Welcome to the first of five interviews with fathers from around the blogosphere!  Although this was supposed to be a feature leading up to Father’s Day, I’m scheduling it AROUND that day instead.  I wish I had some cool reason for the change, but I don’t, other than that I have a baby and Twitter and they’re both equally distracting.

Chad Skelton, also known as @vancouverdad on Twitter, is a dad who blogs/reports for the Vancouver Sun’s online edition.  He has a wife and a son, and is currently on paid leave to be a stay-at-home dad.

I was first introduced to him via Twitter, most likely through Follow Friday.  His columns are insightful, intelligent, well-researched — and he often answers questions in them that I didn’t even know I had.

I hope you enjoy this interview with him and go say hi!

1. You recently changed your blog’s name from “Parenting in Vancouver” to “Curious Dad”. Have you noticed an increase in traffic or participation via comments or Twitter due to this change thus far?
Not yet — but the name change is still pretty new. I’m hoping over time that the new name will encourage people who may not live in Vancouver to check out the blog, since most of what I write about is not Vancouver-specific.

I also think the new blog name is a better reflection of what the blog’s really about — which is someone trying to find answers to parenting questions he’s curious about.

2. You write some really insightful and informative posts.  Where do you find your sources and inspiration?
First, thanks for the compliment.

I’ve been a newspaper reporter for a little over a decade now, mainly doing investigative work, so all day I’m trying to come up with story ideas and figuring out how to answer tough questions. And I’ve always found that it’s hard to turn that part of my brain off when I’m not at work. So in the day-to-day act of parenting, a lot of questions — like why babies look more like their dad than their mom or whether store-brand formula is as good as the name-brand stuff — just occur to me. And the blog is a good venue to share what I’ve found out with others.

I also think approaching parenting blogger as a reporter helps add a useful voice to the parenting blogosphere. I read a lot of parenting blogs and there are some great, funny first-person blogs out there and some wonderful blogs on particular aspects or styles of parenting. But I think it’s useful to have someone with a reporter’s research skills really digging into some of the questions moms and dads have.

3.  You have one child, and what a lot of parents would consider to be a dream job: you get to stay at home with him, while being paid to write articles about parenting.  How did you land such a great gig?
I should say that while I’m extremely lucky to be able to have this time home with my child, my gig isn’t quite as cushy as it may first appear. Many years ago, when my wife and I first starting talking about having children, we decided that ideally she’d want to stay home the first year and I’d want to stay home for the second year. Knowing doing that would cost a lot of money, we immediately started putting some cash aside.

Luckily, The Vancouver Sun has a great unpaid leave program — so I can take up to a year off work (without pay) and my job is waiting for me when I get back. So that’s what I’m on now: a one-year unpaid leave.

A few months before my leave began, I decided that I wanted to write a blog during my year off to keep my writing and research skills honed during my time away from work.

When I told The Sun about my plans, we came to an agreement for me to write the blog for vancouversun.com, in exchange for a very small amount of money. I’m hoping, if the blog is successful, it may become part of my day-to-day
job when I return. But at the moment, it’s really more of a hobby than a job — indeed I’m essentially only “paid” a few hours a week to do it. To be frank, I suspect some of the more successful bloggers I read make quite a
bit more than I do from the ads on their site.

4.  Has being in the public eye had an impact on your family life yet? Have you been recognized as the Vancouver Sun’s parenting columnist while out with your family?
So far, no. Which is good. I think it could make things a bit awkward if people at the playground or library storytime knew who I was.

5.  Can you tell us a bit about how you balance working at home with raising your son and maintaining your marriage?
As I say, the blog is really more of a hobby for now — an hour here and an hour there while the boy is napping. My full-time job at the moment, like so many other moms and dads, is taking care of the kid.

6.  “Daddy bloggers” are a rare breed in comparison to mommy bloggers (although you wrote a recent article about dad blogs being “the hot new thing”).  What do you feel fathers offer that is different from a mother, blogging-wise?  Do you feel outnumbered, or unique?
There’s no doubt that being a dad — both as a blogger and a stay-at-home parent — puts me in the minority. But I feel that more when I’m at the playground, and I’m the only guy there, then when I’m blogging.

I read a fair number of both dad and mom bloggers and, on the face of it, I can’t think of anything that clearly separates them. Some blogs are more personal, others are more opinion. Others, like mine, are more research-heavy.

The one thing I’d say is that there seems to be a particular subtype of dad bloggers that are often railing about how they don’t get enough respect and how marketers always use the term “Mom” instead of “parent”. I can sympathize with dads who feel they aren’t appreciated. But I find reading such blogs kind of tiresome.

While my blog is called “Curious Dad”, I’ve always tried to gear it to both moms and dads. I only occasionally write about topics that are solely of interest to fathers. And, if anything, I’m sometimes accused of being a “gender traitor” by other fathers for arguing dads are held to a lower standard than moms or wondering why some dads don’t do diapers.

I hope I’ve been successful in making my blog appealing to both moms and dads. If the comments on my site are any guide, both genders are reading it — which makes me happy.

7. Finally, describe your ideal Father’s Day to us.
A nice brunch at home with my wife and The Boy.

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Don’t forget about my Babies of 2009 Carnival coming up on July 1st! Help me spread the word.