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About Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dad


  
Confounding Fathers:
This section of the blog is about politics.  Fatherhood is about leadership, teaching, setting an example and equipping my daughter with the skills to nurture herself through a life full of challenges.  Politics and government should be about the same things: provide opportunity and resources while also encouraging personal responsibility.  That our current president could be elected demonstrates, to me, a crisis of fatherhood in this country.  If this tyrannical son of a bitch is what we think a good leader looks like, fathers are failing their sons.  The posts will make observations about our current political climate and, when possible, suggest new ways of doing things. 



Dad as Hell:
This section of the blog is about dealing with mental illness.  As a dad, part of my responsibility is to wrestle with my own inner demons so they won’t possess my daughter.  These posts will be about mental health struggles and may sometimes read like an essay version of an Eminem song. 





Dad Rock:
This section of the blog is about music.  Most music today is electronic but my interest in electronic music starts with The Postal Service and ends with Girl Talk.  I’m a guitar dude and guitar music today is branded Dad Rock.  In posts of this section, I’ll talk about music. 







Father Figure:
This section of the blog will be about health and fitness. 




 

  

                                                 

This is How we DeWitt:
This section of the blog will be about parenting and marriage specifically.  There will be anecdotes, observations and advice. I'm an awesome dad and an awesome husband.  You can be too! 


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More Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dad...

Dad Rock, Revisited

One of the few upsides of having been a real judgemental dickhead when I was younger is there’s all this great art I dismissed out of hand then that I can discover now.  Here are some bands and albums I used to hate that I was big time wrong about. Fleetwood Mac    I used to joke that I lived my life in a Fleetw ood Mac Free Zone, which was constantly moving, three foot radius that revolved around me.  Their hyper-produced, glistening blow rock was antithetical to everything I thought popular music should sound like. Though I’ve always loved, “Dreams” because of Stevie Knicks witch-like hypnotic abilities, the rest of their songs seemed like they were written to be listened to when you’re half asleep.  Somewhat ironically, I fell in love with “Rumours” on a trip to Los Angeles which was full of spiritual awakenings, largely triggered by a very, very stoned listening to “Rumours” on vinyl. This listening, and the guttural sobbing which accompanied it,...
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LieuteNate DeWitt

Tuesday is one of the days when I’m Trixie’s primary care provider, so I get to play Mr. Mom, or as my wife likes to call it, “Dad.”  Trixie and I spend the day together while my wife works. When she gets home around six we have dinner, give the baby a bath and put her to bed.  Last Tuesday my wife had to work late which meant I was on my own for dinner, bath time and bedtime. I don’t get too flustered by the tasks required of fatherhood, so it was no big deal.  In college, I babysat my three younger siblings during the summers. The older ones were 7 and 8 and the baby was 8 months old one summer and 20 months old the next, so I’m no stranger to changing diapers, making bottles or entertaining the endless monologue of questions which can come out of kids.  Naturally, it wasn’t a problem to feed and bathe my daughter. In fact, when it’s just me and her, I kind of love it because I get to make all the decisions. I think of myself as Lieutenate DeWitt. LieuteNate ...
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Some Practical Advice on Living With Monsters

Ever since becoming a dad, I’ve been grumpier than usual.   Some of my negative mood could be attributed to life as a new parent and adjusting to the new responsibilities which come with this new reality.   Some of my negative mood could be attributed to the insomnia which, like some Twilight Zone, Monkey's Paw plot twist, comes hand-in-hand with the new workload and stakes of parenting.   All your decisions have new weight to them, there’s a human being you have to keep alive and the twist is you get to do it all without sleep. Some of my negative mood could be attributed to the fact we bought a house and had to deal with realtors and lawyers and banks and movers and contractors and the rest of the people whose job it seemed to be to screw us over as we tried to make a home.   Some of my negative mood could be attributed to the junk food I ate as a coping mechanism for the aforementioned stresses, which paradoxically made me more anxious then groggier, neither o...
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Been Meaning to Update this Site...

Been meaning to update this site, it’s just I woke up last September to find the dog had crapped on the rug so my wife and I set to work cleaning that up with water and vinegar and that smelled terrible then the baby woke up and needed her diaper changed and didn’t exactly smell great and she got very upset when there was a picture of Minnie Mouse on her diaper instead of Doc McStuffins so I calmed her down and got her dressed and my wife took her to daycare while I went to yoga then took a shower and tried to do the dishes but the disposal was broken so I called the repair guy Steve and made an appointment then got an email from my dad soliciting a list of grievances I have with him – he thought maybe I’d have 25 of them – so I wrote that salivating and contemplating and what I sent was whimsical and empathetic and downright kind yet he complained it was too mean even though he asked for a list of grievances and all I want is for him to take some basic accountability for being woefu...
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