I’m typing this while glancing at my almost exactly, down-to-the-hour 4-week old daughter, as her older brother sleeps a room down with their mother. In the months leading up to this predicament, I’ve received plenty of commentary on life with two kids. It ranged from “expect to lose 90% of your free time”, to “it’s not that bad until the kids outnumber the parents”.
Through my paternity leave, I took a deliberate break from my daily routines and responsibilities, which included blogging. I wanted to take advantage of the extra time — freed up from work hours — to relax; the older child spends his daytime at the preschool and the newborn is starting life with a steady diet of sleep and feeding. It adds up to a few precious available hours in the afternoon1, which most parents will attest are invaluable.
Happily, I have been continuing to write in my Day One journal even as the blog briefly stagnated. Both provide the constant practice of writing, but the primary difference is the audience. To use a coding analogy, journals are private/secret Github Gists: completely informal, and written for your future self. Blog posts are like public repositories: most end up being noise or unread by anyone other than the author, but in aggregate they coalesce into a window into your personality and even abilities. Certainly, Github profiles have long doubled as recruiting fodder.
Despite the advent of popular, shorthand social media, blogging is still an important medium. Particularly for anything that takes more than a sentence or two to express, the act of writing and publishing text widely is a backbone of modern communication that should persist for a long time. My own modest goal — through two kids and a host of other adult-sized obligations — is to keep this thing going for another 5 years; wish me luck.
To make up for this limited freedom, we’ve had to devote more time and energy for the periods of the day when both kids are around. Evenings are the worst.↩
