Pokemon Go taught me to be a better father If you haven’t heard of Pokemon Go yet, just go outside. You’ll probably see hordes of teenagers roaming around looking for the pocket monsters on their phones around real world landmarks. Ok, you might see me as well. The game is good for more than just setting download records, inflating and then crashing Nintendo’s stock, and social ineptitude. There are many lessons to be learned about parenting from the game as well.

My baby stopped breathing At a month old, I thought I pretty much had life with the twins figured out. We still weren’t getting more than four hours of sleep at any time, but the three to four hour intervals were becoming more frequent. The boys were also beginning to be in sync more often during the night, meaning we had to wake up less often. More than getting more sleep, we were beginning to get used to life with five to six hours of sleep a night.

Introducing the Pokemon Go Half Marathon I’ll admit it, it’s a bit weird for a 31 year old new father of twins to be obsessed with a Pokemon game. Yet, somehow this game without any game mechanics, goals, or objective has captivated me. Blame it on my obsessive compulsive quest to capture them all in the original series back when I was just slightly too old to admit to playing it.

Software, like children, is often a balancing act How managing software development prepared me for raising children Software development is a game of inches. Ok, that may be more apt for football or horseshoes. Much like child rearing, it’s the little things in software that make a big difference. It may not seem obvious, but there are a lot of lessons to learn from development that can make you a better parent.

Essential lessons the first week working with newborns at home I went back to work this week after two weeks off with our newborn twins. Everyone said before that life would change and boy did going back make me notice. I realized quickly that there is just so little time in a day and every minute with the boys is precious. I also started prioritizing time at work a bit better thanks to a new appreciation for what is important.

How to Train for a Marathon with Twins Training setup At 7:00am on a Saturday after getting six hours of sleep, though broken up into three hour segments because of the two week old twins I now co-habitat with, the last thing I want to do is get out of bed and go running. But because I signed myself up for the 2016 Chicago Marathon in October before realizing how my priorities would shift, I had no choice.

Back Off Mommy Mafia “You all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it ok for guys to call you sluts and whores.” — Tina Fey, Mean Girls Mean Girls is one of my favorite movies not just because of the excellent writing, directing, cinematography, and acting, not to mention original score, but also because it imparts so many life lessons. In this case, moms need to stop shaming other moms and piling up pressure on each other, because it just makes it ok for everyone else to do the same.

The Good, Bad, and Ugly: What I’ve Learned in the First Two Weeks of Fatherhood Big smiles! Our identical twin boys, Axel and Anders turn two weeks old on Friday and in some ways, it feels much shorter, and in others, like sleeping, way way longer. The anxieties and fears of week one are mostly in the rearview now and have been replaced with new ones. With another pediatrician checkup this week, and weigh ins with it, we’re now way less worried about weight loss.

Things that Terrified me During the First Twenty Four Hours of Fatherhood At 8:00 am on Friday, June 17th, 2016, Axel and Anders Lund, our identical twins were delivered via cesarean section into the world. Now that we are nearly a week into this crazy thing called parenthood, we can largely look back on the numerous things that we freaked out about and smile. It’s been an eventful 5 days but the boys are in great health now thanks to the great nursing staff at St.

Why I’m Taking My Full Paternity Leave, and You Should Too You’ve seen the data; the United States is one of only a few countries that doesn’t mandate paternity leave. We’re in the illustrious company of Suriname, which I swear was never a country when I had to learn countries in middle school and Papua New Guinea. The tides are changing a bit with companies, largely in the tech sector, offering their own paid paternity leaves, but we still lag tremendously far behind all other world powers.