I'm agog; it's a blog!

Fatherhood changes you. For one, I never thought I’d never create a blog. And yet here I am. Blog. I hate the word. Blaaaaaoooog. It rhymes with smog, bog, fog, cog. How did we end up with such an unattractive word for writing? People who write blogs are the type of people who think that the Clintons removed all the Ws from the White House keyboards before vacating. Or they believe that the 911 attacks were a government conspiracy. They’ll believe pretty much anything as long as the information is delivered to them via an anonymous email forward or some ranting lunatic talk show host. These are not smart people, these bloggers. At least that’s what I’ve always believed. And now look at me – blogging away like a crazy person.

Journaling on the Caring Bridge website the last three months has kindled a love of writing – for both me and Janell. We enjoy the feedback we get from our friends. I personally enjoy not having to repeat the same anecdote 14 times, and I’m also the type of person who will bore you with the same story on three different occasions. Some of you are nodding your head right now. And let’s face it – neither Janell or I are particularly gifted orators. When conveying a story, I tend to omit important details while mindlessly digressing at a rate which leaves the listeners wondering what in the heck we were talking about. Janell, on the other hand, likes to embellish her stories. Finding the actually story a bit too ordinary, she will not hesitate to stretch a statistic, or enhance a quote, or adorn her retelling with more exciting details, all the while stretching the simplest incident into a tearfully long narrative. Again, many of you are nodding your head right now thinking, you know, Janell does tell long stories. Speaking of which, is this story long enough for you? Hmmmm? The point is that when we want to share something about our daughter, don’t you think my wife and I are better served just writing about it?

That being said, there will probably come a day when we no longer use Caring Bridge. It served its purpose flawlessly. Friends and family were “kept in the loop” while Janell was on bed rest and while she and Audrey were in the hospital. But the mission statement for Caring Bridge tells us that it connects “loved ones during critical illness, treatment, and recovery. I guess you could say we are in recovery, so Janell will still post updates, but I’m no longer comfortable using the site as a sounding board for a first time father. So this page, errrr blog, will serve as our outlet in the future .Now have I justified the existence of this blog yet? Huh? Can we move on? Alright, I thought so. Here we go.

Today marks the Audrey’s six-week birthday. Six weeks!? Oh, where has the time gone? It seems like just yesterday we were waking up every two hours to appease your insatiable hunger and stumbling around like zombies with warm bottles of formula, wondering if we could possible squeeze in an extra hour before the next feeding. Actually, that was yesterday.

Ands here’s something I was tossing about inside my mind last night at 3 am: Our daughter is perfect. I’m serious. Think about it. She just turned six weeks old and she’s never spoken a cross word about anyone. She’s never been jealous, covetous, prideful, or hateful. She’s never gossiped. Never told a lie. She’s never attempted to realign congressional districts in an effort to suppress minority voter turnout. Daddy is SO proud. When’s the last time you went six weeks without doing something you regretted or for which you needed to apologize? My record is like 11 minutes. In fact, I have a feeling I’ll be apologizing to my wife for parts of this posting very soon.

Oh well. I’m a blogger now. I get to speak my mind, stupid as I may be.