The first 48 hours

I took my two year old son to the zoo the other day and I read an interesting caption in front of the giraffe habitat. Apparently, in only a matter of hours, the baby giraffes are able to walk on their own. I suppose, somewhere in the evolutionary history, too many baby giraffes were getting left behind.  Either that or they were slowing down the parents a little too much.

This is not the case with humans. It's been a little over 48 hours since our second son was born, and I think he's still several months away from walking. Right now he's laying on my chest squeaking in an extremely cute fashion. Other than that, his skills range from suckling something fierce to sleeping in broad daylight.

That's not to say I don't have the most profound respect for this little guy.  He's quite the trooper, as all babies are. Imagine it this way, you just spent nine months in a climate controlled, gravity free environment, with food literally handed to you through a tube. All of a sudden, you find yourself being squeezed like a container of toothpaste, head first, down a canal that requires your skull to malform. It's got to be, by far, the worst headache ever. Your eyes, which have never experienced anything beyond almost total darkness, meet two glaring lights in the birthing room. Your lungs go from breathing water to breathing air in an instant and your nutrition is literally cut off from you. Bloody, cold and crying, you are poked with a needle and get cream rubbed in your still adjusting eyes. It's supposed to prevent blindness, the first of all great ironies. The one advantage is that you can move around a bit more.

Things get a little bit more familiar as you are placed next to the familiar heartbeat of your mother and given the opportunity to suck for your food. A new concept but something you've at least practiced. She is warm and you soon fall back asleep.

Except in the next several hours, you keep getting pulled away from her, and you keep getting poked. The worst comes a day afterwards, when they make the place where you pee hurt real bad.

Close to two days after you make this weird passage through the rabbit hole (no offense intended ladies, just a literary reference), you are strapped tight in a weird contraption and whisked off.

After so much pain and stress, it's no wonder we are programmed to not remember anything.

Waiting

"I think Sunday is my least favorite day," my wife told me the other day, when we were out for a walk.

It happened to be a Sunday, and I thought back on our usual afternoon church meeting - a near futile attempt of keeping our two year old son occupied for an hour and ten minutes with snacks and toys and laps around the hallways.  I think the meeting went a little long - heaven forbid - and he knew it.  The kid had flexed his core muscles to their max to express his disdain for sitting still any longer, and it was most likely one of the typical - stumbling across the finish line - moments when, as soon as the closing prayer ended, we just let him go free.

Fearing for a second that this typical experience had finally done her in on the "day of rest" I asked her for more details.

"I think it has to do with that, but also that I just have a long week ahead of me that I'm not exactly looking forward to."

It made sense.  We are super close to our second son's due date, and apparently being nine months pregnant is not allowing her an easing up of work.

"I suppose that's why they say Friday is the typical favorite day," she continued.

I thought about the idea for myself.  "I'd have to go Saturday for me."

For some reason, I have become immune to the phenomenon of anticipation when it comes to days of the week.  Friday is great, don't get me wrong, but it is great especially after 5:00 pm.

I have found, however, that waiting has much more of an impact in other aspects of my life.  Take our pending kid.  Jack was twelve days early, and we are currently well beyond that with this one.  For the past three weeks (we thought the doctor was too late on her due date estimate, apparently we were wrong) we have waited for that moment when the water breaks, or when the real contractions start.  It is like a ticking time bomb with no timer on it.  I have lost sleep due to the anticipation.  I have long since checked out of work, and my productivity has plummeted.  It probably doesn't help that I am having to put several projects on hold.

It's moments like these where I feel I can really expand my ability to live for the moment, to enjoy the fact that we are still getting full nights of sleep, where we don't have to clean up all the spit up.  Where we don't have to juggle two kids.

That time will come, and it will be wonderful.  In the mean time, life is also wonderful now.

Preview for Upcoming Book: GATHER THE STONES

The star studded life of the mayor’s teenage son is thrown into mayhem when he saves a suspected child molester from drowning.

There is no reason why the path of Jack Turner, quarterback of the football team and son of the mayor, should ever cross the path of Chuck Fredrickson, the old vagrant who forages the parks for wild asparagus and is suspected of multiple child molestations.  Yet when he saves Chuck from drowning in a flash flood, they form an unlikely friendship.  As Jack’s worldview on what it means to be truly human changes, he finds that stepping away from the world in which he once lived is not only difficult, but one that will almost definitely lead to his social execution.

The shadow of social media’s blame and shame culture looms over this Midwestern coming of age drama, where everyone finds him or herself on both sides of the social daggers.  A mayor who seeks re-election, a son who tries to balance parental expectations with his own desires, a pastor’s daughter whose scandals hide beneath her curtain of piety, a social outcast who lives free from normal expectations, a suspected criminal who had woken up one day to find the world had left him behind - all spiral together in a whirlwind of discord that bring the once civil town to its own reckoning.

Some readers have compared it to a modern, inverted version of the Scarlet Letter.

Coming Fall 2016