beer and bollocks....

dads night. i felt old this time, Harlow's been there 112 days, the others dad's babies have been there 5, 4 and 4 days. one is a 27 weeker though, so they will be there for a while, but the others were expected to last only a week or two. ~sigh~

but there was beer.

and there were biscuits.

and nuts.

in fact, the main reason for going is probably to have the beer with guys in a similar position to yourself, without the wives worrying about that their husbands are saying.

two of the others were first time dads so during the discussions i gave them some advice.

advice: DO NOT FORGET YOURSELVES
a dad is for children to look to when the going gets tough, for wives to look to when entering uncharted waters. there is no one for fathers to look to for support. this kinda makes things difficult for a new dad. there is "who's a clever baby then?" for the child, there's "you did a great job!" for the mother, but whats a father get? "didn't your wife do well?". great. go celebrate your new child by buying them a power tool, a really big one; or a large flat panel tv (look what the baby fairy just gave me??). you will need something lest ye explode.

advice: take control when the wife is in hospital.
theres two scales to this, the small and the large. SMALL: your wife always gets the yellow milk and you can't stand it? get the blue!! she will discuss the fact you got the wrong one, but you will still have blue milk, so it's ok. thats on the small scale. there is a larger scale out there too... LARGE: imagine the following conversation and the implications thereof: "hello dear, we had ourselves one of those freak tidal wave things, it made it's way through the house and took out the pink wallpaper you like so much in the toilet. it was the oddest thing. it left all the rest of the wallpaper alone." large changes like this are a little bigger than yellow/ blue milk scenario and you should proceed with caution.

advice: take pictures.
your time in NICU is more of a journey. if you do not take pictures, you will forget just how far your child has come. in Harlow's case, i take my wedding ring off my finger and twirl that around for a while remembering how far up Harlow's arm it went. puts things back in perspective for me.

other than that, i guess a dads main job is to keep everything else as normal as possible. keep farting during the quiet moments, keep forgetting to pick up the one item (canestan) from the groceries list until it looks as though your partner is going to meltdown in a most spectacular way.

ps: i really DO need to get some canestan.