What's So Great About Being A Dad?

Kaylin, Maks, and me

I wrote this for “The Mom and Caregiver” magazine this month, and thought that it would be fun to post it to my site as a Father’s Day tribute.

A father’s role has changed a ton in the past several decades. The rise of feminism has resulted in some pretty great things, like a much larger role in the lives of our children. When I was born it was still something of an anomaly for a father to be in the room at the birth of their child. Today it’s commonplace—the births of my two children are two of the greatest moments of my life.
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What our children think of GM

Kaylin on the future of GM from Brian Garside on Vimeo

I spent some time last night speaking to my children about GM’s recent decision to declare bankruptcy, leaving them with a nice fat $10 billion dollar 12% investment in what was already a useless company.

Heaven forbid that our government had taken that $10 billion dollars and invested it in a forward looking company like Tesla, instead they invested it in a company who’s predatory business practices have managed to drive what little innovation entirely out of their industry. Well played Canadian (and even worse US) government. Now not only are we taxpayers out that $10 billion, but we’ll STILL end up with hundreds of thousands of auto workers on our unemployment roles.

Kaylin’s comments were a little more succinct than Maks, who I think was only interested in grabbing this reporter’s camera, but in the interest of fair and balanced journalism, here is Maks’ point of view.

Maks on the GM Bankruptcy from Brian Garside on Vimeo.

What it's like to have kids

Kaylin and Maks

Charlene sent me an article recently on what it’s like to be a stay at home mom, and it got me thinking, I’ve figured out a lot of little analogies that help put some perspective on what it’s like to have little kids rolling around the house.

Most of the people I work with are in a similar point in their lives, some are ahead of me with older kids, some are still at different points, pre-kids, some pre-marriage.  Today isn’t bad, but it’s different.  We look back on our lives and wonder “what the heck did we do?”, we used to wake up when we woke up, go to bed when we went to bed, spend money when we felt like it, and we always had money (usually more than we could spend).  We’d buy little things and big things for ourselves, and never really think about dropping two hundred bucks on dinner and a movie (two hundred bucks???  Really???  That’s like a WEEK’s worth of groceries WITH DIAPERS!).

But here we are.  The here and now.  It’s a different world.

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Maks O'Brian joins our clan

Here is Maks as he gets his first test

Today at 1:20pm, we welcomed the newest addition to our family as Maks O’Brian without too much fuss.

Char woke up at 4am, tossing and turning and woke me up around 5 (of course last night was the night I decided to catch up on some work and TV at the same time and ended up crawling into bed around 2:30).  She woke me up again at 5:30 asking for Tylenol (which our midwife had recommended).  I got in the car and drove, looking for a 24 hour store that would sell Tylenol…not an easy feat when you’re groggy.  In the process I almost killed a skunk on Oxford, and had to hit two stores to find Tylenol (and then I only got Regular Strength).

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Picture = 1000 words

Pictured here is a head, two arms, two feet, and a rapidly beating heart.

Coming soon (October 2008) pictures of an awesome new Garside.