SineSwiper wrote:Somewhat. Still a lot to take in, and honestly, the whole thing probably won't sink in until I'm holding the kid in my hands.
In all honesty, I haven't "felt" that much different. I mean, the kids are everything to me and I will sacrifice everything for them, but really, my life hasn't changed too much. I'm a guy with more of an open door and have people over all the time. My family and friends knew that nothing would change as long as they were OK with the kids being around. And they love the kids and look forward to seeing them so it hasn't affected any of that. Really, my life has hardly changed other than some "chores" related to kids (ie. feeding them, changing them, etc.). But you look forward to spending the time with them and often, you can do just have them involved with you as you do many things anyways.
Sure the wife's "job" is, for the time being, to take care of the kids (it will remain that way permanently if we can make it work financially). But if you think of when the "job" ends (now that we're past them getting up too often at night) around supper time, there's hardly any "extra" work for her. I come home and we play with the kids, I take them downstairs with me to hang out (yep, to hang out, they love it; a couple of the guys I'm sure remember me having to pause for a sec during a Horde session while I had to change my son :-) to give the wife a break. She still reads, watches her shows, etc., that she did before. Not a huge change for her other than the fact that she doesn't have to go to work and the occasional getting up during the night (it's rare now, my kids sleep very well at night; we're incredibly fortunate that way).
There's a big fallacy about how much your life will change once you have kids. Sure, the first couple of months are very different, particularly if you're dealing with premature kids. But once you get past that, it's a relatively small change unless you make it a big one.
At least for the first year or two anyways :-)