My name is Christian M Benedetto, Jr. and I am the founder of www.DaddyOutpost.com.
It’s funny how life works out, I own and run a few small companies with my wife Suzy. We have a niche commercial real estate company and title insurance business. Nothing crazy just good honest businesses. We are working on growing them together and have started them from the ground up.
You see, I got married later in life and was your classic workaholic man who developed vices not hobbies as he got older. I liked to play poker, shoot craps, drive nice cars, sport fish, hunt and shoot guns and enjoy smoking a good cigar. I gave up golf well over a decade ago when I started my own company. In my late 30’s I started giving most those things up, well except for the cars.
I got married when I was 40 and became a dad at 41, it’s the hardest and best job I have ever had (and I have had some cool ones).
Our son "B" as we call him, or "CMB III" – we did not find out while Suzy was pregnant if the baby was a boy or a girl so we had the nickname Baby B, and it kind of stuck since B for Boy, B for baby, B for Benedetto and he is the III so it is also a little less confusing around the house.
On the second day into the five day Memorial Day weekend of 2009, my wife Suzy suggested I get a hobby. Apparently watching the House marathon or the History channel while emailing clients off my blackberry did not qualify, nor did reading my son the Bill of Rights or teaching the dog to catch food in her mouth from the table.
She wanted me to get an actual hobby – I thought who has time for such things. It’s like taking a long walk, you start out here and end up back here. I did plenty of that in the Marine Corp. A hobby made no sense to me, but since my wife is right 99.99% of the time I figured it was just easier to get a hobby now, then figure out why I needed one later on my own.
I considered my options, Tennis? seems too much like work. Golf? too hot. Bare Knuckle boxing? I was too old. While I enjoy reading, but that’s really not a hobby I also enjoy writing so she suggested I put together a fifth book which would include the poems I wrote for our son. And although my wife, mom and mother-in-law love them, I was not sure if they would sell.
I am not your traditional writer of poetry, not classically trained and I did not even start until my late 30’s and when I did begin to write I wrote mostly of my time in the United States Marine Corp. In recent years I was fond of saying if you can’t dance you had better write poetry.
So I decide on a hobby – I’ll put up some poems on line, build a blog, which became a web site, which is now DaddyOutpost.com
Back in August of 2007, shortly after we found out Suzy was pregnant, I started doing all kinds of research about pregnancy, being a dad and fatherhood. I found very little useful information in any one place. This is my answer to that need for information in one place.
So fast forward to Memorial Day weekend 2009 I decide to build the web site as a way to share my poetry to my wife and son. I buy the domain name and for $57 I’m off to the races on godaddy.com with a hosting and support package to help build it. So for two nights I keep the secret from my wife as I am up half the night building it. Finally I show it to her and she is very happy both that I did it and I have a hobby, so I ask some friends that are dads to look at the site and I start adding things that just make sense to add. 529 college savings, health care issues for men and woman, how to tie a Windsor Knot . . . . The list goes on. However, the site looks like it was built over a long weekend, by a guy who was guessing what he was doing
So then I am speaking with my friend Luigi Tartara who is married with a son, just a few months older than my son, who own a creative agency and we decide to really expand the site to what you see now. Along the way we got some great insight from a friend who runs a communications company, Larry Dell the father of two adult daughters, Bob White, a sales associate at my real estate firm, who is the proud father of seven gave some advice and, of course, all of our wives. So take a look at the site, visit us often and let us know what you would like to see on the site.
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