Dads and Technology

The birth of your first child certainly marks a new chapter in your life. There’ll be no more sleeping until noon on a weekend, no more avoiding your mother-in-law, and certainly no more spontaneous sex on the kitchen table. However, the arrival of your little bundle of diarrhoea-dripping joy does not necessarily herald the end of buying expensive gadgets. In fact, fatherhood turns out to provide some pretty special opportunities for purchasing cool technologies or the cheapest tablets, and wife-approval is surprisingly easy to secure.

Projects for dads: photo mosaics ... zoom in to Zumyn

Here's another great gift idea for your child’s grandparents, god parents/guardians or perhaps even for yourself. Zumyn allows you to create a mosaic photo of your child using your entire collection of baby photos. The web site's photo upload tool compresses your pictures before uploading (saving you plenty of time), and the clever Zumyn software will then arrange your photos to represent any particular picture you choose. It's free to use, but you can pay for prints on photo paper or canvas if you like the results.

Legalise baby racing

Even the fittest of dads can get tired when running around after the kids. So what should you do when you can’t hack the pace? As ever, some high-tech Dadgetry will solve the problem, and I’ve found just the thing to keep Henry amused while I have a hard earned rest on the sofa.

Henry has been crawling for a good few months now, but it’s difficult to get him to venture around the house without leading him everywhere like a very cute little puffy-cheeked lap dog. So I stepped into Argos, handed over my £7.79, and left with a radio controlled Mazda RX-8. It was the best £7.79 I’ve spent since he was born.

Wife Approval Tip 4 – Use her cycle

No, no, no – not her bicycle, her menstrual cycle! For generations men have been suffering at the vicious hands of our lady-folk’s egg-dropping routine, but now it’s time to fight back and earn some Dadgets for our centuries of hardship.

The key to this tip is knowing your wife’s cycle, so I suggest investing in a pocket calendar or some clever iPhone application (search the app store for something like “How can I track when my wife is going to turn into a crazed lunatic each month”). Armed with this information, you’ll know the best time to bite.

Now you might expect my next piece of advice to be based on asking for Dadget-purchase authority when she is not in her monthly mood. In fact, I encourage you to do exactly the opposite. Whip out that huge list of elaborate and expensive Dadgets that you know she’ll never approve, and ask her at the worst possible time of the month. Not only will she say ‘No’ to each and every one of your suggestions, but she’ll also singe your eyebrows with the flames coming from her mouth.

A necklace? For heterosexual fathers?

Tell yourself that you're a modern father who is fully in touch with his sexuality. You also enjoy cuddles with your baby, and the Daddy HeartString Baby's Companion might just be able to stop your child from chewing your face.

Tell your wife that just because you are wearing a necklace it does not mean that she can start buying you pink shirts.

The HeartString Baby's Companion (HBC) is essentially a lump of plastic on a necklace for your baby to touch, chew and yank on while they are breastfeeding or cuddling you. I have limited lactation powers but I do enjoy a good cuddle with Henry, so I offered to give the ‘Daddy’ version a go.

Kids Party Dadgets - Part 1

I'm not a fan of party-planning myself, possibly linked to a dream I once had involving Margaret Thatcher and a bowl of car keys, but I feel that a few good Dadgets will see me through anything. Having children means that you'll end up arranging countless parties, so what are the Dadgets to look out for?

Let's start with the invitations. Why waste money and rainforests on paper invites when you can plan the whole shindig online for free? There is a wide range of party planning web sites that will allow you to send e-invites to your event and then monitor the RSVPs as they come rolling in electronically.

Y-Cam Knight Video Baby Monitor Review

The wait is over - here is Craig's long awaited review of the Y-Cam Knight video monitor...

Can a security camera babysit?
1. Tell yourself that this is far superior to any video baby monitor currently on the market. You’ll be able to show off live video of your sleeping baby on your iPhone from anywhere in the world, and who knows what kinky applications you’ll think up when you can finally afford that Swedish au pair.

2. Tell your wife that this essential device will allow you to keep a tearful eye on your little baby whenever you are kept away from home on business. Buying the Y-Cam Knight would be a testament to your fatherly love.

Wife Approval Tip 3 – Be a woman about it

Your wife thinks that layers of concrete and plasterboard actually magnify her voice, which is why she insists on talking to you when she is in a completely different room/floor/building to you. To compound the problem she then expects you to have absorbed and understood every last word of what she was banging on about, and she will test you on this at some random point over the next 7 years.

As annoying as this behaviour may be, it does open up a wonderful possibility for Dadget purchasing. When there is a Dadget that you simply must have, but you cannot apply any of my previous Wife Approval Tips, then you simply need to adopt the woman’s approach. In actual fact, don’t even go to the trouble of pretending to try to talk to them when you’re in a different room. How will they know?

"Look, honey – our new FreeSat HD+ box has finally arrived!"

The impregnator's diary - part 6

Babies are a lot like wives. For starters, they’re always pissed off about something but they won’t tell you what the problem is. They also throw up when they’ve had too much to drink, and they often break wind with the sweetest of smiles on their face. So all in all, marriage has been great preparation for fatherhood, but it has also enhanced the whole parenting experience. It’s great to share the wonderful moments together – such as Henry’s first smile, which came after about 6 weeks – as well as distributing some of the hard work and late night feeding. This does, however, create a bit of competition about who has done the most. Nappy changing is a particularly competitive sport:

"I changed 5 of his nappies yesterday, you know."
"Well, I changed 6 and one of them had an enormous messy poo in it. It was a 3-wiper."

The impregnator's diary part 5: Wild firing and hot totty

I’m a Dad. I still don’t think it has sunk in, but the milk gushing out of my wife’s breasts during sex confirms that something has indeed changed in our lives. Henry’s first few weeks have been the most amazing, frightening, exhilarating, stressful and rewarding time of my entire life.

Dawn ended up staying in the hospital with Henry for a couple of days while she began her recovery from the Caesarean, which meant that I was restricted to playing a visiting role in our son’s life for a short while. Nevertheless, I was still there to change his first dirty nappy and he dutifully introduced me to the unpredictable targeting of baby penises. Our little fellow’s little fellow fired wildly while his bottom dribbled out a gooey black mess during the split second we weren’t looking. Dawn and I laughed heartily while struggling to staunch the flow from every hole, but we got there in the end.