Here's Water In Your Eye

There is a fairly large online community, many of them my friends, of stay at home dads (SAHD). A lot of the growing presence of this Dad blogging stuff is fueled by those same SAHD's. I often read about the problems they have in what is typically a female dominated occupation. As bloggers they are also introduced to all sorts of offers and advertisers that address them as moms based on assumptions alone. I know from following these guys how frustrating this can be.

Even with the growing number of SAHD's I still think that there are many things that moms do as parents much better than us dads. If you disagree then by all means call me an idiot. It won't be the first time.

In my experience moms are simply more nurturing and gentle people. They are more understanding and compassionate. I, being a dad, am in no way gentle. I am not nurturing. I am rough and practical. I am more prone to analysis of the problem than offering my condolences.

I am OK with this. I think it clearly shows why it is best to have two parents raise a child. The kid then gets the benefits of each type of personality. Braden has his sweet loving mom to care for his every need, and he has his dad to teach him how to kill animals and fix the sink.

Over the past year bathing Braden has been one of my primary duties. For the first 6 months of his life I don't think I ever gave Braden a bath. It was a delicate process and I feared it immensely. Eventually Arica helped me overcome that fear and become a baby washer.

I watched Arica so many time gently wash the shampoo out of Braden's hair careful to avoid getting any water or shampoo in his eyes. I watched her do it again recently and she hasn't lost her touch. She is soft and gentle and ever so caring.

When I am at the controls the description is more fast and shaky. I have never been able to keep the water out of Braden's eyes. I have tried and tried for Braden's sake. Eventually I just started going for the quickest solution. My reasoning was that Braden was going to get water in his eyes no matter what so the quicker I finished the better.

This method has worked out pretty well in my opinion. As you can see below my careless non-nurturing method of hair rinsing has helped develop a fearless little bath tub warrior.