ironSoap

Posted by Nikki

Paul has been a dad for almost a year now, and yet by watching him, you’d think he’d been doing this forever.

He wasn’t always sure he wanted kids. For years it was a source of tension in our marriage as we decided what our future would hold. Eventually he came around and we got pregnant. Sadly, we had a miscarriage with our first pregnancy, but all this did was solidify Paul’s conviction that he wanted to be a father. We were fortunate to get pregnant again about a year later, and were blessed with a beautiful baby girl. For all of his doubts about his ability to be a good father, Paul was a pro at it, from day one. I had a rough labor that ended in a c-section, so I was unable to do a lot of the caring for our baby, initially. Paul stepped in without pause. Within the first 24 hours of her life, I could tell that my husband would exceed my expectations as her dad. It was love at first sight for him – and she was equally smitten.

From the beginning Paul has has been an equal partner when it comes to caring for Callie, with the obvious exception of nursing. Changing diapers? Check. (I don’t think I changed a diaper until we’d been home for several days.) Middle-of-the-night feedings? Check. Bath time? Check. Comforting a tired/sad/cranky baby? Check, check, check. He goes to (almost) every doctor’s appointment, no matter how minor the issue. He rocks her, sings to her, plays with her, and reads to her. He steps in to give me a break when he knows that I’ve had a long day or am reaching my limit. He teaches her about life, and nurtures her imagination.

I’ve always known that I won the lottery when it came to finding a life partner. Paul is loyal, caring, sensitive, hilarious, level-headed, and handsome to boot. He is my best friend in the world, and I can’t imagine my life without him. And now my daughter is going to grow up with the best dad she could ever ask for. I can’t wait to watch their relationship develop and change as she blossoms into a young child, a teenager, and eventually a young woman. He will teach her what to expect from a mate, and what kind of treatment she deserves. He will be her biggest fan and most loyal supporter. He will challenge her to reach her fullest potential, and will teach her morals to help guide and shape her life. He will love her more than she will ever know.

Happy Father’s Day, Honey. You are the man I would choose to be Callie’s father, if I wasn’t already lucky enough to have you as my husband.

My life moves in tides formed from temporary routines that feel, as they settle momentarily, far more permanent than they remain. For a time, the chaos of change will recede in one area or another and I’ll find mild comfort in a regimen. Usually I only have anything approaching a true appreciation for them in retrospect. Here are a few of my favorites, and two from the present, which I actually can identify as they happen.

The Lunch Workout

Working at the City, at that time, was ridiculously easy. The workload was light, the atmosphere was loose and, to sully a term, municipal. I ultimately left that job for the sole reason that it was devoid of challenge and, after three years of what sometimes felt like vacation, I was surprised to find I felt trapped by the lack of pressure.

I guess we made up for the atrophy of our trade skills by joining the gym. When you feel like you have a lot of time, I guess you start to go down that list of things you always said you’d do if you had more of it. I was as surprised as anyone. There were three of us—you know, work buddies. We didn’t interact in a whole lot of social scenarios but we’d spend some amount of time most days chatting idly. It started with the two of them, I’m sure, some kind of mutual whinging about the lack of self-esteem or a sense of slipping health common in early middle aged Americans. Somehow they decided to do something about it, and they joined the local gym. I think they’d only gone a few weeks when they invited me, and I made excuses for a few days before finally trying it out.

Our routine was to break for lunch, hit the gym and then stop and grab something semi-healthy to eat back at our desks. It was supposed to match our granted hour long break we were approved to use, but in practice we regularly found ourselves absent for ninety minutes, sometimes even longer, especially as our circuits became more complex. We did very well at the gym, and we stuck with it using each other as motivators, which meant we lost weight, got stronger, became more athletic. It was hard to keep the workouts short. They became the highlights of the day, and when the office is so dull and dreary it’s easy to justify a few more reps or another five minutes. In between sets we’d shoot the breeze as we spotted each other. Later we began frequenting a different facility that had racquetball courts and the lunch breaks stretched even longer, as it wasn’t even just the joy of doing something positive but now it was a game, spending time with friends.

When I decided to move on, to seek higher salaries and better working environments, I added a commute to my day. I didn’t have in-town gym access during lunch. We tried to keep meeting up. For a while we switched to tennis at night, and that was fun, too. My schedule switched again as I got yet another job. Working nights was hard enough, there wasn’t much energy for workouts anyway. Schedules were hard to sync up. Sometimes this happens with people. Eventually I had to quit the gym. I wasn’t going often enough to justify the expense. Finally we moved away, back toward where my jobs had been for a couple of years at that point and it was looking like hitting the gym with my friends wasn’t going to be a reality any more. I still miss the ease of how those workouts fit into my schedule. I chat occasionally with my friends still, but all of our interactions happen online. I don’t know if either of them still work out. I like to think that at some point I’ll find a way to get focused, regular exercise back into my life, but it’s a challenge. I miss the old routine.

Lightbox Drawing

One of my shorter, happier routines settled in as I was in the process of graduating from trade school. One of the instructors at the school and a couple of students had formed a multimedia production house called Spotbox.com. The site is long since defunct, the domain registered now to an anonymous squatter, but this was in 1999, and Silicon Valley was in the height of the dotcom boom. I was interning there, basically just squinting my eyes and hoping a lucrative degree would land in my lap. I was less than six months away from getting married and after over a year of practical unemployment as I pursued my education, I really needed a paycheck.

Spotbox didn’t pay me, they could barely keep the lights on as I recall. They were basically a contract design firm who, in their spare time, were being spectacularly creative with what was at the time a very uncharted new medium. I was asked to create tweens: Basically an animator would draw several keyframes of an animation, maybe one of every six to ten frames necessary to create a moving cartoon. The grunt work of animation is the tweens (well, it was before computers took over everything; get off my lawn) where you just draw the transitional images that go between the keyframes. That was me.

What it involves is taking the keyframe drawing, putting it on a box with a diffused glass surface and a light inside. It’s called, naturally, a lightbox. You then place a new sheet of paper on top of the old so some light shines through and you can see the original drawing beneath and then you copy the drawing. Almost. What you actually do is make almost the same drawing only with a slight adjustment toward the next keyframe. Eventually you’re closer to copying the next keyframe and when you’re done, the rapid succession of each image creates the animation.

We did these animations by hand, on paper, and then scanned them into the computer and used a program called Adobe Streamline (now discontinued since the functionality was duplicated as part of Adobe Illustrator CS2) to convert the line art into vector format for coloring in Illustrator. It was a process that probably could have been done more efficiently, but like I said, we were experimental and we were broke. My lightbox was actually homemade out of an old drawer and was really too tall for me to sit at comfortably. I’d come home with deep grooves worn into my arms from resting them heavily on the edges of the box.

For maybe a month I would go to school in the morning, then drive a few blocks over to the Spotbox office which was on the top floor of a disgusting tenement that I can only presume was selected because the rent was practically nothing owing to the fact that there were residential apartments mixed in with the leased office space. Or maybe Spotbox just leased a regular apartment and used it as an office, I don’t know for sure. I don’t recall there being a kitchen, but I spent most of my time in the back of the side room (maybe a bedroom?) hunched over the lightbox while the rest of the people worked nearly 16 hour days on the handful of Macintoshes trying to finish design projects for Apple and Daimler Chrysler so they could pad out the portfolio.

I worked mostly on some of the side projects Spotbox was hoping would eventually become their stock and trade: These were basically webisodes and animated web series before those were actual things. We were using Macromedia Flash 2 for heaven’s sake. We did things like Yo-Yo Ninja Boy (which I did the original design and animations for, although the far more talented Scott Lewis would eventually go back and re-do all my work to make it look, you know, good; my contribution to the project will forever be lost to history which is probably for the best) and some very odd cartoons about drive-thrus.

What stands out to me most about this time was that I was spending my days in the company of creative people just being creative. We’d riff various ideas, someone would start telling a story about how they got inspired by something, maybe a run-in with a waiter or a quip by their toddler that cracked them up. There would be a joke told in response, and we’d all laugh. Then someone would take the idea and add on, doing the “What if instead of this, it was like…” thing until everyone was laughing and throwing around ideas. The sound guy (a fellow named Fred I believe) would stop by and play a riff he’d come up with and you could see the wheels turning in everyone’s head as they tried to come up with where it might fit. There was a lot of, “Hey everyone! Come check this out!” and we’d all huddle over a monitor and see what someone had whipped up. People slept under the tables when deadlines loomed. We talked about books we read or movies we wanted to see and what we would do if we were going to make Star Wars Episode I (before the horrible truth about the prequels was revealed).

Eventually I had to find something that paid. I landed a job building corporate training programs in Flash and announced I was leaving Spotbox the same day they were going to offer me a small wage (I had to turn it down; like I said, I was about to get married). I’ve often wondered if my career might have gone in a different direction if I’d decided to stick with Spotbox, maybe more along the lines I envisioned when I graduated: Commercial art peppered in my off time by creative personal projects until leading eventually to LucasArts or Weta or Pixar. I suppose I’ll never know, but I miss the creative atmosphere.

Regularly Visiting

Early in Nik’s pregnancy she was very sick. Morning sickness was a big concern of hers going in because she loathes feeling nauseated. Sadly for her it turned out to be a valid concern and the first trimester saw her spending an awful lot of time in bed, trying to keep from losing the small amounts of pretzels and buttered noodles she could force down. She was also tired a lot, and while she was going to school and I was working, her class work was mostly manageable during my working hours which were clearly demarcated so we had a lot of shared leisure time.

For several months we mostly just hung out in our room. She watched TV back there, trashy reality shows and re-runs of Friends. Since a lot of the TV she was watching didn’t interest me that much I could have spent the time away from her, doing my own thing in the other room. But I wanted to spend time with her. She was carrying my child, after all. We compromised by having me hang out with her, playing World of Warcraft on my laptop and half-watching whatever show she was engrossed in. We spent countless hours this way: I grinded my way through Azeroth while Nik controlled the remote. I’d show her silly things that were happening in the game; she’d back the TiVo up if I missed anything crazy on the tube.

I don’t think at the time that I recognized the significance of this quiet, low key leisure time we shared. I knew, conceptually, that things would change once the baby arrived but I didn’t have a frame of reference for how long it might be once a child entered the picture before a lazy evening spent in bed would be a possibility again. From the outside it may have seemed like we were in separate worlds, but I didn’t feel that way at all. I felt close to her, comfortable that we were enjoying each others’ company in that way that happily married couples can do with non-interactive diversions like two people reading separate books in the same room. In many ways it’s the pleasure of company itself that fills the need for companionship and interaction isn’t always mandatory.

In the intervening months the time we’ve had to sit in relative silence has been minimal. Stolen moments when Callie is asleep or occupied by someone else feel like opportunities that simply must be taken advantage of with the kinds of interaction we used to take for granted: Adult conversation, chore completion, shared meals, etc. Our together time seems like it is necessarily directly shared because so much of the rest of our lives right now are defined by the divide-and-conquer approach. The rewards that come from caring for our beautiful daughter cannot be overstated, and I’d never trade back down, not even for a second. But still. I miss the contented quiet.

The Cafeteria Breakfast

My normal morning routine goes like this: I’m up sometime between 5:15 and 5:30 am so I can be at the shuttle stop by 6:30. 0500 hours is excessively early for me to begin with but when you factor in a chronically sleepless little baby, that’s a very short window. Because of this I usually sleep on the shuttle as it travels to work. It’s not the most comfortable thing in the world, but sleep comfort is a forgotten luxury anyway so I take what I can get. When the shuttle drops off at work around 7:40 I don’t go straight to my cube and start working. Instead I go to the cafeteria and get a hot breakfast.

Unlike the lunch provided by the on-campus food service, the breakfast menu is reasonably priced and I like almost everything they offer. This gives me a wide variety of options every day and while I don’t often vary too far from the toast/fruit/hot cereal routine, I occasionally select the weekly healthy entree (whole wheat french toast with berries for example, or egg white scramble with spinach and bell peppers on a wheat tortilla perhaps) and I’ve been known to get a croissant instead or get a small scoop of scrambled eggs or yogurt instead of diced fruit. Then I grab a glass of milk and a small mug of coffee (both free) and I find a quiet corner of the typically vacant seating area and sit down to a solitary breakfast.

Sometimes I do a little work on my laptop to get a head start. Often I’ll read the book I carry around as my afternoon shuttle ride entertainment. Occasionally I’ll play a game on my phone or just sit and enjoy some alone time. It’s usually a big breakfast and it takes me until eight o’clock or slightly after to finish, but that’s just fine with me.

I don’t feel lonely eating my breakfast alone in the cafeteria. Mornings to me have always been—when they aren’t being reviled—the domain of quiet introspection. I love the sleepy optimism that accompanies the first part of he day: Most people have yet to find time to get their irritable dispositions into full swing, and the few who have, by choice or by turn of fortune, found themselves up before the bulk of their geographic contemporaries are typically reserved but present a quiet show of solidarity with each other in the form of slow smiles over the brims of steaming coffee mugs.

Maybe it’s the orderly way in which every day starts almost exactly the same that appeals to me. Schedules don’t get disrupted prior to the first appointments. The birds are almost always up before the people. The same parking spots are emptied at homes and the same ones are filled at work at roughly the same time every day. You can’t pinpoint when a day’s plan goes off the rails all the time, but you can be sure that starting tomorrow, you’ll have a second chance to keep it on track again. Or it could be that the weather patterns in the morning always seem a little more welcome. Even blustery, rain-soaked days seem beautiful for a moment when viewed through a kitchen window while the house remains dark and still. You move slower and more carefully to not disturb the family. Mornings contain warm showers and fresh clothes, sleepy good-bye kisses and wishes for happy days. Mornings contain scrambled eggs and cold milk and a few stolen moments to yourself.

Yeah, a lot of people—myself included—like to complain about mornings. But, I’ll miss the chance to relish them.

The Bucket of Toys

I don’t remember, even though it was only a few months ago, how my daughter transitioned into having an actual playtime. When she had crossed out of the newborn stage where she was mostly a drowsy little lump she would lie on her play mat and stare dumbfounded at the crazy lights and repetitive warbling tunes it emitted electronically. At some point she began reaching for the dangling tchochkes and tugging on them and feeling their varied fabric textures. But I don’t recall when she acquired the equivalent of a Toys “R” Us inventory stock or when she began to interact with them on some sort of self-directed schedule.

I suppose it was around the time she began sitting on her own, but I know that even as her collection of distractions was growing I would prop her up and play with her by waving the toys in front of her and acting out silly stories and nonsensical puppet skits, singing songs and giving her little tickles now and then to keep her attention. That, though, was more me playing and her staring at me as if to say, “Dude, lay off the paint thinner.”

But now she plays for real, with her own itinerary and preferential toy du jour. She pushes the buttons on her electronic whizbangs of her own accord, claps along to the warbling tunes and laughs when she amuses herself with something.

Most evenings when I get home from work she’s just gotten up from her final nap of the day and there’s a bit of time before Nik or I needs to start dinner. So I put down my stuff, kiss my wife hello and chat for a moment and then I crawl down on the floor and watch my little girl play with her big bucket of toys. Sometimes I’ll build little towers of the soft blocks and colorful plastic whatnots for her to knock over. Now and then I’ll encourage her to push different buttons on her battery-operated toys to relieve her mother and I of a tiny bit of the mind-numbing repetition. When her interest wanes I may roll a ball back and forth between us. But often I’m simply a casual observer of her own discovery, reading her board books out loud to her while she busies herself with some trinket or another, clapping along with her, or just providing her with a dad-shaped jungle gym to pull up on, climb over and cover with well-intentioned slobber.

I know that eventually my role will be more active in playtime. I’m already starting to recite colors of the objects she chooses to stick in her mouth. I sing along with the counting songs and make the few sign language motions that I know which represent the lyrics or the toys she’s reaching for. I’m here to guide, to prevent egregious accidents, to provide some educational context, to be a presence for whatever she may need. It’s not the most thrilling thing in the world. Soon enough her and I can sing together, enjoy more complex games of roughhouse or hide-and-seek or tea parties or dollhouses. For now, it’s a simple time of letting go a little bit and watching the way she discovers life. It may not be the most daring or exotic way to end a day, but it’s one of my favorite parts. And I’ll miss the wonder.

I present to you a chronicle of our first eight months with a baby, as told via Twitter and Facebook status updates. Minor spelling and grammatical edits have been made, marked with brackets for full disclosure. Analysis follows the list.

[Update: 4/8/2010 08:32] Looks like I missed about half of Nik’s Facebook updates, so I’m adding them in now. Plus, I bumped the starting point back to the beginning of the delivery day and also updated the analysis at the bottom.

ironsoap Re: Water breaking. @DixieGirl: “No one talks about how gross this part is!”
Tuesday, August 4th 08:33

Nikki Hamilton Water broke this morning. Admitted to hospital. Started pitocin. Having a baby today!!
Tuesday, August 4th 09:37

ironsoap We have multiple IV bags, pitocin being administered, some irregular contractions but no active labor. The waiting begins.
Tuesday, August 4th 10:42

ironsoap Contractions are getting pretty painful for @DixieGirl. Giving it another 20 minutes or so before we pester the nurses.
Tuesday, August 4th 11:40

ironsoap So at last check, 3cm with epidural installed and feeling good. Epidural was an ordeal though. They went for the pin-the-tail approach.
Tuesday, August 4th 13:19

Nikki Hamilton I heart epidurals.
Tuesday, August 4th 14:01

ironsoap OH @DixieGirl: “Seriously, I’m going to need a Western Bacon Cheeseburger after this is all done.”
Tuesday, August 4th 14:27

ironsoap Halfway there.
Tuesday, August 4th 15:47

ironsoap They’ve decided not to check the progress this hour after all. Everything’s still going well but they’re worried about GBS risk.
Tuesday, August 4th 17:04

ironsoap Medication is wearing off, they just checked and there’s been no progress. Sending in the drug reinforcements and hoping for a late rally.
Tuesday, August 4th 17:45

ironsoap Going in for c-section.
Tuesday, August 4th 18:25

ironsoap Calliope Faith Hamilton. Born 8/4/09 at 6:41pm. 7 lbs. 7oz. 19 inches.
Tuesday, August 4th 20:26

Nikki Hamilton Calliope Faith has arrived! 7lbs. 7oz, 19 inches at 6:41pm. She is beautiful and we are so in love with her!
Tuesday, August 4th 22:36

DixieGirl Exhausted but too uncomfortable to sleep. So ready to get some of these tubes out of me and walk around.
Wednesday, August 5th 00:30

Nikki Hamilton Paul has only been a dad for a little over 8 hours and he is already the best dad ever.
Wednesday, August 5th 02:48

ironsoap The cutest/saddest thing I’ve ever seen is a one-day-old with hiccups.
Wednesday, August 5th 14:38

ironsoap Maybe it’s the lack of sleep talking, but I’ve yet to hear something from hospital staff that wasn’t useless or contradictory. Bah.
Thursday, August 6th 02:51

Nikki Hamilton Terrified to get the staples removed tomorrow.
Thursday, August 6th 14:11

ironsoap I never thought that four hours sleep and a hot shower would be all I wanted for myself in the whole world.
Thursday, August 6th 15:28

ironsoap Ready to be discharged from the hospital. @DixieGirl grabbing one last free ice cream and poking the spoon thru the bottom in her zeal.
Friday, August 7th 11:04

Paul Hamilton is home from the hospital. Really wanting to catch up on email, FB, etc. but too exhausted right now.
Friday, August 7th 13:37

Nikki Hamilton Home from the hospital. Exhausted and overwhelmed, but happy. Trying to catch up with emails and comments. Thank you everyone for your congratulations and well wishes! Callie is the most wonderful baby ever!
Saturday, August 8th 00:23

Paul Hamilton Made it through the first night at home, just the three of us. Perhaps not surprisingly, everyone got far more sleep than we did at the hospital.
Saturday, August 8th 10:23

Paul Hamilton Thankful that the in-laws stopped by this evening. I was able to get some much-needed chores done while they fawned over Callie.
Saturday, August 8th 22:13

DixieGirl 20 minutes between one explosive diaper and the next. A new record for Callie at only 5 days old.
Sunday, August 9th 01:48

DixieGirl I have porn star boobs and the scariest looking belly ever. So want my old figure back.
Sunday, August 9th 23:31

Nikki Hamilton thinks the most beautiful thing in the world is watching her husband with her daughter.
Sunday, August 9th 23:39

ironsoap Had a pretty good night last night, with minimal meltdowns and what I suppose can be classified as sufficient sleep.
Monday, August 10th 12:04

Nikki Hamilton Calliope is one week old today! She went to her first check-up and has gained 10 oz since leaving the hospital last Friday!
Tuesday, August 11th 14:29

ironsoap We had a great night last night. Of course, we have an appointment tomorrow morning so tonight we’re boycotting sleep.
Tuesday, August 11th 04:26

DixieGirl Already tired of being told we are pronouncing our own daughter’s name incorrectly.
Tuesday, August 11th 14:30

Nikki Hamilton Sleep deprivation is no joke. Experienced parents: please, please tell me that one day I will sleep more than two hours at a time again. I’m actually jealous of all of the “going to bed now” updates on facebook.
Tuesday, August 11th 23:55

Paul Hamilton You know all those advertisements you see where a baby gets a bath and she comes out all happy and glowing and adorable? DO NOT BELIEVE THE LIES.
Wednesday, August 12th 11:16

DixieGirl Learning how to eat quickly. Can almost keep up with @ironsoap these days.
Thursday, August 13th 16:35

ironsoap Yeah. There was a projectile pooping incident.
Friday, August 14th 13:05

Nikki Hamilton Learning how to do everything one-handed.
Friday, August 14th 13:37

ironsoap What? Huh? There’s a world going on out there?
Tuesday, August 18th 14:23

DixieGirl Overwhelmed, emotional and exhausted. Caring for a newborn is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
Tuesday, August 18th 20:51

Nikki Hamilton Not a fan of cluster feedings. Especially when they occur between 3am-7am.
Wednesday, August 19th 19:52

ironsoap Today’s shocking development: The pediatrician appointment frustrated and annoyed me. Bonus: We have to [be] back later today.
Friday, August 21st 10:26

Paul Hamilton It is safe to assume that my status will be “is exhausted” until further notice. Expect this notice in or around 2027.
Friday, August 21st 11:45

Nikki Hamilton Agenda for today: Pediatrician, lactation consultant, back to Pediatrician. I hope sleep factors in somewhere, but I’m not counting on it.
Friday, August 21st 15:03

DixieGirl Thoughts of sleep consume my life these days. I would make a deal with the devil if it meant I could get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.
Friday, August 21st 15:14

ironsoap I didn’t anticipate all the assembly that was involved in fatherhood.
Saturday, August 22nd 22:48

DixieGirl It is amazing (amazing!) what a couple hours of sleep can do for your mood. The day she sleeps through the night I will do a dance!
Saturday, August 22nd 11:31

ironsoap I think the past three weeks have caught up to us and are making @DixieGirl and I delirious and giggly at the drive-thru.
Monday, August 24th 16:35

Nikki Hamilton Switched pediatricians and LOVE our new one!
Monday, August 24th 17:12

Nikki Hamilton Venturing out by myself for the first time since having Callie to go to a doctor appointment. Hoping I’m ready for this…
Tuesday, August 25th 13:31

Paul Hamilton Getting ready for an appointment at the pediatric cardiologist to get Calliope’s heart murmur checked out.
Friday, August 28th 09:54

DixieGirl On our way to the pediatric cardiologist to get Callie’s heart murmur checked out.
Friday, August 28th 10:44

DixieGirl Doctor says Callie’s heart is perfect! The heart murmur was just normal background noise. :)
Friday, August 28th 12:21

Nikki Hamilton My kid is a super champ when it comes to eating. She’s averaging 5 ounces of weight gain every three days!
Friday, August 28th 12:22

ironsoap Dear Leave Management Contractors: It makes my leave feel less leave-y if I have to talk to you every other day about it.
Friday, August 28th 12:29

Nikki Hamilton Going on 48 hours of Callie only sleeping for an hour at a time. Delirious with exhaustion.
Sunday, August 30th 03:23

Nikki Hamilton Callie already loves being read to by her daddy. Listening to Paul read to her and watching her stare at him in wonder is quickly becoming my favorite time of day.
Tuesday, September 1st 22:11

ironsoap Coordinating sleeping schedules. In purely theoretical terms, naturally.
Tuesday, September 1st 19:17

ironsoap Taking a walk with the family on a warm summer evening.
Wednesday, September 2nd 19:56

ironsoap The baby just gave Nikki a pretty good left cross on the chin, but she did drop her shoulder a little and left herself open for the jab.
Wednesday, September 2nd 23:41

Nikki Hamilton Callie had her one-month check-up today. In her first month of life she’s grown almost 2 inches and gained over 2 pounds. The doctor says she’s doing great and is a healthy baby!
Wednesday, September 2nd 15:36

Nikki Hamilton Isn’t sleep deprivation used as a form of torture?
Thursday, September 3rd 02:42

Nikki Hamilton is secretly proud of herself for sticking with breastfeeding even though it has been difficult.
Friday, September 4th 21:47

Nikki Hamilton For the past week Callie has cried on and off (and refused to sleep) from 11pm to 4am. Just in time for Paul to go back to work next week.
Monday, September 7th 13:18

DixieGirl 5 weeks after her arrival, Calliope’s birth announcements have been ordered.
Thursday, September 10th 15:20

ironsoap Aaaaand the baby spit up in my face. Was my mouth open? You betcha.
Thursday, September 10th 17:13

Nikki Hamilton Sad that Paul has to go back to work on Monday. :( It has been so awesome to have him at home with us.
Saturday, September 12th 14:43

ironsoap Trying to enjoy the last day of my paternity leave. I’m going to miss it.
Sunday, September 13th 16:25

Paul Hamilton hopes that if he’s been distant or unreliable or unresponsive or cranky with anyone over the last six weeks that they can forgive him. It’s been… surreal.
Sunday, September 13th 18:27

Nikki Hamilton The night before Paul has to go back to work Callie is refusing to sleep.
Monday, September 14th 02:05

DixieGirl First day at my new job and I have the world’s most demanding client. Also, I don’t think I ever get to clock out.
Monday, September 14th 11:47

Nikki Hamilton Ready for bed… too bad I never know when that time will be.
Monday, September 14th 16:21

Nikki Hamilton Did not shower or change out of my PJ’s today, however I managed to brush my teeth. I’ll consider my first day as a stay-at-home mom a success.
Monday, September 14th 18:54

Paul Hamilton Every single electronic white noise or music player Calliope has (at least 4) features an auto-shutoff that cannot be overridden or even adjusted past what I must assume is the industry standard of five minutes. Unable to comprehend the logic of this.
Tuesday, September 15th 11:44

ironsoap Fairly certain @DixieGirl just got Callie to laugh. Either way, an adorable sound.
Tuesday, September 15th 11:52

Nikki Hamilton I think Callie laughed for the first time today!
Tuesday, September 15th 12:32

ironsoap Nikki: “Come on, kid, poop or get off the pot.” Callie: *FRNT*
Wednesday, September 16th 19:42

Paul Hamilton Nik: “What’s higher than major?” Me: “Corporal?” Nik: “Dude, that was Corporal poop.”
Friday, September 18th 11:13

ironsoap I didn’t sleep well last night, but not because of my newborn. There must be some kind of law against that.
Friday, September 18th 11:31

Nikki Hamilton It is only 12:30 and we have already had two poop blowouts that required an emergency load of laundry.
Friday, September 18th 12:35

DixieGirl Things we should buy stock in: laundry detergent, diapers, wipes and burp cloths.
Friday, September 18th 13:05

DixieGirl My husband is encouraging me to relax in the bath with a glass of wine while he takes care of the baby. Because he is awesome.
Friday, September 18th 23:20

Nikki Hamilton It’s always a nice surprise when rubbing your daughter’s back to stick your hand in poop. Today’s incident resulted in an immediate bath.
Saturday, September 19th 17:55

Nikki Hamilton The phrase “No use crying over spilled milk” is clearly in reference to dropping 6 oz. of freshly pumped breastmilk on the floor.
Sunday, September 20th 10:29

ironsoap I know I’m through the looking glass because I’m relieved they’re _only_ using a chainsaw at 8:00 in the morning.
Monday, September 21st 08:29

Paul Hamilton The cat discovered the comfort of the baby’s crib last night. That straw may not have been the metaphorically terminal one for the camel, but feeling that Nik may view it as the one that slipped the disc between L4 and L5.
Wednesday, September 23rd 11:24

DixieGirl Available to good home: Baby-repellent cat that sleeps in cribs and wakes up peaceful infants. Must love fur on everything you own.
Wednesday, September 23rd 12:06

Nikki Hamilton wishes it wasn’t so warm out so she could go on a walk with the baby.
Wednesday, September 23rd 15:07

Nikki Hamilton Callie has discovered her thumb. It’s pretty cute.
Thursday, September 24th 13:08

DixieGirl I’m having trouble staying awake and Callie is having trouble falling asleep. Not a good combo.
Friday, September 25th 16:18

DixieGirl Trying to figure out why the library doesn’t allow strollers.
Saturday, September 26th 14:21

ironsoap Hey cashier lady: You know what’s more helpful for my crying baby than telling the same stupid story about cheese twice? Doing your job.
Saturday, September 26th 21:02

Nikki Hamilton is feeling sad today. Not sure if it’s the result of a night full of nightmares or the fact that Paul has to start going into the office tomorrow and I will be on my own with the baby.
Sunday, September 27th 10:47

DixieGirl Starving, but baby is snoring on me and Hubs is snoring next to me on the couch. Hoping everyone wakes up soon!
Sunday, September 27th 14:04

Nikki Hamilton wonders how to get her 8-week-old baby to take better naps.
Monday, September 28th 11:47

DixieGirl When my child is hungry, you feed her NOW. Or there will be hell to pay.
Monday, September 28th 16:38

Nikki Hamilton First day alone with the baby and I went on my first outing without Paul. Thanks to the help of my awesome sister I braved Babies R Us!
Monday, September 28th 16:47

Nikki Hamilton Trying to scarf down lunch before the baby decides she’s sick of the playmat.
Wednesday, September 30th 14:40

Paul Hamilton Last night the offspring slept for seven hours, woke up peacefully to gulp down a meal, then went quietly back to sleep for three more hours. There was much parental giddiness this morning.
Thursday, October 1st 11:38

Nikki Hamilton Callie’s newest way of signaling she’s finished with her meal is to blow a raspberry at me, ensuring I am covered in milk.
Thursday, October 1st 11:56

ironsoap Hoping The Pixies, Wilco, T.Rex, Dead Kennedys, etc can loosen the children’s songs from their barnacle-like grip on my brain.
Thursday, October 1st 16:36

Nikki Hamilton I love that it cracks Callie up everytime she sneezes.
Thursday, October 1st 18:58

Nikki Hamilton You know you’re suffering from sleep deprivation when you spray your outfit with Shout rather than Downy Wrinkle Release.
Friday, October 2nd 08:03

DixieGirl Not looking forward to Callie’s 2 month checkup this morning. Many shots will be involved. And not the kind involving alcohol.
Friday, October 2nd 08:06

Nikki Hamilton Sitting in the waiting room while Callie gets her vaccinations. Paul thought this was best.
Friday, October 2nd 10:14

Paul Hamilton Wife says, “Can you watch the baby real quick? I’ll get you some breakfast.” Expecting toast, maybe oatmeal. She comes back with eggs, toast, bacon and coffee.
Friday, October 2nd 11:19

Nikki Hamilton Calliope spends a lot of time grinning up at the ceiling. We like to think she’s smiling at her Great-Grandpa Follett and Great-Grandma Yoder.
Saturday, October 3rd 13:05

Paul Hamilton Ugh. Got rear-ended by some jerk in a Mercedes because some other jerk made an illegal U-Turn. Nik was driving, Calliope and I were in the back seat. Spent the afternoon in the ER making sure everyone is okay. We all got a pass; even the car escaped surprisingly unscathed.
Saturday, October 3rd 18:57

Nikki Hamilton Callie is two months old today!
Sunday, October 4th 16:50

Nikki Hamilton Walked by Callie’s bed this morning just as she rolled over for the first time!
Monday, October 5th 05:54

Nikki Hamilton When did getting up at 7am become sleeping in[?]
Tuesday, October 6th 10:50

Nikki Hamilton It is a cruel irony that even if the baby sleeps through the night you still have to get up to pump.
Wednesday, October 7th 11:34

Paul Hamilton heard himself ask, “Did you just drop pie on the baby?”
Wednesday, October 7th 15:49

Nikki Hamilton really, really wishes her baby liked slings or carriers so she could do baby wearing.
Thursday, October 8th 14:31

DixieGirl Day 3 of a very fussy baby.
Thursday, October 8th 14:49

Nikki Hamilton The thing that made the baby stop fussing and squ[eal] in de[li]ght? Sitting in her boppy on the floor watching “The Real Housewives of Atlanta”. Paul will be horrified.
Thursday, October 8th 18:53

Nikki Hamilton needs her crabby little girl to take a nap.
Monday, October 12th 12:49

Nikki Hamilton cannot wait for Callie to be old enough to go to Disneyland.
Monday, October 12th 18:19

Nikki Hamilton Rain falling outside, stew cooking inside, cozy baby sleeping = perfect day!
Tuesday, October 13th 11:32

Paul Hamilton Four unwelcome words: “We have a poo-mergency.”
Tuesday, October 13th 13:02

Nikki Hamilton It took 10 weeks, but I finally took my first completely solo trip out with the baby!
Thursday, October 15th 16:47

ironsoap The baby steadfastly refuses to take her prescription so she spits it out onto her blanket. Naturally the cat is happy to lap it up. Rad.
Thursday, October 15th 18:59

DixieGirl Cracking @ironsoap up with the crazy sounds I’m making at the baby.
Friday, October 16th 15:59

Nikki Hamilton does not like pumping.
Saturday, October 17th 17:03

DixieGirl I’m learning that one of the most difficult things about parenthood is that someone is always ready to tell you you’re doing it wrong.
Saturday, October 17th 19:24

Nikki Hamilton I think my growling stomach just startled the sleeping baby.
Monday, October 19th 11:57

Paul Hamilton In the span of five minutes the cat barfed all over the place, the baby spit up on me, Nik had a make-up incident and I gashed my finger open on a pencil sharpener. I can’t explain how exactly, but the end result of this is: We’re ordering a pizza.
Tuesday, October 20th 19:49

Nikki Hamilton I spent the year leading up to Callie’s birth looking for a job to no avail. In the last week I’ve had two different people call me about a job opportunity. I suspect Murphy was involved.
Wednesday, October 21st 10:35

Nikki Hamilton I don’t understand how I could have slept as long as I did last night and still be tired. In an unrelated note: I did it again. I made coffee minus the coffee grounds. :/
Thursday, October 22nd 09:56

ironsoap Did a solo mish to the library with the baby this morning. It was almost—almost—disappointingly uneventful.
Friday, October 23rd 11:54

Nikki Hamilton I’m wearing sweat pants with spit-up on them and I fully intend to go to the grocery store like this. Who says new moms aren’t hot?
Friday, October 23rd 19:29

Nikki Hamilton is not a fan of growth spurts.
Saturday, October 24th 06:58

Paul Hamilton Enjoying a relaxing Sunday afternoon with my wife and daughter.
Sunday, October 25th 18:01

Nikki Hamilton My child sounds like she is being tortured when she does tummy time.
Tuesday, October 27th 12:58

Nikki Hamilton Callie is taking a much-needed nap and I am going in search of some much-needed chocolate.
Wednesday, October 28th 19:52

Nikki Hamilton Callie decided she’d rather play than sleep last night.
Friday, October 30th 10:04

Nikki Hamilton Callie really wants to be upset but she keeps getting distracted by the sheep hanging over her swing.
Friday, October 30th 15:23

DixieGirl I have never seen someone have this much dedication to fighting sleep. Why can’t babies understand naps are a *good* thing?
Friday, October 30th 16:47

Nikki Hamilton Callie aimed wrong and missed her mouth with her thumb. She decided that sticking it in her cheek would be the same concept.
Friday, October 30th 16:52

Nikki Hamilton How long do growth spurts last? What I thought was one last weekend began again this weekend. Maybe I’m wrong and it’s something else?
Saturday, October 31st 15:24

DixieGirl Trying to stay awake while rocking a baby is a losing battle.
Monday, November 2nd 14:51

Nikki Hamilton can’t believe her baby is 3 months old today
Wednesday, November 4th 08:12

Nikki Hamilton The baby had a poop blowout that was so severe the onesie could not be saved. RIP Lucky Duck shirt. Guess you weren’t so lucky.
Wednesday, November 4th 12:52

Nikki Hamilton is getting pretty quick at typing one-handed.
Friday, November 6th 16:02

DixieGirl Relaxing in comfy sweats, watching guilty-pleasure TV with a sleepy baby in my arms. Life is good.
Monday, November 9th 18:22

Paul Hamilton Overheard at the Hamilton’s: “Changing your diaper is like a rodeo.”
Tuesday, November 10th 12:05

DixieGirl The baby makes noises like a zombie. I’m sure @ironsoap is so proud.
Tuesday, November 10th 15:12

Nikki Hamilton is wondering when the growling will stop and the napping will begin.
Tuesday, November 10th 15:42

Nikki Hamilton is really hoping the little one sleeps through the night tonight. It was a cruel trick to get us used to it and then take it away these past two weeks!
Tuesday, November 10th 22:32

DixieGirl It appears my daughter enjoys it when you sing novelty rap to her.
Thursday, November 12th 12:40

Nikki Hamilton Sick mom and (possibly) teething baby makes for an unhappy household. Luckily Paul is awesome and is keeping it together for all of us.
Saturday, November 14th 19:58

Nikki Hamilton wishes she could make her baby feel better.
Monday, November 16th 13:12

Nikki Hamilton Turns out you can’t bribe a baby. If it did work she’d have a pony and a car by now, all in exchange for sleep.
Wednesday, November 18th 22:01

Nikki Hamilton Turned around after throwing something in the garbage and Callie had flipped onto her stomach. She’s slowly getting the hang of the rolling over thing.
Monday, November 23rd 18:22

Nikki Hamilton Wow, that was intense. Three hours of screaming and she’s finally asleep. I’m not counting on it lasting long. Hopefully I get at least a few hours of sleep…
Tuesday, December 1st 00:36

Paul Hamilton Despite taking an extra month to complete it, I’m disappointed that Callie’s “Zombie Baby” Halloween costume turned out badly. Once again the creativity I see in my brain and the creativity I can produce with my hands does not sync.
Tuesday, December 1st 15:42

Nikki Hamilton was planning on making homemade banana bread today, but Callie is having a rough day. Not sure how one becomes a supermom that does it all.
Tuesday, December 1st 16:32

DixieGirl I want to go back in time and punch [P]ast Nikki for ever complaining about lack of sleep. She had no idea.
Wednesday, December 2nd 08:48

Nikki Hamilton Thinking Callie will be braver tomorrow when she gets her 4-month shots than I was today getting my ingrown toenails removed.
Thursday, December 3rd 15:42

Nikki Hamilton Has it really been 4 months already?
Friday, December 4th 07:37

ironsoap Heading out with @DixieGirl for our first date sans baby. Fairly excited.
Saturday, December 5th 18:12

Nikki Hamilton 4 month stats (a few days late): 13 lbs. 14.5 oz and 24.5 inches long. She’s grown almost 6 inches in 4 months!
Monday, December 7th 13:49

DixieGirl I should be cleaning while the baby sleeps, but after the difficult morning we’ve had I just want to relax for awhile.
Monday, December 7th 13:50

DixieGirl You know what really helps a baby that has trouble napping? Construction on your apartment building.
Monday, December 7th 14:33

DixieGirl I want to stay in a warm, cozy bed all day. Callie does not.
Tuesday, December 8th 09:52

ironsoap We’re out of clean drinking glasses. For a minute, I seriously considered drinking out of a baby bottle.
Tuesday, December 15th 19:59

Nikki Hamilton Experienced my first out-in-public diaper blow-out complete with poop caked on baby’s leg and matching stain on my lap. So, so awesome. :/
Wednesday, December 16th 15:26

Nikki Hamilton Rough day in the Hamilton household. Baby is definetly cutting her first tooth and is NOT happy about it.
Wednesday, December 16th 17:08

DixieGirl Enjoying some time with the baby and Paul before he leaves for Missouri.
Sunday, December 20th 15:02

Nikki Hamilton is sad Callie and I won’t be able to accompany Paul to Missouri for his Grandpa’s funeral.
Sunday, December 20th 20:55

Nikki Hamilton All I want for Christmas is sleep.
Tuesday, December 22nd 07:49

Nikki Hamilton Callie is suddenly mobile. She is rolling all over the place. I believe it is time to childproof the house.
Wednesday, December 23rd 18:12

Nikki Hamilton Attempting to get Callie’s picture taken with Santa.
Thursday, December 24th 13:30

Nikki Hamilton is thinking Christmas Eve is probably the one night during the year that kids go to bed without a fight. Unless, of course, your kid is 4 1/2 months old.
Thursday, December 24th 23:17

Nikki Hamilton Paul let me sleep in this morning while he watched a recorded Sharks game with the baby. Can’t wait to experience Callie’s first Christmas after we all eat some breakfast. Merry Christmas, everyone!
Friday, December 25th 10:19

Nikki Hamilton wonders if it makes more sense to go to bed now and try to get some sleep before the baby inevitably wakes up, or just stay up until she does.
Sunday, December 27th 00:38

DixieGirl I remember a time when Tool would be stuck in my head, now it’s The Itsy Bitsy Spider.
Tuesday, December 29th 11:37

Nikki Hamilton Sigh. What we thought was a tooth (and even had confirmed by several parents) has disappeared. Now I have no reason for Callie’s behavior lately.
Wednesday, December 30th 11:52

Nikki Hamilton Everyone have a safe and fun New Year’s Eve! 2009 was one of the best years of my life (second only to 1999 – the year that started it all). :)
Thursday, December 31st 15:09

Nikki Hamilton Happy New Year!! 2010 started off with the baby sleeping until 9:30. A sign of good things to come?
Friday, January 1st 09:59

DixieGirl Bedtime is becoming more difficult the older Callie gets.
Saturday, January 2nd 22:13

Nikki Hamilton Callie is one month away from being halfway through her first year of life!
Monday, January 4th 11:31

ironsoap Drank a 5 Hour Energy and then kissed the baby. She’s been really intense ever since. That stuff is potent!
Monday, January 4th 12:03

Nikki Hamilton Paul and I started watching the sign language dvds my friend gave me. I can’t wait to teach Callie all of the signs.
Monday, January 4th 16:46

Nikki Hamilton Listening to the baby blow raspberries at herself instead of sleeping. I’m guessing her face is somewhat damp.
Tuesday, January 5th 21:14

DixieGirl Overheard at the Hamiltons[']: “Babies are damp”.
Wednesday, January 6th 18:50

ironsoap Having a coughing fit does not make rocking a baby to sleep easier.
Thursday, January 7th 22:13

ironsoap Much earlier morning than usual due to doctor appointment for the baby. At least I have the day off.
Friday, January 8th 08:02

DixieGirl You know who is a good candidate for vaccines? A crabby baby that’s overdue for a nap.
Friday, January 8th 14:56

ironsoap Baby had a rashy, wailing reaction to a vaccine shot today. So naturally it was the first time @DixieGirl decided to stay in the room.
Friday, January 8th 18:51

Nikki Hamilton Callie had a rough time with her vaccinations today. She ended up having a reaction to one of them and now has to get them one at a time.
Friday, January 8th 18:57

Nikki Hamilton has a cranky baby that doesn’t feel good.
Saturday, January 9th 15:18

Nikki Hamilton I love that my daughter saves the majority of her poop blow outs for when we’re out in public.
Monday, January 11th 17:16

ironsoap Today’s Patience Mid-Term: Try to get a reluctant baby to take a nap while a gang of obnoxious morons tears the siding off your building.
Tuesday, January 12th 10:51

Paul Hamilton Nik and the baby’s communication technique has devolved into growling at one another. Interestingly, this seems to be more effective than their previous efforts.
Tuesday, January 12th 14:37

DixieGirl Feeling really bad for the baby and the cat right now.
Wednesday, January 13th 10:48

Nikki Hamilton My child does not want to eat today. I never have that problem.
Wednesday, January 13th 16:11

ironsoap Dinner with friends was great. Fearing we will pay the price for disrupting the baby’s bedtime routine, though.
Saturday, January 16th 20:36

ironsoap Well hello there, pre-dawn morning! It’s been, what? …24 hours? You haven’t changed a bit.
Sunday, January 17th 06:36

ironsoap Hitting the workout room for the first time since the baby arrived. Future Paul is sure to curse my/our name.
Sunday, January 17th 12:05

ironsoap Waiting at the fish counter, wearing a five month old with questionable intestinal control. It creates an interesting bouquet.
Sunday, January 17th 16:30

ironsoap Turns out I don’t know the lyrics to very many lullabies. I’m sure my audience is indifferent, but I still kind of feel like an ignoramus.
Monday, January 18th 18:09

DixieGirl Big thanks to the dude that watched me struggle to get in the door with a stroller and didn’t offer to help.
Tuesday, January 19th 10:13

Nikki Hamilton thinks it’s going to be (another) long night. Callie has been having an exceptionally rough time sleeping this week. Both Paul and I are exhausted.
Wednesday, January 20th 22:30

Paul Hamilton Snuggly babies may just be the perfect compliment to cold, wet mornings.
Thursday, January 21st 10:10

DixieGirl Why does my child hate sleep SO much?!
Thursday, January 21st 22:00

Nikki Hamilton My toes are still throbbing after kicking Callie’s bouncer this morning. Found out upon inspection that one of them is a pretty shade of purple.
Friday, January 22nd 00:42

ironsoap It would be a lot easier if getting up ridiculously early with a baby was energizing, like getting up to exercise.
Sunday, January 24th 05:41

DixieGirl PSA: Please do not give sleep deprived parents your parenting tips based on any experiences you have had with your dog.
Sunday, January 24th 16:01

ironsoap Huh. Forgot to eat this morning. You’ll have to excuse me, it’s been a long time since I saw this side of 09:00 without rocking a baby.
Monday, January 25th 08:26

Nikki Hamilton The construction workers have the uncanny ability to begin all of their noisest work the second Callie falls asleep. Nap fail. Repeatedly.
Tuesday, January 26th 11:17

Nikki Hamilton I could watch Paul play with Callie for hours. Not sure if me or the baby is more entertained by him.
Tuesday, January 26th 19:20

DixieGirl How does one keep their child’s head warm if the child knows how to remove hats (and hates wearing them)?
Thursday, January 28th 09:25

ironsoap New pet peeve: Establishments without changing tables in both lavatories. I’m not in the situation, but what about single dads? C’mon.
Thursday, January 28th 18:51

DixieGirl It’s funny to me that sometimes Callie can sleep through an amazing amount of noise and other times the cat meowing wakes her up.
Friday, January 29th 13:57

Nikki Hamilton Of course the construction guys are going to bang on the bedroom wall as soon as Callie fell asleep. Why wouldn’t they start work on the opposite end of the house that they were working on prior to her sleeping?
Friday, January 29th 14:06

ironsoap I feel like the theme from “Cheers” ought to play everytime I walk into Babies R Us.
Sunday, January 31st 16:26

ironsoap Tried to go to a new Me[x]ican restaurant tonight. Left hurriedly after asking, “Did we just bring our baby to a bar?”
Sunday, January 31st 19:00

Nikki Hamilton Going to Oakland with my sister to pick up Callie’s birth certificate.
Monday, February 1st 08:23

DixieGirl How do I time it to have Callie try to sleep at the same time as they’re working on our bedroom walls EVERY SINGLE DAY?
Monday, February 1st 15:02

Nikki Hamilton Need ideas for free or inexpensive activities outside of the house. Callie and I are going a little stir crazy these days.
Tuesday, February 2nd 15:34

DixieGirl In fur[t]her bad news: no public restroom in said coffee shop and baby with poopy diaper.
Tuesday, February 2nd 15:42

DixieGirl There could be big money in a line of medicine safe for breastfeeding moms. Specifically cold and flu remedies.
Wednesday, February 3rd 14:43

Nikki Hamilton Callie is six months old today! Time is flying by!
Thursday, February 4th 05:17

DixieGirl Accidentally took the baby to another bar. But who ever expects Togo’s to have a bar in it?
Thursday, February 4th 14:00

DixieGirl Really not looking forward to 6 month vaccinations today, especially after our last experience.
Friday, February 5th 10:38

ironsoap Extreme sports for parents: Four hour outings with no diaper bag.
Friday, February 5th 10:53

Nikki Hamilton Trying to figure out what Callie and I are going to do all day on Friday. We have to be out of the apartment from 8am-5pm while the construction team installs new stairs. :/
Sunday, February 7th 20:39

DixieGirl Amused that I cannot tell if that is Paul or Callie I am listening to snore over the baby monitor.
Thursday, February 11th 23:18

Nikki Hamilton Pumping in the car is not easy.
Friday, February 12th 07:32

Nikki Hamilton Callie has lost her baby scent. :(
Tuesday, February 16th 22:59

DixieGirl Cannot believe I walked out of the house without a single burp cloth.
Wednesday, February 17th 14:24

DixieGirl Disappointed that a large chain like @Starbucks does not have changing stations in the restrooms.
Thursday, February 18th 16:33

ironsoap Actually considering a pre-22:00 bedtime.
Thursday, February 18th 21:34

Nikki Hamilton Dinner at Harry’s Hofbrau with my two favorite people. The perfect way to end the week.
Friday, February 19th 19:14

Nikki Hamilton We have started child-proofing the apartment. I can no longer open anything.
Saturday, February 20th 23:55

DixieGirl Can’t decide if it makes more sense to stay up until the baby wakes up or go to bed and try to get *some* sleep.
Sunday, February 21st 00:10

ironsoap Three guesses why the whole family is still awake with four hours left before alarm clocks start going off. I’ll spot you the first two.
Monday, February 22nd 01:25

DixieGirl Running errands with my mini-sidekick.
Monday, February 22nd 13:37

Nikki Hamilton Doesn’t remember the last time she ate a meal at a normal pace. No, wait, it was about 6 1/2 months ago.
Tuesday, February 23rd 13:10

DixieGirl Callie learned how to wave today. Now she waves at anyone that makes eye contact with her.
Tuesday, February 23rd 13:55

DixieGirl My daughter has the habit of peeing all over the exam table everytime she goes to the doctor.
Wednesday, February 24th 11:18

Nikki Hamilton Experience[d] parents, when did your kids start sleeping through the night? Did you do anything to help them along, or did they just start sleeping well on their own? Callie will be 7 months old next week and I need to know there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I am so deliriously tired I am no longer thinking straight.
Wednesday, February 24th 13:07

ironsoap In retrospect, taking a cranky, under-napped baby to a restaurant on a busy Friday night wasn’t our best idea. We made it happen, though.
Friday, February 26th 19:30

ironsoap Somehow got bamboozled into “professional” portraits for the baby. Fully anticipating the hard sell in 5… 4… 3…
Saturday, February 27th 14:44

ironsoap 7 month-old slept from 22:00 until after I left for work at 06:30, a first in weeks. #sleeptraining #lullababy
Wednesday, March 3rd 06:58

Nikki Hamilton Callie has decided her favorite form of communication is blowing raspberries. While completely amusing to us, it is slightly awkward when we tell her to say “hi” to strangers and she spits at them.
Wednesday, March 3rd 10:21

Nikki Hamilton Exactly 7 months ago we decided we should go to the hospital “just in case” and returned home a party of 3.
Thursday, March 4th 06:28

ironsoap It only took 45 minutes to get the baby to sleep last night–half the time as the night before–and she slept through again! #sleeptraining
Thursday, March 4th 08:50

DixieGirl It would be awesome if the cat and the baby could both agree to stop spitting things up.
Friday, March 5th 09:04

ironsoap Baby mohawks are the best part of bathtime.
Friday, March 5th 20:47

Paul Hamilton Nik to the baby: “I’m going to look for your money while you eat your hot dog, okay?” Me: “Can I hear that sentence one more time, please?”
Friday, March 5th 20:59

ironsoap Had a bit of a setback last night, but tonight baby fell asleep in under 15 minutes with practically no fussing. #sleeptraining #lullababy
Friday, March 5th 21:40

Nikki Hamilton Really wanted to workout while Callie took her nap, but it has been so long since I worked out last I cannot remember where the DVDs are. :/ Guess I’m rocking the post-pregnancy flab for at least one more day.
Monday, March 8th 15:58

ironsoap After a week of steady improvement, the last two nights have been very difficult. #sleeptraining #lullababy #wellidontneedanytrainingkid
Tuesday, March 9th 22:21

Nikki Hamilton Took a nap while cuddling with Callie this morning. Even with the loud constuction on the roof going on, it was still the best nap ever.
Wednesday, March 10th 12:43

DixieGirl Baby is asleep. Husband is asleep. Why am I still awake?
Saturday, March 13th 01:39

Nikki Hamilton We took Callie to her first Sharks game on Saturday and found out the hard way that it scares her when they score. :(
Monday, March 15th 00:14

Nikki Hamilton Signed Callie up for swim lessons. I guess this means I have to get into a bathing suit soon…. does a wetsuit count?
Tuesday, March 16th 13:19

Nikki Hamilton The weather was so nice today we decided to have an impromtu picnic at the park for dinner. Callie was a bigger fan of the grass than the bubbles Paul was blowing.
Wednesday, March 17th 22:01

DixieGirl Bedtime is not going smoothly tonight. :(
Wednesday, March 17th 22:01

Nikki Hamilton Daylight savings has turned Callie into a late bird. She gets up later every day. 10:45 and still asleep…
Thursday, March 18th 10:42

Paul Hamilton Me: “How about that spot right there? Is that some pee?” Nik: (Sticks her hand right in it) “Nope, it’s dry.” Me: “…Dude. That was some pretty savage super mom action right there.”
Sunday, March 21st 22:19

ironsoap Worst night yet. #sleeptraining #failure
Monday, March 22nd 00:09

Paul Hamilton Aaand that’s why super savage mom action is not the way to go. On a related subject, what’s the best way to disinfect skin?
Monday, March 22nd 20:01

ironsoap It’s hard to concentrate on this training while a cute baby is trying to play hide-and-seek with me. #workfromhomepitfalls
Wednesday, March 24th 09:54

ironsoap They said it couldn’t be done but I totally got the baby’s onesie off without undoing her highchair harness.
Wednesday, March 24th 19:01

ironsoap Trying to fill a weird amount of time between the day’s various activities. Settling on trying to lull baby to sleep while @DixieGirl shops.
Sunday, March 28th 12:09

DixieGirl You know you’re exhausted when you use a CT scan as an excuse to take a 30 second nap.
Tuesday, March 30th 12:33

ironsoap Trying a different approach to our sleep strategy tonight. Last couple of nights have been pretty brutal. #sleeptraining
Tuesday, March 30th 20:51

Nikki Hamilton Eight months of awesomeness!
Sunday, April 4th 14:34

Now, by my count 30% of those were about sleep, napping, sleep deprivation or exhaustion. 22% are elated, contented, excited or relieved. 13% involve diapers, spit-up, going to the bathroom or changing a baby. The rest are assorted observations, anecdotes or announcements and honestly, that sounds just about right in terms of mapping to the amount of your waking thought is devoted to the various topics.

I also found it interesting that when referred to by name, we call our daughter “Callie” 64 times in these posts. By contrast we use her full name, “Calliope,” eight times. We use the generic term “baby” 82 times.

So I’m not sure it was clear considering the backdating of the previous post, but I tried to write an entry about the first six months of Callie’s life and it ended up taking me two months to finish.

To avoid having people assume I was really that bad at math I set the date for the post to February 4th, which was when I first started writing, but I guess that throws off some various mechanisms that work to distribute my postings to places like Facebook and Twitter. It’s probably just as well; the final result in my opinion is not indicative of two months of work.

It’s actually gotten me thinking about my posting habits quite a bit because even before the intended-for-February post my previous effort was October or something. But then again I look at my Drafts folder and see entries that were begun on September 29, December 8, January 7 and so on, none of which were ever completed.

Long time readers will recognize this cycle: I write a couple of long-form articles that accidentally resemble half-decent writing and one person says, “You’re a good writer!” Then I start thinking I have an audience and I have to meet expectations which results in me thinking that nothing I write is worth the minimal effort it takes to parse my fourth-grade-level prose.

I’m also coming to realize the impact that short-form self expression has on my desire to write lengthy blog entries. A quick scan of the archives will confirm that few humans—on this planet or off—are as capable of taking a simple thought and expounding on it to the point where written words are actually capable of rending brain cells into a fine paste not unlike single-grain oatmeal. Which is why the by-design restrictions of Twitter and Facebook statuses are nice because they demand that I be pithy. But since I’m speaking my mind and getting to the point, the temptation to take that small passing thought and extrapolating from it reams of text is lessened. I’m sure you’re in agreement with me that this is by and large a good thing.

So my choices are either continue to nitpick longer pieces until I finally squeeze out something that meets some invisible criteria or I can try to get back to what ironSoap was supposed to be in the first place which is an online journal detailing some of the semi-daily events and activities to keep people who either care or have a heavy masochistic streak enlightened.

I think I need to simply learn how to lighten up about it and get to the point a little more. I avoid making promises about updating schedules because they are, simply by virtue of being made, destined to become bald faced lies. However, journal or no, the underlying intent of ironSoap was to encourage me to write regularly and that ain’t happening. So something needs to change. I know the bar for “quality” around here is fairly low but don’t be surprised if I sacrifice a little of it in the coming weeks in favor of quantity as part of an effort to avoid multi-month droughts.

They say, “Enjoy it while it lasts.” They usually follow it up with, “And it doesn’t last long.”

I’m doing my best.

Lulla-cry Baby

I’m not so good with the lullabies. They are comforting, even to me, but also to my daughter—I guess that’s just the point. Still, the comfort comes from having them sung to you; as the singer I found quickly that my memories of the melodies were sharp, the lyrics not as much. As an audience you find solace in the intent underneath the lyrics, the softly sung choruses in whispered verse. Memorization of the poetry on top is far from mandatory. So I struggle with various on-the-spot mumblings and half-remembered couplets. Often times I find myself sticking with a single refrain, usually something simple like “Kum Ba Ya,” riffing on the tune with a stream-of-consciousness sort of babble that only half makes sense. Fortunately, we chose a name that rhymes with and matches syllables with “baby.”

The difficult part of singing lullabies isn’t the lyrics, though. That’s just the part that makes them awkward. The difficult part is that many of the standards, “Lullaby and Good-Night,” “Twinkle, Twinkle,” etc are in keys that aren’t readily hit by whispered singers. I have no delusions that my singing is stage-worthy or even publicly acceptable, but I love to sing. I’ll make up silly songs for no reason whatsoever and belt them out as I wash dishes or take a shower or drive along a nighttime road. Catapulting dippy made-up songs into the air is fun and fairly easy, but trying to maintain a sense of steady melody at a low, sleep-inducing volume is… not.

Sometimes the variations of song and lyric are clearly not for my daughter’s edification. She seems just as happy if I iterate endlessly over “Hush Little Baby” but there are so many songless Mockingbirds and clumsy horses I can promise to her before I start to go a little batty. On one night in question I’d exhausted my supply of lullabies but not my child. I continued to rock her gently in my arms and grasped clumsily at something to continue with, afraid in that deluded panicky state you enter as a parent of an infant that something you are doing, have done or are about to do will cause a startled awakening accompanied by the requisite wail of newborn anguish. Lacking any true inspiration I began to improvise on a hoarse, practically tuneless little melody that was half “You Are My Sunshine” and half “Simple Man” by Lynyrd Skynyrd.

The lyrics were standard lullaby fare: Blissful slumber, promises of new days tomorrow, reassurances of parental protection, simple exclamations of steadfast love and devotion, non-sequiturs for the sake of rhyming couplets. The difference, as near as I can tell, is that instead of struggling to excavate long-forgotten lyrics from the depths of my brain, I was expressing in the first person my affection for the sleepless and thrashing babe I rocked like an exhausted pendulum. It was far from the first time I’d ever made such thoughts and feelings known to her, but be it the inherent weariness or the structure of song or perhaps just the fact that it actually worked as intended, lulling her steadily into the desired state of calm and rest I’d been working on so diligently, the result was unexpected.

I’m not, by nature, an emotionally charged sort of person. At least I don’t perceive myself as such. My default mode tends to be a sort of mildly bemused observer, occasionally drifting into moderate crankiness or a slightly softened compassion. The range is fairly short between the extremes of my moods. I don’t really get hopping mad very often. I don’t have very many moments of unbridled joy. And I definitely don’t find myself moved to tears with any kind of regularity. I didn’t even cry when Callie was born, though I went into the experience fully expecting to. It surprised me when I discovered that instead of being moved I was simply overwhelmed and sort of terrified which resulted in me entering a kind of semi-robotic state.

But in this case, I watched my little girl open and close her tiny mouth a few times, slowly, as if tasting the air around her, drinking in my song. I saw her beautiful eyes flutter closed and stay shut. I felt her nuzzle just slightly closer to my arm with the croaking sound of my stupid and now forgotten song, the tears fell.

The First First

I don’t put much stock in “Firsts,” at least not the way it seems many parents do. And okay, I have no data to back this up but I suspect it is principally a “mother” thing. At least the tracking portion of it in cute little books that look suspiciously like low-rent scrapbooks to me. If I had to wager I’d say the demarcation of “firsts” originated with dads as a means of injecting some competition into child rearing.

Anyway, maybe I should put some stock into it because perhaps developmentally those milestones are more significant than I give them credit for. To me, though, it feels like our daughter’s firsts are hardly forebears of new chapters in her life. She has consistently displayed a propensity for various actions and achievements only to promptly discard the activity once mastered as if to say, “Check. What’s next?” Her first smile, her first head lift, her first babbled vocalization, her first object grasped from curiosity (as opposed to reflex) are all lost to the haze of overwhelming change and adjustment that has characterized the last six months.

But I do recall the first time I heard her laugh like a little person.

She has a number of distinct laughs: The throaty chortle she uses when she’s amused by our games of peekaboo and silly faces, the shrill delighted squeal she uses when surprised by happiness such as a tickle or a raspberry blown on her soft little tummy, the wide-mouthed tchkkkk of air escaping tightly stretched lips and firm tongue that she does when she’s cracked herself up and convulsed into a little twitching ball of self-congratulation. I love each and every one of these laughs, but the one I love the most is the braying “ha-ha-hee-hee-hee!” of genuine mirth when something really cracks her up.

The first time I heard it I was changing her diaper and trying to make her smile as has been my custom from nearly day one. I’m not as much of a speed-changer as other dads I’ve spoken to who view the chore as a sort of Nascar pit crew scenario whose principle measure of success is beating a previous best on the stopwatch. I certainly don’t spend as much time at the changing table as Nik or most other moms I’ve encountered, but I try my best to interact with the baby as I process her waste receptacles because I figure it’s not her fault she’s too short and too immobile to use the toilet. Heck, even I bring a book with me to the bathroom so the way I see it, people need some entertainment when they have their business taken care of.

I couldn’t say what led up to the moment, but it was probably the usual barrage of tickles and hugs and exaggerated smiles. At one point though I grasped both of her wrists and lifted them up to my closely-shorn hairline and tickled the tips of her tiny fingers with the stubble. She squealed a bit with excited glee. So I pulled her arms up higher and drooped my head down a bit lower and drug her little palms across the close-cropped pate of my balding head. With a clutch of her stimulated fingers and a laugh that sounded for all the world like a delighted little girl as opposed to an amused newborn, she screeched out the now-familiar sounds of real person laughter. The sound was so surprising and remarkable that it forced a hearty laugh of my own out of me and for a couple of minutes the two of us took turns cracking each other up. Whenever we would regain our composure I’d rub my head with her chubby baby fingers and we’d start all over again.

It took a long time to change that particular diaper.

Mistakes, I’ve Made a Few

We’ve made a lot of mistakes already as new parents. Thankfully and mercifully none of them have resulted in anything seriously detrimental to our baby’s health. One that stands out in my mind is mistake I made in planning a bunch of family visits almost immediately after the birth. The problem wasn’t in the family, it wasn’t even in the visitation, the problem was merely in the additional set of worries and responsibilities that come with having people over when added atop the already crushing weight of adjusting to life with a newborn.

For their part I think our families were gracious and patient with us. It couldn’t have been easy. I read a lot and assumed from the data gathered there that the early days would be times when any and every helping hand would be more than welcome. A lot of the visitors we had were in fact there to offer support, be it emotional or by attending to chores we would maybe otherwise have let slip or in perhaps subliminal offers to assist with the baby. The hitch is that Nik and I are stubbornly, perhaps stupidly, independent. We feel a collective loathing to admit that there is something that we need help with, that we can’t handle entirely on our own. I think in a way we felt that we had waited nearly ten years to have children just to make sure we were, in fact, ready so yeah, help appreciated but not necessary.

Especially with my family it was just too much too soon. Nik and I were exhausted and terrible company. We sat around. A lot. We watched mindless TV. A lot. We fed the baby. We changed the baby. We rocked the baby. We watched more TV. Our schedules were dictated by the child we were determined to handle on our own, without apology. As first time parents who were accustomed to being basically homebodies anyway it didn’t feel so different from our normal routine, just a bit more intense and filled with 100% more dirty diapers than we were used to. What did feel different was the parade of guests. We don’t have house guests often: We’ve lived in smallish apartments for ten years. We’re the mobile ones, we do the visiting. Having people up in our space was awkward for us. We were trying to adjust to the idea of being a threesome instead of a couple and that’s weird enough, now we have my family and… well they probably felt like we were the worst hosts in the world.

They weren’t wrong.

But the mistake wasn’t in them coming. It wasn’t—I don’t think—even in us being preoccupied. The mistake was in planning the trips so close to the baby’s birth. Many of the trips were planned also to coincide with my leave of absence from work, so I think there could have been some more consideration of that to begin with. A lot about the time I spent on paternity leave would be done differently if I did it again. I’d have saved some time, if possible, to take a bigger chunk of time off later in the year. Like around the halfway mark. Like around now. Callie is so much different now than she was when everyone was coming out to see us and her. Nik and I are so much different now. I often think about how little I get to see my daughter during the week: I leave for work before she wakes up and I get a couple of short hours with her when I get home before we have to go through her bedtime routine and then I put her to bed and try to spend some time with Nik before one or both of us collapses into exhaustion. Nik does her best; she comes out to have lunch with me about once a week. She sends me pictures and messages during the day telling me about the activities her and Callie enjoy, relaying funny little anecdotes of the things she does.

I think about how most of my experience with my child was in her helpless undeveloped newborn stage and how little has been in the delightful, tiny emerging human stage. I wish I’d saved some time off to get in on that action. I wish we’d planned short introduction meetings with my family at the beginning and arranged longer visits for later, when she was interactive and funny and capable of being charmed and charming with her geographically dispersed extended family. It was a mistake, and you can’t take it back. I know the people who were so overjoyed to see Callie and us early on don’t mind that the baby they saw was minuscule and basically inert. Their excitement was genuine, as was ours. But it’s hard not to wish you’d done things differently, and harder not to worry that it might be a portent.

The Bold and the Beautiful

On weekends I spend a lot of time with my daughter. For one thing it gives Nik a much-needed break from the constant care of a baby for a couple of days and for another it gives me a short window to connect with her now that the hassle of needing to provide an income for our family has injected its unwelcome head back into our lives. It seemed long on the face of it and in fact the six weeks I spent on leave following the birth was the longest period of un-work I’ve spent since I was probably 20 years old, but looking back now it didn’t last nearly long enough.

Mostly we hang out and play at home, I feed her and change her and do all those things parents have to do with infants. But also we go out and do stuff together. Nothing super exciting like zoos or parks or museums (yet), but regular outings like the grocery store or the bank. I’ll never understand dads who think of spending time with their kids as “babysitting.” It’s certainly work of a caliber I’m highly unaccustomed to, but to me it came with the package. I’m not trying to convince you how awesome I am here. Quite the opposite. I feel like this is simply normal, like spending time with one’s daughter—even as young as mine is—was never meant to be strictly a maternal undertaking. I think it’s curious and a little sad that stay-at-home dads are kind of weird (being a SAHD, I mean, not the dads themselves) and it’s kind of discouraging that I get about equal numbers of pats on the back as I do pitying stares when I’m out alone with Callie. I’m not saying I should get more back-patting, I’m saying I shouldn’t get a second thought.

Anyway, one of the differences early on between Nik and I was that she marked out a sort of activity comfort zone for herself. She avoided going out alone with the baby, she found the tools and tactics that seemed to work for her and she resisted deviation. I, on the other hand, felt like a brave adventurer when charged with the baby’s care: I’d see how much I could integrate her with all my “normal” activities. I tried all the carriers first, I took her to places she didn’t “have” to go because I wanted to be with her and go wherever at the same time, I forged ahead with bottle-feedings and bathtimes. Honestly it wasn’t that I was or am particularly adept at any of this: But there is this thing that guys do when faced with uncertainty and that is feign absolute confidence and control. It’s a defense mechanism and you’d be surprised how often it works. Sometimes simply trying to be in charge of a difficult situation is the same as actually having a handle in the first place.

I have no idea if my brazen disregard for the klaxons of panic that sounded in my head at the prospect of extraordinary “newness” helped ease Nik’s transition into confidence or not. I like to think my willingness to try things like showering with the baby in a bouncer just outside the door when Callie and I were home alone opened the door to the notion that having a baby didn’t mean donning a leash. Now, of course, Nik is unimpeded by the existence of a child in our lives: She spends more time outside the house and outside that comfort zone than she does within.

Digression aside, when the baby and I venture outside on weekends I’m intrigued by how many people are struck by the presence of a baby. I classify people’s reaction to seeing Callie into three categories: The Melted Heart, The Panicked Soul and The Unimpressed.

The Melted Hearts are those who, regardless of their mood before laying eyes on her, will dissolve into a sappy grin. The more socially forward of this group will come up to us and interact with Callie, often then engaging me in some mild conversation, “How old is she,” “Is this your first,” etc. They’ll openly stare and try to get her to smile at them (which Callie is typically more than happy to oblige). Often people in this category are women, often older either of a grandmotherly age or approaching it although there have been plenty of guys who fall into this category as well, though none of them have been under 30. Obviously these are my favorite and Nik and I have discussed often how happy it makes us when we see someone’s mood noticeably lift on account of our baby. I confess I think she’s ridiculously adorable and I semi-shamefully admit to sort of showing her off when I’m out but I think sometimes that that weird effect dads-alone-with-babies has stunts the Melted Hearts moreso than when Nik is present.

The Panicked Souls are those who definitely take notice of a baby in their midst, but they regard her not like some kind of wonderful surprise addition to their day but as a ticking time bomb of some sort. Generally these people will also stare openly at Callie but not in the admiring way Melted Hearts do, but in the way you might stare at a slavering and obviously rabid deer that wandered into your picnic area. Logic dictates that you probably aren’t in any immediate danger, but you don’t want to take any chances. I’m not entirely sure what Panicked Souls are concerned about: Maybe it’s that I’ll whip off her diaper and start twirling it above my head like a sling, maybe it’s that she’ll suddenly break out into eardrum-puncturing wails (little do they know she reserves those for bedtime) or maybe they just think I’m suddenly going to rush up to them and tell them they have to babysit her for an hour because I just got called away to do an emergency heart transplant or rescue a litter of puppies from a burning building (what? like I can’t be a cardiologist or a superhero?) thus initiating a sequence that resembles something out of an 80s comedy starring Steve Guttenberg. I have no idea. People in this group tend to be males younger than 30 and any woman whose outfit costs more than my monthly car payment.

The Indifferent are those who try to pretend that Callie doesn’t exist. Often these people are those who are patronizing businesses without a lot of square footage in their storefronts like coffee shops and libraries. The presence of unpredictable infants in areas that are typically reserved for relatively quiet conversation is, I understand, kind of a potential disruption but I think no one wants to be “that guy” who’s got a problem with a dude carrying around his child on a Saturday afternoon. Their strategy seems akin to “ignore it and maybe it will go away.” The irony of the parallel between this and the way a child might hide under covers to avoid a scary imagined monster is something I like to savor. The mischief in me often wants to try to get Callie to take a nap in places like these just to spite the people who would ordinarily be Melted Hearts but I usually resist the temptation. To provide context: Callie loathes naps. Curiously the other large group of people who fall into this category are parents who have slightly older children like around 5-9. I wonder sometimes if they have finally exited the baby/toddler/preschooler stage and are counting their blessings but desperately fighting the hidden longing they harbor to have a baby around the house again. The wounds of sleepless nights and fearful worry for the well-being of someone so helpless and wholly dependent are still fresh, but not so much so that they cannot be overlooked or overwhelmed by the sight of a fresh-faced little cherub riding in a front-carrier with a happy toothless grin.

My Rock

Possibly the most remarkable thing to come out of Callie’s birth has been the emergence of Nikki as a superstar stay at home mom. Not that the road has been entirely smooth, far from it. In very many ways it has seemed to be the hardest transition she and, as an extension, we have ever had to make. Which was not entirely what I expected. I said last year that Nik was singularly fixated on being, or perhaps even born to be, a mother. This, I think, led to an assumption on my part (at least) that she would glide effortlessly into the role and relish it from the outset.

It hasn’t been that easy.

But, Nik doesn’t get the credit she deserves. So let me take a moment to enumerate just a tiny fraction of the reasons why she is indubitably the best wife I could ask for and why she is literally the only person I would ever want to be the mother of my children.

• Breastfeeding: Nik and Callie struggled mightily to figure out breastfeeding. We tried so many things: We saw lactation consultants, we pestered our friends and families, we acquired a vast array of assitive devices to try and make nursing easier. Nik toiled with it for almost two months and when circumstances made the prospect even more challenging she switched to exclusively pumping. This exhausting, uncomfortable, time-consuming, onerous task was carried out for five additional months all because she wanted Callie to have the benefits of breast milk no matter the cost to herself.
• Courage: A huge part of why this phase of our lives has been challenging for her is because Nik, long prone to clinical depression, has been fighting off the effects of postpartum depression. Ignore that idiot celebrity scientologist (excuse the redundancy), PPD is real and it’s rough. It didn’t help that I, in all my granite-like density, completely missed the symptoms that I was supposed to be watching out for. Somehow, though, despite what could have been a debilitating handicap she bravely soldiered on and simply met every challenge head on. She may have felt like she was drowning under the weight of the new responsibility and the struggle to reconcile the roller coaster emotions coming along with it, but she never missed a beat.
• Support: We had hoped that even after I went back to work I would be able to spend a lot of time at home, especially during the first year. But then the wheels of change started turning at work and as opportunities arose, that changed rippled down into our plans. It wasn’t feasible for me to be at home as much as we’d thought and that in turn meant that in order for me to take advantage of the career opportunities in front of me Nik was going to have to rise quickly to the challenge of being a full-time solo SAHM. She may have been nervous about it and felt like she wasn’t up for the task but she’s proved to be not just a wonderful primary care giver for our daughter but also the most dependable partner in our collective responsibilities that I can imagine. She thought she couldn’t do it without me, but it turns out I couldn’t do it without her.
• Team Parenting: I’m trying very hard to be a good dad to Calliope. Time will tell how effective my efforts will be, but while it sometimes feels like society at large is either skeptical or ambivalent of my goals, Nik has never once given any indication that she was anything other than fully supportive of my desired involvement level. She shares everything, even though she is often the one who has to carry out our collective decisions. She makes it a point to include me in everything, she sympathizes with the fact that even though she’s got the harder job of the two of us, I wish I could switch with her sometimes or even just wish I could be there more. She sends pictures of her and Callie many days. She relates all of their triumphs and difficulties each evening so I’m always clued in. Above all, she makes me feel appreciated.

This has by far been the hardest, most rewarding, craziest, most phenomenal six months of my life. I can’t believe it’s been so long already. I can’t believe it was ever any different. But more than anything I can hardly bring myself to take a breath for fear that I might wake up and realize this has all been the most wonderful if achingly fleeting dream. I thought before that I felt like a lucky man to have the family I do. I know now that feelings aren’t a factor. The stone fact is that no one has ever been more blessed than I am and a man couldn’t ask for a better wife or a more perfect daughter.

I’m obsessed with human waste. Not in the creepy I-keep-mason-jars-of-it-under-my-pillow sort of way, but in the it’s-constantly-at-the-forefront-of-my-mind fashion. I’d blame my daughter but honestly she doesn’t really seem all that concerned about it. Sure, when she’s been sitting in her own foul for half an hour she’ll express some dismay over her environment, but it’s not like she’s really interested in what it is, she only cares what it represents. I, on the other hand, care deeply about it for reasons I don’t fully understand.

Actually, that isn’t true. I do in fact understand my preoccupation with “poops” and “peepee.” It’s like when there’s that really annoying pop song that seems to be on everywhere you go, relentlessly pounding its syrupy beat and trite lyrics into your skull for days on end and finally your only defense is to give in, turn up the radio to sing along, download the track from iTunes and buy a T-shirt with the chorus hook printed on it to wear ironically and prove to everyone how cool you are for being so uncool. What I’m saying is I don’t want to spend so much time thinking and talking about doo-doo but I don’t have a choice because it keeps coming up so I can either gnash my teeth in impotent angst over it or pretend it’s some kind of scientific pursuit.

The reason it’s such a nagging constant these days starts with the diaper. I realized before we had a baby in the house that children of this age utilized diapers in lieu of toilets and I understood that they needed to be changed quite a bit. What I wasn’t exactly prepared for was the frequency of the diaper contents. Aside from the half dozen or so “pit stops” in the restroom which can be accommodated in my case by a urinal (or even a waist-high bush if it comes to that) I have about one serious visit per day. By comparison my daughter does upwards of six or seven number twos per day. Early in the morning it’s all fine and good, with much praise and odd parental pride: “Look at the big girl with her big girl poops! Such a good girl!” etc. By mid-day the tone has shifted more along the lines of “Again? Well, okay…” and by the early evening you’re hearing the sort of heavy bargaining typically reserved for International Treaty Negotiations only in this case the outcome is who has to change the current diaper and who is owned (and I quote) “Fourteen thousand back rubs and the full unrestricted rights to choose the pizza toppings for the next ten pizzas.”

But listen, if it was just the frequency I could readily treat it as an unfortunately regular annoyance that entered my mind only as necessary and then left just as readily. But alas the tragedy of baby ownership is that they lack any sort of reliable communication interface aside from a catch-all error code function which is not only excessively verbose but also frequently misreports problems and occasionally alerts for no reason at all. As such you’re left to secondary monitoring to determine the overall health of the unit and in this case it means you can only ordain the quality of the input by closely examining the output. Not that even this kind of analysis is really informative. I mean, given the various parameters described by the professionals, I know from experience you can have detailed debates with your co-administrators over whether a particular specimen exhibits problematic characteristics or not. If you want to try this experiment at home, see if you can agree with a family member about what qualifies as “mucousy” given no additional information or examples.

I can tell you authoritatively that there are relatively few parties like a parents party when a parents party gets going on a Friday night about whether this or that globule of excrement means the baby is sick, allergic to something, getting too much foremilk or is indicative of a normal infant’s digestive system. Holla.

But perhaps the most persistent human-by-product-related musings revolve around messes in undesired locations. I’m talking about pee in your hand or poop on your hat here. I like to think of myself as a fairly clean and sanitary person. I shower regularly, I prefer a tidy environment (maybe not to the same degree as some, but I’m certain more so than others) and I try to remain at least mostly presentable. But it only takes one—two at the most—instances of being out in public and finding some sort of excrement that doesn’t belong to you on your arm or shoe before you start to develop an ever-present concern that you may at any given point in time be sporting dookie on your pants. The terrible fear is that the baby may not even be around when a tragic discovery is made and it’s really hard to play off a big pee stain on the back of your shirt while you’re giving a career-making presentation to your boss’ boss’ boss without having something cute and cooing to distract people with.

I guess the best you can hope for is that they’re new parents too, at which point they’ll just be thinking, “Wait. Did I check the back of my shirt for urine this morning?”

Paul walks in. Nik sits on the floor, baby in front of her.

Nik: Here, take this.

Paul: What is it?

Nik: It’s a gold nugget.

Paul takes diaper.

Paul: This is a diaper. Augh! There’s poop here!

Nik: Well, it’s not full of candy.

Paul: No! The poop is on the outside!

Paul hurriedly throws diaper into trash. Paul rushes to the bathroom and begins washing hands.

Nik: Laughing. There was an incident.

Paul: Aw, man. There’s no soap in here! What is happening?

Paul runs into kitchen.

Nik: Hey, when you’re done running around, can you get a new shirt for the baby?

Nik considers.

Nik: Also, you may want to grab the carpet cleaner.

If you’ve ever wondered why your parents are crazy, I happen to have stumbled across the answer: They are all suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In one of those deliciously wicked twists of design, appreciable mostly by those of us who collect and consume irony as if it were artisan cheese of the most rancid and pungent varieties, the source of that trauma is in fact children themselves. The execution of this assault on parental sanity occurs upon a child’s arrival into the world and lasts basically as long as children are incapable of forming any lasting memories thus ensuring that they emerge from the ordeal basically amnesic while their mothers and fathers remain haunted shells of their former selves. As such, children are left to wonder what force on Earth could have made their parents such complete lunatics, fully unaware that the madness that plagues their own existences is in fact self-wrought.

The techniques employed by the welcomed invaders are classic, really. Sleep deprivation is a legitimate form of torture but it really is just a softening tactic in this particular application, a way to pave the road for the true torment yet to come. I mean, you can set off a bomb in a building but if you want to bring the whole thing down, you need to first weaken the foundations. What happens with babies is not a sort of constant annoyance the way you might expect where they, for example, cry for protracted periods of time. After all, the goal here is to inflict psychological damage rather than merely focusing on brute force sleeplessness. Instead the assault comes in the form of a series of intermittent wails which vary in volume, duration, and pattern such that you can perpetually be lured into the false notion that relief is imminent.

Being sleep deprived is a state I’m familiar with. Large portions of my life have been spent with self-inflicted exhaustion due to my disinterest in ceasing whatever interesting activity engages me so that I can rest. Then there was the whole graveyard shift debacle of ’07 though I’m not sure I want to pick at that scab too much just yet. What strikes me about the sleeplessness associated with newborn skirmishes is how oppressive it is, comparatively. It is all-encompassing and creates obsession in the strongest-willed combatants. Normally if you get behind on sleep you cancel an appointment, wait for a weekend or take a prescription medication to knock yourself out for a couple of days. But in this case there is no reprieve and no amount of chivalry on the part of your squadmates can rectify the situation since the one thing—the only thing—that you could not sleep through is the cry of your beloved foe.

Nik and I used to gripe before the baby was born about new parents we’d run into who would examine Nik’s pregnant belly and say something like, “Get ready to never sleep again.” We regarded these people as plankton: Unfeeling sociopaths who were menacing a pregnant woman who had experienced one failed pregnancy already and lived still in mortal fear of having complications in another. At least, she would seethe, your baby is healthy. Our sympathy for these veterans has waned considerably over the past few weeks since we realized that the problem isn’t a lack of appreciation but one of all-consuming weariness that borders dangerously on narcolepsy. At no point is a new parent unaware of the triumph and blessing their child represents, but it becomes impossible to fathom anything else except sanity-violating tiredness. “Sleep” becomes the answer to every puzzle, it is the epitome of every desire, the chalice placed out of reach that contains the magical elixir of happiness. At one point deep in our daughter’s third week of life Nik and I were watching Jeopardy! and we shouted synonyms for slumber in the form of a question, with all sincerity, for 21 out of 30 questions in the Double Jeopardy round. I heard my wife, typically the paragon of reason, attempt at one point to bribe our daughter to sleep with such untenable promises as ponies, castles and luxury cars.

Once the parental psyche has been rent under the spine-crushing weight of enervation the true damage is done via a series of carefully coordinated clandestine assaults on several fronts: There is a physical component where a series of thrashing, uncontrolled movements batter even an adult male in such a way as to not leave any discernible marks but, like tapping a sack of light bulbs with a wiffle bat, the invisible damage is extensive. There is also a more direct psychological aspect to the strategy employed which is almost criminally devious in its subtlety. It plays on the dark corners of fear in your mind by placing a sudden, almost violent responsibility on an unsuspecting civilian, tormented by the other tactics explained above and then cruelly demands that one heap atop this responsibility a freighter of concern and worry. Because the most vindictive tactic unleashed is white-hot love and devotion invading every pore with each screech and every holler. Unjustly the parent is forced to adore their invading force, to pledge undying allegiance to their captor such that instead of resisting the conquerors they welcome them, cater to them and weep to placate them.

I found myself at one point standing in the shower, broken like a once free-spirited pony and staring blankly at the soap scum encrusted wall and thinking I might let the water run cold before I could face another moment of the exhaustion, the abuse. I steeled myself, shut off the water, dried and re-donned my pajamas that had become my uniform and returned to the front where I found it eerily quiet. I relieved my wife of her watch and prepared to flirt again with sheer madness. The moment was fleeting but I gazed down at my baby girl, defiantly refusing sleep, I saw the corners of her eyes crinkle. I braced myself for the tears I knew were coming, steeling for her siren call to cleave my skull but then—suddenly!—an unexpected smile crossed her tiny lips and at once broke into the most beautiful toothless expression of contentment, purity and joy. In that instant, a lifetime of treaties were signed.

Normally I’d consider myself to be a patient person. I find there are far too many interesting distractions and means of filling the space between plainly noteworthy events to bother being too preoccupied with getting to the next. But as pertains to the upcoming birth process, which we are now 12 days prior to the “scheduled” date—which is, as I understand it, at best an educated guesstimate—I find myself lacking my usual sense of casual ease regarding anticipation.

I think there are a couple of things contributing to this but one of them is my wife, she-who-bears-the-child, who is beyond done with the proceedings and ready to have it over. She’s been an absolute champion of womanly strength and courage throughout the ordeal, from her vindictive morning sickness in the first trimester through her pelvic pain due to symphysis pubis dysfunction. It’s not that she’s annoying me with her persistent drive to have the delivery process begin but rather it is her desperate race to feel “ready” prior to that event that runs counter to my ability to shrug my way through the process.

It manifests via a series of lists, starting with the Master To-Do List. It’s relative brevity is misleading, these dozen or so line items are ultra high level overviews of nuanced projects which, in most organizations, would require several project managers, small but efficient teams of 20-30, an oversight committee reporting directly to a steering committee and a staff of support personnel including administrative associates and filing clerks. Each entry in the Master To-Do List has a sub-list which spans several pages including multi-step action items and firm deadlines for completion. There are charts which map out efficient travel routes between build sites and resource acquisition areas, which is important because all items have a mandatory environmental impact and budgetary concerns report attached, which must be strictly adhered to.

Each of these projects is intended to facilitate the arrival of our bundle of joy, although sometimes the line connecting point A (completion of the To-Do item) and point B (utility to an infant) is insubstantial and hard to comprehend, like string theory. I know I’m more of the brawn than the brains and my distinction as such was already in considerable doubt, but when you’re standing in a pile of splintered wood that was at one point a packing crate and crawling into a dumpster to mash down the contents so you can fit the 423rd Amazon.com box inside, you lose a little focus on the big picture and can’t help but wonder what a partially developed human could possibly need that requires this much cardboard.

There was a point this past weekend where Nik expressed a desire to take a break from our List attendant proceedings and for a moment I allowed a look of dissatisfaction to cross my face which sent her off into a torrent of teary incoherence. I think my performance as a supportive husband during the pregnancy has been adequate to acceptable (somewhere in the B/B+ range if one was grading generously) but I do prove to be expertly capable in making my wife cry which she typically—in retrospect at least—attributes to the hormones. I’m not necessarily convinced and hormones or no, there are few more reliable ways of identifying oneself as a class-A heel than by reducing a pregnant woman to tears. In any case I reassured her that I wasn’t upset that she needed to take a break or annoyed that she wasn’t as capable of powering through as she used to be or that I was disgusted by her baby-bearing appearance as she postulated. I’m not sure how that last one slipped into her rolodex of possible causes for my inconsideration but it must weigh heavily on her mind because she presents it as a possibility for practically everything I do, including activities that have absolutely no bearing on her whatsoever. It goes like this:

Nik: “Do you want a bite of this cookie?”
Me: “No, thanks.”
Nik: “Is it because I’ve put on weight?”
Me: “What!? No!”
Nik: “Then why?”
Me: “Because I don’t want any cookie?”
Nik: “So you think I shouldn’t eat it either, then.”
Me: “I didn’t say that! I think you look wonderful! I don’t care what you eat!”
Nik: “Because it’s too late for me? Is that what you’re saying!?”
Me: “I’d love a bite.”

Once I had her calmed down I reassured her I had only been temporarily disheartened by her need for our fifth break in the last hour because I just wanted to get the project done. She asked if there was such a thing as husband-nesting syndrome. I didn’t understand and she triumphantly parroted what I had just said about just wanting to get it done as if that were the critical shred of evidence that exonerated an innocent man accused of a grisly triple murder. I opened my mouth to explain that it wasn’t that at all and in fact I just wanted to get it done because I was hoping that if I crossed at least one item off the Master To-Do List I would be granted a reprieve from comparing shades of pink and learning the ins and outs of bottle assemblage, storage, cleaning and warming at least long enough to watch the last half of SportsCenter. Instead I closed my mouth, swallowed and said, “Well, I don’t know. But I bet I have it!”

The truth is, I really do want to have the preparations complete. My problem is that the closer we get to arriving in this mythical locale known as “Done” (Population: 0) the more immediate our proximity to that thumb-twiddling place of “just hoping it happens soon before the mom-to-be finally loses it and performs a home c-section on herself with a pair of poultry shears.” What I fear is that we’ll be the first people in the history of the world to actually have nothing else to accomplish before the baby arrives weeks in advance and we’ll have nothing to do or talk about other than the fact that she’s not yet in labor.

Me: “So… are you in labor yet?”
Nik: Pauses. “No.”
Me: “Oh. Bummer.”
Nik: “Yeah.”
Me: “Hey, remember when we finished the nursery?”
Nik: “I do.”
Me: “Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a baby to put in there?”
Nik: “Um, yeah.”
Me: “…”
Me: “So, are you in labor now?”
Nik: “Why don’t you wait at the hospital?”

Yet at the same time I’m pushing for these things to be completed because the alternative is so much worse. I know at this juncture that if Callie did decide to arrive in the next few days we’d have ample place for her to sleep, plenty of means of feeding and clothing her and sufficient material to avoid having her just poop on the carpet for me to clean up later with paper towels (we pretty much leave that to the cat). Frankly, we’ve been at the stage where we could be classified as technically prepared for her arrival for over a month now. But from Nik’s perspective there would be no greater catastrophe than having her show up without having a vinyl cutout of her name adhered to the wall over her crib, unless of course she were to arrive and we didn’t have a bouncy seat for her to sit in covered in brightly colored jungle creatures that vibrated, played tinny electronic versions of classic lullabies and emitted “realistic rainforest noises” that sounded curiously identical to a guy peeing into a urinal.

It’s just that the dichotomy of wanting to help Nik finish her list so I can stop spending my weekends feeling frantically pressed for time and the fear of actually accomplishing what we set out to do and having to spend the next two or three weeks drumming our fingers creates a sense of unease I’ve never known. I’ve never been so excited for something to happen and so fearful of it at the same time. I want to savor the time we have left but I’ve never been the kind of person to wade slowly into the shallow end of a cool swimming pool: I prefer the one shocking rush of the deep-end dive.

The other element is honestly that the impending paternity leave I have coinciding (shockingly!) with my paternal initiation represents my sole vacation time this year, and in fact represents a good half of my vacation time for next year as well. As progressive as my employer is on some issues, they lag behind in granting leave for fathers so I have had to scrounge and scrape together as much time off as I could from various channels and as a result I’ve worked for months with only a handful of standard US holidays to provide reprieve. At least my daughter had the courtesy of agreeing to be conceived last winter so I was able to take the time off in the doldrums of August. But I won’t lie: I’m so ready for some time away from work.

It’s strange to think of this as a vacation because my mental image of the next eight weeks or so don’t involve a lot of relaxation and all accounts suggest the first few months are fairly drastically weighted toward the SUPER INSANE CRAZY end of the spectrum on the Life Transitional Stage scale. But it will also be the longest stint of active non-work since I began my “career” over ten years and that includes a year of spotty employment earlier this century. I have family coming out during that period which I’m very excited about both because I’m delighted for them to meet the newest family member and also because I so rarely get to see any of them. In many ways this is the ideal work furlough for a nerdy homebody such as myself: No buffering days for extended travel, no short-term jump in extra expense, no unreasonable expectations to meet, no trying to cram sufficient amounts of organized “fun” into a day to meet an imaginary quota. Just family, friends and a new chapter of our lives.

“Are you nervous?”

This has become the de facto query directed at me when the subject of the impending birth of my daughter inevitably comes up. I’m not saying I find a way to shoehorn the topic into pretty much every conversation, but—hey, have I mentioned I’m about to be a father?

So. Am I nervous? Well, let’s see. I know that having a child can be expensive. We’re facing a situation where our typical two-income family has been relying on me as sole breadwinner for over a year, an arrangement that is unlikely to change in the next couple of years as we’ve decided it is best for Calliope if she has a full-time parent present during her formative years. As opposed to, say, some kindly old woman named Marge who collects the remainder of one paycheck after the government is finished with its plundering. I never really cared for the Atomic family model but when the math adds up… I mean, it’s math. You can’t argue with math.

Then there’s the fact that I’m in a sort of awkward career stage where I desperately need some re-education or additional training probably at a significant cost so I can break my relative salary stagnation which has been in place for about three years now. Did I mention the economy is sagging and my company just announced yesterday its third round of layoffs since I started ten months ago? I would classify myself as concerned about the financial responsibility I face.

Am I nervous? You know, this child has been almost ten years in the making. Theoretically speaking, that is. Nik and I will celebrate our tenth anniversary this October in what I presume will be a much shorter, less grandiose and significantly more anxious ceremony than we may have anticipated twelve months ago. But it’s possible that at any juncture from that date in October (of the last decade; of the last millennium if you want to fudge the numbers a bit) this thing could have been instituted. The reasons it took this long are numerous but a key factor in a lot of it was my own fears of paternal suitability. I’m not exactly the poster child for responsibility or maturity. Among my encyclopedic flaws are a severe jealousy for my personal and leisure time. Initially when we got married I said that I did in fact want children but I wanted us to have some time to be just a couple, to get to experience some alone time while we were young and not save it all until later in life. My proposal was for five years.

We didn’t make it even those five years before Nik began to grow restless waiting for the opportunity to be a mother. Few things in life have held as much appeal to this girl as the prospect of being a mom. Nurturing and care are in her blood, like she has a special enzyme that causes children to find comfort in her presence, solace in her voice and security in her arms. She began to speak of our five-year plan as if it were merely in draft form, suggesting she might put it to a special vote by the council to have the sentence reduced. It was sadly at this same time that I was growing less enamored with the notion of parenthood for mostly selfish reasons and I could not hide it from Nik. She asked point blank if I was still committed to the idea of parenthood and I had no choice but to confess that I was having doubts.

The next few years were difficult. We avoided the subject a lot, because as a couple we were happy but as a couple facing a future whose vision we didn’t share, it was also tinged with nervousness and sadness. But it had to come up now and then and the conversations were wrenching, draining. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be comfortable with the idea of being a dad. In some ways it made me a worse husband: I can’t bring myself to give my wife what she most wants in the world because I need the decision to be mutual and not some sort of martyr, but if I can’t do that, what else do I have to offer? Why even try?

It took an epiphany in the throes of the worst illness I can recall as my brain boiled beneath a 103° fever to make it clear. She was waiting for me. Her faith in me had moved beyond faith in my words or faith in my intent, she believed with her whole heart that either I would come to see that building a family with her was what we needed to do or, if not, that it was in God’s plan for us to be childless. She was willing to sacrifice her whole sense of identity because she was more devoted to me than she was to herself. Stewing in three-day filth and surrounded by discarded Kleenex brand facial tissues and empty glasses of 7Up and orange juice cocktail I suddenly understood that she would give anything for me because she believed in me with her whole heart.

I didn’t really get over the notion that fatherhood was a terrifying prospect, but I at least got over myself. I allowed myself to believe that she might be right, that I could do anything I set my mind to and I was willing at last to set my mind to being a good dad. It took a little bit more planning but everything began to get better after that. I softened on my stance and Nik cautiously began to accept that I might mean it when I said we could consider the idea of building our family. When we did finally reach the point where we were trying we conceived very quickly but our first pregnancy ended in a tragic miscarriage that almost undid everything. It was Nikki’s worst fear come true and we had no idea how to recover. It set us back more than a year, and not just in our plans for having children. Given the pain of that summer, we’ve been on pins and needles the entire pregnancy and I’m not feeling like the apprehension will ever ease. We already love our daughter so much and we’ve yet to even meet her.

But am I nervous? I’ve decommissioned an entire room of our apartment from an office/storage/hobby room into a nursery I don’t even recognize as belonging to me. We’ve helped Babies R Us post a record-breaking earnings quarter and re-arranged not just the baby’s room but our bedroom as well. It now sports a gigantic bassinet thing and a tiny desk that replaced our nice office work area. Even our living room now has to accommodate a bookshelf and, soon, an assortment of bouncers, playmats, toys, cushy pads and safety devices to avoid accidents. I’m already struggling with all manner of new bits of technology I never knew nor cared existed: Carbon monoxide alarms, internal/external thermometer alarms, monitoring systems, vaporizers, diaper disposal units, car seats, collapsible stroller frames. I love gadgets and yet these devices feel alien and unfamiliar.

All of these objects have been purchased and acquired on the recommendations of the thousands of people who’ve done this before us and while I’m grateful to have their advice and opinions, it can be overwhelming at times. There are persistent assertions that we will be sleep-deprived for months following the birth of our child. People warn about the challenges of parenthood as you struggle to maintain an identity as a couple, to make time for each other and to remember your marriage. It seems daily someone reminds me that, because we’re having a daughter, there will come a time in the all-too-rapidly approaching future where I’ll have to contend with snuffling pre- or just barely post-pubescent boys victimized by some fashion or another that I refuse to comprehend seeking to gain favor with my angel and shoulder me out of the picture. These slouching bags of water and hormones will bear the full brunt of my four decades of training in the arts of scorn, sarcasm and derision to the horror of my daughter who will flee the humiliation of her insufferable parents and seek solace in their simpering arms while I rapidly re-evaluate my long held belief that concealed sidearms are unnecessary in a civilized society.

There are cautionary tales about childhood obesity, the rise of autism, developmental concerns vis a vis television watching and electronic media consumption. Not to mention the basics of discipline and forging appropriate relationships with children as protectors and caregivers, nurturers and providers that stops short of casual friendship and who-runs-the-show spoilage. Oceans of ink have been spilled, countless hours devoted on television and PTA and church seminars and parental support group meetings to cover these topics and one’s head twirls around like a ballerina on a music box to consider having to wade into this fray. There is so much to learn, so many pitfalls on the way, so many places where someone as broken and insufferable as I am can stumble and cause irreparable harm to an innocent, unknowing child who had no worse part in this than to be stricken with the misfortune of having me as a parent.

Yeah, am I nervous?

Listen to me: I couldn’t be more excited.

It’s midday, except that it’s not. In a short while I’ll be up before sunrise, haunted by these things, writing for a means to find purpose. For now, the sun is mild and there is no breeze flowing from the colorless sky. I’m in a place where I can create, mostly at will although there is accomplishment in my efforts, versions of the things in my life that have come before. These versions are all made of soft material, like shaped balloons: They are kid-friendly and age appropriate. Here is a soft, bouncy version of the kitchen in the first home I remember, tiny ripples of not-liquid and not-solid forming the swirling rings of the electric stove burners in vibrant pinkish red. “Don’t touch,” I say calmly, “Those are hot.”

I’m leading a little girl through my fabrications, a girl I don’t know. She’s very young, maybe four, maybe less. She understands and responds to me, but mostly she listens. Sometimes she wanders ahead of me and I watch her closely. I know I am responsible for her but I’m content to let her explore as long as I can see her.

We discuss the things I’ve made casually, in that adult-to-child way when the grown-up respects the young one’s thoughts and observations as if they both had something to learn. This is right I feel. There are no thoughts, only feelings with words. We spend some time in each location, having time to spare. Her voice is high and amicable, full of bright curiosity and exquisite carelessness that is not a part of apathy but of contentment and inexperience. There is no darkening of the sky but this word-feeling casts a shadow.

The place is inside a giant sandbox I now notice. The surface isn’t sand exactly, it’s not dirty and doesn’t cling to your skin or pour into your shoes as you run. It’s stable but soft and stretches wide and far. We have much ground to cover. We pass a playhouse I’ve made that is a shop where they sell pizzas. My pretend pizzas are made with syrup and discs of candy because I think the little girl will like it better than the food I made in my first job. I tell her about how they used to tease me because I slid my foot along behind the broom when I was supposed to be sweeping the floor. They said it looked like I was dancing with it, and the girl’s giggle brings a sad smile to my face. She doesn’t understand the flushing heat of embarrassment that came with being branded the Broom Dancer. She does little twirls around the oven I created for her, holding the soft pretend broom high above her head so it whirls and blurs like a yellow helicopter blade. I don’t use the lesson opportunity to teach her about humiliation. We have time, but we need to move on.

We pad through the supple sand-like powder and she stops now and then to sit in it and run it through her fingers. I sweep it up and create another moment for her, before her eyes while she squeals with delight and claps her tiny fingers together. It is a mostly dry creekbed or man-made inlet, I was never sure, reproduced here as a model, a tiny play set in 1/64th scale. A path runs along the levee on either side, which people use for bicycle riding or jogging when the weather is nice. I top it with some paper doll people walking funny little origami puppies and the girl picks one up and says, “Aww. Doggie!” I feel words that say I had a doggie once but I don’t remind her of that. She moves the dolls along the path, echoing the memories of Saturday mornings. I don’t tell her of the time when a girl—not significantly older than she is now—told me on my birthday that she wanted to be with someone else instead and how I walked along this path in the pouring rain for what felt like hours, mixing tears with the icy drops until my jeans were soaked and my shoes squished with each step. I don’t tell her that. I don’t tell her how, a few years later, I would return to this same pathway with a different girl and tell her that after all we’d been through it wasn’t enough and we needed to go our separate ways. I leave out all of it, including the part where I just walked away, leaving her crying and alone. Without knowing that, she won’t know how it hurts to be on either side of heartbreak or how ashamed one can feel of their own actions.

The time passes and does not pass. The sky never changes, the invisible sun never sets. We must keep going, though we need not rush. We arrive after a time at the place I’ve been dreading. I’ve made for her a safe model of one of my favorite roller coasters. It has slides where the dips should go and cushy merry-go-rounds instead of frightening loop-the-loops. The colors are shimmering blues and candied greens. She pushes ahead of me, eager to try. “This was the first ride I ever wanted to go on,” I tell her, having to raise my voice to be heard over the distance. I can’t tell if my words are carrying across the landscape that separates us or not. She runs through the playground I’ve made for her in the essence of my favorite amusement park memory and she laughs. She looks ahead and runs further still, seeing more amusements re-created by me. I know something about these, but I can only hurry to catch up.

She crawls through tunnels and tumbles down ramps and gentle, padded inclines. She seems so far away and I cannot seem to cover the ground. She stops, and faces me. It looks like she’s half her size from this far away and I feel-think I’ll never catch her. She asks me a question although maybe it isn’t spoken: “What’s this one?”

I look carefully and tears fill my eyes, though I blink them back quickly and hope she can’t see from way over there. “That’s the ride I’m afraid of,” I tell her. She looks carefully at what I made, a shallow pool of bathwater, warm and welcoming, with tablets of floating foam in the shape of daisies. She skips along them, ever further out of reach. I want to tell her not to fall in. To be careful, but she won’t hear me now.

“Well I’m not afraid,” she says proudly.

I look ahead and I see what I didn’t want to have to face. It’s an opening in the sandbox, a ring of rubberized safety padding surrounding a pit. There is a cover over the pit, painted in yellows and blue zigzag designs like a ball you might buy from an enormous bin at a discount store if you could get one out without making the whole pile come down like an avalanche and bouncing across the tiled floor. The cover is a half-dome, hinged and creased across the diameter so it can retract and open. I don’t want it to open, but it will. It is.

Blue light pours from within, splitting the seam created by the widening gap between hemispheres and the girl looks at it, head tilted slightly in wonder. Tears roll down my face and I ignore them because she can’t see me anymore, she won’t look back, I know. I plead-feel Please don’t look inside and I sink to my knees. Inside is the world. Inside that passage, that pit, is danger. I’m afraid, because I’ve been there and I know. I’m afraid because I want to scream to the girl that we have to go back. I even try making something for her, something to distract her, something to get her to return to my side. I know she won’t, and I’ve forgotten how to create. I drop to my hands, needing the support, my head falls forward and I weep.

Please, no. I forgot to warn her.

She is silhouetted, black against the blue light, and my tears blur the edges until I wake.

I apologize for the delay. ironCast Episode #6 has run afoul of some technical and scheduling hitches, but it should be up before the end of the weekend or Monday morning at the latest. I’m also working on a few more actual, you know, blog posts which will be available when they are finished. Considering all things that could be later this weekend or it could be July 2010, honestly. I am doing what I can, within reason.

However, if it helps to tide you over I was finally able to get ironCast up onto iTunes. If you use the program and wish to subscribe to the ‘cast that way, you can use this handy link to find the show and simply hit the “Subscribe” button whereupon your favorite media player will automagically download the freshest content for you as it becomes available.

I’m not sure why I’m encouraging you not to visit my website, but since I don’t bother to assault you with advertising, I stand to lose nothing. Anyway, if you do happen to visit our iTunes page, please be a dear and review the show or at the very least rate it so we have some vague notion of how we’re doing. At this point for all we know we could be bringing shame and dishonor to our families—a curse which will last for generations—or we could be poised on the cusp of a lucrative XM/Sirius radio deal, lacking only the proper tinder to start the flames of a grassroots groundswell if I may be permitted to combine several clichés and metaphors in a cement mixer. What I’m saying is that without feedback of some sort, you have no one to blame but yourselves.

“Turn left here.”

I glance over my shoulder and note the impenetrable wall of traffic. “Uh, no can do.” I coast into the intersection and look forlornly through my driver’s side window at the road I should be on. A scowl of annoyance folds my cheek and I heave a sigh. “Well, I guess I can swing around at the next light.”

The next light is a No U-Turn intersection. I’ve already committed to the turn lane by the time I realize this, so I take the left anyway and figure I’ll just make another left on the other side of the overpass and come back ’round to my initial destination. Of course there is no left turn possible so I stay in the furthest left lane that I can, hoping soon some light will allow me to reverse direction and get back on track. I am reminded of my dad, whom we’ve occasionally teased with names like “The U-Turn King.” Yes, karma, I see you over there in the corner. Ha ha. Very funny.

“Hey,” Nik remarks, “I think this street is the one you were trying to turn left on originally.” As I breeze past the crosswalk I duck my head and look up at the rapidly passing street sign and, yes, this is the street I originally missed turning onto, obviously it had curved sharply right after the intersection and now ran parallel to the initial road.

“Perfect,” I say.

The next nine minutes involve sixteen left turns, two U-turns and a punched steering wheel (okay two punches were attempted but I’m such a poor executor of my frustration only one of my blows actually lands on the wheel which is half a foot directly in front of me), but at last we’ve found the correct road—and the correct direction, which was a point of consideration I hadn’t thought would play a particularly strong role but proved to be nearly as vexing as locating the proper street. I silently say thanks for my wife’s insistence that we leave the house with time to spare, “just in case.”

I consider what peculiar decisions we’ve taken to arrive at this point in time and space and trace it back to Nik’s central neurosis. It’s like this: We had an ultrasound which confirmed the gender of our baby (a girl) six weeks ago. They took a picture from an unflattering angle off the monitor with an arrow pointing between her legs and typed across the image, “It’s a Girl!” It’s one of the many things that will only fly (with me) for a very brief window of time. Anyone expressing this much fascination with my daughter’s reproductive organs beyond that had better come equipped with an expensive diploma, a stethoscope and a healthy fear of lawsuits, hedge clippers and firearms. But Nik has a sort of casual paranoia: She doesn’t concoct elaborate scenarios in which aliens kidnap her or governmental bogeymen plant tracking devices in her toenails, she prefers to presume that cosmic forces plot against her in an effort to thwart her shopping trips and decor decisions. In this case she’s convinced that we require independent verification of our unborn child’s sex or she will refuse to purchase needed items, register for gifts or accept charity on the (let’s face it) 50/50 shot that the doctors are incorrect.

Which is what has us traveling this twisty maze of unfamiliar streets, looking for the offices of a private ultrasound technician specializing in—ahem—state of the art 4D ultrasounds. The term 4D is something that would probably only get a pass in the logic-adverse world of commercial prenatal products and services. The real fourth dimension is a spatial construct separate from the commonly understood planes of height, width and depth which is described as reasonably as the concept can be in this mind-fracturing article. I think what the marketers mean in this case is that the imagery incorporates the fourth dimension of spacetime which is linear progression via chronology. In other words, the images are arranged in a sequence. Never mind that this is classically defined as, you know, video. I guess it just doesn’t have that same cutting-edge ring to it.

These sorts of establishments offer a variety of services, not unlike studio photographers, only with extra-womb shutterbugs you have to find particularly seedy providers before you encounter the analog to the “genitals only” package. They are intensely specific about this option, including several blocks of disclaimer verbiage in assorted font sizes reminding customers that even an accidental glimpse of the baby’s head, neck, chest or face region is likely to cost upward of $200 additional dollars in service fees. As I settle into the longer stretch of non-highway road on the route I wonder what sort of trickery they plan to employ to prevent us from catching a glimpse of our daughter (?). What if the arbitrarily selected placement of the ultrasound wand happened to be right above her (?) face? They wouldn’t really charge us extra just because the baby was trying to use my wife’s navel as a periscope, would they?

I decide, as is my cynical tendency, they most definitely would. I try to gently prod Nik to get the child to turn around or something. “Where do you think her head is?” I ask casually, breaking the relative silence.

Nik shrugs, she’s still staring at her handwritten instructions. We’re a pretty wired family but we’re notoriously bad about keeping our printer stocked with ink, so we spend a lot of time looking up directions online and copying them by hand onto the backs of envelopes or torn receipts. I let the question linger in the air. She finally looks up. “Huh?”

“Do you think she’s facing toward your front?” I ask, still keeping my voice suave.

“I dunno, I guess so.”

I consider this. “So you think he’ll probably start toward the bottom of your stomach like the OB/GYN? Or do you think he’ll go for a top-down approach?” I’m thinking of the diagrams in a number of books I’ve thumbed through which always depict the infants sort of heads-up until it is time for the labor/delivery process during which they seem to execute a precision half-gainer with a twist. She regards me like a pet owner who just watched their dog run facefirst into the screen door after barely getting the sliding glass door clear.

But before she can chide me she glances out the window and realizes that the scenery has changed and she quickly examines her note. “Whoa, it’s around here somewhere,” she says. I look out the window, searching for a reference address. Rather than noting any street digits, I’m distracted by the black glare of the telltale signs of Bad Neighborhood: Bars line every window, graffiti extends beyond the typical suburban targets like open sound walls, bus stops and public school portables, spilling onto traffic signs, parked cars and unlucky pedestrians. The street lights have dimmed to a dull yellow, the universal color of warning and I begin to process what she just said in the context of what my fight-or-flight reaction is relaying to me now.

“It’s here?”

“Yeah, well the website says it’s not the nicest location. You know, so they can keep the costs down.”

“They keep costs down by squatting on Skid Row?” I can practically feel her scowling at me.

“Oh!” Her death gaze is cut short by a glimpse of a passing address. “It should be right… around…” her finger points out the window like a divining rod trying to find a lock. “Here!” I slow my approach and make the right hand turn into what must be the smallest parking lot ever designated as such. It contains one ’87 Oldsmobile Cutlass and is already full. There is a razor thin pathway leading toward the back of the building with a sign clearly punctured by multiple drive-by shootings indicating additional parking is available through this alley/ambush bottleneck.

The building itself is a fleabag hotel that has been converted—my guess is illegally—into a business park. The tenants include two bail bond operations, a head shop (hours: M, Th from 11:00 am – 3:45 pm) and the local NA chapter, who are currently holding a meeting. The ultrasound place is on the lower floor, street side in what I’m beginning to think of as the “killzone” for any marauders or other passing brigands. I’m trying to execute a three-point turn at a safe 45 mph while Nik is calmly gesturing toward the canal of death, deeper into the inky blackness of urban nightmares. “Looks like we’ll have to pull around back.”

I can’t bring myself to actually stop the car, so I speak quickly, “This place is a hovel. We are going to die here and our tale will serve as a grim warning to future generations.” This is my protest, but I note with chagrin that I haven’t been able to avoid actually directing the car down the alleyway. At the back side of the building is another parking lot in the loosest sense of the word. It is an enclosed and dimly lit cul-de-sac crowded with stolen cars and derelict RVs whose windows glow with ethereal lights in sickly green hues. The sort of mad street chemistry being conducted behind those filthy panes of shatterproof glass by bearded urban hillbillies frosts me with a deep marrow chill, like filling my bones with Icee™. Crowding the limited space available are looming trees, bristling with sniper’s nests and camouflaging the night’s sinister soldiers.

“There’s a spot,” Nik chirps brightly.

I pull into the stall and begin to hurriedly collect anything that might be of value—anything loose, essentially. I’m glancing out the windows, praying the automatic interior light timer will hurry because as it is we’re a virtual Victim Beacon, broadcasting our location with searchlights and highlighting our lack of defensive weaponry with fiber optic sandwich boards. Nik looks over at me, my arms laden with personal electronics, spent checkbooks, car chargers, pens, anything shiny that might reflect light and draw the villainous eye of a thug on patrol through his favorite hunting grounds. Sweat beading on my brow, she crumples her lip as if she was seeing me for the first time for what I truly am: A five-foot-seven banana slug. “Let’s just go,” she says with a heaving sigh of exasperation. A sound pierces the darkness which I immediately attribute to gunfire but upon further reflection…

“Was that… cannon fire?” I can honestly say I never expected to be dragged by my earlobe through a parking lot by a pregnant woman. Oh the places you’ll go, indeed.

The door to the destination is open, but the lights are off. Also open is the door to the meeting in the next suite which I thought originally was for NA but turns out to be Serial Killers Anonymous, a lesser known organization. The gathering of greasy-haired outcasts thumbing something rigid and slender outlined just beyond the threshold of recognition in their jacket pockets, talking to their curtains of hair with sharp bird-like movements of their heads is peppered with beefy tattooed convicts proudly displaying an impressive array of improvised blade scars across their arms and faces. Their heads turn in unison as we pass, regarding this pasty suburban couple with the same intensity as a pack of starving jackals watching a flat-tired butcher delivery van. Our options are to brave the unknown darkness behind the portal that represents what I can only assume is our final destination or stand out here testing the efficacy of the 12-step program.

“Come in, come in,” a voice creeps from the darkness, “I’ve been expecting you.” I’m having trouble placing the accent, and Nik and I shuffle nervously into the dim room, sort of egging each other on. A form moves toward the back of the suite and my eyes adjust enough to make out a shadow pulling away from the pale glow of a laptop monitor. There are flashes of color and motion just visible via the insubstantial orange light that barely filters through the slits in the closed blinds. It doesn’t seem like the form really moves, it more appears at our side, and the light clicks on.

Our host is an eastern European man, maybe mid-forties. He’s suddenly wearing a hunting-safety orange vest over a set of blood red scrubs, where a moment ago I swore he was wearing some sort of hood or at least a cloak. After another second of consideration I decide I’m not much comforted by the notion of red scrubs and I examine the extremities of them, the wrists and cuffs, to see if perhaps they were once white and only appear to have been intentionally dyed red. He’s swarthy and has a scruff of salt and pepper across his chin and neck, but I notice with some alarm that his eyes are solid black and even under the unforgiving illumination of these florescent bulbs, they reflect no light. “So, what are you here to see?” he asks cordially. I finally recognize the accent: Transylvanian.

Nik explains to him that we want to verify the baby’s gender. “You didn’t get an ultrasound from your doctor?” he asks. Looking a bit embarrassed, Nik shuffles her feet.

“We did,” I say, my voice croaking a bit as I realize my mouth is entirely devoid of saliva. “We just want to be sure.”

“Okay,” the Count Ultrasound says. Only he doesn’t say it in that “yes I understand” sort of way, he says it like, “Ooookay,” in that “hey it’s your money, weirdos” kind of way. I’m a little insulted that a vampire masquerading as a medical professional would be judging us. He continues, to Nik, “Up on the table, please.”

From across the room I’m suddenly acutely aware of several things:

1. My wife has a long and particularly luscious neck.
2. Count Ultrasound has positioned himself between her and I.
3. I left my ghoul-hunting equipment at home.

I look around the room, trying to find any sort of object I could use as an improvised weapon, thinking, “What would MacGuyver do? What would Jason Bourne look for?” The most useful result of this exercise is that I confirm for the record that I am neither MacGuyver or Jason Bourne. Less useful but interesting is the room itself. Aside from the standard issue exam table, there is a high-quality color printer, a pretty state-of-the-art HP laptop which is really a desktop replacement, a massive screen stretched across the far wall, a decent projector mounted on the ceiling and an ultrasound machine that makes the one in Nik’s OB/GYN’s office look like it could have been used to confirm the gender of Caesar Agustus.

In no way am I up on any of the current models in the ultrasound sector, but I know snazzy techno-gizmos when I see them and this thing is pretty smokin’. It has its own flat panel high resolution display and as Count Ultrasound begins, he dims the lights in the room and suddenly the inside of my wife is projected wall-sized in HD on the screen from the projector. The picture quality, compared to the images I felt I was getting pretty good at deciphering, is astounding. Within moments I feel like I can start to make out tiny details I would never have distinguished from the blizzard of static at the OB’s office. I swear I can see a tiny wrinkle in the knuckle of a baby toe when suddenly the Count snaps the light back on and announces, “We’re done. It’s a girl.”

I think he’s joking, but it’s hard to tell from the back of his head. Nik looks like she’s near to tears so I’m guessing maybe he’s serious? The moment lasts too long and Nik and I exchange a few glances before she catches the Count’s look again and seems to soften. He says something I don’t hear and Nik laughs her nervous fake laugh while he replaces the wand on her belly and begins again. Oh, it was a joke. You know that one where you make a pregnant woman almost cry?

Hilarious.

The clarity in this ultrasound is remarkable and indeed after a couple of seconds to get my bearings I can clearly identify the parts he’s highlighting with the mouse cursor on the screen: This child is indeed my daughter. He flips the mode over to the dubiously referenced 4D mode which mostly seems to fill in the x-ray style ultrasound with an amber coating to give it some solidity and creates a more photographic effect. Indeed, if you wish to be charged for the privilege, the technique can give you something that approximates the child’s first picture in which you can make out a lot of their features. I’m impressed by how deftly the Count avoids the child’s face so as to avoid granting us any freebies, but I also note that Nik seems to be subtly shifting herself underneath the wand, trying to trick him into rolling over the child’s head area and giving us a peek.

Without thinking I avert my eyes, afraid Nik’s gambit will be successful. Sure, there is the ridiculous reflex based notion which puffs out its tiny chest in the face of logic and suggests that if I somehow don’t see the baby’s face I can’t be charged for it but there is something else driving my actions. It’s subtler and less prone to metaphor. Obviously I’m curious. I’ve waited for months for this child, my offspring, to reveal herself and yet there are still months to go. I have a documented fascination for technology and the wonder of using it to simulate magic.

But something in me feels like there is a magic in itself to that moment so poorly captured in novel and film where a child is drawn crying from its mother and placed into the waiting arms of its parents. It is like meeting a pen pal for the first time and finding the love you hoped and feared you might have for them is in fact real and consumes like a fire. It’s like opening the Christmas present you’ve pretty much got figured out and finding your hopes confirmed but being even more grateful for it than you thought you’d be. It’s the surprise that isn’t a surprise, something so marvelous that it can’t be cheated, it must be experienced. And at this moment I’m feeling like I risk ruining it before I’ve had the chance to know what it’s like.

Listen, the truth is, I chicken out.

But honestly it doesn’t matter because the Count is crafty and he shifts the wand with Nik like a bemused dancer dealing with an overly confident upstart. I guess he’s played this little game before and I realize he’s got the upper hand regardless: Even if Nik is successful he can always just charge us for it and emerge the victor one way or the other. I try to telepathically relay to Nik that the deck is stacked. Whether she receives the signal or comes to the conclusion on her own, she gives up.

We spend a few more minutes checking toes and seeing the baby kick, which gives a peculiar reference to the little bumps we’ve felt for weeks now. After a bit the Count stands up and snaps on the light (again), provides Nik with a towel so she can clean the goop from her stomach and fusses with his high tech equipment for a bit before dangling a parcel containing a CD-ROM and a couple of high-res printouts in front of me but just out of reach like an older brother. He’s expecting payment and suddenly I realize we haven’t discussed methods. Does he accept cash only? Checks? Discover card? Plasma by the pint?

Our exit is awkward, we’re reluctant to turn our back on him but similarly hesitant to return to the mean streets, especially carrying an unmarked package which could entice a particularly curious brand of mugger. My voice wavers as I speak intentionally loudly about our recently acquired baby pictures, clarifying that we aren’t transporting rare electronic devices or precious stones or anything else appealing to any hooligans who may be lurking just out of site, in wait. We reach the car out of breath although neither of us recalls running or even walking fast. I leave a sixteen foot streak of black rubber on the asphalt in my haste to depart and I glance into the rearview mirror one last time, confirming we don’t have a tail. A quick look to my right finds Nik, pale faced and clutching the package of images of our unborn daughter’s genitalia, an approving grimace on her lips.

“So,” I ask, trying to regain my cool exterior, “Want to try the best ice cream in the world?”

00:01

I guess I should have realized what she was doing earlier. Silly superstitions fluctuate between amusing and annoying for me, but I don’t have a problem with little games. That she kept her half of the wishbone in a plastic baggie was the tip-off I should have received, but it wasn’t until just this moment that the light bulb had sputtered on.

As an aside, I can’t figure out the phrasing “The light bulb went off” as a metaphor for sudden realization. Given cartoon parlance, the idea always illuminates the bulb, which means if the bulb “went off,” the idea would be extinguished. An odd turn of the language, that.

Anyhow, here I am with a mouthful of kettle chips, staring idly into space while the open refrigerator cools my jeans because I’m functionally a very thin-haired teenager, waiting to sip Diet Coke directly from the two-liter once I’ve had a chance to swallow and I’m staring at this bit of chicken carcass magnetized to the fridge door and I get it. She wished that she was pregnant.

And it worked.

Or, at least, it proved to be a timely guess. Or an accurate hope. Or… something. For a few seconds I marvel that most of the truth or effectiveness of hope and wish and prayer and astrology and superstition and faith and optimism is basically attribution: If you think of it as coming from fate or God or cosmic forces or planetary alignment or positive thinking or the power of the human spirit it works either way. Did a wish on a chicken bone give my wife what she’s always wanted? Did God answer her prayers? Did nothing more magical than raw biology occur? It just depends on how you look at it. Maybe, technically, the answer is just “yes.” Maybe God granted the chicken bone the power to grant the wish that provided the sperm with the strength to push that last tiny bit.

Maybe it’s just easier to say she got her wish.

00:02

The fleshy woman had a security camera poised above and just to the right rear of her desk, overlooking both the semi-awkward chairs that served to provide customers with a modicum (a very small modicum) of comfort and, my paranoid mind assumed, to evaluate her level of worktime dedication. Pre-registering for admission to the hospital is kind of surreal when you think about it. Delivering a baby is one of the very few times you plan on visiting the hospital. I guess that’s why most people hate hospitals: They always interrupt your life.

Really, we love hospitals. They give us a place to go when these mysterious bodies of ours malfunction. I tried to imagine living in a place where hospitals weren’t standard issue in every township and populated region. It looked a lot like the scary places on Earth that I’m hesitant to visit. Maybe because they lack hospitals.

Jowls swinging, the woman “hoom”ed over our paperwork, flitting thickly back and forth between the forms (which weren’t that detailed) and her computer screen, which was turned opposite us so the security camera could stare watchfully at it but we could not. We listened to the clack of her fingernails on the keyboard for what felt like too many seconds while she let the semi-silence drag on. Finally she looked up, “Can I have a copy of your driver’s license, please?” Nik complied readily. “Did they take a copy when you were in here before?”

Nik looked puzzled but replied, “Yes.”

Heaving her bulk out of the chair (an unnecessary motion, I presumed, the office was scarcely big enough for her full frame, much less the three of us; I couldn’t imagine what she would need to do that one of us couldn’t handle by lifting an arm six inches to any side) she slapped the ID cards into the copier tray. “Well, no harm in copying them again, I suppose.”

I almost spoke up, suggesting that having unaccounted for copies of her driver’s license and insurance card lying around was indeed capable of causing harm, but I decided to stow it. Instead I marveled at the unfunny cartoon magnet on her overhead cupboard and the gigantic teacup-and-saucer shaped pots that crowded the room with poorly maintained plants.

The copier whirred and she lifted the lid too soon, half-blinding herself with the scanning light. I suppressed a laugh, mostly for Nik’s benefit, and watched as she handed the cards back to my wife, beaming with her un-self-conscious radiance in the stiff chair next to me. Before the woman flopped herself back into the chair I already knew that she was going to tell us we were all set to enter the hospital in less than 100 days for the first steps in the journey that would alter everything forever. I wished the confirmation was being delivered by someone with less Mary Kay brand lipstick on her teeth.

00:03

It had been a pretty tough morning. My first-shift partner had taken a personal day and things were breaking all over the place, causing me to get overwhelmed and stressed out. I griped over IM to Nik and she almost immediately asked if I wanted her to come out and have lunch. It was well past my lunchtime but having no relief/backup that day, I hadn’t actually taken a break. I didn’t really want her to go out of her way, but I did want to see a friendly face so I said if she wanted to come out, I would like to see her.

After the break she had decided to just stay and hang out until my shift was over. Fortunately the rest of the day had been much smoother than the first half and now we were discussing dinner options while I tried to pack up my equipment and hit the road. When Nik and I talk about what to eat for dinner the conversation often goes something like this:

Me: “What do you want for dinner?”
Nik: “I dunno, what sounds good to you?”
Me: “Meh, I could go for pretty much anything. Did you have any preferences?”
Nik: “Well, I’m starving but nothing sounds good.”
Me: “How about something we don’t get very often?”
Nik: “No.”
Me: “How about something we eat all the time?”
Nik: “I’m sick of all of that.”
Me: “So… if you could eat anything in the world right now, what would it be?”
Nik: “I don’t know. I can’t think of anything. Give me some suggestions.”
Me: “Like, more suggestions than I already have?”
Nik: “You didn’t give me any suggestions.”
Me: “I should start carrying around a tape recorder.”
Nik: “You should start carrying around some sandwiches.”
Me: “…”
Nik: “…What about sandwiches?”

But in this case we were also saddled with an additional issue of being close to our budget limit for food, plus we were in an unfamiliar location and had two cars. We had a meal at home that we were prepared to eat but it was at least 45 minutes until we could get there and then another probably hour until it would be ready. I suggested we push the budget anyway and get some food.

As we exited the building Nik said she didn’t want to do that because she’d feel guilty the whole time she ate, knowing it was bad for our budget, and she wouldn’t enjoy it. I said that was okay and we could think of something else. We walked along the sidewalk that separated the lots. My car was in the one to the right, the employee lot, hers in the left for visitors. We stopped moving because we hadn’t decided how to handle the transportation. Nik was looking increasingly agitated. She didn’t think we could agree on anything to eat and didn’t even know what we could find.

I suggested we could head into the main part of Sunnyvale and see what we came across, then come back and get my truck before we came home. Nik finally lost it. Her eyes puddled with tears and her lip quivered in that sad/cute way it does when she’s trying to avoid feeling silly for being emotional. She spoke in short, liquid phrases. “I haven’t eaten since before I left home! I know we should just go home, but I’m so hungry I’m getting a headache… I can’t think straight…” Out of the corner of her eye she saw one of my unknown co-workers, who was trying unsuccessfully not to stare at the cad making a pregnant woman cry. Embarrassed now at her audience and tumbling into a self-replicating spiral of emotional overload, she clammed up and tried to urge me toward my truck to just get something happening so she could try to forget the fact that she was crying about food of all things.

I don’t always know what to do when people get worked up over small things. I don’t judge them for it, in my estimation people like me are probably too cold and reserved for this world. Frankly, there’s a lot of stuff to get worked up about. In that second with tears falling against her will onto her stretched belly (where else would they land?) as if to bathe my unborn daughter with tears wrought by my inconsiderate behavior, I made a command decision. “Come on,” I said. “We’re going to get hamburgers. And I’m going to drive you there.”

“What about your tru—”

I cut her off. “I’ll take the shuttle tomorrow morning. I’ll drive it home then. No problem!” I smiled at her, hoping to appear reassuring and not reveal that if my all-in gamble on swaggering confidence failed me I would have no backup plan for how to ease her pain. She choked on a little laugh and glanced nervously at the bicycle-fiddler, who might as well have been whistling and staring at the clouds. She blinked back the pooled tears and wiped a palm absently on her shirt, and circled her arm around mine so I could lead her to the car.

00:04

It’s really not the sentiment the bothers me. I appreciate that people are engaged with expectant parents the way they would never otherwise be. There is a certain universal human-condition aspect to being pregnant that causes a sort of softening of the edges on the barriers that people usually construct between themselves and the ubiquitous strangers who populate their same general space. It’s in the smiles from passerby, it’s in the breezy conversations that wouldn’t otherwise be struck, it’s in the sense of palpable excitement from random humans with no other connection to you than their appreciation for your contribution to our species.

Still, there ought to be some limits. In some cases those non-pregnancy barriers exist for socially relevant reasons. Nik had just undergone the most recent barrage of naming suggestions from some arbitrary, disconnected passerby which sounded more like names they would like to use on their own children than names they felt would really suit a child coming from the collated DNA of Nik and I. We hadn’t exactly kept a secret that while we were fully prepared with a previously agreed upon name for a boy, the revelation that we were having a girl left us without a solid contingency in place. Hearing this had seemed to open the door for people to supply us with useful suggestions.

It wasn’t that we hadn’t scoured baby name books and sites already. Options were hardly what we lacked. What we lacked was that sense of connection to the name, the feeling that it was the end of the sentence that started with, “So I was hanging out this weekend with Paul, Nikki and…”

Of course, I wasn’t making it easier. I insisted that whatever name we chose also had a solid nickname. My entire life the principal complaint I had about my name was that it couldn’t be shortened. It felt many times like people avoided calling me by name, preferring to address me as “dude” or “bud” or whatever because there wasn’t a decent “hey-I-know-this-guy-and-we’re-on-informal-terms” phrasing for my name. Even people who have single syllable names like Tom or Jim can go by “Tee” or “Jay.” I won’t pretend I’m upset that no one ever felt it was cool or funny to call me “Pee.”

I built a spreadsheet. It contained the names we were considering in one column, the possible nicknames in another, matching middle name options in the third and then a column each for our individual ratings: 0-5. A calculated column then tallied the scores and sorted them by which names we both liked the best.

Lots of names Nik liked I had to rate low because they didn’t have nicknames at all. Many of the names I suggested were nixed because they were too unusual, even though I selected them to be long versions of the short names she liked. Nothing scored a higher cumulative rating than 6, and I kept dropping my score on that one because while I liked the full name, the more I thought about the short name the less happy I was with it.

Nik sighed and tried to shake off the well-meaning but ultimately frustrating encounter. Since we had the boy’s name earlier than we needed it we weren’t shy about sharing it. Even that had been somewhat bewildering as people felt perfectly at ease offering us critiques as if their reminders that it made a very excellent dog’s name was somehow helpful. The process felt in many ways like a classic case of too many cooks occupying the same kitchen.

“You know people are going to drive us crazy about this until she gets here, right?” Nik asked, although it wasn’t exactly a question. It was my turn to sigh. “I mean, what if we can’t come up with a name until right before she gets here?”

I rolled the thought around in my head for a moment, like Play-Doh. “What if…” I trailed off.

“What?”

“Nah. Nevermind.”

She scowled. “You have to tell me now. You know I hate that.”

“Okay,” I said with a grin. “I’m just thinking, what if we just told people we weren’t telling anyone the name?” Nik wrinkled her nose the way she does when she’s thinking.

“We could say it was going to be a surprise!” She seemed very excited about this.

“Uh, yeah. Sure.” I’m not huge on surprises, but I supposed that was what I was insinuating anyway. “Plus, that way even if we can’t agree on anything until the day before she’s born, no one has to know how much we struggled to come up with it. They might just assume we knew it all along.”

Nik cocked an eyebrow at me. “Ah, the procrastinator’s dream.”

00:05

We didn’t anticipate much of the reality of the pregnancy. We had plenty of notions about what it would be like. Having suffered from lower back pain for several years after an on-the-job injury and even undergoing spinal surgery to correct a herniated disc (an uncommon procedure in someone so young), we assumed Nik would have lots of back trouble during the ordeal. Instead it turned out that her lower back was fine but her ribs and mid-back were what sustained the most pressure from the extra weight in front and were causing her lots of sleepless nights and frustrating issues with general comfort.

I went to the freezer and retrieved the two ice packs we kept in there, these funky gel-based numbers that supposedly stayed cooler for longer periods of time. Than what I’m not precisely sure. I suppose than regular bags of ice cubes. That’s not the point. The problem was that even through a shirt they felt like they caused frostbite. We solved the problem by arranging them into a pillowcase, along the seam, separated lengthwise by about six inches. She would then wrap the case around her side, one ice pack lying atop her belly bulge and tucked under a breast so it could numb the thin muscles overlying the ribs. The other pack pressed against her back, just on the other side of her body from the first.

The problem was the position she had to contort into to hold the packs in place made the pain even worse than without the ice. So I grabbed an Ace bandage and wrapped it around her middle several times, making sure to get up underneath the edges of the ice packs so they would stay in place, then I clipped the bandage snugly in place. It was a little silly looking, with a bandage around the middle of a pregnant woman and a cream-colored pillow case hanging off her hip like a tiny mis-fitting cape.

I finished wrapping it up and the cold sent goosebumps up her bare arm, disappearing under the strap of her tank top. “Thank you, sweetie,” she said and planted a soft kiss on my cheek, standing up with surprising lightness on her tiptoes to reach.

00:06

Instinctively, my defenses began to rise. Forcefully I kept my voice even and tried again to explain my position, but I didn’t get far before her mind came up with another point. I could tell from her tone that she was on edge as well but trying valiantly to avoid escalating the conversation into a genuine quarrel. The curious thing about parenting is that so much initially affects the mother directly and physically. Eventually I presume the biology gets out of the way and things even out, but at this point there was so little actual influence I had.

“I think you’re not grasping that this is a long time we’re talking about. You don’t have to watch what you eat. You don’t have to alter much of anything, because the baby isn’t depending on your body!”

I nodded. “Well, that’s kind of exactly my point. I appreciate the reality of that circumstance, but don’t you think I should have some kind of input on things that affect our child? How is it fair that you play the biology card and it turns out it’s a trump card?” I’m sure she loves it when I make gaming metaphors.

It was all theoretical at this point. The discussion revolved around a comment she had read on an online article discussing bad husbands in the delivery room. One example had been a guy who, when the mother asked for an epidural, told his wife, “Come on, honey. We can do this!” Universally he had been reviled but I felt there was more to it. Perhaps they had agreed earlier that they would try for as natural of a birth as possible. It seemed like he was merely cheerleading, although I sort of understood that his use of the pronoun was a bit mistimed. My contention which was leading us down the path of disagreement was that husbands shouldn’t be chastised for offering opinions about labor process just because they weren’t the ones who had to do it. Initially my example had been that Nik once told me, “You can’t hold anything I say in the delivery room against me.” I was merely suggesting that the same ought to hold true. As much duress as men aren’t under in that situation, it’s still sort of new and scary. Plus, I say more stupid things per day than the populations of many second world countries combined, so my odds of not being a fool during delivery were vanishingly slim.

Eventually we were here, debating how much input on all things parental a father could really have when the executor of those decisions was, by definition, the mother. Nik was nodding as well, but not in agreement, more in understanding. “Well, you can have input, but you can’t have the say.”

I considered this. In a phony authoritarian voice I said, “That sounds like ‘Your opposition has been noted for the record, Mr. Dad.’” Nik curled her lip in a way to suggest, well, like, yeah. I softened my voice. “Can we at least agree that I should be some part of the decision making process?”

She tried to hide the eye roll, but I still caught it. “Of course we can.”

I’ve considered the prospect of parenthood for many years at this point. I never thought it would take less time than was necessary for the child to gestate to realize how challenging it actually was going to be.

00:07

Ultrasound technicians like to pretend they’re privy to some deep magicks, enabling them some true sight when they wield their arcane implements of divination. Honestly, they just have a lot of practice staring at grainy video feeds and speaking with authority. By the time the 20-week scan arrived, I’d seen about half a dozen or more of these in the last couple of years and felt like I was getting pretty good at seeing what they could see.

It helped when I realized that what often makes it strange-looking is that you can see completely through all the tissue most of the time. I guess it makes sense if you can see through the skin and organs of the mother that the sonic waves don’t conveniently stop when they hit the baby’s body. So sometimes you can see the baby from the bottom and catch a glimpse of its tiny, developing brain. On a related subject, I sometimes have a really tough time not making inappropriate jokes. For the record, ultrasound appointments in which they examine your fetal child to determine if everything is developing properly? Not great stages for witty stand-up routines.

I could tell the tech and Nik were discussing something; the lady squishing the paddle through the ultrasound fluid, more than a little reminiscent of hair gel, was talking a steady clip and adjusting various knobs and dials on the machine. I was in another land. I was watching my daughter roll and bounce, springing her head back and pushing off with tiny feet from the lining of my wife’s uterus. She was, it seemed, playing. It was the kind of moment you might catch if you walk up to a child’s room and find them alone, unaware of your presence. They softly entertain themselves with something mundane and maybe repetitive, lost in the world of minor activities that are still new to these inexperienced creatures. She was swimming, or jumping, or just rocking herself.

It looked like fun.

00:08

When I work from home, I tend to sit at the dining room table. The desk in the spare room/soon-to-be-nursery is always ridiculously cluttered and far too crowded with other computer peripherals from the aging desktop we can’t quite seem to part with for my laptop. Plus when I’m out in the main part of the house I don’t feel as much like I’m just stuck back in my cube at work. Nik, especially these days, prefers the couch. From my station it’s nice because we’re more or less facing each other and that makes it easy to chat while I work and she does her thing, usually studying or reading or watching TV.

She has a weird obsession about her face and makeup: She claims she had horrible acne as a teenager and she regularly complains about suffering from adult acne although I never really noticed it in high school and I don’t think it’s even remotely as bad now as she makes it out to be. But regardless she made a set of rules that she lives by regarding her skin. For one, she never leaves the house without makeup. This is frequently inconvenient for me since that means there is no such thing as her just “running out” to pick up something from, say, the 7-11 on the corner. If something needs to be picked up quickly, I’m the guy. For another, she never sleeps or lies down with makeup on. That means that if she has plans to take a nap at any point during the day, she tries as much as she can to avoid getting ready to go out until after the nap.

Sometimes, this doesn’t work. We’d had an OB appointment earlier that morning which had necessitated her getting her makeup on and she had class that evening so she couldn’t even get ready for bed early. But it was clear she was fading and needed to get some rest. She compromised by arranging some pillows on the couch and sitting in a more or less reclined position, head back, feet up, hands folded gently across the expanse of her stomach.

I was busy working, head down in some crisis of the moment and I stopped to crack my neck. As I did I pulled off my glasses and rubbed my eyes, catching a glimpse of the clock to see that I still had hours left to go in my work day. In an effort to shave a few extra seconds off my work and add a bit more mental refreshment, I looked around the room and my eyes rested on Nik.

She lay there, sort of awkwardly positioned but looking almost improbably relaxed, and I noted that the sun was low in the sky so it shone past the tall trees outside the balcony, and through the opened blinds on the patio door, illuminating her face. She says regularly that she doesn’t have that “pregnant glow,” which I believe she considers to be little more than myth. I sat for the full minute, watching that glow come from both within her and shining from without, cast by the golden sun and lighting her up the way rooms do when she enters. The soft rise and fall of her breathing, the barest of smiles tipping the edges of her mouth, a cool serenity in her expression the way she’s looked since she found she was pregnant.

I reminded myself to swallow, and reluctantly turned back to my tasks, wondering exactly how I happened upon this state of unimaginable fortune.

00:09

I don’t even remember the dream, now. In fact, given that it had wrenched me out of slumber several hours before, I didn’t even really remember it as I stood zombie-like in the shower later that morning. I was trying to concentrate on the pounding of the hot water against my neck and shoulders and not on the dream. Or the memory of the dream. Or maybe just the feelings of loss and sadness that had permeated my mind since it had played out in my subconscious.

All the books say expectant fathers often dream about their own dads, and while the specifics of the nightmare were nebulous and slippery, sliding further away on the masochistic occasions that I tried to recapture them, I do remember this: When I woke up, near to tears, I asked a concerned Nik who had shaken me out of it, “Is my dad okay?”

I guess the connective thread that binds fathers to sons as they become fathers themselves is predictably strong. The notion, passed into my waking forebrain, of losing my own father was readily contrasted with my sense of apprehension at suddenly having an entire set of people who depended on me and found value in my existence who would be left behind and, ostensibly, worse off in the case of my demise. It’s all very morbid and depressing to contemplate, especially before breakfast.

I honestly don’t know how we do it most of the time. I mean “we” in the most inclusive sense, the humans who get up knowing full well how tragically fragile our lives can be, and we carry on doing our thing, spending our time like borrowed money understanding that with each new relationship we forge we create another strand in a web made of spun glass, as easily shattered by a stiff wind as by a swung hammer. The shower thundered against the backs of my ears, and I listened carefully to its drumming, aware at once how dangerous and incredible this world can be. I shifted my weight a little, thinking it was probably getting to be time to dry off, get out and continue my day.

Maybe that’s just how we do it. We get up. We kiss our families. We face the day as bravely as we know how. We just hope. It seems somehow worth it, though thousands of years of poetry and art and music have tried in vain to describe why, we just sense it. Somehow it matters. Somehow, it’s worth sharing.

I decided to let the water run, just a bit longer.

00:10

It was the sixth time we’d visited Old Navy in as many weeks. When Nik first started to show, she was pretty pleased with her body. She had been on an impressively strict exercise regimen prior to conceiving and the first trimester had been a loathsome ordeal during which Nik was locked in a tense battle of wills with her own stomach. In this corner, crippling nausea. In the other corner, Nik’s lifetime aversion to regurgitation. The bout was ultimately ruled a draw but each landed some vicious blows.

Anyway, going into the second trimester Nik had actually lost weight, which didn’t make her doctor ecstatic but I’ve yet to meet a female who didn’t find weight loss, regardless of circumstance, a net positive. I’m fairly sure chemotherapy patients at least start off my saying, “All things considered, I’m pretty happy with the results.” She was starting to show in those blissful early visits but was only stretching her waistband a bit from the bump and overall her confidence was high.

I suppose “blissful” is a relative term. Shopping with Nik is a very effective tool in building patience. For one thing, she’s almost—almost—as picky about her clothing as she is about her food. Which means she can walk into any of two dozen stores packed floor to ceiling with garments, make a single circuit through the rows of jeans and dresses and shirts and jackets and return to the entrance declaring with authority: “They don’t have anything here.” It’s like a strange shopping blindness and I’ve found through repeated trial and error that picking something up and showing it to her does not penetrate the filter.

The other part of the equation is that she hates trying on clothes. I mean she really hates it. Given the choice between trying on clothes and stuffing live carpenter ants into her nostrils, I’m guessing the first thing out of her mouth would be, “How many ants are we talking here?” Practically this results in her returning a lot of clothes. I mean a lot. Every single trip to the clothing store(s) has, in our ten years plus as a couple, resulted in at least one item that needs to be returned. Of those approximately seventy-four trillion garments, I’d estimate one-third have actually made their way back to the place of purchase to be exchanged for cash or credit. Goodwill shoppers frequently petition us to move into their region when our leases expire.

I believe it was the former issue that ultimately led to this moment. It wasn’t that we didn’t see any maternity items, but Nik didn’t like any of them. She was also trying—and you will detect no note of complaint in this fact from me—to avoid spending a lot of cash. Naturally such ideals are lofty; lacking a large or persistent customer base maternity shops have decided to price according to demand and demand is high when as each week passes the figure a woman once only thought she loathed transforms into a mocking caricature of what she’s always envisioned herself to look like on her darkest days. Given the very real prospect of trying to squeeze an expanding body into a shirt that fit mere months ago and having the result resemble those Pillsbury biscuit cylinders when they’ve been accidentally dropped at the checkout line, women will pay upwards of $200 for an eyepatch if it makes them feel a little bit more attractive.

The obvious tragedy here is that pregnant women look, to outside observers, adorable by their very nature. We are genetically programmed to have a melting fondness for the rotund pregnant form unless we are actually the ones who are pregnant. Cruelly, maternity outlet stores capitalize on this biological fact like wolves serving starving sheep crabgrass à la mode in some famine-stricken region.

I’m not sure if I was shocked or relieved to find that even during the months Nik had spent shopping for maternity clothes, stores who didn’t specialize in them seemed to be ridding themselves of stock. I guess it’s difficult to justify charging $86 for a maternity T-shirt when you have regular, non-maternity T-shirts in XL two aisles over selling for $5.99.

But this Old Navy had clearly sold maternity clothes, they had sold them to Nikki, earlier in this exact pregnancy. Now here we were a week later, operating under Pregnant Lady Logic which suggests that seven days is all it takes for an entire rotation of a store’s stock. We were bewildered to find the spot we had checked to see the exact same elastic-waist pants and mid-paneled jeans and stretchy tank tops the prior Saturday was now an extension of the Jr. Ms. department like an encroaching vine of youthful non-reproduction had overtaken the motherhood section in the night. Nik approached a woman wearing an Old Navy name tag, tiny fists balled, clearly expecting a fight.

“You don’t have any maternity clothes.”

The employee looked up lazily from her strenuous task of folding. “No.”

“No? So where are they?”

“Where are what?”

Nik’s brow furrowed. “Where are the clothes?” The employee matched her rumpled expression and looked around, clearly thinking, look around lady, they’re everywhere. I didn’t have time to inject a friendly word of advice warning the girl about how pointing out the clothes was fruitless.

“I’m sorry ma’am,” the employee said, dropping the half-folded skirt onto the stack in front of her, “but what?”

“I’m looking for the maternity clothes,” Nik said, a little optimistic now that they were finally getting somewhere.

The girl, whose name tag read, “Mindee” and was adorned with what I presumed were supposed to be floating hearts but looked more like a child’s first clumsy attempts at the capital letter B, spoke slowly, now understanding that she was dealing with a challenged couple. “We don’t carry maternity clothes. Like I said.”

“What?” It was Nikki’s turn to be perplexed. “You just had them—”

Mindee cut her off. “Yeah, we got rid of them.” She resumed her skirt-folding. “Sorry.” She didn’t sound the least bit.

I could tell Nik was ready to launch into a tirade questioning the marketing decisions and lineage of every single employee who received a paycheck from Gap, Inc. I swiftly interjected, “Thanks,” and began tugging Nik by the arm toward the front doors. She was irate and hardly softened her voice much less her tone as she adjusted her focus from the shopgirl onto me, which I suppose was the intended effect of pulling her out, though just then I couldn’t remember why.

She was practically growling: “How are you going to just up and stop selling maternity clothes? What, did people stop getting pregnant all of a sudden!? Because, oh look! Here’s a pregnant woman RIGHT HERE and she thinks this is complete bul—”

The young man clearly knew nothing about the encounter at the rear of the store. He had been given some menial fabric-related task up near the entrance and obviously had been instructed to greet every customer as they entered and to cheerfully bid them farewell as they left. He was only doing his job when he piped up in a brisk voice as we stormed past, “Have a great day!”

Without even pausing for a breath Nik broke off her epithet and brightened her own voice into the patented Cheerful Nikki Phone Chirp: “Thanks! You too!”

00:11

At first it had seemed like one of those things, odd coincidences where something could be interpreted several ways but it was just nice or funny or pleasant to pick the unlikely explanation. But it was getting uncanny. Nik had popped on the TV just for a moment to set up the TiVo to record the Sharks game that night and when she was done she had dropped it back into Live TV which for whatever reason was set to Animal Planet. The show was some random pseudo-documentary probably full of dubious science about lions. As a sort of joke she had addressed our cat directly: “Hey, Dixie! Those are like, your cousins or something. Check it out.”

The cat had turned her head toward the TV, regarded it in her cool catty fashion for a moment, and then sat down, still staring straight at the set. Nik and I had shared a laugh. “I think she’s intrigued,” I remarked from my station at the dining room table. We tried to transition back into whatever conversation we’d been having before the game had come up.

But it was increasingly difficult to ignore the amusing spectacle of the cat who, for all appearances, was actually watching TV. She hunkered down into her relaxed, belly-down position with all four feet under her. She was apparently transfixed. “Wow,” Nik commented, “It really does look like she’s watching it.”

We had sat there for a few more minutes, watching her look intently at the television, waiting for her to break the spell. Then the show went to commercial, and things got surreal. As some ad for breakfast meats or impotency drugs came on, Dixie diverted her attention, staring first down at the carpet and then gazing languidly around the room. We had watched as several more commercials aired and she showed none of the previous interest in what was being displayed. And now the commercials faded and the show started up, some baritone voice-over artist booming, “Welcome back to Animal Planet!”

And the cat returned her attention to the show. She had watched the lions, stopped caring during the commercials, and was now glued again to the set, watching as the pride stalked some breed of Elk or another. “I’ve never seen a cat actually watch TV before,” I said aloud.

Dixie shot her attention over to me, giving me one of those wicked kitty glares that suggests, in a best case scenario, murder. I lowered my voice, “Sorry. Geez.”

She turned her head back, disturbance quelled for the moment.

00:12

There was no earthly reason for us both to be up that late. I was slated to work the next day although my sickly discomfort and sleeplessness was making that feel less and less likely by the moment. Nik, on the other hand, was just having one of her usual rough nights dealing with temperature control issues, aches, pains, discomfort with any of her recommended sleeping positions and you know, the regular stuff pregnant women go through like frequent urination and being woken by hunger.

Despite the unlikelihood of it all, here we were at four in the morning, sitting in the living room in un-slept-in pajamas, flipping through the channels. She munched on some late night snack or another while I curled my lip at both my gurgling stomach and the ridiculous choice of programming that late at night. I stopped on some random sports channel and dumped the remote onto Nik’s extended belly. “You find something.”

“Hmm-mm.” She said around a mouthful. “You do it.”

“I already tried,” I whined. “It’s your turn.”

“Well, I won’t,” she declared simply and definitively. We engaged in a non-uncommon battle of the wills as Ultimate Fighting played on our set.

“See? You won’t pick something so we get to watch these two dudes grope each other and—” a contestant punched the other in the head several times in rapid succession, interrupting my thought. “Oh snap!” I cried. That quickly, the match was over and clearly they had spent too much time hyping the event prior to the fight taking place because the post-game interviews were performed as the credits rolled by too quickly to actually read.

“Who actually watches this garbage?” Nik said, not necessarily revolted.

“Well, we do, for one.” I said.

“Because you won’t pick something good for your poor pregnant wife to watch,” she taunted. I just scowled in response.

Our banter may have continued, but the fighting show ended as abruptly as the match itself and the next moments would capture our attentions and seal our destinies for the next thirty minutes to come: The thrilling, self-declared NON STOP ACTION screaming from the intro to television’s only show dedicated to the noble sport—nay art—of turkey hunting.

00:13

Fathers are granted very little opportunity to connect on any level with their children until after their birthday. This is not some conspiracy organized by humanity’s sorority of mothers, it’s merely a fact inherent in the structure of the proceedings designed by God. I guess He figures that moms are going to be the ones handling the bulk of the physical contact anyway once the child arrives be it via breastfeeding or a slobbery thumb rubbed across the cheek to dislodge particles of Cheeto, dirt and congealed oatmeal. If there is any time to acclimate both mother and child to this bodily connection, it’s straightaway.

But dads on the other hand have to work to find that chemistry. Being uninitiated, I can’t say how much effort is involved, but I know that Nik has been talking to our daughter for months now, explaining the nuances of music and expressing her love and warning about the inherent insanity of her paternal unit. I, on the other hand, attempt to talk to her and end up feeling like I’m just talking to my wife via some odd bellybutton conduit. It feels sort of awkwardly silly, not unlike the times where I speak in a funny voice as if I were our cat, anthropomorphized, and she responds back. I know in an abstract sense that our girl is in there, a real person just too small to come out and be seen and held and kissed and loved, I just can’t get a sense for what she’s like.

I’m reading a stack of comic books, Nik is half watching something on TV and half fiddling around on her laptop. Abruptly she stops and sets down her computer, reaching over quickly to grasp my wrist. She drags my hand over toward her and I resist a little because I’m weird about being made to do things without any context or explanation. She plants my palm on her belly, low down toward her waistline and pushes my fingers under the elastic of her pants a few inches, a familiar touch that would be wildly inappropriate for anyone but me.

I know what she’s doing but honestly she’s been doing it for about a week and a half now and so far all that happens is she says excitedly, “Did you feel that?” I’m forced to respond truthfully in the negative which always leaves her looking crestfallen and me feeling a bit guilty. I’m even a bit annoyed at this point because I don’t expect anything will happen for a few weeks yet and I’m not looking forward to this scene playing out dozens of times before I finally give up and fib telling her oh yes, I did in fact feel that aw isn’t it so sweet and special. I’m really just wanting to get back to the adventures of the Teen Titans at this point.

Nik is valiantly patient with me. She likes to say that she envies my own patience but really all I offer is a detached indifference to most things that masquerades as patience. Her ability to never give up, to refuse to accept anything that resembles defeat no matter how long it takes no matter what toll there may be is real and genuine. It is unwavering. It is patience. She smiles as sweetly as I’ve ever seen her and she whispers, “Say hello to your daddy.”

The kick is little more than a soft thump, a light breeze tapping against my palm. It happens in slow motion, like a tiny high five shown for dramatic effect at the end of a championship game. One single moment, one tiny snapshot of time. One blink. One kick into my palm, and Nik glows. Her stomach seems to hum and it’s almost like there was a flashlight shining within her womb, silhouetting our baby against her smooth skin. She stretches her miniscule, developing hand into mine and we embrace the only way we are allowed at this moment. I linger there, frozen in a moment of pure contentment as we connect as one. Our family.

“Hi daddy.”

And I exhale.

You may have received word via other channels, maybe you didn’t. But Nik and I are expecting our first child late this summer. We returned from the second trimester screening today with knowledge in hand that so far everything is progressing normally and we have a healthy little girl on the way.

Which of course means that soon enough I will be outnumbered by women in what I can only deduce is a karmic reversal from the circumstance inflicted on my own mother.

The significance of the pregnancy and the impending arrival is not lost on me; I recognize that there has probably been plenty of ample blogging fodder in the last few months but my silence originates less (this time!) from laziness or some sort of blockage and more from a peculiar schematic dalliance.

Truthfully the road to this point has been long and peppered with drama, but it has been a shared road and thus I feel it is only fitting that any chronicle include my partner; since she is more or less uninterested in narrative writing (what you humans refer to as web logging) I’ve been searching for alternatives. I’m still working on the specifics, but the redesign of the site you see—still a work in progress itself—is a nod toward these ends.

And in case you were wondering about the redesign and it’s relative simplicity, I’ve taken my cue from the Readability project, which opened my eyes (ha ha) to the torture inflicted on the Web’s many readers. Counting myself among both camps, I chose to no longer perpetuate the affront to my consumer half and implement the beginnings of a friendlier format. Feedback is certainly welcome, and if you are so inclined, I implore you to keep your RSS feed active for just a bit longer. There may be additional change forthcoming. I’d hate for you to miss out now, on account of impatience, especially after we’ve endured so much together.