Meet Mark Roeder…

Hi everyone, my name is Mark Roeder. I work full time as a Project Manager in Washington DC for a DoD contractor after 10 years active duty in the Navy, living in the Virginia Beach area.

My family is the most important thing to me and I spend all of my spare time with them. I married my best friend over 10 years ago and we have two tiny humans that share our last name. I love sports and my son shares my passion and I’m lucky enough to coach his soccer team for the second year in a row. I am a dad blogger and have contributed to the Huffington Post Blog, Babble by Disney and my own site, All Good in the Fatherhood.

I started off writing as a form of therapy, a way to get my thoughts out of my head and onto paper (or a screen really). I really enjoy sharing my experiences through fatherhood and after some of the great feedback that I’ve gotten, I love knowing that I can help out or entertain just a few people.

The S Word

As a married dad, we all think about it all the time, we can never seem to get enough of it, plan our lives around it and often daydream about that dirty S word… Sleep! What other S word could I have been talking about? Get your mind out of the gutter! From the moment that our first bundle of joy, cries and poop was born, we had to adjust our lives to be able to function on significantly less sleep. We thought that once the midnight feedings were done, we would be able to get more sleep but boy were we wrong! As the kids have gotten older, it is nice that they can get their own breakfast and play and even feed the dog in the morning, giving us a few extra minutes, but not many as they haven’t quite figured out the art of quiet. When Brenn is still asleep and Lilly is awake, she will come in our room and talk and use our bathroom and want snuggles and hugs, really any way to not be the only one awake. A clock in each of their rooms has been a blessing and rules that they cannot come out of their room until 8:00 gives us slightly more rest.

Sleep is almost a tradable currency in my house, with negotiations always ongoing such as “If you get up early today, I’ll go grocery shopping for you and get up with them tomorrow”.

It seems like there is a sick kid or a nightmare on a weekly basis. My 5 year old still randomly climbs into bed with us once a week or so and she takes a while to fall asleep and has been known to talk to herself or even ask us some of the most random questions about a meal that we once ate at a restaurant that was completely unmemorable but is enough to spark a thought and make it that much harder to fall back to sleep. On top of kids keeping us up, we have 2 cats that sleep on the bed, a golden retriever that sneaks on to the bed when she thinks I’m not paying attention and a giant rabbit downstairs that doesn’t like to be left alone so will randomly thump or toss things around his cage. The odds are stacked against all of us but I promise that you will not jump out of bed faster than when you hear a kid or animal start gagging and it turning into full-fledged projectile vomiting.

I know that it has become cliché at this point but for all the times that we didn’t want to nap as a kid, we wish we could nap so much more as an adult. We sneak naps whenever we can get away with one, my favorites are when I can sneak out of work early on a Friday and catch an hour cat nap before getting up and thinking about dinner and our raging Friday nights of Pie Face and Nick Jr! My wife relishes her nap time and she loves the lazy Sunday afternoon nap, and I cherish my alone time with my kids on Sundays, even more now that they are no longer devoted to homework and studying. I have been known to catch a few Zs on the couch while the tiny humans play all around me.

I wake up early most days to go to work, usually around 4:45 which is way better than the 3:40 for my last job. It is tough to balance life in that respect between not getting enough sleep to function properly or going to bed when my kids do and not getting any adult time with my wife. I usually get around 6 ½ to 7 hours during the week and a solid 8 on the weekends and that works for me but not everyone is the same. I know a lot of people that need much more than that to function, and others that seem to be able to go without sleep all together. Being in the Navy gave me the ability to sleep anywhere, at any time and I have even fallen asleep standing up on multiple occasions. I fall asleep almost daily on my Metro ride home from work, but I’m too nervous for a deep sleep.

We are all warned when we find out that we are going to be parents to get all the sleep that you can before the baby gets here and that seems to be the stereotypical advice given, but I believe that we need to cherish what we have, whatever it is.

Stay strong and not so sleepy out there dads!

Be sure to check out Mark’s blog at www.allgoodinthefatherhood.com