Brilliant dad feature week 45

January 14, 2016

This week our brilliant dad feature is Tim. He has been married for 17 years and is a dad of three girls ages 12, 9, 8 and a little boy who is almost 2 years old. He grew up in a small farm town in Michigan and moved to Grand Rapids for college. He says he fell in love with the town and put down roots in this fine city. Additionally, it has become Beer City USA with all the great local breweries, led by Founders, so that has made his decision look good as he enjoys good beer. He started a blog four years ago to advocate and tell the stories of his two middle daughters. They both have Type 1 Diabetes. The blog is called the Bleedingfinger Blog. He has written many articles on diabetes for a few different health websites and diabetes websites/publications. Thank you Tim for taking part in the brilliant dad feature.

1. Have you always wanted to be a dad?

As long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a dad. Although, it is much more different than I imagined as a young man, but I couldn’t have planned it any better than what I have now. My kids are awesome.

2. How did you feel when your children were born?

When my kids were born, the feeling was the same, even though the feeling around the current job and life situation were different. Each child born was the highest of highs to say the least. There was so much stress when my oldest was born, a different kind of stress when my youngest (a boy) was born. My job was going bad when my oldest was born, and I had a great job situation when my youngest was born. I had 2 weeks of vacation time to use when he was born. That made life a lot easier.

3. What have been your most rewarding experiences as a dad so far?

The rewarding experiences are many. Seeing them win awards at school for character ranks very high, only a child in each grade gets that award each month. Watching them learn from their mistakes and learning to say I’m sorry is great too. They have brought so much enrichment to my life, a purpose of raising great kids a rewarding mission and a challenge.

4. What are some of funniest moments to have happened to you as a dad?

There are so many funny experiences with my kids, I don’t know what to pick. They all have creative personalities.The girls do skits and plays for me a few times a year.That’s a blast to watch. Recently, they did their own rendition of “Matt Foley”, it was funny. My little boy is almost two, he’s so funny and has the best personality.The other night, he was waving his toy light-saber around while the girls were watching Star Wars. It was too funny to watch. I caught it on video, priceless.

5. Are there any situations with your children that you have found difficult to cope with?

A very difficult situation to deal with was my middle two daughter’s diagnoses with Type 1 Diabetes, a lifelong chronic autoimmune disease. It takes a lot of work for my wife and me to manage their blood sugar on a daily basis. There is always something to deal with every meal, every day and every week. They were 3 and 3 ½ at diagnoses, and each one was diagnosed exactly 2 years apart. That is why I blog,to tell their struggles and victories, I could go on, but I’ll just point you to my blog for more.

6. What are your dreams and hopes for your children?

My hopes and dreams for my kids, a cure for Type 1 Diabetes and my other 2 children never get it.That’s a huge worry for me because the genes for Type 1 run fairly deep in my family. I want to see them all go to college and graduate and not change their major 4 times like their dad did. Maybe my biggest hope and dreams are that they become caring, compassionate, kind, polite and emotionally mature people. I think that will lead them down the road of life as well as anything.

1 Comments

Cardiff Mummy Says

January 14, 2016 at 11:12 pm

Lovely photos. My friend's two year old son has just been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes so I will be sending her the link to this blog as I think it will be a big support for her.