The office is a mess as usual. The desk is in a jumble, the floor is barely visible and, as usual, there is an unseemly stench coming from the garbage.

Fortunately, the clients have all retired for the day. So, now I get to leave the mess and relax. Right? I mean Environmental Services will tidy everything up and I’ll come back to the office in the morning to have the pleasure of using a spotless work area for another day of hard negotiating and compromising. Right?

Well…

I’m allowed to dream, aren’t I?

However, when the desk is jumbled with marker, crayon and paint, the floor is covered with crushed banana, hard macaroni (the cheese is on the wall), and ripped up toilet paper and tissue, etc and the smell coming from the garbage is comprised of day old feces, urine and not so old vomit, I’m probably not going to see that dream come true….

Especially when the maid has just finished what was supposed to be an eight-hour shift, but ended up being a ten-hour shift at a hospital with very testy patients.

Hence, my night job starts. Only, I don’t get overtime, just bags under my eyes, a bunch of gray hairs, and then eventually waking up on the very edge of our full size bed that has an official capacity for two, but somehow always accommodates three people, leaving me dangling off the side.

And that’s just a snippet of the adventures of The Mannly Nanny.

No, I’m not a woman with testosterone to spare. I’m a stay at home dad to six kids. Our youngest is still in diapers and our oldest is carrying her driver’s permit. Then there are the four in between. Four girls and two boys, noise included.

This wasn’t the plan when the Mrs. and I started this journey 17 years ago.

She would finish her nursing degree, and I would become a certified educator (that’s a fancy name for teacher). We would both be licensed to work in our respective fields, but only one would pursue our profession FULL TIME.

That ‘one’ was supposed to be me. But you know the saying “man plans and God laughs” don’t you? Well, God must have been belly-laughing with the plans we had made.

I would graduate, get a job in a public school with all the perks of built in vacation, great benefits and tenure and pension lined up all at the expense of America’s taxpayers, and my pregnant wife would cut back on her hours at the hospital to fulfill her true dream of being a Home Manager (a fancy name for housewife or mommy/wife).

Everything was going as planned for a time. I graduated and got several interviews. I was even offered one job, which I accepted. Then reality struck. The school district walked back their offer. It was my “lack of credentials”. (A teacher with a lack of credentials? Who knew there was such a thing?)

So, back to square two again. I continued to pursue more employment, but nothing materialized. The Mrs. kept working, had a baby (an 8 pound girl who needed the help of a plunger to exit the highway). She went on maternity leave (which meant transitioning to a “per-Diem” employee because the FMLA still hadn’t kicked in, which resulted in losing our health benefits and full-time income.

Six weeks later my wife was ‘re-hired’ as a full-time employee and took her two jugs of milk and returned to work with tears in her eyes. There we were. The baby and I were left at home with a freezer full of breast milk and a bunch of plastic nipples.

So, here we are. More than 15 years later and my wife continues in her full-time position as a Registered Nurse while I remain in my role as a father, husband, teacher, psychologist, chef, maid, mother, chauffeur, handy man, accountant, seamstress and seasonal baseball coach.

So with inflation on the rise, and our finances getting tighter what else is there to do but to do what so many others have done in the age of social media. Why, start a blog, of course!

This isn’t your ordinary copycat parenting blog that will tell you how you’re a terrible parent and are lacking the skills to properly raise your children. No, this is a blog with lots of excitement, suspense and the occasional blood and gore. This is the place where you can come to feel encouraged about how you’re raising your kids while experiencing how we’re raising ours.

Welcome to the first of what will be the many adventures of The Mannly Nanny!