Baby Parade

Happy Birthday, Novella!

2009-04-03T08:58:00.001-07:00

Today Novella is one. I remember in March of 2008 how much time I spent clearing out preconceptions and preparing myself mentally to live one day at a time. While the amount of permanent memory loss and nerve damage I have suffered from sleeplessness is a bit of a cliche, everything else has been a huge surprise. For about a week she was a helpless little gurgling lump, but she began advancing so fast there has been little time for nostalgia. Within three weeks she was dragging herself across the floor in an army crawl. She was chattering, crawling, and walking long before the pediatrician told us she would. She is taller and heavier than most babies her age. She is wearing 24 month old clothing. She is teething like crazy. It sounds overwhelming, and it is, but I am so excited. Because my biggest wish is that I can soon start talking to her, hanging out, and finding out more about who she is. She was born with a very strong personality, it is all I can do to try and instill some good habits in her and let her just be who she is.

Her eyes are as big and moony as the day she was born.

I am wearing the same T-shirt I wore the day she was born, and it is a total coincidence.

Seriously

2009-03-03T20:38:00.000-08:00

This is my little girl. Warning: her personality has become overwhelmingly huge and this post may wound your eyeballs with cuteness.

As always, there are thousands more pictures than I can fit in a blog. They are all here.

South Carolina

2009-02-19T18:26:00.000-08:00

I played "South Carolina" by John Linnell of They Might be Giants in that last clip. It's from a CD called State Songs. I played it again for Novella today, and she was bopping to the whole CD, but really started waving her arms around all goofy for South Carolina when that track started again.

Here is more cuteness to the same song:

More Dancing

2009-02-18T18:49:00.000-08:00

I've been so busy raising Novella (and not sleeping) that the updates have been even more sparse. To make up for it, enjoy the cutest video ever taken.

Hey!

2008-12-24T12:19:00.000-08:00

Dancing

2008-11-22T13:39:00.000-08:00

Novella likes it when you sing to her. So much so that, if she is leaning on something, she will sway back and forth to the music.

Giggles #2

2008-11-22T13:34:00.000-08:00

Sometimes Novella giggles for no particular reason. She's an idealist like that.

Halloween

2008-10-30T13:42:00.000-07:00

Lullabyes

2008-10-23T13:31:00.000-07:00

Novella has been able to say "dada" and "mumma" for a while, and for at least a month and a half has known who is who and can call us by name. The downside is she also is very attached to her mumma, and lets me know every time mumma has to go to work or leave the room. I was getting pretty desperate for a while- desperately I would try and soothe her when Mummy was beat tired, but Nova would punch and claw my face crying "Mumma!!" It sucked.

Then I discovered she likes Daddy's lullabye songs. I guess my voice is deep, and kind of sounds like Mummy's in the womb, and I am lucky enough to have an awesome wife who sang and read stories to her baby way back then.

I make up some improvised lullabyes, but my favorite "real songs" are Lie Still, Little Bottle and Out of Jail by They Might Be Giants. I have no idea where those rank in my "favorite TMBG songs" list, but I remember all the lyrics when I'm holding a screaming baby, and the tempo goes well with the recorded heartbeats that come out of her nursery noise machine.

She likes recorded music once in a while, but not at bedtime. She just likes singing, and often she will go from full-on-wail to flopped limp and peaceful on my shoulder in a matter of seconds.

Try not to think about those lyrics too much, if you clicked the links. What matters is they're good lullabye melodies.

She is becoming very verbal. Lots of piglet noises still, but also very opinionated and passionate rants, full of emotion and fluctuating facial expressions. And still, everytime she tries a new mushy fruit she gives us that look of skepticism before she commits to liking it. That's right you little free-thinker. Keep questioning authority, just not at bedtime please.

Flopping

2008-09-30T10:17:00.001-07:00

Novella says hello, then attempts to test the video viewer's sense of object permanence.

Crawling

2008-09-30T10:05:00.000-07:00

Novella and I have a brief dialogue where I do most of the talking and she scurries about.

Giggles

2008-09-30T10:02:00.000-07:00

Novella likes a good old fashioned game of peek-a-boo as much as the next baby. This is due to her lack of object permanence! Fun!

Gibberish

2008-09-09T09:04:00.000-07:00

Lots of things happened.

The best part of taking Nova to the zoo was buying her a plush stingray. She cried almost the entire time, but boy she still loves chewing on that stingray.

She calls the cats and power outlets da-da as much as she calls me da-da, but I still think it rules that da-da is one of the easiest syllables she can articulate. I think I've heard her yell "Mummy!", but only when Mummy isn't home and she's rather sick of me. But, with great adorability, she speaks in gibberish constantly. Cutietimes.

Leaving the house with her remains a struggle. Our schedules are busy, but more importantly Novella is easily overwhelmed by crowds. She spends most of her time crying, but I suppose she has more than compensated by being quite the happy zen baby at home. Not to jinx us, but she gives us at least 6 hour stretches of sleep most nights. Most nights.

Victoria's Aunt Joyce and Uncle Alan are in from England, and the timing is perfect. Nova is finally sociable enough to be interesting to a couple visitors. Oh my patient relatives, we will be inviting you to see her more soon!

Current count: 1,353 pictures of Novella in 5 months. That's about 9 pictures a day!

Skeptic

2008-07-26T14:33:00.001-07:00

Phrases I'm looking forward to teaching Novella:

"I have yet to find compelling evidence."
"I am a spectator of the universe, not an agent of chaos."
"I find your bravado tedious."

Command

2008-07-22T08:12:00.001-07:00

Dance Interview

2008-07-19T12:48:00.000-07:00

I tried interviewing Novella again, but she responded in a more pure language, the elegant art of dance.

Dreams

2008-06-28T08:46:00.001-07:00

The last two nights, Novella has slept 7 hours or more in a row. This means her daddy, for the first time in months, has been able to sleep long enough to have REM and dream. Thank you, Novella. Last night Daddy dreamed that he was a hipster super-spy, and he was rocketing around Glasgow in a mobile desk like the one Conan O'Brien uses in green screen sketches. Except real. Because everyone had them in my dream world.

Thanks Novella, Daddy always wanted to visit Glasgow.

Reckoning

2008-06-09T05:33:00.000-07:00

Novella continues to break height, weight, and diaper load records. She has reached a point where she will fill a diaper with poop and I will think to myself, "Damn, that has more mass than the last meal I ate."

We are very slowly incorporating visitors into our routine as Novella passes the two month mark. Soon she will enter her third month, ending her "4th trimester" as the experts call it, cuing her to become a more rational and timely beast. Will she take the cue? Or will she periodically regress into a squealing, chaotic pterodactyl hatchling? I think we know the answer. She still snorts a bit, our little piglet, but more and more frequently she seems to want Maria Bamford to sing Old MacDonald to her and she lets loose a loud shriek characteristic of those extinct winged reptiles. Sometimes while she is deep in sleep.

So, she's progressed, but we're still not sleeping normally.

It is also of note that she is smiling all the time, and is the most gorgeous baby we could hope for.

Happy Birthday, Tasha!

2008-05-23T20:03:00.000-07:00

This is a special birthday message to my sister-in-law, and Novella's auntie, Tasha. Lots of people are having birthdays around now, like my mom and Vicky's mum. Why does Tasha get a special video message? Well, she's in South Africa right now, and she hasn't gotten to meet her new niece yet. We figured this was the least we could do!

Happy birthday Tasha!

300

2008-05-03T16:15:00.000-07:00

Novella is one month old today. Also, if you haven't kept up, her online photo album has 300 pictures in it.

I may not be posting a lot of words here, rambler that I am, but right now I am just trying to enjoy my time with this tiny larval daughter I have. Sometimes I just stare at her and try to flex the unused sectors of my brain in the hopes I can slow time down.

Pictures serve me best: better I not waste time jabbering and I just capture moments I am present in with a quick flash.

Novella's photo album, updated regularly, is still found here.

Interview

2008-04-26T08:45:00.000-07:00

Hiccups

2008-04-16T20:41:00.000-07:00

Champion

2008-04-09T21:35:00.000-07:00

Took Novella to the Outpatient Lab for bloodwork yesterday. The nurse said she was the strongest newborn she'd ever seen.

Took the baby to the pediatrician today. She gained weight, which is good. Better still, she'd gone from 21 to 24 inches. This puts her in the upper 90th percentile for length in newborn 1 week old or younger.

So she's a larval Amazon, basically.

Not scared yet.

Pictures

2008-04-05T11:10:00.000-07:00

Novella also has her own online photo album on Flickr. You can find it here.

The main page will constantly update as I upload new pics. If you'd like to see them as "sets", they are organized in the right hand margin.

Novella Violet Telfer

2008-04-04T08:22:00.000-07:00

Limbo

2008-04-01T08:25:00.000-07:00

The baby is now three days overdue.

Those typical questions like "Are you excited?" have now been replaced with "Oh my god is everything alright?!" which is far more disturbing. Yes, babies can be born past their due-date and not be mutant abominations. Relax. You can still talk to me like any other expecting father, no need to add a tone of horror.

My daughter's birthstone is now officially diamond. This is something girls think about, I guess. The origins seem rooted in tradition and ruined by commercialism. But you know, girls like to feel special in a way that only the Breastplate of Aaron can satisfy.

Due dates are so stupid. Obviously nature doesn't give a shit about dates, it's your employer, doctors, etcetera who want numbers. So while we don't really care when our baby wants to come into this world, we're now officially being annoyed by the number-lovers of this world.

We'd like a birth as natural as possible, so hurry the fuck up, baby.

Anxious

2008-03-27T15:41:00.000-07:00

A cool piece of advice I recently heard was:

"Enjoy life before the baby, and enjoy life after the baby."

Except... we're ready. I'm hardly making any plans with anyone in anticipation. When rarely made plans get canceled, I have to say "well... I don't know when we'll do this then!" And in response I get a slow blink and then a sigh of realization- they'd forgotten how rare that plan was for me. Everything present tense is blurry. People keep asking if I'm excited. If I'm scared. If I'm ready. Of course I am all these things. I'm catching the same friends asking me if I'm "excited" for the third time in a week, and surely they're as sick of asking as I am sick of answering.

People try to make plans with me on or right near the due date, forgetting. Not many of my friends have babies, but I imagine it's hard to remember a friend's due date. You know their life will completely change, but when it will seems to slip everyone's minds.

Sometimes I try to make plans for the future, well beyond the due date, and people say "Don't worry about all that! You'll have a baby!" But... I want to make plans! I want to do things in the future! But people talk to me like the future is folly, kind of like I will be dead. Thanks, I plan on being highly functional and alive if I can help it.

There's lots of stuff I won't have done before the birth of my child. I will not have seen some movies yet. I will not have read certain books, played certain video games, gone to certain places. These events are too big to squeeze in now, but I still want to do them, so I imagine myself doing them with a child. It seems within reason. But for some reason the vision of me visiting London, New York, playing Grand Theft Auto IV, it's all unfinished. There's a baby shaped blur sitting next to me in the vision. I know it's a her, I think. I know what outfits she might be wearing. But I don't know how big she will be, the color of her hair, or what her face looks like. But there she is in all my plans, plans I can't realize, plans friends and family are nervous to realize.

We're ready. We're ready. We're ready.

Two of us, anyway.

Comedy Baby

2008-03-21T10:21:00.000-07:00

"When people have a baby, they aren't funny/suck". So says, well, almost every single comic I look up to. I'll watch a special on Comedy Central, I'll listen to an album, and it's there. The topic is omnipresent these days. In fact, so says almost every good and shitty comic alike in the Chicago stand-up scene.

Almost every open mic or showcase I do, right before me someone does a joke about how shitty babies are, or how shitty new dads are. I have a joke that's a decent response to it (which I downright require, because sometimes someone will do these jokes and then the host will introduce me as about to have a kid) but I get so tired of doing it!

I would even suggest that the standard is the opposite. The alternative is now the mainstream. It is actually far more cliche now to insult a new parent than it is to be one, and as the movie Idiocracy recently hypothesized, smart people are too antsy and whiny to actually pony up and raise a new generation and only retarded rednecks actually bring one into the world. Check it out, I think it's something we've all seen before in some context:

But to drive my point home, here's 3 of my favorite comics all slamming new parents. The first even slams comics who are new parents. It's all 100% funny, all 100% a challenge for me to write better:

Brian Posehn's "Punch my baby" bit:

Paul F. Tompkins' "New dads" bit:

Click to watch.

Patton Oswalt's "Babies are horrifying and polluting the planet" bit (about 7:10 in, there's only audio):

In a sense, I feel like the most important thing I've ever done is airline food.

I also know the truth. This is my journey, not theirs. I am not actually afraid of cliches, or bothered by them. This is all noise, heroes reflecting on their paths, paths that I find compelling but paths that are not mine. You cannot be intimidated. You must create somehow, and this is how I create.

Chubs

2008-03-21T09:58:00.001-07:00

I've put a lot of "sympathy weight" on in the final half of this pregnancy, which is unfortunate because I lost a lot of weight in the first half of it jogging.

I absolutely hate the way I'm looking in pictures and video of me doing stand-up. It's really frustrating because I hit a kind of stride with it and was lucky to get some on tape and film, but there is a marked difference around early December when I have clearly put on about 25-30 pounds.

I'm watching the jokes and going "wow, this is something I should send to festivals and agents and the like", but part of me is also going "what the fuck is that giant bugbear with glasses wheezing out all my material?!". Just look at the profile picture here, and then watch the video on the bottom right margin. The picture was taken in early November, when I was at my lowest weight in years. I'm wearing a tie and looking kinda sharp if I do say so myself. In that video it's late February, and my XL T-shirt wraps so tightly around my belly it looks tucked in. But it isn't. It just has no more fabric to fall below my belt. Ugh.

I can't wait for the weather to change. As soon as it's truly nice out again I can go back to my morning jogs. I'm already cutting back a bit on the booze. I want so badly to be a healthy daddy for my little girl, and to wake up with energy in the morning. I may never be able to do that last part without a big cup of coffee (after all my jogging in the morning, exercise never woke me up. that only works for certain body types and genetically gifted people, and those who try and sell exercise by saying it will always make you feel good are a pack of liars)... but I digress. I want to be healthy. And later this year, I'm gonna have to make a point to not start eating pizza 3 days a week as soon as I stop wearing shorts. I'm a daddy. Gotta focus. Gotta pace myself. Gotta not look like a bugbear.

Going Fetal

2008-03-21T09:43:00.000-07:00

My favorite band, Eels, is finally doing a show in Chicago again that isn't part of Lollapalooza, something I did not care to spend an entire paycheck on.

Surprise: the show falls within a week of my daughter's projected arrival. Even if the baby came tonight I seriously doubt I'd be comfortable heading to the concert.

Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Dan, it is really obnoxious for you to complain about missing a band because of your baby. Worse than that, it's cliche and bad-dad sounding. But hear me out- the last time I commented in a blog about not being able to go to something because I had uncompromisable plans, someone read it and set the wheels in motion for me to then interview two of my idols in lieu of seeing them perform.

So, not that I think those same friends know the members of Eels, but if anyone out there does happen to know them I would not be offended if you somehow could arrange for Mark Oliver Everett to come by and sing my daughter a lullaby while he's in town. I'm just saying. I've been enormously lucky before with that sort of thing...

(Note: it appears someone named "chi_diana" wrote that first blog link, but it was in fact me. Metroblogging Chicago just got some of my entries screwed up. Promise.)

Holding Pattern

2008-03-17T08:41:00.000-07:00

Victoria has finally gotten out of going to work, so she is chilling out at home nesting this Monday morning instead of making the 1.5 hour drive to and from work. This is especially awesome because we live 1.5 blocks from the hospital. At home is a great place to be.

My wife is ready to go, right by the hospital. I am ready to go, but swirling in orbit around her as I go to work and produce a show or take a class. Our home is totally ready to receive this new life. Every time I make an orbit away from the house, or we venture together somewhere, we notice how uninteresting things other than our baby are. The world around us buzzes with white noise, increasingly monotonous as we near the due date, and I realize that if the outside world ever seemed to be less cool than the world I share with my wife, it will be even more so when I have an awesome child and awesome wife. How I will cope with other people's mediocrity when I have a glorious amazing imp strapped to my chest in a BabyBjörn, I have no idea.

Compatibility

2008-03-10T08:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Victoria and I wrestled with our new car seat and finally succeeded in getting it installed in our car. To succeed, however, we were met with angel-like resistance. The issue: our car, though compatible with all child safety regulations, is a bit begrudging about explaining how to take advantage of these features. For instance, there are "safety bars" the seat can clip onto. However, these bars are invisible and buried deep in the bowels of the seat, almost impossible to find. Our car's instruction manual has a page dedicated to the subject, and it reads:

"This car is compatible with most child safety seats. Refer to their manual, as all these seats install differently."

Yes, thank you car instruction manual. I am aware that, much like the colors of the rainbow, many products differ from each other. But other than treating the manufacturers like they are mistreated ethnic minorities, you have a goddamned metal bar in you somewhere and I'd love if you could point me in the general direction.

Eventually we found the fucking thing in the 20° weather and installed the seat. Though this was just the most successful in a series of compatibility issues we have had with baby products. You see, there are an infinite number of products, and the various manufacturers have nothing but contempt for each other. Much as Mac and PC make products for each other with thinly veiled contempt (Have you ever used Microsoft Office for Mac? Every time you use it you can feel how your document/email/spreadsheet is meant to be a flaming shit placed on Steve Jobs' front stoop.) everything is made by competing companies.

Changing tables are made in sizes that no changing table mattress is designed for, a fun discovery we solved with a bassinet mattress.

The cutest mobiles in the world only work on 5% of cribs because of insane, non-adjustable railing restrictions. That's right, I am already one of those parents who writes scathing Amazon.com reviews of children's products. If I believed in a god I would shriek "lord help me".

I am lucky, however. A coworker of mine named Pete just emailed everyone to let us know his twins were born very early, weighing in at about 2 pounds each. They are doing great, but it was a reminder this morning that all my problems are luxuries, and I am expecting a large, oft-kicking and oft-punching girl who is now officially full term.

That's right, Victoria became "full term" on Saturday, which basically means that though her biological clock is supposed to release the baby in 19 days it will come out just as healthy now as it would at the end of the month. I may have few days left as a non-parent. Stay tuned.

Poké Ball

2008-02-25T09:11:00.000-08:00

This is how good things are going to get around my house.

I hope I have many many videos like this in a couple of years.

Courtesy of Fuzzy.

XX

2008-02-21T15:15:00.000-08:00

Victoria got another ultrasound today, with much staring at my baby's tiny vagina. It's definitely a girl. No more speculation, we're from 90% to 100% sure.

I guess I can stop feigning interest in my sketch comedy company's fantasy baseball league. I won't have to play catch. Probably.

Indulgence

2008-02-21T12:43:00.000-08:00

When my little girl comes, I won't get to lollygag.

She will wrestle with shoes, bibs, and other impossible foes for hours on end, but it won't be my turn. "No time for love, Dr. Jones", as the spry young Asian child notes in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I must constantly forge ahead without delay if I'm to accommodate this new life.

Most things will survive. It is not the end of the world. My wife and I have a good relationship and communicate on many levels. Friends and family will understand. Jobs will adapt. We'll manage.

But I have to fucking finish His Dark Materials and Mass Effect! Oh man! These indulgences are only good in 1-3 hour sessions.

Mind you, I'm not stupid. I know I will have time spans like this again to play games and read books... but not for a long, long time. Until that baby has a regular sleep schedule, I'll be taking naps every spare second I have. Trains, late nights at home, these will no longer be respites for anything other than sleep. And you see, these are sprawling epics I'm immersed in. If I don't finish I will have to push the pause button for months! I don't know if I can handle it.

Wish my retinas and I luck, I'm pushing my cones and rods to the limit.

Lugubriosity

2008-02-13T10:27:00.000-08:00

I am not perfect, and this is often most evident in my social skills. There are two things I am accused of most often:

1) Sounding like I am being sarcastic, or like I am kidding, when in fact I am trying to be sincere.
2) Regarding the darkest ideas possible like they are normal and appropriate to common conversation.

I don't mean to apologize for this. Far from it, it is part of who I am, and my good friends have learned to accept it as I have learned to reign it in. It does often lead to awkward moments though, and the company I am keeping makes all the difference as to whether these misunderstandings can be laughed into dismissal.

I recently made both of these mistakes at once at a class for expectant couples.

This class was designed to teach nursing techniques, and was held at the hospital we are going to deliver the baby in. It was taught by a very kind and friendly nursing specialist, and so I expressed our concern that the baby would be taken away or kept from us right after delivery. The woman assured us that no, this hospital was very into letting the parents immediately bond with the baby.

Now, before I continue the story, hold onto that moment in the conversation while I give you some insight into how my mind works.

When I think of babies being born in a hospital, I am taken to a pop culture image that I thought was shared in the collective unconcious. You know in television and in film that classic room babies are often kept in? It's just rows of clear, plastic, lidless crib-boxes with clipboards attached to them, and on one side of the room is that big clear police-interrogation room glass. Babies are then held up to the window by parents, doctors, and nurses for visitors to see while rows of other babies sleep or gurgle or cry together in their seperate compartments. I have a picture of myself meeting my little brother this way. I figured everyone thought of those rooms being a place babies go, and that it could be a little cold and detached if the baby spent a lot of time in there.

So the nursing instructor goes on about how great the hospital is, and ends with:

"It's a really wonderful environment, I'm really lucky to work here. They give you lots of opportunities to bond."

"That's so relieving to hear," I said, "That's so much better than taking my baby to a room full of babies in drawers."

Why I chose the word "drawer" I couldn't tell you, other than I thought it was a completely sincere synonym for those tiny crib-boxes. I was not in tune with the collective unconscious of the room, however, because they stared at me horror struck. The instructor, the other couples, and my wife all thought I had just made a joke about a baby morgue. A room full of dead babies in drawers. Closed drawers.

I was attempting neither to be funny nor make a reference to anything dark, but there I was pushing the entire room into a boat on that wacky river Styx.

I have tried to craft this story into a stand-up joke onstage a couple of times in the last week, and the groan I elicit is so overwhelming that it's not worth the laugh.

Feminism

2008-01-18T14:59:00.000-08:00

On the subject of my child's gender, I found I had my first baby related gender equality moment today.

I was looking at a very cool website of baby stuff. Taxi-car baby booties? Book of sci-fi baby names? You have me intrigued.

But then I come across this bullshit.

Boy's snapsuit? Boy's? Why can't a girl wear that shit, because it's fucking blue? My girl can pull that off. What if my girl is born with the power of motherfucking flight? You don't know! I'm looking right at the photograph of the super-costume, and yeah the manufacturer drew a cartoon boy baby on it, but it says boy nowhere on the fucking package. You inferred that bullshit. Who are you to narrow the options for a couple who only wants for their baby the impossible dream of soaring through the air and fighting crime? Even if she can't fly, I hope she has super speed so she can crawl around you at the speed of sound, which will make you cry because you're boring. You don't know a goddamn thing "Spoon Sisters". That's the worst part, you're an adorably feminist sounding organization. How did you convince yourselves of this masculine archetype? Do you think it's inherently "male" or even "wrong" to want to fly? Something stupid and male about it? To hell with you. I don't care how wonderful your organization is, or how badly I wish my friends and relatives would buy me the entire of your catalog at the baby shower. I am furious.

Girls can fly too you... you... motherfuckers.

Relenting

2008-01-14T09:15:00.000-08:00

At 9:30 AM on Saturday, we went ahead and got the "special" elective ultrasound. This means it wasn't at a doctor's office, but at a loft office where people got to make a "memory" out of the experience. It was really cheesy, but I confess I loved it. I got to see the baby in 3D, which was crazy. It looks like a person. It is indeed a girl... or at least this woman at the ultrasound loft said so. Victoria is still skeptical that not enough time and science was spent coming to the conclusion. Unlike previous ultrasounds where the procedure was more to check on heart rate and development than gender, this woman spends every day staring at this thing with couples begging to know the gender. She was confident. I trust her. I'd say we're up to 99% certain.

When we got home at about 10 AM, I crashed into a heap and didn't get up until Monday morning. Something started happening in my skull and throat on Wednesday, and by Saturday it was so bad that I basically lost all of Saturday and Sunday. I'm not an idiot who thinks he can "power through" a sickness. But when there's a baby that can't feed itself that takes on a new meaning. No more laying in a blanket cocoon while watching my Shark Week DVD collection. No, the next time I get a sinus infection I will be on my feet, boiling bottles or changing diapers, all the while with some kind of mask over my face because I'll be terrified of giving the girl my disease. Should I see a doctor? Of course. But it better work around the baby's schedule.

That's right. I may never get to have a traditional, lazy "sick day" again.

Yikes.

Survival

2008-01-10T08:54:00.000-08:00

Knowing that you're about to be a parent when you're a loud, obnoxious man-child with no social skills can be pretty scary. But nothing is more assuring than knowing how many 5 year olds you could take down in a bloody scrap to the death.

32

I figure I have at least 10 years before my child truly poses any sort of threat.

The Weather

2008-01-08T13:21:00.000-08:00

The winter before you were born was a little different.

This is typical of Chicago, where we live now. None of the seasons follow the standards society imagines them to have, and if people think otherwise it is a tradition to make fun of them.

Lots of snow came down really early, then in early January it all melted and got really warm and rainy. Cold and snowy! Record snow! Then freezing winds! Then mild! Nice! Humid and warm! Record high temperatures! It will probably be cold and snowy again. It will shift, and people will blame various things. They'll all be wrong, because weather is amorphous and bizarre and we never get it right. Weather is massive, chaotic. And here we are just north enough for a lot of snow but south enough for blistering heat. Far from the ocean, on top of a lake. Too many factors for the tilting of the Earth to indicate what to expect.

But lots of people talked about this winter. It will be and has been debated. What pressure situation was there? Are good things melting? Oceans rising? How will this winter effect everything? Even though the forces at work are powerful and impossible to manipulate, we are desperate to throw in our two cents, to obsess, to define what we're going through when it's nothing but curveballs.

See, last winter was very snowy and cold. It stayed fairly consistent. No anomalies. No big shifts.

About four mild winters before that, all with very little snow. Unexciting.

Winter's my favorite season, and this one was exciting.

Soon after this winter ends, you'll be born. I'm pretending you somehow affected the winter with your development. That from the womb you summoned and banished glaciers at a whim. I imagine this because you're about to affect everything else in my life and I need to get used to ideas like these.

The 80% Pronoun

2008-01-08T13:01:00.000-08:00

So we had an ultrasound a while ago, and with the technician at our side we stared really hard at the monitor.

80% chance that it's a girl.

But here's the thing- they tell you that you can't really know a girl 100%. You can know 100% if it's a boy because there's not a lot of weenis-shaped debris floating around to confuse you. And this baby was very tumbly. I thought I was sure I saw a girl, that we went over the criteria the silhouette needed to meet. We gave the technician this knowing look that she returned.

"We know what we saw there!", the look said. "A whole lot of nothing, if you catch our drift!"

In that moment we were so certain. But as time goes on my wife and I fall into that 20% of uncertainty like it's a black hole. Anti-matter sucking us in.

We're calling it she. Her. We're preparing for a girl too; everything purchased is very gender neutral, but our brains default to the 80% chance that it is a girl. We're telling people about the 80%, but they aren't listening either. It's like if we keep calling it a girl, the percentage will fatten up somehow. All of us hear 80% and we just ride that fact like it's a luck dragon.

But there's a 20% chance it's a boy with a tiny, obfuscated dong.

There's an advanced ultrasound we can take that will eliminate the doubt, but of course insurance doesn't pay for it so we're trying to talk ourselves out of it. It would be so silly, yet so comforting to know the gender. Because when they do that ultrasound they ask you "if you want to know". When you say "yes" to that question, you want an answer! What is this 80% shit? You didn't ask me "would you like to be 80% sure"!