 | Dear Dad’s diary: volume 2 2013-05-29 Author: Shannon Cook |
Dear Dad’s diary,
Major journal update – I’ve increased the size of my child army from one to two. Two is an interesting number. A two-year-old child is two times as likely to cause a stress-induced heart attack than a two-week-old. With their emotional shifts going to twice the extremes they did a year earlier, every small outburst has been supersized to 44 ounces of psychoburst.
The toddler takes twice as much effort as a newborn in terms of actual physical exertion. I can feel my muscles strain doing daddy dead lifts. My knee, or some other part of my body quietly waiting to break down, will strike out against me soon. It’ll happen when I lift the two-year-old. The two of us will cry.
The weird thing is that when you combine two children of two varying ages, you’re not looking at four times the amount of parenting. I think the ratio is closer to 20 times. Because now every two hours you’re up with the two-week-old, and the two-year-old is starting to take two hours to do EVERYTHING. And that cycle just keeps going.
Forever? No, for-two-evers.
All that physical exertion spread out over all that time. Wow.
Who was that fellow who kept pushing a boulder up a hill just to have it roll down again? If he’s interested in swapping out… Maybe that’s just the twos talking, but seriously, wouldn’t pushing a boulder up a mountain seem much more fulfilling? Is THAT why people get so into fitness? We’re all looking for a boulder to keep between us and them?
Oh, you two. How I fear you both, and your destructive forces.
Shannon Cook is a husband, a father of three and a filmmaker living in Austin.
