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RulesofDadding

Rule 1: No Photos Please!

Updated: Feb 9, 2022


I’ve hit a problem already.

It’s only post two on the blog and I’ve already discovered that this might be harder than first anticipated.

Not the writing you understand. I am witty and erudite enough to keep churning posts out until my withered old fingers crumble at the keyboard. My issue is with the visual content to go alongside my wondrous words.

Most other parenting blogs naturally make use of the thing the blog is all about to illustrate the content. That being their cute as a button kiddie winkles doing things that are adorable and engaging enough to make you scroll down for more. Unfortunately, I don’t have that luxury. As is the case with a lot of adopters we have to be very careful about photos of our offspring just in case they end up on the wrong social media feed.

Of course, this isn’t just a frustration I’ve been met with at the onset of the blog. It has been with me since the Monkey arrived.



Being of the age we are, a lot of our friends and colleagues have also decided to start families too. This means that on a daily basis my timeline can be clogged with a deluge of children doing cute, amusing or unfortunate things. Some of these children are a delight to watch and bring joy to my feed. Some of them are just soggy peanuts dribbling into their rolls of baby cleavage and shouldn’t be allowed the air time. The One thing they have in common though is doting parents who just want the world to know how special their special little baby is. I’ll tell you something though: Yours ain’t as special as mine… I just can’t show you!

Any picture you could show me of your kid I bet I could find one of ours that’s cuter. World Book Day? We’ll Gruffalo your child under the table. Swimming? The all in one Nemo suit and armbands will dive bomb your child into oblivion. Toilet training? I’ll double down on a video of our little man sat on the loo blasting out his own special version of Old MacDonald had a Poo. I’ve even got adorable ones of him crying his eyes out in the bath because there’s too many bubbles. In retrospect that may have seemed a bit cruel but his little squishy goblin face was just so photogenic and I can crack them out at his eighteenth birthday party.

Any other parents out there might be taking this as daddy smack talk and have started to gather their posse together to get some finger snapping West Side Story gang warfare going to force me to put my money where my mouth is and produce the evidence of little man’s adorability. Problem is, as much as I’m tempted and as much as I want to. I just can’t risk it.

We had a nightmare at contact with his birth family that I’ll no doubt go into at a later date. That experience made me do something which I probably shouldn’t have done which was to seek them out on Facebook. Guess what. Despite them living so far away and despite us having nothing in common as so far as our daily life was concerned. One of my Facebook friends was friends with one of our little man’s birth family through having met them once at a poetry slam. Can you imagine if I shared a picture and my friend liked the picture and it then popped up on birth family’s feed? Our security settings should stop that happening, but you can’t trust social media to alter their terms and conditions without telling you and if something went wrong, the consequences for us don’t bear thinking about.



That’s why, unless you’re in our special family groups on Facebook you shall never see more than the back of Monkey’s head, or a cleverly angled shot of his hand and foot, or a blurry edit of his shadow. I suppose that’s one plus point to the no photos rule. I have had to acquire the skill set of David Bailey to at least have some usable social media fodder to click bait for love hearts and likes. If I carry on and get enough of them for the blog, I may even open an Instagram account to link up (I believe that is what all the young trendy gad about towns does these days) and it could even lead to me doing a Brooklyn Beckham…. I mean release a photography book… Seriously! I’m old enough to be his dad.

And if I were his dad, I probably would have told him that he probably shouldn’t have released that book. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t. After all. Isn’t that what every parent wants? The world to see pictures of their perfect children.

Even if none of them are really that perfect.

Well....

Except for mine.



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