Ohio dad cleans up the house after dinner. Then he makes a totally new dinner—and feeds the kids again: ‘I need to go to a doctor’

Parents often joke about losing their minds somewhere around the birth of their first kid. After all, it's a pretty extraordinary experience to suddenly be in charge of a brand-new human. But sometimes the mental chaos lasts well after the newborn phase.

One dad of two is going viral after describing how his “parent brain” did something quirky.

‘I have zero recollection'

Cincinnati father Gerod (@beigedad) shared a story he said left him questioning his own memory. His video has since accumulated more than 16,000 views.

“There is seriously something wrong with me, and I do need to go see a doctor to figure out what it is,” Gerod said. He explained that about a week and a half earlier, he'd picked up his two kids—a four-year-old and a one-year-old—from his in-laws' house after work, where his mother-in-law invited them to stay for a spaghetti dinner. His wife, a nurse, was still at work and missed the meal.

When he got home, Gerod settled into his normal routine of situating the kids, tidying the house, and then making dinner before his wife got home. He made a full meal for himself, his wife, and the kids.

“The kids sit down to eat, and they only eat about half of their meal,” Gerod said. “I'm like, ‘That's weird.' And then I sit down, and I eat my entire meal, and then I clean up dinner. I get the kids baths and in bed.”

It wasn't until his wife got home and sat down to eat that the realization hit him.

“We had dinner at my in-law's house, we had spaghetti, it was wonderful,” Gerod said. “And then we had [a] second dinner. When I got home, I made the kids another dinner, because I had zero recollection, in that moment, what we had done just 30 minutes prior. And that is why they only ate about half their meal.”

Gerod said he was “surprised” the kids ended up eating any of their meals at all. He appeared to express real medical concern in his caption, writing that “this is not a single occurrence.”

“I need to see a doctor,” he said.

@beigedad What kind of doctor should I go see for this? This is not a single occurrence. #storytime #dad #doctor #memoryloss #husband ♬ original sound – 3 minute sounds!

Is this kind of memory lapse actually common for parents?

The phenomenon often nicknamed “mommy brain” is well-documented in mothers. But does this happen to fathers too?

According to Momwell, psychologist and researcher Dr. Jodi Pawluski has found that non-birthing parents like Gerod undergo brain changes similar to birthing mothers. And rather than pregnancy hormones alone, it's actually “interacting with the baby [that] allows the parental brain network to come online.”

Some research reflects this with actual brain imaging. According to USC's Dornsife school, a study found that new fathers lost “gray matter volume, especially in the frontal and parietal lobes—parts of the brain involved in executive functioning and sensorimotor processing, respectively.”

“If men told us during pregnancy that they wanted to take more time off from work after the birth, and felt more bonded to their unborn child, they subsequently lost more gray matter volume,” USC reports. “Greater volume loss also emerged among fathers who told us that they spent more time with their infants at three months postpartum … More motivated, hands-on fathers lost more gray matter volume across their transition to parenthood.”

Buzz News has reached out to Gerod via email.