Hey hey

Greetings, and thanks to everyone at dailypixel for giving me the opportunity to write about dads, kids, and the strange and happy ties that bind them.

As a university professor with a flexible teaching schedule, I have the luxury of spending two days a week with my young daughter, whose second birthday will be arriving in about three weeks. The choice of devoting so much time to my kid was somewhat of a constrained one; we live in one of the most expensive and remote communities on the continent, and the two teachers’ salaries my wife and I earn are insufficient for all sorts of basic necessities, including full-time day care. I am, therefore, a professional and parental anomaly -- a part-time stay-at-home father with a full-time job.

When my daughter was younger and less mobile, this arrangement didn’t interfere with my usual responsibilities; her freakishly long and regular napping schedule enabled me to prep my classes, mark my students’ essays, and keep up with my research. Now that she’s a toddler, though, the naps have shortened, and my days have been overtaken by sticker books, fake tea parties, games of chase, and near-hourly readings of Green Eggs and Ham. (Spoiler alert: After tremendous prodding, to protagonist eats the ham.)

I’m getting significantly less work done these days -- a fact that I'll thank readers not to mention within earshot of my superiors -- but I’m also finding once again that the clichés about parenting are usually correct. In ten or twenty years, I’m almost certain to harbor exactly zero regrets about any of this. I can’t, of course, speak for my daughter, but the best case scenario is that she won’t, either.

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