[Djeffery]

Dad of 20 year old boy-girl twins. Funny how 20 years seems to have flown by but Friday takes forever lol. I was 32 when we had them. I took 6 months of parental leave when the kids were born (well, their second 6 months, my wife stayed home the first 6 months). I highly recommend any dad to do that. It was an awesome time. Get up and feed them, take them for a drive for a nap, walk around the mall with the double stroller, babies are chick magnets lol. We were also building a new house in that time I was off, and the realtor at the new subdivision loved it when I would come in with the kids in their carriers while we picked samples or discussed floor plan changes.

I also had a vasectomy right at the start of that time off, fortunately when my wife and I were overlapping our time off. Saw the comment above about dreading it, and that was the worst part, the dread, as the procedure was pretty simple. Plus you get to be a suck for a couple days and wives really love it when their partner does this.

The year they started school, I ended up going on the afternoon shift (not by choice). Back in those days, the first couple years at school were every other day, so we had a daycare provider who covered off the off days. I was on that shift until they were 10, so I missed out on all the weeknight activities (still not sure if I got the good end of that sometimes though lol). I do recall on a cruise vacation though, my daughter was in the kids club talent show and I was like "when they hell did she learn to dance and use a hula hoop like that" lol.

I've seen some comments on the teen years, but I haven't seen mentioned what we have experienced. My son really has latched on to mom, and my daughter is more close to me. Although my daughter is also more close to mom than my son is to me as well lol. I probably pushed my son away a bit as he was really hating school and pretended to be sick a lot and I rode his ass pretty hard about it. He completely dropped out of high school when covid hit and everything went online and he is probably 6 or 7 credits short of graduating, although he says he is going to do finish it online. He will talk about doing something, and I'll bring up maybe working on finishing school and he walks away and doesn't speak for a few days.

There are times I wish we had kids earlier in our marriage (I was 26, she was 25), as I think about my parents and the lives they lived after I was grown, they were 23 and 20 when I came along. I mean, my wife and I were married a year when we had a surprise 50th birthday party for her mom, and my wife turned 50 a couple years ago when the kids were still teens lol. But then I also look at the life we lived before kids, drop what we were doing and go away for a weekend, go out at night, go on trips, and think "wouldn't it have been nice to have a few more years of that" lol.