Jordan Watson, best known for his How to Dad YouTube videos, is co-host of The Parenting Hangover podcast with ZM’s Clint Roberts. The Bay of Plenty-based father-of-three is also the current world record holder for the quickest 100m sprint in jandals – 13.62 seconds – wearing his own brand of Golden jandals. His wife, TV production manager Jody Watson, is on Instagram as @howtomumnz. The couple met as 18-year-olds in 2006 and got married in 2012.
Jordan says … When I finished school, I did 7th form at Morrinsville College, I had no idea what I wanted to do. The careers teacher said, “Look, you’re always doing speeches, why don’t you look at going to Bay of Plenty Polytech and do a five-month radio certificate?” I had a friend who was already going over there to do a sports course, so I jumped at it, because I knew we could flat together.
On the first day saw this attractive young lady come down the stairs. She was late to the class – the last one to arrive. She caught my eye. Within a few weeks, we were kicking it off and hanging around with each other. We were giggly-into-each-other pretty much straight away.
[I was drawn to her] good looks and giggly-ness. It sounds so cheesy to say “bubbly”, but it’s the bubbliness that she has, even to this day, with such a positive outlook on everything. We had this older, blind guy in our class. We were in the polytechnic library, and we were flirting, but we weren’t a couple yet. The blind guy said in his radio voice, “I can hear love in the air over there.” He’d picked up on it before we’d even said to each other that we were into each other.
After two weeks, it was official. I had this old crappy ute, a single-cab, old, 1980s huge thing. I’d taken Jody somewhere. When she was about to hop out, she stopped and looked at me. “So, are we going out now?” I thought, “I thought we were already, but okay.”