Changing a car battery

After recently coming back from an overseas family holiday, I had a chance to reclaim my man badge (lost when I sent an e-mail to my entire office a couple of years ago advertising Tupperware for a party that my wife was hosting) by changing my car battery.  By now I'm assuming that I've lost almost the entire female audience that started reading this article, as they've drifted onto something more relevant for them, or back to one of the chat forums on this site, and that it's only the blokes still reading. To everyone who is still reading: kia ora, welcome, my name is Brendan, I'm going to be contributing a Dad's Diary, blog-type column each month, and with me always being one to state the obvious, this is the first of them.

So back to the family holiday, we (being myself, my wife Genevieve and 17 month old daughter Madeleine) went on a cruise aboard the Pacific Star up to New Caledonia.  It was our first real family holiday since Maddie was born (not counting the road trips down country to visit Nan and Poppa, and an ill-fated weekend in Christchurch in December that I'd rather not go into). We had, in our wisdom as young parents, decided that it would be a great idea to spend 8 nights sharing a room together, confined to the floor area of a cruise ship for the majority of that time.  Did I mention that rooms on such cruise ships are not known for their generosity in their floor area?  Don't get me wrong, the holiday itself was absolutely fantastic.  We all had a wonderful time and enjoyed it very much, but spending any length of time in a confined space with a toddler who had started to walk quite literally on the day we boarded the ship and is now trying to assert her independence as a "big girl", comes with it's own challenges.  Maddie was a complete hit with the staff and other passengers on the boat and by mid-way through the first full sea-day was happily high fiving the waiters and waving bye-bye to anyone going in the opposite direction.  While this is endearing to begin with, as you can imagine, it is also something that can grow old.  Fast.  And this is especially so when as sometimes happens with married couples, you are having a rather frank and heated discussion (not an argument - there were no raised voices thank you), expressing opposing positions, and someone comes up to you and says "Awww… what a cute baby!"  This of course results in said baby playing up to the platitudes of the stranger, leaving the parents quietly fuming and a little annoyed.

That all being said, one of the nicest comments that I heard on the boat came on one of the last days of our trip.  Here I was wandering out of the Pacific Showlounge with Maddie in my arms on a mission to change a stinky nappy, therefore missing the beginning of the "meet the cast" session with the Pacific Star Entertainers, when I was stopped by another passenger.  Instead of saying the usual "what a wonderful daughter you have, you must be so proud, such beautiful blue eyes…" type thing she said simply, "I've seen you around the boat and I must say that you get the award for being the most patient Dad on board." 
This left me absolutely stunned.  After all I was just doing what I do, yet someone had taken the time to compliment me on it.  And so it got me thinking, what we do as Dads is something that in New Zealand society we don't really talk about.  Sure we get the recognition for being the fun ones, the ones that hold our children upside down by the ankles as they giggle uncontrollably.  But we don't really hear about the little things that we as Dads do every day without really thinking about it.  It's just what we do.  I know I'm not the only Dad like this and with that in mind, this column is really for you guys, the unsung heroes out there.  Remember the old saying ~ "Anyone can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a Dad."

And Dad's apparently, change car batteries.