The stay-at-home dad: Toddler tales of the tape

While raising kids in the smartphone era comes with a heap of complications, I don’t know where I would be without my digital collection of video memories.

I’ve probably spent hundreds of hours watching back videos of my kids as tiny little babies. I love babies so much that my wife and I (foolishly?) kept wanting a new kid once the previous one started running around the house. Kids, in my opinion, are best when immobile.

Living space and finances finally led to the shutdown of the Wilson Baby Factory (after four models), so now my baby fix must be satiated by watching these home movies via the cloud. Memories are good too, but four kids in such a narrow stretch of time turn individual memories into blurry blobs of exhaustion.

Our kids love watching videos of themselves as well, and we’ve made it a tradition to watch curated marathons for each child’s birthday. Our youngest daughter had a birthday last week, so we watched dozens of clips of her past seven years.

How she’s grown doesn’t surprise me. Instead, it’s all the ways she hasn’t changed.

At 2 weeks old, we already had ample video evidence of her “furrowed brow scowl.” I remember her as an extremely happy baby, and the videos show plenty of smiles and laughing, but she also developed a piercing glare of frustration at an extremely young age, and that same furrowed brow torments me to this day.

My daughter laughs from deep inside her chest, sucking in excessive air with a grunt that sounds more like a grumbling grandpa than a happy child. Laughing also frequently gives her hiccups… something she had often even in the womb. Anyway, I watched and rewatched a video of a 10-month-old version of my daughter peeking through a playground tube structure, laughing identically to the way she laughed while playing on a jungle gym for her 7th birthday. That little baby laugh will warm even the iciest of souls.

Her stubbornness and FOMO (fear of missing out) existed from the early days as well. By far my favorite rewatches this week came from her toddler days… when a boisterous 2-year-old had to learn how to contend with a new baby brother (while maintaining firm command of her two older siblings). There are multiple videos of my daughter climbing on her parents as we fed the new infant. Most of the time she just wanted to be in charge of the baby, but clearly she also wanted to reclaim her position as the family’s true baby.

During that same stretch of time, we saw the argumentative side of her personality explode as her language developed. Consider this video-capture conversation when she was 2, keeping in mind that at this point she knew her name and how to say it easily.

Me: “What is your name?”

Her: “I’m TWO!”

Me: “Yes, you are two. But what is your name?”

Her (scowling): “No, I AM TWO!”

Me: “Yes, that’s right. What’s your name? What do we call you?”

Her (growling): I SAID I’m TWO!”

Me: “So your name is two?!”

Her (yelling): No! I am TWO!

This went on for a while. She never conceded the argument. Five minutes later I asked her again and she calmly told me her name. When I asked her why she didn’t tell me before, she flatly claimed that she had.

Speaking of twos, there’s another video of her around the same age, crying uncontrollably on the floor, yelling about wanting two carrots… while holding two carrots in her hand. When we told her that on the video, she yelled at us for not giving her just one carrot.

Now imagine that level of gaslighting with five more years of development. She’s now mastered her craft, to the point where last week she told me the character of Hans in “Frozen” is pronounced with short ‘a’ sound (like apple) and that the movie clip I showed her to prove her otherwise was “fake.” Yes, the version of “Frozen” on Disney Plus has been re-edited to make my daughter look wrong, and, of course, her being wrong is a scientific impossibility.

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Tyler Wilson is a freelance writer and stay-at-home dad to four kids, ages 4-10. He is tired. He can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.