Oh, Daaaad!

This is going to be a very sweeping comment and I will preface it by saying not all partnerships fall into this dynamic but let's face it, Mum's are way more on the ball than Dad's are when it comes to the kids. I hear gasps of horror from a few of you out there but I can feel the wind on my face of soooo many of you beautiful Mum's nodding away in complete agreement. Let me give you a couple of examples...

When I was younger, I used to end up in hospital quite a lot with bad asthma and croup. Of course this would happen in the middle of the night so Mum or Dad had to take me up to the hospital while the other parent stayed home with my brothers tucked snugly in their beds. I remember one particular night, I was going through the admissions process and while I lay in a bed with my nebuliser mask on, Dad sheepishly comes in with the clipboard of paperwork in his hand. "Honey" he said "what is your middle name again?" What the? My own father had forgotten my middle name? Surprising seeing as he chose it! With my shallow breaths I managed to tell him my middle name and chastise him for forgetting it. The smirk on the nurses face said it all...only a Dad would forget his child's middle name!

Then there is this little classic that goes on in my household all the time! Mat will often wake in the morning and say "Gee the kids slept well" or remark on a weekend how wonderfully late the kids are sleeping in (after 7am is a late sleep in for our pair of early risers). Every time these words roll out of his mouth I look at him in disbelief. Not once has this actually happened, it is just that he is lucky enough to sleep through the graveyard shift of parenting. We can have the kids screaming during the night, coughing, crying, and even coming into our bed but he doesn't notice at all! It truly amazes me because I can hear the kids fart or groan in the night and before I know it, I am instinctively jumping out of bed to check on them. On the flip side of this though, Mat has remarked that he can come home late after a night out, smash, crash and bang his way through the house to our bedroom and loudly make his way into bed and I don't wake up at all. Good point. But I am still baffled by his inability to hear the kids during the night, even when they are right beside him!

Lastly, I have to give you an example that took place yesterday at the kindy pick up. Soph's kindy is attached to a school so you often have parents coming to collect their kindy children with their school children in tow. Yesterday, one of Sophie's friends, Caitlyn, was picked up by her Dad and he was loading his kids into the car not too far from where I was doing the same. All set, he started to drive off only he didn't get very far because his daughter, who must have been in Grade 2 or 3, started banging on the side of the car...the outside of the car. He had completely forgotten her! Oh my goodness, he was mortified and I was trying to make it look like I hadn't noticed but here was Sophie, staring and asking loudly "Why is she banging on the car? Why did her Dad forget her?" I quickly bundled Soph into our car, questions still flying, and tried my gosh golly darn hardest not to look over in the direction of parenting mistake #1: Forgetting Your Child. 

So, there you have it, some pretty concrete evidence that sometimes Dad's are not quite on the ball and in fact completely drop the ball from time to time! While we wouldn't change them for the world because they have so many wonderful parenting qualities, surely we could tweak them just a little??