Baby thoughts

I haven't blogged in a while, and the main reason for that is that the one thing that's been taking up a lot of space in my mind was something that I wasn't ready to announce just yet. I can now finally say what that thing is, and I can finally start writing some of my thoughts. In short: I am going to be a father.

As is my wont, my head is spinning on all sorts of things about this. Don't get me wrong - the primary emotion that I'm feeling over this news is happiness. Still, I'm anticipating many annoying, clueless, and even downright stupid remarks from people. While this will be my first child, I know enough about how this stuff works that I can expect people to give me all sorts of advice, and no doubt I will be doing some things that will make them think that I'm raising a potential serial killer and/or spontaneous combustion.

I also want to clear something up. As many people know, my wife and I were hoping to adopt a child. That process wound up taking much longer than we ever suspected. Finally, we decided to just go ahead and try to have one for ourselves, and maybe down the line if we want another kid we can adopt one.

Basically, my wife and I anticipated, and sure enough we're getting them, comments about how "everything happens for a reason". Now, anybody who knows me knows that phrase makes me go into a murderous rage as it is, but this really shows that they don't quite understand what happened. We had a baby of our own because the adoption process wasn't working out for us. It's not the other way around. We did not seek to adopt because we couldn't have one of our own - we genuinely wanted to adopt a child. In other words, adoption was our first choice.

Speaking of things that bug me, I told my wife that I was going to punch the first person who told me our child's astrological sign. Well, somebody already went and did that, but that person is a sweetie, so I don't want to say anything bad about her. And to be fair, she said it because she was the same sign, and it wasn't followed up by a description of what this sign was and how we should properly prepare. It was just kind of a "Oh, it'll be a __________." type of comment that wasn't meant to mean anything important. Still, I did punch her in the face - not very hard though. I'm a man of my word.

What will drive me crazy is when people start to talk about it as though it's something that I'm going to give any consideration to at all. (Notice that I refuse to identify which one it is? You'll never hear the word escape from my mouth.) Recently somebody asked my wife and I what signs we both were - as if it mattered to us. I just don't know what to do about people sometimes.

Anyway, I realize that this is just an expression, but it's an expression that needs to go away. I'm talking about when people refer to a baby as a "miracle". No, it's not a miracle. We know where babies come from. It's a natural process. Is it still amazing? Sure. I also think that when a dog has babies it's amazing, but this is quite a bit moreso only because it's MY baby (and my wife's - she seems to have some sort of role to play in this whole thing). It really hit me hard (in a good way) when I saw him/her moving around like a Mexican jumping bean when we saw the ultrasound. It's fantastic, it's wonderful, it's sublime, but it's not a miracle. A miracle would be if the baby just popped out of nowhere. At the very least, it would be a miracle if it didn't make my poor wife feel bloated and sick to her stomach.

It's a natural process, like I said. This isn't to say that it's somehow not great and beautiful, but to me a miracle would be the type of thing where you just don't know how the heck it could have happened. We know how this happened. (Or maybe that's the problem - some folks don't know!)

Anyway, I'm rambling. I'm sure that I will post more thoughts about this as the next few months fly by.