This blog is meant to give advice on fatherhood and personal finance from firsthand experience. This first article highlights the time before I even thought about having the baby. My ‘fatherhood journey’ if you will. I sit here ten weeks after this beautiful baby girl was born. I wish I had something like this, a soon-to-be Dad’s perspective, to read during the process of pregnancy because I think it would’ve calmed some of my nerves.
As expected, this first article will highlight a little bit of my life before we had our baby, the pre-natal process, and, as the site title would lead you to believe, some brief insight into the finance portion of things that will be greater detailed in future articles. But later on, I will just talk about being a Dad—the good and the bad, the things I did right, and the instances I wish I could’ve used a mulligan. Hopefully, it will help you in your journey!
I want to make sure I am honest with you. The privacy of my daughter is incredibly important to me. You will not see photos or videos of my daughter on this site or any social media platforms that I use. The only one who is going to determine the online footprint of my daughter is her. So there won’t be cute pictures of her or anything like that. There will be a lot of stock photos, writing, and maybe videos of me talking on various social media sites.
Now, back to your scheduled programming. A fatherhood journey was something I mostly knew I was going to want to experience at some point in my life. I say mostly because, like most immature men, there was certainly a stage when I was in my late teens where I had a mindset of “Why get married and have kids when I can have all this fun doing x, y, and z?” But upon becoming an adult, a time around my mid-20s when I was done fuckin’ around (for the most part) and ready to take life seriously, I knew one day I would be a father.
The Beginning of My Fatherhood Journey
Before I go further I need to warn you, there will be swearing. I have a terrible mouth in real life, and I’m not too terribly interested in being something that I’m not. So be prepared for profanity. You’re going to get nothing but the authentic me at Fathering and Finances.
After running through a couple of sales jobs I eventually quit and decided to work on a political campaign. Little did I know that leaving the same city I’d lived in virtually my whole life for just six months would give me memories and friends that would last a lifetime, in addition to my beautiful wife who, if not for her, there would be no purpose for this website.
Fast forward to when I asked my future wife to marry me—at that point, kids were in the back of my mind. We then bought a house and it moved towards the front of my brain a little more. Then I married her and it crept just a little closer. But then COVID hit and the next couple years suddenly were spent working on our house and evaluating how the rest of our lives would look.
I’ll state from the outset that my fatherhood journey will not likely be yours mainly because my wife is six years my junior and I thank the Good Lord every day for that. Medicine is advancing at a rapid pace, but I didn’t want my wife to be in her 30s when we had our first child because biology dictates that there shall be a cap on the amount we could have without facing the challenges that many women in their mid to late 30s and even 40s experience. Luckily, I married a 24-year-old, so we had a little time to get things in order the way we both wanted.
As we emerged from the pandemic I had a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity to run a Congressional campaign. My wife and I were looking up DC homes online, but also discussing if we’d still want to stay in Ohio while I commuted a few days a week. We were certain that we were going to win. The best-laid plans. It turns out we didn’t even make it out of the primary. I was devastated and after going back to my old job I simply had no idea what would happen next. We went on a vacation a week or two after the election and then I started work again shortly thereafter. But something was missing.
A couple weeks after getting back from the beautiful Atlantic Coast of Florida, we went up to my wife’s family’s lake house in Michigan. After a night of drinking and just generally having a good time, the truth came out: I told my wife she was going to make an excellent mother and I was ready to have a child. But, the journey to fatherhood is not quite that easy.
Getting Pregnant
After doing some research, I saw it could take months and months to actually get pregnant. In fact, there is only about a 30% chance that a couple will be pregnant during the first month of trying. My wife bought these strips that she would pee on, put the data in an ovulation app, and when the numbers were where we needed them to be, we did the no pants dance.
In July of 2022, my wife did her first series of pregnancy tests (a few days earlier than she told me she was going to, mind you). I came home one day to find a onesie on our closet door that said, “My Daddy and I Are Eagles Fans”. Before I get to the main part, I am a Philadelphia Eagles fan, so while this blog in meant for everyone, it’s a little less so for Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants or Washington Redskins/Commanders fans.
Back to the story. After seeing the onesie I was stunned. Couldn’t believe it. “There was only a 30% chance,” I kept saying over and over. But it was true, and boy did I feel like a virile, strong, red-blooded man in a way that I’d never felt before. And yes, that feeling still lasts today.
A trip the her OB-GYN confirmed it—we were expecting and due in March 2023. My fatherhood journey was official!
Being Pregnant
I think I speak for my wife in saying that those 9.5 months were among the longest in our lives. We had to wait for another appointment to hear the heartbeat. And that was nerve-racking because hearing the heartbeat means that you quickly shift from worrying about a miscarriage to the odds of it being is small that it’s not really even in your mind. I hope we never experience a miscarriage because I quite simply can’t even imagine the pain and I feel terrible that people do experience such a shitty moment in their lives. A few weeks later we went back to hear the heartbeat. One word: amazing!
Before getting to genetic testing, it needs to be made clear that we are unapologetically pro-life. Whatever the Good Lord throws at us we’ll be ready for. So, we elected to have genetic testing done because if there was something wrong we wanted to be ready for it—we’re both planners.
My wife received a notification that the results were ready and we knew it was then we wouldn’t just find out the genetic information, but also the gender. The baby was completely healthy and as I told my wife before we knew the results, every fiber of my being believed we would be having a girl. My gut was right. Some people have asked if I was more nervous about the genetic testing results or the gender. My answer is yes.
Unique Challenges
The next seven-ish months were unique, for us in particular. My wife’s side of the family has dealt with birth defects, so this was classified as a high-risk pregnancy. That meant more trips than usual for ultrasounds and she would undergo twice-a-week stress tests (NST) to ensure the baby was moving well and the heartbeat was okay. During that time we were sent to triage twice for a confirmation of tests because her OB-GYN was overly cautious.
Our little girl for all but the last month of the pregnancy was small. That’s defined as under the 10th percentile by most doctors. She was growing consistently, but just not fast enough. So the ultrasounds and stress tests continued until the second to last set of appointments when she had a massive spike in weight and was in the 20th percentile. She was ultimately born at 6 pounds, 13 ounces.
One thing I can’t recommend enough—go to as many appointments as you can. I went to every single appointment. It’s the journey of fatherhood! My thought was that we’re a team and I wanted to be there for my wife no matter what. Mostly, I was just there to talk to her. And some of the time I was bored out of my fucking skull. But we persevered.
This is the conclusion of the pregnancy portion of the article, but in the following paragraphs I have given summaries of the finances and links to in-depth articles I’ve written on each subject. I wanted to talk about what I did to help my wife, some things I wish I would’ve done differently, and the purchases that we made through the process.
Finances
Pregnancy can be expensive, and I wrote an article on how we planned for it. Fortunately, our health insurance is top-notch, so outside of $200 for genetic testing, we didn’t pay a dime for medical care from the confirmation pregnancy test through labor and delivery. And even for our daughter’s first few pediatrician appointments. I realize that is not the case for most people.
The next biggest expense is assembling the nursery. Learn how we planned for that here. We went to DeltaChildren.com and purchased a set that included a crib, dresser, rocking/swivel chair, mattress, two sets of sheets, mattress cover, a bassinet and I feel like I’m missing something else. We saved $500 compared to buying them individually. If you’re able, set these things up yourself. I have absolutely no patience and irritate easily, but spending time with my wife to assemble these things was incredibly meaningful and an excellent way to bond.
So many clothes. As you can see in this article, you don’t need as many newborn clothes as you think! We did pretty well at the baby shower, but my wife was pretty insistent on making sure we bought the bulk of her clothes. All you will hear people say is how expensive the clothes were. If you’re buying everything for retail price then, yes, it is incredibly expensive. But what we did is pretty simple. Carefully walk through Macy’s, Carter’s (when there are sales), and the JC Penney kids sections.
I can’t tell you how many onesies we got for less than $4, some even as cheap as a dollar. I can promise you that for the first few weeks, you just want them clothed in literally anything because you’ll be changing outfits a lot due to spit up. If money is no object, sure, spend it on the $30 shoes and $25 onesie. But we’ve spent less than $500 and we basically have her first six months and a healthy chunk of 9 and 12-month clothes set. Also, always check clearance online. Buying for a baby is extremely easy since it goes by months.
We had a long discussion regarding strollers and car seats. After painstaking research, we can’t recommend Graco’s ClickConnect series highly enough. We bought an excellent car seat, a jogging stroller, and a smaller stroller. The car seat comes with a base that you install in the car and you can easily put it in and take it out. The same tech applies to attaching the car seat to the strollers. We bought one extra base for my car because I can’t imagine the pain in the ass that transferring those would be.
We bought a Graco pack ’n’ play online, as well as a larger fenced-in playpen for steep discounts online. The playpen won’t be used for a bit, but we’ve already used the pack ’n’ play several times.
Buy way more diaper pad covers, bibs, and burp cloths than you think you’ll need. For the burp clothes and bibs, we love Burt Bees. They’re premium, but they’re incredibly soft and soak up everything well. Learn what we do about diapers by reading this article.
A Diaper Genie is a must. Also, the Hatch sound system has been a godsend (more on that in a future post).
I can’t think of any other big-ticket items off the top of my head to help your fatherhood journey, but altogether you are absolutely going to be spending thousands to do this right. I’ll do my best to help you get to the lower end of that.
More to come soon!
