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as a man, your role at the beginning of the child, as you mentioned, that spirit of play doesn’t really come in until they’re a little bit older, which is easier for a man. What would you say is some good tips for me entering this right now, especially for that first phase? That’s a good question. Well, look, when… After my wife and I got married, I was about 28 or so, and she’s a year older than me, she was ready to have a baby pretty much right away. And I still wasn’t firmly situated in my career, although my prospects were good, I wasn’t worried about it. And I wasn’t in a hurry. But she was more in a hurry. And I thought, well, I don’t want to stop her from doing something that she wants, so why am I resistant to this? So I went for a walk and I thought about it, and I thought, okay, well, I have things to do to finish developing my career, and I have to do them right now. I was finishing up my PhD, and like, I have to do that, there’s no way around that. And so nothing can interfere with that, because that’s not going to be good for me or for my family. So that’s one possibility. And then I thought, well, also, I don’t know what the hell to do with an infant. It’s not in my… And look, I’m a relatively maternal man. I worked with little kids, I’ve worked in daycares, like, I like little kids. And so I’m more prone to take care of little kids than most men by temperament. But even so, like, infants? I don’t know what the hell to do with an infant. So I thought, oh, maybe that’s the problem. I don’t have any problem with kids at all, once they’re sort of ambulatory, like older than nine months, let’s say. And by the way, you can start playing with a baby very, very early, like the play is very subtle. You know, I had taken my granddaughter, my son’s daughter, and put her on my knees, standing up when she was about four months old, and I got her to play a head bonking game. You know, I’d bring her forward and bonk my head on hers. I go one, two, three, bonk, like really lightly, obviously, and then wait, because babies are slow, eh? Their pace is slow. One, two, three, bonk. And then I did that like five, six times, so she knew the pattern. And then I went one, two, three, and pulled her forward, but didn’t bonk her, and she laughed. And I thought, hey, kid, you got the game. You know, you established that little pattern and then deviate from it. That’s the game. It’s like peek-a-boo, too, you know? It’s like, it’s a surprise. It’s a bit of a surprise. So you can start playing with a baby very early. It’s very subtle to begin with. But I would say, so know that, know that, that you can start playing and interacting very early. So, and that’s a good thing to have at the back of your mind. And that ability to play just gets more and more important as the baby gets older. But I would also say that your role is to take care of your wife while she takes care of the baby. So that means you’ve got to watch her because this is going to tire her out. Like it’s a full-body experience for a woman, right? I mean, first of all, she’s pregnant, and that’s a hell of a thing, especially in the last month. Then she has to give birth, and you know, I think that’s something men have no real comprehension of. And then she has to recover. And then that baby is like desperately vulnerable and requires everything the woman has to provide for the first, absolutely for the first two months, and pretty much absolutely for the first six months. So you’ve got to stand in the background and you’ve got to watch her. And you’ve got to make sure that she doesn’t get overwhelmed because that’s when you need to be in there. You need to go in and say, look, you know, you need a rest. You need to have a nap. You all take care of the baby, all watch. And so everything’s going fine. And it’ll wake you up if it’s necessary, but you got to spell her off. And so you need to make that arrangement. And that’s the primary, you know, you think that’s how it looks to me, is her primary responsibility is to take care of the baby and your primary responsibility is to take care of her. And then you have to understand that she’s going to be gone from you for like six months. And if you can engage in that wholeheartedly, you can get to know the baby and you can set the stage so that that baby is really well attached to the mother, like firmly, and that’ll save you so goddamn much trouble for the rest of your life, you can hardly imagine it. Because that initial bonding, that’s what provides the scaffold of security, like the physical scaffold of security for that, new person. And if that’s disrupted, it’s real trouble. So, you know, in six months, it’s not, you know, an instant, but she’s going to come back. And then you’ll also have, when my son was born, when Julian was born, my daughter, Michaela was only a year and a half old. And that’s a bit of a tricky age gap because a year and a half old kid still needs her mother quite a lot. And then you have a new baby. And if you have a year and a half old kid and then a new baby, the year and a half old kid looks like a teenager. It’s like, they’re not a baby anymore compared to a newborn. And so they can easily get kind of shunted aside and that can produce a lot of sibling rivalry and jealousy and bitterness and alienation on the part of the older child. So we taught her very early to take care of the new baby and to understand that if she established a relationship with him, you know, that would be a benefit that she could derive from the new situation. She’d have three people to love instead of two and that’s a good deal. The same applies here in relationship to your wife and the new child. It’s like, you’re going to have to let your wife go for six months. But if you’re very careful with that, as I’m sure you will be, and you really take care of her, you know, she’ll come back and she’ll be fine. Well, she’ll come back to you and then you’ll have this other person, a daughter. You’ll never have anybody in your life who loves you as much as your daughter will. Like if you do that right, and it’ll be the same if you have a son and that is a bloody good deal. I’ll tell you, man, I loved hanging around my, when my kids were little, I would way rather be with them than anyone else. They were fun. You know, and that’s, it helps if you have the right disciplinary structure in relationship to your kids and you’ve worked that out with your wife. So I have a rule. It’s a very good rule. You know, don’t let your kids do anything that makes you dislike them. And if you discuss that with your wife and you make that a rule, you know, you can note to each other, that kid’s annoying us. That kid’s being annoying. And then you can work together and you think, okay, what’s annoying? How do we stop it? Because if he’s annoying you, he’s going to annoy everybody else. And if he’s annoying, no one will like him. It’s not good for the kid. But if you can get that right, there’ll be nothing more enjoyable that you do in your whole life than spend time with your little kids because they really want to like you more than anything else. And that’s a great deal, man. For sure. Yeah, no, I’m definitely very excited for that, that relationship building. And like you were saying, and luckily in the past, we’ve had almost a little bit of experience with the flip where when I was, I got better this year, but in the past when I was a little bit more stressed out about entering a prep, we would communicate before getting into it. In the past, we didn’t, but we started to communicate. Be like, okay, I’m about to enter a really intense phase of my prep right now. So I just want you to know preemptively, I love you. You’re my number one priority. But right now I may not be able to show you that as much as possible, but I promise afterwards, we will reconnect, we will do everything we can. And also in the process, I will do the best I can. So now that we’ve practiced that, you mentioned six months, it’s going to be pulled away. So we’ve already been communicating and we will more, and especially you giving this tip, I’ll go even talk to her again tonight and be like, I understand that you’re going to be stepped away for the six months and give her permission to be there for the baby. And also understand that afterwards we’ll reconnect and come back to each other. But rather than finding it out along the way, understanding it before it comes so that we’re able to prepare for it and not build any resentment that might come. We are in the midst of Lent, the 40 days leading up to Easter. 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Download the Hallow app at Hallow.com slash Jordan and you’ll get an exclusive three month free trial of all 10,000 plus prayers and meditations. That’s Hallow.com slash Jordan. So the other thing that Tammy and I figured out at that time was because your wife is going to be very preoccupied with this new person and to the degree that you want to be around your wife, that’s going to leave you on the outside. Like that’s going to happen. And that’s also a place where the kind of resentments that tear families apart can start to develop, because you can be resentful about your wife because she isn’t there. And then you can be resentful of your daughter because she’s taking you away from your wife. And then you’ll deny all that because you’ll think, well, I’m not the sort of person that could be jealous of a baby. It’s like, oh yes, you are. You definitely are. And so is everyone else. So these things have to be managed. And so one of the things we discovered, this was actually my wife’s suggestion, that once, say after that six month period where your wife has the wherewithal potentially to attend to you to some degree, let’s say, and to want to do that, that’s when we started our practice of regular dates. And we have done that for, I don’t know how long, 35 years now. Like we make dates two to three times a week, and we’ve done that for that long. And that’s a really smart idea, because one of the things you’ll find is that you’re going to be way busier than you can possibly imagine once you have this baby. And even more so if you have more kids. Like it’s a real threshold transformation, right? Because now you have someone really vulnerable and you are responsible for them. Like it’s unlike anything you’ll have ever done. Now you’re a disciplined guy. So you have taste of that sort of thing, but it’s still, it’s a watershed moment. And because you’re so busy now, it’s easy for your relationship with your wife to become secondary, or even number 11 on a list of 10 priorities, you know? And that’s not good. And so my sense is that couples who are embarking on the process of having kids have to make a conscious commitment to placing each other first for some amount of time during the weeks and months ahead. You can’t just wait around for it to happen because you don’t have the bandwidth. And this is something we’ve got better and better at too. And I would say cumulatively, you know, over all the decades is that the dates we have just get better and better, just like because of practice. But so if you know, you know, you’re going to have to leave your wife to the baby for six months, and then maybe she’ll be able to come back to you. And then, but having a plan for that, you know, like to begin with, she’s still going to be pretty tired. It might be that, you know, you have someone take care of the baby while you’re at home, and you guys have dinner together, something that simpler, you watch a movie together, you know, it’s got to kind of start out slow. But having a conscious plan for how you’re going to prioritize your relationship, given that you now have a baby to take care of, that’s going to save you a lot of misery and grief as well. Absolutely, yeah. That preemptive planning is something I’ve been processing a lot, especially recently, because she’s also in pregnancy, of course, they crave connection, and they’re building their home, and almost nesting, I guess you could say. And I’ve been going through a large, very large growth phase of my business that I own here in Florida, and we’ve been traveling a lot for that. So I’ve been out of town a lot. And you were talking about part of your worries when you were having a child where you got to get your PhD, which is also good for your family long term so that you’re able to provide for them. And that’s partly what I’m processing and going through right now, that’s taking me away a little bit right now. But I understand long term, it’s going to provide for my family, it’s what’s going to be best for them. But then, let’s say over the next three months and the first three months of the year, I’m home for about eight days, ten days, and Courtney’s home all the time. So I need to be a lot more conscientious when I come home with being planned. They’re like, okay, I’m only back for three days. We need to plan ahead that we’re going to do date nights every time I’m back because we need that time to connect. And that’s also great practice, like you said, where I might feel busy now, but when there’s a child in the mix of all that, it’s going to be tenfold. So being able to preemptively plan ahead and actually build structure and routine where you’re planning those moments of connection rather than just waiting for them to naturally happen, which maybe when you’re young and you just, it’s Friday night, let’s go out, we’re not tired, let’s have fun, it used to happen naturally. But as life picks up, you need to be a lot more attentive to actually planning ahead and making sure it happens. Yeah, well, and you also got to learn with each other because there’s going to be, imagine there’s an optimal balance between, look, if you’re going to have Thanksgiving dinner, you don’t want to eat a pizza like at four in the afternoon. You want to be optimally hungry. And it’s a state of optimal deprivation. And so you also want to negotiate with that with your wife. As you progress through your marriage, it’s like, how much time do you have to spend with each other? But how much time do you have to spend apart or in a state of desire, right, to make all of that optimal? You know, and that’s a very subtle thing to get right. You know, like my wife needs to be alone more than me. And she is a lot more fun to be around and a lot more interested in me if I leave her the hell alone more. And because I would likely choose, what would you say, I’m more cuddly? God, what a horrible thing to say and admit than she is. You know, and it’s easy to be put off by her somewhat prickly exterior. She’s very playful, but kind of rough, you know, and so she’s kind of a prickly person. And it’s actually something I like about her. But, you know, we’ve had to be very attentive to find exactly that balance, you know, so that I’m not around her too much, so that she can come to miss me, so that when we are together, that we’re both extremely happy about it, you know? And that’s something that this regular practice of planned togetherness, that can also foster that, because you can learn that. It’s like, well, because you can watch yourselves. Like, you’ll find out, well, when am I truly happiest to see her, like under what conditions? And she has to figure that out with you too. You know, and that’s a good thing to discover. And you can discover it if you make that effort.