LG was born. Neither of these are terribly auspicious anniversaries, although if I could go back in time and write this on LG's birthday, it might seem more important. In my defense, I was enjoying time at the beach with LG and Hollie, so ya'll are lucky you got the photo retrospective I already had planned for that day.

But I'm still here, still plugging away, some 70 posts later. What have I learned in that time? What have the intertwined worlds of fatherhood and blogging taught me since I first put text to page and dared claim I was capable of producing something worth reading?

Well, sit back and get ready, cuz I'm about to tell you.

1. It's much easier to write a blog post if you let the pictures do the hard work.
Okay, so I've been a bit lazy of late. But I have two excuses, one of which is slightly better than the other. First, it turns out that being a dad takes a lot of time, and blogging often doesn't make it all the way to the top of the to do list. I mean, I've got to watch Doctor Who some time! And when blogging does creep to the top of the pile, I take the a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words route. By that logic, the post from her birthday was something like 13,000 words. That, my friends, is value.

Laziness aside, my second excuse is a good one. Her pictures are so darn cute! And you don't even get to see all of them! I'd like to tell you that I only post the most super stupendous pictures. But frankly, almost all of her pictures are winners, and every one you don't see is fantastic.

2. I still love cooking.
It's happened. We're on the tail end of baby food. This morning, I doled out the frozen mushed food for the next few days, and I realized there wasn't much left in the freezer. A few weeks ago, we made the conscious decision to switch LG over to full-time solid food. She already eats whatever is on our plates, in addition to her gourmet, organic, pre-portioned, daddy-made baby food melange. We just decided to stop making the mushy stuff.

So as space in the freezer has opened up, I've starting cooking real food, not just mushy stuff. In the freezer right now I've got corn, pepper and acorn squash stew, creamed corn and spinach (alright, so some stuff is still kind of mushy), chicken stock, apple sauce, calico beans, chili and perogies. And today I've turned half a case of tomatoes into a big pot of tomato sauce. It's never not fun. I just wish I had more time to do it.

3. The geekiness has drifted somewhat.
Don't get me wrong; I'm still a dork. But one of the things that happens when you find yourself crunched for time is that some things get left behind. I've probably played video games six times in the past year. Not counting the stuff on my iPhone, at least. My comics reading is down. (Heck, my reading is down across the board. I just finished a novel last night, and I think it might be only the second or third since LG was born.) Still loving Doctor Who, and I've watched the entire run of Enterprise on Netflix (shut up. it's better than you remember. just skip past the theme song), as well as a bunch of choice TNG episodes. I haven't kept up with any of my favorite bands, save for the new Fountains of Wayne record (it's great, BTW). What I'm saying is, it's hard out there for a geekdad.

Lately, I'm mostly just a dad. But I'm a lucky one.
I take it back. Huge, gargantuan geek.