Our 753rd Dad in the Limelight is Paul Wandason. I want to thank Paul Wandason for being a part of this series. It has been great getting connected with him and now sharing Paul Wandason with all of you.
1) Tell me about yourself, (as well as how you are in the limelight for my readers knowledge)
I’m a father first. My love, my time and priorities lie first with my family.
I’m an English expat living in Holland. Mostly a quiet chap who likes to keep himself to himself but thrust into the limelight with 2 children who love adventure and exploring the new world I’ve helped bring them into! I’m most content simply being with them, but when I do get time to myself I like to get outside and look at the stars, or read science fiction and watch science fiction movies – preferably with a hint of time travel which I find fascinating!
Limelight-wise I’m trying to push myself forwards with my interest in time travel (in fiction!). I have a blog (time2timetravel.com) where I publish a few thoughts about the subject, but I also write reviews of time travel novels. I think I must be OK at it because I get a lot of contact from authors who ask me to read and review their work! It’s a huge privilege for me to be invited into their world and asked for an opinion!
Recently I was also asked to be a guest author on another time travel blog (timetravelnexus.com) which pools together a few time travel fans. One aspect I really enjoy on that site is being able to interview authors. I try to stay away from the standard cookie cutter questions, and come up with different questions for each interview, and really dive deep into their novel as well as their thoughts. I get some pretty interesting (and unexpected!) answers!
Along with blogging I’m also trying to write my own novel. If I ever get the thing finished (it’s taken me 6 years so far and I don’t think I’m even half way!) I’m going to crap myself when it goes out to readers. Being a reviewer I think I’m setting myself up for some pretty harsh criticism. Still, I guess a single star in the darkness might be better than not having tried at all…
2) Tell me about your family
Two little girls of seven and four-and-a half, and a wife of indeterminable statistics.
My wife is Dutch and speaks excellent English, and we have two young daughters, both of whom speak and understand Dutch a lot better than me! The eldest is sensitive and thoughtful – she definitely looks before she leaps, and has a level of empathy which far exceeds most children of her age that I’ve met. My youngest is the opposite – charges around causing mass destruction and seemingly without a care in the world other than to enjoy herself…but she’ll surprise us with her eye for detail when something isn’t as it should. You know, like a cup of milk on the wrong side of her plate!
3) What has been the largest challenge you have had in being a father?
Cotton wool manufacturers – they don’t make the stuff soft enough for me to wrap my daughters in. The corollary is that I have a problem with absolutely everyone who’s got absolutely anything to do with my daughters – child carers, teachers, other parents, other kids and the in-laws. None of them are good enough for my girls! I only truly trust my wife with my children – I don’t think she’s always right, but I love her, trust her and learn a lot from her!
Being an expat also throws in some complications. Although I’ve been living in Holland for some 8 years, there are plenty of things that I still don’t understand – or that I haven’t gotten used to. I want to guide my children through this quagmire, but at times it seems like the blind leading the blind. It’s getting easier with time though – and not just because it’s with increasing frequency that my girls help *me* in this country!
4) What advice would you give to other fathers?
Doing it your own way works, but Team Parent United is crucial.
5) How have you come to balance parenthood and outside life?
I keep the see-saw in the garden.
There is no outside life; I welcome the fact that my children are an integral part of my life, not just a hobby (or worse, an inconvenience) between their waking and sleeping hours. So when I’m invited to a wedding where children aren’t welcome (it’s happened…*growl*), instead of finding a balance and working out the logistics of who to look after our children whilst we’re off having a nice time without them, I stick up my finger to the happy couple and I stay with my girls (i.e. including my wife). Likewise, if restaurants don’t like kids, my family and our cash go elsewhere.
Being a Dad is who I am and I refuse to section off activities. Of course there are some things I want to do on my own…taking a leak without people banging on the door has now become a luxury. Or watching a movie without chattering in the background. So I make sure the toilet door’s locked, and wait till they’re in bed before I think about watching a decent scifi movie. I mean, it’s not rocket science, is it?
So yeah, if outside life wants to define itself as things which don’t accept my kids on some level, then outside life can stay outside and stay out in the cold – and I’ll be jabbing it hard with my cotton buds!
Family first. (Did I mention it’s taking me over 6 years to write my darn novel?)
6) What have you learned from the fathers that you have interacted with?
To be honest, not much. What works for them and their kids won’t necessarily work between me and mine. I mean, seriously? Who’s going to read about me here in the limelight and change the relationship they have with their children?
Most fathers I’ve interacted with are bloggers (I see precious few of them on the school run), many of whom have expressed concerns that blogging takes too much of their time…often involuntarily. That’s a real danger – to spend too much time writing about experiences with children rather than actually living it. I remember one father in particular that I had email contact with when I’d just started with my own Daddy blog. He was having trouble balancing time between blogging and with his family. Eventually he decided to jack in his blog.
In time, I learnt that I also needed to step back from my Daddy blog every now and then. I might have the perfect idea for the perfect killer post, but if writing it up properly meant me taking notes instead of being there in the moment with my girls then it simply isn’t worth it. All those family birthday photos I’ve taken? I’m in none of them. I’m stuck behind the lens of a camera instead of holding my daughters’ hand when she blows out the candles. It’s the same when half my brain isn’t in the moment but thinking about how I can write it up.
So…yeah. I’ve given up my Daddy blogging and now concentrate on my time travel blog (time2timetravel.com), and I’ve learnt I’m not the only Dad who feels that way.
7) What else would you share regarding your experiences as a father thus far?
(I’ll answer this after question 8 please!)
8) What have been the most memorable experiences that you have had thus far as a parent?
This is difficult to narrow down because there are so many moments which are special in their own way and in their own scale, but I’ll give you 2 – a good and a bad.
I remember clearly my first wedding anniversary. I had planned a nice quiet and romantic evening with my wife. She was heavily pregnant at the time and we’d been ‘warned’ that quiet relaxed evenings were soon going to be a thing of the past, so I’d arranged a meal out for the evening. That evening didn’t come to pass as I’d planned out because our first daughter was born a couple of days earlier.
On our anniversary I was lying in bed holding our baby whilst my wife lay next to me sleeping. I was completely surrounded with love; it could barely get any better!
My darkest day of parenthood which is etched into my brain is with our second daughter and an accident she had in a playground whilst on holiday. I’ve described it in this blog post but the long and short of it is that I thought she was going to die.
Figuratively speaking I completely shat myself and I vowed to take a first aid course as soon as I got home.
And 2 years later I still haven’t done that yet. What a pleb.
7) So back to question (7). The main thing I want to share is a recognition of the need to get some fist aid training. You never know when you’ll need it, and it can literally be a life saver.
Now can one of you out there give me a kick in the behind and get me to sign up for a course?
Paul Wandason is a Daddy of 2, husband of 1 and master of none! (i.e. wrapped around 2 little fingers and under 1 thumb!) He loves science fiction and astronomy, but loves his family more. So he loves time travel too! You can visit him on his time travel blog at time2timetravel.com, friend him on Facebook and follow him Twitter (@tadpaul353).
If you have any questions for Matt, please leave a comment here and I will make sure that he gets them so that he may be able to respond!
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