Sick dad, bad dad (fat, sick, and barely dad)

During my recent psycho bout with cold, flu, ear infection, and currently hearing loss brought about by the ear, I’ve felt like a pretty shitty parent.

Due to my odd work situation I have Maggie two days a workweek. One that I take her to work with me and one day that she helps me with projects around the house or rentals.

I’ve generally not had any issues with taking her to work other than minor ones, and she loves watching me do anything.

While I was sick she watched me lay down and be miserable, then she got sick, and she got to be sick while watching me be sicker. I missed out on a good three weeks of daddy time with her that I won’t get back, and it pisses me off.

In this time she’s had a lot of things she’s learned – how to take a step toward a cat assisted, waving, clapping, eating anything in reach, signalling that she’s tired, projectile vomiting on command, etc. And for most of it I was like “oh, that’s great, why don’t you take a nap so daddy can die quietly on the couch for another couple of hours.” It’s not been good.

I’m getting better now, and coming to the realization that I don’t like being sick dad. I mean, who likes being sick? But I feel like I’ve failed as a parent when my steadfast goals are to exhaust the baby so she goes to sleep so I can go to sleep as I’m a big exhausted baby.

It’s been an eye opener just how much feeling like curling up and dying is a failure in my eyes to my baby, so I think I’m just going to have to step up my game and try and get my immune system back in whack, which it’s completely out of this year due to the disease train that is daycare.

Think it’s time to get back to juicing a bit. I remember after watching Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead and getting on a juice cleanse, well, the cleanse didn’t go so well but the juicing I always had energy on and I don’t recall being sick during that time.

We sort of gave that up while ITMama was preggo as juicing can evidently do bad things – well, probably the unpasturizedness of the thing. Dunno. It was also sort of hard to get back on the wagon as I made a juice that managed to turn my brain against all juices, but perhaps I can forget that and move on.

Oh yeah, if you haven’t seen Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead, I think it’s available on Netflix streaming at the moment, and it’s actually really worth a watch even if you don’t care about getting healthier. I considered it the inspiring moment of 2012 for me until I found out I was getting a little baby… then inspiration changed.

So yeah, one of my goals right now is to not be sick dad any more. Purely for the selfish reason of I don’t want to sit there in a pool of snot resenting that my baby doesn’t want to take a nap. The not so selfish reason is weak sick dad also might be more prone to dropping her.

And that’s my plan, I don’t like sick dad with Maggie. Sick dad can’t toss her in the air and reliably catch her, can’t properly zombie her, and doesn’t make her laugh like well dad does. So yeah, screw sick dad. I want my energy to play with the baby.