Previously on Tales of a Middle-Aged Dad…

Hi, and welcome to Tales of a Middle-Aged Dad. I’m your host, the eponymous M-AD, and if you’ll indulge me for just a moment, I’d like to set the familial scene for you.

• I’m the M-AD in question, a late-thirties software engineer, married for eight of those years to…
• Mrs M-AD, my wonderful, beautiful, wife, with whom I currently have one child…
• Junior, a five-year-old boy, just into Year 1 at school, and soon to be older brother to…
• The as-yet-unsexed (um…) Junior Junior, due in January, 2016.

We’re a two-car, north-of-England, semi-detached kind of family, which by my reckoning make us fairly average.

So why Tales of a Middle-Aged Dad? Well, a couple of reasons, really:

Firstly, we live in age where the entirety of the knowledge of the world is available to use 24/7 (well, unless the WiFi goes down, perish the thought) at the touch of a button. The internet is a fantastic, democratising, force for good. It gives everyone who wants one a voice, a voice with which they can scream, laugh, and lecture to the rest of the internet-dwelling world. For we parents, this resource should be neither overlooked, nor under-utilised. Many times have my wife or I turned to the internet for answers or advice about whatever bizarre, unforetold predicament Junior has found himself in, whether medical, behavioural or other. Usually, you can be reasonably sure to find another lost soul on the internet who has suffered the same outrageous fortune as you have, and will handily provide a solution for removing Play-doh from noses (answer: carefully, with tweezers, or by nose-blowing. Caution, I am not a doctor, so go see one), or whether you can give a child both Calpol and Nurofen at the same time (spoiler alert: probably not). However, there are times when your predicament proves to be somewhat unique, where there isn’t a pre-existing answer out there on the internet, ready and waiting for you. This blog is to add our family’s experience to the mix, to hopefully be that answer for some other frantic parent Googling “Should my child’s poo be orange?” (I don’t know the answer to this, I’m afraid – try Googling it.)

Secondly, this is a little bit of a backlash against the Mumsnet-type fora, where raising children appears to be a competition. If it’s not DD learning to swim at 12 months old, then it’s DS being potty trained at 6 months and oh isn’t your child maybe there’s something wrong with him. Raising a child isn’t a game or a challenge. It’s a long, hard, enjoyable, wonderful slog, that will make you cry and laugh in equal parts for most of its duration. If you’re not crying and laughing in about equal parts, then I’d say you’re doing something wrong.

So that’s the reasoning behind this self-indulgent little corner of the internet. If I can write about my experiences as a fat Dad to soon-to-be two kids, and that writing in any small part helps or reassures some other fat or thin Dad or Mum, then I’ll be content.

And with that, I’m off to Google orange poos. Not a problem now, but forewarned is forearmed.