For the past three months, life has been so very different.
With our daughter’s birth, I was able to exercise Baby Bonding Leave, which granted me up to 12 weeks of leave to… well, bond with our baby!
I took a little of that time up front, then went back to the office for a while while my wife finished out her maternity leave.
When she went back last week, so began my tenure as CEO of Daddy Daycare Inc.
The experience has been amazing, if not a little scary. I am eternally grateful that I have had this opportunity at all, and I will likely brag about it for years to come. I’m painfully aware that not everyone gets a chance to just stay home and be a part of their new family like this.
This is an experience many will never have. The weight of that is not lost on me.
Still, on the flip side, taking this much time off from work has also stirred mixed feelings within my brain. In fact, this is the longest I’ve been away from a job since 2003 when I started working at the local Chick-fil-a.
The only gaps in those windows included vacations that never lasted more than a week, or moving from one job to another, which usually ended up butting against a weekend so I had no time off. Getting used to waking up every morning and not going to work is just a little jarring.
All in all, three months have gone by since the world I once knew ended with our baby’s first cry. The only problem now is that the world that I will live in currently remains shrouded in mystery. The next month will be spent as stay-at-home dad while the holiday hurricane whips around us with friends and family everywhere.
At the start of the new year it’ll be back to work and the wife and I will juggle a mad attempt to keep our baby out of daycare until the spring.
I imagine it will be sometime around June of 2017 we might start to settle into what will become a daily routine… one where Mom and Dad go to work, baby goes to daycare, and we all meet up at the end of the day for dinner and bedtime.
Until then it is, as some say, a mad house!
TechnicoolDad 
