Jersey City Dad: An Introduction
By Tad Hendrickson • Mar 16th, 2010 • Category: Blog, Jersey City Dad
Hi folks.
In what is likely to be a grand act of embarrassing myself, I’ve begun this blog — Jersey City Dad — to chronicle my adventures as a working-stay-at-home dad. My day job, if you can call it that, is as a freelance music journalist who covers jazz, world music, rock and other odds and ends for a variety of print and digital outlets. But rather than talking about The Hold Steady or Matthew Shipp’s latest album, here I’m going to be talking about life with our son Dashiell Sung Hendrickson.
As you can probably see from the picture above, Dashiell is adopted. This photo was taken by my wife Kathy the night we got him in Seoul, South Korea. You can’t really see it because the photo is so small, but trust me there was fear in my eyes as I sat there with the guy waiting for our takeout fried chicken. That smile on my face is pretty crooked too for that matter. I never babysat when I was younger, nor have I worked with kids in some official capacity, so I was thinking about the fact that we were just meeting the little guy and we would depart less than 12 hours later for a 21-hour flight back to Newark. The flight went pretty well, all things considered, but I remember we made a rookie move of feeding the kid three bananas — he didn’t take a crap the whole flight, poor guy.
That was Aug. 29, 2008, and a lot has happened since then. The days, weeks and months have been something of a blur. I’ll likely update this blog with things that are going on now, but there will be flashback to the early days as likely look back at some stuff that happened or thinking done that is now ironic, or stupid, or lucky, or telling in some other way. No doubt certain themes will emerge over time and I’m looking forward to seeing exactly what the hell I write about. Chances are good that I’ll be talking about potty training in the weeks and months to come as it is something that we are just beginning. If you have any advice, send it my way. Also, you can see the two of us wandering the streets of Jersey City as I do errands or catch us at Van Vorst Park where we go weather permitting and often with our precocious chocolate lab pulling Dash and me along. Say hi.
Anyway, that’s it for now on the introduction front. More to come — I’ll post at least twice a week or more as things come to me. That’s it. I hear the baby has just woken up from his afternoon nap, which means its time for some food and likely a diaper change.
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Tad Hendrickson is a freelance writer based in Jersey City who has covered music of all genres as well as literature, the arts, food and real estate. His work has appeared in such publications as Elle, the Financial Times, the Star-Ledger, JazzTimes, Amazon.com, Spinner.com, Relix, Time Out New York, the Village Voice and Global Rhythm, where he was also editor-in-chief from 2006-2008.
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