From Set Life To Sleepless Nights: A New Dad’s Awakening

What if the loudest career wins suddenly felt small next to a toddler’s first crooked wink? We open up about the whiplash of early parenthood: the dizzying joy, the bone-deep fatigue, and the way touch and routine can rewire a life overnight. From overnight shoots and cross-country events to midnight bottles and surprise wakeups, we map how expectations break, resilience grows, and love resets the scoreboard.

As adoptees, we also unpack how kinship hits differently. The first palm on a newborn’s back felt like meeting our own skin on someone else—an electric, grounding recognition. That moment reframed everything: guidance without a script, curiosity over control, and the courage to let a child test edges. We talk risk done right—why letting kids climb, wobble, and recalibrate builds real balance—and how our worst spills often came from stepping in too fast. Joy sneaks in everywhere: pillow forts turned floragami obstacle courses, tiny knuckles, music sessions that swing from Radiohead to K-pop, and a toddler prank that outshines any night out.

We’re candid about the brain fog of sleep deprivation, the sudden collapse of small talk tolerance, and the social reshuffle that follows. There’s a new economy of energy: fewer plans, deeper presence, and an almost sacred respect for plateaus when the house finally sleeps. Plans still implode—like a first-birthday party illness—but agility beats aesthetics when you’re always on call. And yes, there’s a surprise mic grab from our smallest guest, complete with early words and contagious giggles that say more than any thesis on attachment.

If this mix of honesty, humor, and heart resonates, tap follow, share it with a friend, and leave a quick review. Your word of mouth helps other adoptees, new parents, and curious listeners find us—and keeps these late-night stories coming.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:19

Hi, this is Bina.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

And this is Billy. And we are the Adopt Twins.

SPEAKER_04 0:24

Welcome to a podcast from two adoptees who are navigating life, loss, moving on, and growing up.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

For our adopted friends, we hope to bring you a familiar point of view. And for our friends who aren't, welcome to the complicated jungle of how we get on.

SPEAKER_04 0:45

So, Billy, the last time that we actually sat down to record season two was like October of 2024, I think.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Okay. I was like, woo, it's October of 2020. That was a while ago.

Cancer Recovery And A New Baby

SPEAKER_04 1:04

Yeah. No, I was trying to remember if it was 23 or 24, but it was 24 because I was finishing up my cancer treatments, which were done in 2025. So at that time you were expecting.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

Just recently found out. Yep.

SPEAKER_04 1:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:21

And since then, there's a child. Really?

SPEAKER_04 1:26

A whole child?

Fatherhood’s Fulfillment And Exhaustion

SPEAKER_01 1:27

Oh my gosh. She is a whole child. She's amazing. And I have been so looking forward to talking about what it's like to be a father, because most of my friends do not have kids, and they don't want to talk about what it's like to be a father. And then my friends who do have kids don't have any time to talk about what it's like to be a father because they're busy being a father.

SPEAKER_04 1:59

So Yep, I get all of that. Well, I am here for it, Millie. Tell me what it's like to be a father.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

It is remarkable how much I thought that accomplishments prior to my daughter being born truly gave a sense of fulfillment. And just how insignificant every single one of those things feel in comparison to when she does anything.

SPEAKER_04 2:42

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:43

I mean, most recently, she is she's working on learning how to wink, and I'm teaching her. And it's not necessarily a let's sit down and have a class on how to wink. It's I give a little wink, she gets a little smile on her face, and then she scrunches her face and blinks, with one eye kind of going a little a little crazy, and then comes back.

SPEAKER_04 3:13

Yes.

The Beeping Truck Story Vs Newborn Tired

SPEAKER_01 3:14

And and the fact that she is trying and so excited to be trying it is just it it it fills my entire soul with life. But also, I thought I knew what exhaustion was.

SPEAKER_04 3:32

You think 16 hours on set is exhaustion?

SPEAKER_01 3:35

I 16 hours on set, what a cakewalk. 16 hours on set overnight shoot. It's 20 degrees out. It's raining, you've been smoking all day, you're about to lose your voice. The crafty is not hot. The assistant director is doing their job, so everybody hates them. It is a bad time. That I would say, that kind of exhaustion spread out over an entire film set. It it's it's a drop in the ocean. But here's my reference point for how I felt the exhaustion was going to be. Okay. I worked on a program that it went around the country and it started in St. Louis. And my job was to manage a team and have an event that was in Las Vegas, and then have an additional event that was over in uh San Diego. And my job was to take a truck that was pulling a trailer, I would say an F-250, and drive it from St. Louis over to Vegas, down to San Diego, and then fly home and do like about a two to three day event. In this truck, there was a sensor that accidentally got dinged during a repair. So a notification happened every three seconds that said something was attached, something's not attached, something's not attached, something's not attached. This notification lasted the entire state of Missouri, the entire state of Oklahoma, the top of Texas, through New Mexico, all the way to Arizona, where it was fixed in Sedona.

SPEAKER_04 5:31

That's only like a couple of hours, though, right?

Sleep Deprivation And Brain Changes

SPEAKER_01 5:34

A coup you know what? Eventually time had no meaning. Because all that mattered was the beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Beep, beep, beep. Beep, beep, beep. There were attempts to make it better, which made it worse. And then we got to the event after that drive and had, I would say, three days of first event experiences, which was all right, let's see how it goes. Boy, this is gonna take some more time. Hey, you know how we had the expectation of it only taking this much effort to do? We're gonna have to triple it. That's I remember those days. Oh, yeah. I'm saying every I I think there was it was possible to get eight hours of sleep, but it was also Vegas. So I've never been to Vegas. Oh, it's great for three days. So then after that event of being on my feet all day in Vegas on a program that's a hit, so it was always busy. There was no downtime, there were eyes on everything. Been packing it up and going to San Diego to have another one, and then getting home. That level of exhaustion was usurped, I want to say, after day three of getting home. I had no idea the amount of change that was going to happen in my life. And the the highs were balanced perfectly with the exhaustion. Like everything's the only way you get through it. It's the only way. And being present and being there and figuring it out and and just loving this beautiful little creature and giving them their milk and being supportive to my wife and just essentially buying into the fact that we are still going to be sequestered for an indeterminate amount of time, honestly, because we were raising a child. The fact that a person's brain actually changes was a, you know, I an intellectual concept, I guess. They're like, you're gonna your your brain will actually change as a parent. It'll you'll become you're gonna become more dumb. Good news. You're going to be more empathetic, but you're gonna be pretty stupid. And I I didn't understand that the reason for that, or the process for that, it's not just because you happen to smell the pheromones of your child and your brain goes, time to rewire. It's sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation mixed with a beautiful spice of unpredictable mood swings and dashed expectations and ruined hopes.

SPEAKER_04 8:52

Oh yeah. Dive head first right into that cocktail.

New Parent Social Drift And Humor

SPEAKER_01 8:56

Uh-huh. And you're you don't you can't you can't intellectualize it. Like, I guess, I guess maybe somebody who came from an incredibly abusive relationship could kind of get the feeling of it, but I was, I was, I, I was ready for it, but I was not expecting it. Like so many times, like the stereotypical, okay, she's down. I'm just gonna put my head down on the pillow. This is the first time I've been actually able to sleep in my own bed next to my wife in months. Just put the head down on the pillow, crack on the floor. Oh no. Sorry. All right, let's get up. Hey, sweetheart, how's it going? That's good. Just absolute like the those first the the those first months, it's funny running into other parents too. And like thinking, oh, we're gonna have parent friends. You're dumber, you're waste, you're way more dumb. You're so dumb, you're like, no, it'll happen because you both have a kid, so you'll be parents. No, you are two traumatized groups that happen to be in the same space. And maybe a sentence can be exchanged between the two before it's like we'll see you later. Never to see those people again.

SPEAKER_04 10:28

Oh, yeah. So yeah, the amount of people that I have in my phone that were like parents I met at different things. Oh, let's have play dates. Like it looks like my college dating contact list. Yeah, of course it does. It's all never happening again.

SPEAKER_01 10:44

Yeah. With everything, with all of the changes in the brand, everything that she does, I become more enamored, proud, and just absolutely in love with like her smile, the way she laughs, the way that she plays. Like she'll offer me a piece of food and then she'll take it away and she'll laugh.

SPEAKER_04 11:12

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

And I'm like, oh yeah, you got me, you got me good. She's like, ah, I'll do it again. We have a thing now where she will she will go into our bed, say bye-bye, and that means one of two things. One, I go to sleep, and then she screams, daddy, daddy. And I wake up and go, uh. And she laughs and says, bye-bye. With a very stern face, which she'll either poke my nose or say, or I say bye-bye. And then she goes, and she pretends to sleep with her eyes open, going, staring at me until I say her name, and she goes, ah, you got me, you know. And I mean, that's just one of the things. The fact that she dances to music, she loves music. She's in the chapel round, she can dig some radio head.

SPEAKER_02 12:14

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

She likes she likes the prodigy.

SPEAKER_02 12:17

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 12:19

I know. She she loves Rose.

SPEAKER_04 12:24

Oh. Ah patu. Ah.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

Ah, but uh, uh uh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02 12:31

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 12:32

Yeah. Oh, that was that that's been a banger since we started putting it on. She's a fan of K-pop Demon Hunters.

SPEAKER_02 12:40

Okay.

Daily Joys, Music, And Play

SPEAKER_01 12:42

Yeah. But watching the connections of oblivion to testing out and experimenting to having a point of view tied to the noises that she makes, tied to then physical norms. She just learned how to do knuckles over at the early childhood place that we go to. One of the older kids was like, pound it, and she closed her fist, pounded it. I went, what? I thought we just got through high fives. You you can pound the rock now. Oh yeah. And so, and every day there's there's something new. It's and it's it's you just you notice it when it's just like every day. You're like, you see a quick twinge of the eyebrow, and you're like, oh my gosh, where did you learn that? You got that now. And I have ruined my finances.

SPEAKER_04 13:42

I I mean, when you decided to have a child, that that's that's the start of it.

SPEAKER_01 13:48

That's the start of it, right? Exactly. It's like, oh, okay, there'll be jobs. And then really quickly I realized I'm not smart anymore. And also, the part of the brain that gets that loses gray matter is apparently from what I've researched, the part of the brain that is very good at socializing and being social.

SPEAKER_04 14:12

Oh, I am I am a hermit.

SPEAKER_01 14:15

Yeah, that's gone. And that's been my currency for my life. And I just have no patience for like for anybody who's who has anything. Whether it's like somebody at work that's like, do you think that you can maybe do this better? I don't know, maybe you could go bury yourself in sand. Like, I just no no patience for somebody who doesn't have kids being like, yeah, it's just my job is kind of hard. I'm just like, shut up.

SPEAKER_02 14:43

Oh, oh gosh, I'm so sorry.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

Well, it's it's I'm sorry for my friends because I I used to be a really nice person that cared. And now I'm just like, I don't have time at all to pretend at all. I I have a child.

SPEAKER_04 14:59

They take every ounce of everything I have.

SPEAKER_01 15:04

Everything. They are the they take every single thing. And like the the it's wild to be like, wow, what a good day. And then like at the end of the day, being like, this all happens again tomorrow. There's no days off.

SPEAKER_04 15:20

Nope.

SPEAKER_01 15:21

There's never a day off. There's days where they may want to play with their toys by themselves a little bit more, but there's like a delicate alchemy that comes with just like, I've got to make sure that I give you X amount of attention. Because if it goes below that X, we've got a big problem of a day ahead of us. Emergency, emergency, emergency. Yeah. And emergency is coming. Oh my gosh, what's going on? Yeah, it's it's it's wild. And when she was born, what I wasn't expecting was how impactful placing my hand on her back and feeling her skin. And for the first time in my life, feeling my skin on somebody else. That I at that nothing else mattered after that. Like everything else was, oh, you have hopes and dreams, whatever. I'm just gonna figure out how to survive and make sure that they can thrive. That's all that matters now.

SPEAKER_04 16:27

Exactly. And I think I don't know for sure, you know, because I haven't been on the other side of it. But as an adoptee, meeting that birth relative for the first time. I I can't I can't describe what that meant to me.

SPEAKER_01 16:47

Now I have her, and she has me.

SPEAKER_04 16:50

Right.

SPEAKER_01 16:50

And it's and it's the thing is there's there's guidance, but there's no expectation. I'm just fascinated to watch what she's interested in, what she gravitates towards. I'm fascinated to watch her figure stuff out. I'll teach her a couple of things here and there, but I don't have a plan of like, you know, you gotta get good at this, and you gotta, you know, this is important. It's just like you're just a kid just figuring it out. And I just am fascinated by your thought process.

SPEAKER_04 17:19

I love it. What is what's her favorite like thing to play? Like, does she have like any particular toy that she loves?

SPEAKER_01 17:27

I would say that she has a thing called floragami, where it's big old pillows that you can pop shapes out of the center and you can make different, you can make different things out of them. Like you can make a fake little house, you can make a couch, you can make an obstacle course. So she loves using that as a platform to dance on. And she loves climbing it. It's hard to say like if there's like a thing that's hers, but what she loves to do is climb. She loves to physically challenge herself. And she loves towing the line of balance in order to stand comfortably on the edge.

SPEAKER_02 18:16

Huh.

Risk, Resilience, And Letting Kids Climb

SPEAKER_01 18:18

Yeah. And we let her, which is terrifying to anybody else that comes into our house. Because they're like, that small child is going to break their skull open. And the fact is, she already bonked her head a couple times, but she she she it wasn't anything that was too high at the time. So she kind of learned to be careful. I gotta be, I gotta be measured as I do this thing. And then wild to just let it happen and have it be okay.

SPEAKER_04 18:52

Right. And that's the I think that's a very big important thing that a lot of parents and teachers and et cetera like take away from kids. Like they need those moments because that's how they learn what is safe, what is okay, what I can handle without those, with taking that away and just being like, don't do that, and like not allowing them those those experiences. That's when kids will end up actually getting hurt. Absolutely. They didn't have those those chances to learn it in safe spaces with smaller distances, etc.

SPEAKER_01 19:28

Yep. They didn't have the step-by-step to be like, oh, I just got to do this tweak and then okay, then I'm good. Or just the unpredictableness of another force that's bigger than you coming in and trying to guide it when it's like, no, I had this. Well, now I'm confused. Now I'm down, you know. Exactly. More often than not, the times that it she was she kind of took a spill, it was because I was trying to like I didn't trust that she had it.

SPEAKER_04 19:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:57

Sometimes she just she just hit, you know? And it was like, oops, come here. Big snuggles. Why are you trying to climb again? You just hurt yourself, maybe. Okay, you're laughing. All right, off we go, I guess. It's of it. Yeah, it it really, it really is the best thing that's ever happened in my life. She is. And I would have rolled my eyes hearing anybody else say it. Thanks. Beforehand. Well, beforehand. I just didn't, I didn't get it. Okay, sure, yeah. But I mean, have you thought of what about going out and just getting really fucked up? Isn't that cool? No, it's not.

SPEAKER_04 20:40

And it takes too much energy.

SPEAKER_01 20:42

It takes way too much energy. I I you know, I fool me once, fool me twice, and fool me thrice on that one. You know, every like probably month and a half, I'd go out with a friend and be like, I can still hang. And then the next day.

unknown 20:55

I can't.

SPEAKER_01 20:56

Oh no, you have to get fed, and you need snuggles, and you need me to chase you, and you need so much, and the moment I don't give it to you, you're gonna let me know that was a big mistake. Oh, yeah. Okay, that's enough of party time.

SPEAKER_04 21:13

Yep, don't need that. Nope.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

There's so many things where it's just like, well, we had a good run.

SPEAKER_04 21:20

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 21:22

This is this is a whole new paradigm. So it's interesting to start to see the the light at the end of the tunnel. Where it's uh I don't go to sleep fearful I will be woken up.

SPEAKER_04 21:38

My son still wakes me up sometime.

SPEAKER_01 21:40

And I'm sure that she's once she understands how doorknobs work, oh yeah. Here we go. But for now, for now, there's like a there there is a a calm in the storm, and it's we're doing everything we can, a plateau to just be like, okay, we gotta recover. I don't know what's coming next.

Letting Go Of Partying And Finding A Plateau

SPEAKER_04 22:00

Next, but now's not the time to go back to partying. Now's the time to get all the sleep you can so that when again you are you've got something in the reserve tank.

SPEAKER_01 22:10

Exactly. It's very much like okay, but like she's sleeping through the night. Yeah, I've I I I I can't. I I can't because I don't know at any time the other shoe could drop, and all of a sudden we're back, we're we're back in the fetal position. So just saying. I don't I don't want I don't want I don't I don't I don't want to get you another thing of avocado. Mmm, that was the wrong thing to say. I'm so sorry.

SPEAKER_04 22:43

Having him when he was so little and he got sick when he was six days old, so I didn't really want to go out and get a bunch of germs anyways. And then when he was two and a half, it was COVID. So that was like a couple years of like nothing. So after that, I realized wow, I am an introvert and I don't like to be around people. I am going to continue my little Heidi hole.

SPEAKER_01 23:05

Yeah. Oh, this is okay. No, this is okay. How about that? Yeah, yeah, very, very much so.

SPEAKER_04 23:12

Yeah. I'm uh I'm actually going to go out this Friday, though, with a friend of mine who actually was on the podcast in season one, Lisa.

SPEAKER_01 23:22

Hey Lisa, great.

SPEAKER_04 23:24

Her her daughter, I think, now is 11, and my my kid is eight and a half and will be with his father. And we are going to go to this thing called a Broadway rave.

SPEAKER_01 23:38

Sounds horrible.

SPEAKER_04 23:39

Yes. Sounds absolutely horrible. But I was curious and I had to find somebody to go. And she goes to Broadway shows often. So I said, I am targeting her to come with me. Luckily, I will not have my son the next day, in case this goes even more horribly wrong than I am thinking it's going to go. But I I still feel like even though like the weekends he's with his father, I still feel like I'm never like fully off duty.

SPEAKER_01 24:10

I feel that. Yeah. I oh yeah, there's big no off duties. There's just take a deep breath and realize this will never end.

SPEAKER_04 24:20

Right. Because it's like, yeah, okay, he's supposed to be with his father for two nights. Okay, sure. But then like, if God forbid, like something happened, like and like his father had to like, I don't know, go to the hospital or something, then it's like, I'm back on. I'm I have to be there, kind of a thing. Or my my kid got hurt, then it's like, then I have to be there. So it's like there's never, never a fully off top.

SPEAKER_01 24:44

Oh, yeah. We had a birthday party planned for and sh like a lot of people coming over for her first birthday. And the night before the party, she started vomiting a lot, consistently. And it's like, well, off to the uh off to the hospital we go. We were there till 3 a.m. We canceled the party that we had been planning for a couple of months. We made it up on the back end like a month or two later, but it was definitely like, oh, all plans and whatever other people had plans and they committed to this, and now we have to tell them, hey, thanks, but no thanks.

SPEAKER_02 25:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:26

Hey, are you saying dad that's up?

SPEAKER_02 25:32

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:33

Yeah. Oh, you got the microphone. No, you can't listen to people say anything from the microphone. You speak into the microphone.

Always On Duty And Plans Upended

SPEAKER_01 25:40

Anything you want to say to the listening folks out there? Can you say puppy?

SPEAKER_02 25:45

Puppy.

SPEAKER_01 25:49

Can you say mama?

SPEAKER_02 25:50

Mama.

SPEAKER_01 25:51

Can you say dad? Can you say but what does a sheep say?

SPEAKER_00 26:06

Okay, that's fair. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:07

Don't do it for free.

SPEAKER_02 26:11

I love her voice. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 26:13

Yeah, her voice is the best.

unknown 26:15

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 26:16

Yeah, you're the best. Yeah. Oh, you want to come up? Okay, maybe we'll do one more minute. And she's climbing. She's climbing right on up. Here she is, big smiles. Don't press stuff on the keyboard. Nice try. What other words do you have?

SPEAKER_02 26:34

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 26:36

That's a good one. Ah patapata? Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02 26:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:49

You want to sing row, row, roll your bow? Can you count to two? One.

SPEAKER_02 27:01

Oh my gosh, this is amazing. Yeah. So I know.

SPEAKER_00 27:07

And this is what she sounds like when she's getting tickled.

SPEAKER_02 27:21

I love you, honey. I love you.

SPEAKER_01 27:23

Can I get kisses?

SPEAKER_02 27:24

No.

SPEAKER_01 27:25

Okay.

unknown 27:28

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 27:29

Big no sometimes.

SPEAKER_02 27:30

Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

SPEAKER_03 27:35

If you liked this episode of the Adopt Twins, I urge you to pull over if you're driving or stop what you're doing and take one minute to take out your phone and text someone you know that you think would also like the Adopt Twins. Send them a text that says, hey, I've been listening to this podcast and I think you'd like it. Let me know what you think and send them a link to the show. Word of mouth is the best way to spread the hilarity of the Adopt Wins. So stop gatekeeping us and let someone else know. We'll catch y'all soon.