Ask HN: How life changes after being a dad?

You are absolutely correct: your life will change dramatically. In short: your time is not yours anymore. You have responsibilities now. Other things are more important than your hobbies, and even more important than your work. As a parent, you live for your children.

It's still possible to make time for your hobbies, but it takes more planning, and it will never be as much as when you were simply on your own. But before you despair (which you will, often), keep in mind that kids are not just tons of work, they're also tons of fun. They're curious and inquisitive and love to learn new stuff. And you get to teach them that. Take their neverending "why?" questions seriously and try to answer them to the best of your ability. If you don't know, figure it out together. Build lego together, play with numbers together, read together, play Minecraft together, and program together.

I think it's a bit loaded topic, as people have pretty strong opinions about how to do parenting right. I know at 2 weeks, I have no idea what I'm doing yet.

So far it seems things haven't changed as radically as I would have expected. It's been continuous, not a sudden jump into an unknown world or anything like that. Based on stuff I read online, my expectation was that this 24/7 crying ball of torture would enter our house, with poop, pee and drool flying everywhere.

But in reality he's mostly quiet and sleeping. And he's really cute and it makes us happy to "play" with him when he's awake. He doesn't even drool.

In Japan it's usual that grandparents help out at first. So we've had our mother-in-law living here for 2 weeks, which means that with all the attention on the baby, I have as much time as before for my work. This has somewhat eased the transition.

Today was the first day taking care of the baby by just the two of us. I cooked, bottlefed him formula, changed a diaper and did registration paperwork. If I hadn't been doing that, I'm not sure if I'd been working or just wasting time on something else.

One thing I hadn't completely realized was that being the breastless parent, you can't really do everything for the baby. There's formula you can feed of course, but it's apparently better to use breastmilk as much as possible. The baby also doesn't seem to be quite as satisfied with a plastic bottle of formula as the real thing.

I feel like I'm not really allowed to comment much on parenting, as 80% of the work is done by my wife, not me. And for the first 2 weeks, maybe 15% of the remaining work was done by my mother-in-law. Maybe after some more time passes I'll try to write a proper blog post about this.

Sleep schedule of a baby is such that every 2-3 hours he wakes up and starts making dissatisfied grunts. Feed, possibly change diaper and soon he gets sleepy again. I've spent just the normal (short) hours working on my stuff, even having time to read some tutorials, study Japanese and take trips to the beach for swimming. But this might be just a temporarily happy situation, will have to see.

Now cue the people about to comment "oh no you don't know how hard it will get soon!". Maybe. But this is what it's been like in the beginning for us so far. I just wanted to contribute a positive non-scary experience.

For me things did change dramatically and honestly, it was hard at first but looking back I think I was going into it being a fairly selfish person. Since I realized I was being a dumbass and really took in the whole situation it has been amazing, seriously. Of course I don't have anywhere close to the free time I used to have to play around with things but what has replaced that time is even better.

With that being said, the only suggestions or tips I think I could offer would be to try and get your mind right before the baby comes. If you are like me and have to go through the first month with a "my life is horrible, blah blah blah" feeling then things are going to be really bad. It's hard enough without having additional blockers bringing you down, try and get rid of those before the big day comes. Additionally, not everyone has this luxury, but if you do recruit family to help the first week or so. Having someone around to help with the day-to-day stuff that you are going to stop doing can be nice.