Why I Built This Site

My son started school a couple weeks ago, and putting together his back-to-school list turned into more than just a shopping errand. It got me thinking about the bigger picture, about why I'm doing any of this in the first place, this site included.

The logistics part alone was a wake-up call. A nap mat that has to be the right dimensions or the classroom won't take it. A ziplock bag of labeled clothes because a two-year-old can't tell you what happened to their pants. A water bottle that has to survive being dropped, thrown, and left in a cubby overnight. None of that is complicated on its own, but nobody hands you the list ahead of time. You find out what you needed the same week you needed it, which is basically the entire experience of being a solo parent in one sentence.

That's the part that actually shaped how I make decisions now. When you're the only adult on duty, you don't get to plan for the ideal scenario. You plan for the one where the nap mat gets left in the classroom overnight, or the shoes don't come off in time, or the bag of clothes gets misplaced. You build in slack because there's no second person to catch what you miss. That mindset didn't stay in the daycare parking lot. It's the same filter I run every decision through now, at home and everywhere else: what actually holds up when nobody's backing you up.

I should say why I'm even in this seat to begin with. My wife loves her career, genuinely loves it, and staying home with our kids was the decision that made sense for our family. I didn't grow up seeing a lot of that. The dads of the generation before mine mostly weren't wired for this role, not because they didn't care, but because almost nobody handed them a version of fatherhood that looked like this. No shade to those guys. They were doing what they knew. I just want to do it differently, and building something real out of that difference is a big part of why this site exists.

Here's the thing I keep coming back to: change is constant, and failing to adapt to it will surely spell failure. That's true of parenting roles, and it's true of pretty much everything else happening right now, including the AI conversation everyone's having whether they want to or not.

I get why people are wary of it. Writing assistants, large language models, agents doing real work on your behalf, it's a lot of change landing at once, and change that fast is genuinely unsettling for a lot of people. I understand the hesitation. But I decided early on that I wasn't going to be one of the people standing on the sidelines waiting to see if it was safe. I chose to embrace it, to actually use it, and to figure out how it could make my life and the lives of the people around me better instead of treating it like something to be afraid of.

This site is a direct result of that decision. I'm not a professional writer or a software developer. What I am is a dad with real opinions about what gear actually works when you're doing this alone, and a willingness to use the tools available to me to get that knowledge out into the world in a way that might actually help another parent in the same spot I was in. Use what's in front of you, adapt, and don't wait for permission to do things differently than the generation before you did.

That's the whole philosophy behind SAHDAD, really. Adapt or get left behind, whether we're talking about a diaper bag, a career decision, or a piece of technology nobody fully understands yet. I'd rather be the dad who figured it out than the one who waited too long to try.