How Do You Spell 'Awesome' ? D-A-D

Celebrating Dads Who Go the Extra Mile to Be Real-life Heroes to Their Families
 

‘Patrick’s absolutely amazing, and the amount he does for each of our children and for me is phenomenal,’ says Gayle. ‘He’s our chief cook (he was mentioned in Your Family in 2015 for his vegetarian lasagne), and he prepares the kids’ school lunches and my work lunches, does grocery shopping, drops the boys at school every day and helps me out with other errands like doctor’s visits when he can.’

Patrick is especially helpful with Connor, who attends occupational therapy and speech therapy. ‘The occupational therapy helps with Connor’s gross and fine motor skills, endurance, and visual spatial awareness, while speech therapy helps his auditory processing and phonological awareness skills,’ says Gayle. ‘He’s repeating Grade R this year to obtain a better grounding for Grade 1.’

Connor receives a fair bit of homework from occupational therapy and speech therapy, and Patrick spends a lot of time helping him. Patrick’s an English and life orientation teacher and the director of discipline at Hudson Park High School, and Gayle says his job makes him really patient with the boys.

Despite being incredibly busy at school, Patrick still manages to help out so much at home and is super hands-on. ‘By helping with so many of the day-to-day tasks, Patrick gives me more quality time to spend with our children,’ says Gayle. ‘I’ve decided to try and breastfeed Sophie until she’s 18 months old, and the only way I’ve been able to continue breastfeeding is with his support and assistance. He even gets up to make me tea every night when Sophie wakes up for a feed.