Having my second child has rekindled certain mantras I’ve forgotten about fatherhood, one being the need to stay in shape (not just to be there for my family, but also to counter the ill-effects of newborn duty), and the other being the appreciation of time.

Because if there’s anything that being a parent will rob you of, it’s your personal time. No longer are you living for yourself. You are now operating on your child’s timeline, and perhaps that is also why I’ve begun taking timekeeping more seriously.

This is why I began fostering an interesting relationship with my watch. It first started as a necessity, especially because we record our baby’s meals and nap times on paper. So it was imperative to always have a source of time handy, instead of swivelling my head trying to find the clock, especially in the dark.

Soon, the wristwatch also became a planning tool: Do I have enough time for another sleep cycle, or would I be better off starting my day two hours earlier? How long has it been since I tried burping the baby? And most importantly, what ungodly hour is this?

This is also when I started appreciating the finer details of a watch, particularly when it comes to lume. Of course, you can’t mention lume without bringing up tritium tubes, because they offer ‘always on’ performance when it comes to low-light conditions. Building on top of that, you can’t mention tritium tubes without bringing up the brand name Luminox, whose namesake itself joins both the Latin words ‘light’ and ‘night’.

I don’t work the night shift (actually, I guess I do now, with my newborn), and I don’t explore caves on the regular, so having a watch that glows constantly without the need for a light source to charge it was never a priority. That has since changed, thanks to my new life of constantly waking up in a stupor, not knowing where or when I am.

The benefit of owning a Luminox timepiece—we’ll take the Navy 3550 as an example—is that you get attention to detail when it comes to lume legibility. Thanks to the different lume colour at 12 o’clock, I can always orient the watch face, even during the rare moments that I have the watch on my bedside table instead of on my wrist.

You might argue that watches now come with LED backlights, but I would counter-argue that those watches require two hands to operate, a feat that I cannot afford when I have a baby in one hand and a milk bottle in the other.

And you remember how staying fit is an important dad goal of mine? It’s great if my timepiece of choice can accompany me in that part of my life too. So, something hardy like the Luminox Navy 3550 would work well in the grimy and sweaty nature of the gym (in my case, the gym is a six-by-two foot space in my living room). This goes hand-in-hand with baby-proof abilities, which involves the occasional tug (babies' grips are surprisingly strong) as well as undigested formula. Plus, if a watch can handle the grime, it can handle the thorough soaping I give it after a messy session.

This is why I’ve grown fond of the humble wristwatch. I already routinely wear one as an accessory, but in recent days, I’ve rekindled the tool-y nature of it. I’d give my wristwatch brownie points if it lives until my child’s teenage years (Luminox’s tritium tubes last for 25 years, so that’s a possibility), so that he can one day wear it as an accessory, but I can’t see that far in the future for now. Because all I can do is stay in the moment, and for that, I have a trusty timepiece to keep track of every second.