My wife and I like WoW a lot. We’ve played it together for more than two years now, and have been endgame raiders for most of that time. Some­times as many as three nights a week! There have been ups and downs, but we’re both excited about Wrath.

As new par­ents, we’ve learned what the hard­est part is about instances and raids: no pause but­ton.

Our daugh­ter is six months old. What I’ve learned about infants + WoW:

• Infants don’t care about shar­ing you with a raid full of your friends.
• Infants don’t care about voice chat, espe­cially when sleeping.
• Infants don’t get excited about your zomgepics, and they don’t get dis­ap­pointed when you don’t get the drop. (Actu­ally, that’s not so bad.)
• Infants don’t care if you’re in com­bat or not.
• Infants really don’t care about pro­gres­sion boss fights, where unin­ter­rupted con­cen­tra­tion is required or else the raid will wipe.

When an infant senses that you’re ask­ing for patience… they flip out. It’s an emo­tional thing. Babies don’t under­stand: “I love you very much but I’m doing some­thing else right now, so if you can just keep your­self busy for another five min­utes, and then I’ll give you the binkie back while the raid buffs?” And when my daugh­ter doesn’t under­stand things of this nature, like the grownup, com­pli­cated, give-and-take social stuff?

The leaves on nearby trees shake from her cries.

Bad Par­ent­ing 101? Well, yes. At least the raid­ing while hav­ing first baby exper­i­ment didn’t last long.

Now, before you leave a sternly-worded com­ment, take heart that I now know that the answer is easy: stop raid­ing for a while. And you know what? It was easy, once we saw that. Like so much in life, none of this stuff is obvi­ous. I’ve never been a father before. Heck, I haven’t spent time around kids since I was in that age group. In unre­lated news, I’m start­ing to under­stand where all my parental scars came from.

Also, a quick caveat: this is a shared hobby of ours. Yes, one of us could babysit while the other played, but that’s not how we came to love the game. We tried raid­ing sep­a­rately and it’s not as much fun. WoW is some­thing we enjoy doing together. We do plenty of things apart, but play­ing WoW isn’t one of them.

We gave our best towards bal­anc­ing the over­whelm­ing every­thing­ness of being new par­ents while keep­ing up any sem­blance of a raid sched­ule. Ulti­mately, we decided to start our off­sea­son. We haven’t raided in two months, and have no plans to do so until at least Wrath. Our approach to Wrath is going to be slightly dif­fer­ent than wait­ing in line at the shop at 11:30 the night before the mid­night open­ing. It’s going to be a big exper­i­ment with plenty of trial and error.

In the mean­time? We log on now and then, and our friends play­fully ask us: “Hey, want to join us in ZA this week?” I gen­tly deflect them, but really I’m think­ing: sign up for raids? Insan­ity! How can I know days in advance what next Thurs­day night is going to be like in my home? Will there be cry­ing? Kick­ing? Scream­ing? But never mind my wife, what about my daugh­ter? (Try the veal!)

I always coun­seled my guild mem­bers to keep their life right over any game or guild con­cerns. Right now my wife and I feel like we’re barely above water, as I hear that most par­ents feel at first. Raid­ing had to take a back seat. It feels weird to take that advice, even though it’s my own.

Any other WoW-players/parents out there? How did this go for you?