Stay-at-Home Chad
Hello everybody! This is still Chad, still writing about being Toby's dad. But, I am moving "Crawl-Walk-Runbook" off of Substack and rebranding it. Now the project is a newsletter, sent straight to your inbox, with no service trying to get us all to spend time/money reading other things. I hope this change helps me focus more on writing what I want to share with you all.
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"Stay-at-Home Chad"
Toby has two Uncle Nates in her life, and the one that isn't technically related to her recently coined the phrase "Stay-at-Home Chad," and, I mean… yes. Fantastic. I am upset that this wordplay took nine months to get here, but I am thrilled to embrace it.
Until now, I've avoided labeling myself as a "stay-at-home dad." (Instead, I'd usually land on "full-time caregiver" or something like that.) "Stay-at-home dad" just didn't seem like the most direct way to get at the changes I was making. Partly because I leave the house a lot more now than I did when I was working. And also Szuyin works remotely, so describing who's at home doesn't communicate much about our partnership.
I don't really like to emphasize the "dad" part, either. I mean, I do recognize that it is not a common arrangement for the dad to stop working so he can be with the kid(s). But I don't know if there's even a reasonable default assumption about childcare when a couple starts a family. My family is very fortunate that keeping either parent at home as an option available to us.
As a caregiver dad, I don't feel like I get treated as some weird anomaly when people notice me out in the world, taking care of a baby. Toby fields the occasional "ooh spending time with Daddy today?" from folks looking for an excuse to talk to her, but, by now, I'm sure most of the aunties and uncles we run into have it figured out and don't feel the need to make additional comments (to me) about the fact that I'm the dad and not doing a day job.
So, while "at-home" doesn't mean much to how our family operates, I suppose that aspect is more important than calling special attention to which parent is spending their days with the child.
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In Toby news, she is just getting over her first lil cold. Aside from everybody losing some sleep, I mostly felt bad that we couldn’t do much to help her understand what was going on. And that she’d feel better soon. Anyway, some steamy showers, a bunch of vitamin C, and a couple big naps today did a lot of good for her. We should be photo-ready for Halloween!