Our son has no fear. Thunderstorms? Annoying only because they keep him from sleeping. Strangers? Never met one, especially if they are female. He loves the ladies. Dogs? Fluffy friends known as “ba-bas” that are fun to watch and point at. Heights? No problem. If he can find a way to pull himself to a higher plane, he will. His latest trick is multi-level climbing, such as floor to Daddy’s office chair to Daddy’s built-in desk. There’s just one gap in his armor, one tiny weakness that will send him running toward Mommy with a terrified look on his face:

The vacuum cleaner.

I don’t know what it is about vacuum cleaners and small critters. Brenden hates ours. Holly hates it. Jedda hates it. Sure, they are loud, but they are also very useful and can’t hurt you unless you accidentally run over your own toe with the brush (not recommended). But Brenden freaks out. There, his secret is out. This tells us two things:

1. We need to vacuum more.
2. If Brenden is awake, the only way to get any peace and quiet without leaving the room is to fire up the vacuum, which pretty much defeats the purpose.

So until we can help him understand that vacuum cleaners are all bark and no bite, we are ironically forced to vacuum while he is napping.

BONUS TIP FOR PARENTS: If Brenden shows up one afternoon after naptime wanting to take your daughter out for blueberries and Goldfish, you know what to do. Some dads like to clean the shotgun or show off their concealed weapon permit to scare off the boys. All you have to do is bust out the Hoover.

We figured out a way for Brenden to earn his keep around here: housework! We need to polish up his technique a bit, but he gets an A for effort and multitasking.

Now that you’ve gotten to enjoy a year of Jenny’s observations, I guess it’s time for me to throw in a few of my own. Fatherhood is a wild and wonderful adventure!

1. When people ask me, “how’s fatherhood?”, it’s hard to give them a simple answer because it’s such a complex, multi-faceted experience. I answered one friend with a laundry list of descriptors: wonderful, amazing, difficult, frustrating, scary, fun, empowering, worrisome, joyful, confusing, awe-inspiring.
2. I always thought my parents were overprotective because they worried about my safety and wouldn’t let me do whatever I wanted. Now that I have a child myself, I understand why they felt such a responsibility to protect me. Although I try to restrain myself to an extent, I do worry about him a lot, mainly when he is moving. I see a few trips to the urgent care docs in our future. My challenge will be to balance my responsibility to keep him safe with my responsibility to let him try things and learn for himself. Sometimes parental intervention is the best teacher; other times it’s the pain of making your own mistakes.
3. I knew parenting would be a lot of work, some of which would be unpleasant. What I didn’t understand is how much fun it could be. Brenden makes me smile every single day. Sometimes it’s watching him learn a new trick. Sometimes it’s seeing him run to me when I offer him a hug. Sometimes it’s seeing him smile sleepily when I show up to lift him from his crib.
4. Now that he’s a little older and understands more of what we say, I am amazed at how much he can actually understand and interact with us, even if he can’t talk back. A perfect example happened this week. A storm was north of us moving south, and the winds had picked up. Thinking he might find the wind interesting, I took him out to the driveway and started explaining to him about gust fronts. Jenny joined us. After hearing what I was doing, she asked him if he had any idea what Daddy was talking about. He shook his head.
5. It still seems weird to me to compare my job to Jenny’s. I get paid well for doing a job that’s fairly easy most of the time, lasts only 8 hours a day, and provides several days off every month. Jenny gets paid nothing but room and board for doing a job that’s physically, emotionally, and mentally draining, requires either working or being on-call 24 hours a day unless someone else can relieve her, and provides NO days off unless we arrange for me or the grandparents to watch Brenden for a while.
6. As much as I try to enjoy each day, I can’t help but wonder what the future holds for him – what he will like and dislike as he grows up, what talents God has given him, how his personality will change. Even though his face and body are obviously very similar to mine, I don’t want him to be a carbon copy of me. I want to introduce him to a wide variety of experiences (sports, hobbies, places, people) and let him decide which directions he wants to go in life.
7. I now understand why those people who always talk about their kids are always talking about their kids.
8. After our struggles with infertility, I try to be sensitive to others who might be fighting the same battle. But now that we are “past” that battle and have one child and another on the way, I have to resist the temptation to talk about him all the time around everyone. It’s easy to forget how painful that journey was. A couple of people in my office actually lost babies at the end of their pregnancies, which must have been unimaginably painful. I never know where to draw the line.
9. Despite some people’s fear of dirty diapers, somehow they aren’t so bad when they belong to your own kid. But sometimes they are. Wow.
10. I am a very production-oriented person, as you probably know. I want to get things done and get frustrated when things don’t get done. However, as all of you parents know, getting anything done while taking care of a baby is very difficult. When I watch Brenden, I am remarkably unproductive in the traditional sense. The yard isn’t getting mowed. The laundry isn’t being done. My disaster of an office isn’t getting cleaned out. However, spending time with him doing “nothing” is irreplaceable and infinitely more important. On my deathbed I won’t look back and say, “You know, I really wish I’d spent less time with my son.” Brenden helps keep the various pieces of my life in perspective.