Home Dad Chat

Home Dad Chat is a talk podcast presented by the National At-Home Dad Network, and it runs on the rapport between Brock and Danny. Episodes start from the same brief welcome about life as stay-at-home dads. After that, very little is fixed. One episode begins with the admission that the pair had been talking at length before deciding to hit record, and that looseness carries through. Conversations wander, happily. A glance at the calendar turns up Passover, Easter and National Deep Dish Pizza Day, with a nod to anyone near Chicago. A Super Mario film sets off an effort to match familiar voices and mannerisms to the characters. A New Year's greeting becomes shared puzzlement over why an old song asks anyone to forget old acquaintance. Then a rumor about the supposed dark backstory of 'Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer' meets disbelief on one side and talk of reliable sources on the other. Even the pair notice the drift; one conversation wraps up before the train gets too far off the track. Under the banter sits the business of parenting and the organization behind the show. In 'April is......', National Volunteer Month, Volunteer Recognition Day and National Volunteer Week land close to home, because the organization is built on volunteering. The same conversation marks autism awareness, with one speaker crediting the organization for making him more observant and better at explaining autism to the kids. There is an episode called 'Annual Board Retreat', and its talk recalls a meal improvised from what was on hand, chorizo from a Costco run included, next to a lesson about asking for clarification before settling a disagreement. Guests shift the angle. In an episode named for Matt Lofy, the talk turns to teenagers with phones who never set up voicemail, even though job applications expect to reach them that way. Jeremy Haston steps in when Brock is out, which does not stop some ribbing about Brock's age. That conversation takes up motivation, the idea that a clear reason makes a goal stick, with the gym habit that fades after a few weeks as the familiar counterexample. It closes on HomeDadCon and how arriving in the host city can restore energy that has run dry by that point in the year. Titles such as 'Parenthood on the Big Screen vs. Parenthood in Real Life' and 'Movies and Music, Bridging the Generational Gap...' show how readily films and music get folded into talk about family. Sign-offs tend to land on the same plainspoken line: 'I'm a dad, that's what I do.'