(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


Life as a Stay-At-Home-Dad

2024-10-22 14:16:12+00:00

tl;dr — it’s good, but it’s busy.

Last night before bed I hung up four loads of clean laundry to dry, about half of it into the laundry cubicle with the dehumidifier running – a space which I revamped and fitted out with shelving and cupboard space a few weeks ago, and the rest of it on the huge clothing rail in the utility area.

This morning: up at 05:30 to feed a small bottle of milk to the toddler (Life is easier when they don’t wake up hangry) – and then testing and tuning something new features for the “macroblogging” social-media bot; and then:

Toddler breakfast

Wash and dress toddler

Delivering toddler to preschool

Empty dishwasher

Load dishwasher with last night’s crockery

Make bread (using a machine, which is a cheat, but it’s still better than shop-bought and I will be making baguettes by hand tomorrow)

Make breakfast for/with my beloved

Fix the new media centre Samba permissions

Empty dishwasher

Load dishwasher with oversize items missed in the morning wash

Blend half a kilo of beetroot, 400ml of oil, and a bunch of other stuff to make 25 chocolate beetroot wholemeal mini cupcakes which are the only guaranteed way to get fibre and fats into the Toddler

Empty dishwasher

Load the dishwasher with the debris of kitchen prep

List a bunch of surplus junk on the local Facebook freecycling page and liaise with a bunch of people who want to pick it up

Eat lunch – lovely carrot and lentil soup, from previous batch cook by beloved

…and soon: empty the dishwasher, followed by cleaning the living room (or at least: resetting it so that it can once again become a spaceship or a pirate beach or a writing lesson school room) and then I go pick her up.

Thing is…

The thing is: this is exhausting, relentless parenting, multiple loads of dishes or laundry every single day, but it is still far better than an hour and a half of commuting each way into London to go into “standup” with a people who are merely going through the motions of “Agile”, mostly using it as an excuse to prevent other people making changes that might impact the support rota, and then them complaining that you don’t hang out with them enough at the pub.

Making your kid happy is the best thing you can do – I have had a few really good achievements in life, but none of them are as consistently powerful as helping and making the toddler laugh and learn. I’ve said it scores of times: one of the best life-lessons I learnt was by osmosis, from my ~decade in Sun Microsystems Professional Services, watching my (generally male) peers crying into their evening beer that they couldn’t spend more time with their kids because somebody had to pay for the high cost of living.

I swore that would not happen to me, and it’s not happened yet.

Plus: I get to think a lot. I get to listen to innumerable podcasts – especially in my areas of expertise – and to think about how it could be done better. There are a lot of things which people are not saying which need to be said.

One of these days I may be forced back into industry for any of many reasons – the economy and life is far too uncertain at the moment to make any really concrete long-term plans. Until that time I am happy to do washing, laundry, bits of consulting and some writing.

Yes there is literal shit to be cleaned-up on a daily basis, yes I am literally wiping someone’s arse whilst multitasking a household at a level which would put Facebook product management effort to shame. Yes it is a team effort and yes we are a great team. And yes, the house runs on Trello, although thankfully not yet on Jira.

The next challenge is to see how much impact I can make in a few spare moments every morning, with just a text editor and a blog.
[END]

[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/110491#comment-277150
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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