Dear Eliza, One Month Old

Dear Eliza, 

You are already more than one month old. It's been amazing. Your entire life has been the best of mine. 

You are more and more fun every day. You are starting to smile and giggle. You are the loudest sleeper. You coo and talk all night. You fart a lot and seem to poop when my hand is on your butt. I feel the vibrations and laugh. I guess that's bonding? 

Because your Mom gets to hang out with you all day and late nights, I get to hold you most of the evenings after I'm home from work. It's the best. I usually prop you up on my knees and sit on the couch. We just stare at each other because you don't speak English yet. All of that staring makes you tired, so you'll complain for a second and I'll transition you to fall asleep on my chest. 

A lot of people ask how you're sleeping, and so far it's not that rough at all. I think I'm sleeping 5-10% less than I did before. That's mostly because your Mom does the hard work of feeding or pumping. I am good at waking up suddenly saying, "Is everything OK?" and then promptly falling back to sleep. Our border collie Greta gets up a couple times a night anyway, so we are well-trained parents. You're a good sleeper but not much of a morning person. You stretch your arms for an hour trying to wake up and wring your wrists like your Mom. 

In the broader scheme, we had a lot of restless nights for years before you were born, wondering if you'd ever come into our lives. Getting a up a couple times to see and help you isn't a burden. It's a blessing.

Outside of our home, the world keeps on ticking. The Seahawks aren't having a great season. It seems we'll have a good snowpack this year for some good skiing. The presidential primaries are all entertainment. I couldn't tell you who will be the Republican candidate because I can't take Donald Trump seriously. I bet Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic candidacy because Bernie Sanders is too reformative and will be seen as too old. As a Dad to a daughter, I would be excited to see a woman president. Paris has been attacked by a terrorism group, and we've been experiencing a week of memorials. 

I wrote most of the above to date this letter when you read it later. You probably won't remember or recall hearing about any of it because the world changes quickly and the new shines more brightly than the old in our minds. If Hillary Clinton becomes president in this next term, you'll remember her like I do Ronald Reagan -- out of (an online) history book. In your lifetime, there will be more bad Seahawks seasons, some bad snow years (global warming is real), more woman presidents and more terrorism. The latter scares your Mom a lot. She wouldn't travel to Paris anytime soon because of it. 

It's intimidating because you're so new, but I am pushing on us doing some traveling in the next year. We'll start with a weekend in Leavenworth for your Mom's birthday. Then we're off to Indiana for Christmas (by way of Detroit) for your first plane ride. Everyone in Indiana is really excited to meet you. We have big plans next year for Hawaii and possibly Europe. You fly free until age 2, so we should take advantage of that and a time before you're mobile and more demanding. 

Travel is really important to me, and I hope it becomes a passion for you. Travel guru Rick Steves wrote, "Globetrotting destroys ethnocentricity. It helps you understand and appreciate different cultures. Travel changes people. It broadens perspectives and teaches new ways to measure quality of life. Many travelers toss aside their hometown blinders. Their prized souvenirs are the strands of different cultures they decide to knit into their own character." 

As I think about how to help you become a fantastic person, travel is a technique. Seeing how other people live will expedite your perspective on how you want to live and make you appreciate wherever you call home many years from now. Travel will assist your pursuit of happiness. I hope you are brave like your mother and choose a place to live, not just defaulting to where you're from (Northwest is best) but based upon where you want to be. 

For now, this little house in north Tacoma is your home, your first home. It feels more like a home to me because you're in it, cooing and crying and everything in between. Thank you for that.

Love, Dad 

Make Your Next Vacation a Staycation →

Today is my last day of a surprisingly satisfying two-week staycation.

I didn’t realize I would enjoy being home so much. We spend so many weekends and hours outside the “9 to 5” (or “7 to 7” if you’re in New York) getting away from home, and when we take vacations they’re always abroad.

We constantly abandon home when given the chance.

There’s too much to see and do in the world. And that’s certainly true. I’ve got as long of a travel bucket list as anyone. I hoard my vacation time for big international trips. I may die with a regret of never having a job with flight benefits.

But staying home has its perks, I’ve learned.

It’s more time in a comfortable place to be creative and inspired. If you want to be practical about it, more time at home justifies the mortgage. When you travel, how much would you want to spend on a hotel you only sleep at?

The force function of staying home and catalyst for the staycation was the arrival of my daughter, Eliza. Of course, she’s keeping the staycation enjoyable, demanding and sleepless, but I’ve enjoyed the time spent at home beyond parenting.

Because of my work schedule, I rarely see my local neighborhood in daylight, especially during the dark Pacific Northwest fall and winter months. I don’t get to talk to neighbors on the street or go to local restaurants. I don’t run errands. I don’t spend enough time caring for my home, the yard or rooms. I don’t pick up my guitar enough or work on post-processing all of the photos I take.

Most importantly, I don’t spend enough time just hanging out.

I’ve had a chance to do all of the above these past two weeks, and it’s been wonderful.

Instead of catching up on email in the morning, I’m catching up on cuddle time with my daughter. Instead of a budget planning meeting at 1 p.m., I’m throwing the frisbee with my border collie. Instead of sitting in traffic at 5 p.m., I’m making dinner with my wife — and eating at the table with her.

This feels like living.

It’s easy to get satisfied with the routine of work and the correlated lack of time spent at home and with loved ones and loved places.

There’s good reason to go big on your next vacation, but there’s also a time and place (your home) for a staycation. I recommend putting that on your bucket list.

Eliza's Birthday

"Deep breath in," the delivery nurse said. "And push on the way out as I count... 1, 2, 3..."

"Let's go, Amanda. Dig deeper," I said, holding Amanda's right leg. 

"4, 5, 6..."

"You can do this. Let's see a big push," Amanda's mom said, holding the left leg.

"7, 8, 9..." 

"Dig deeper," I say again. "This is worth all the shots and all the time we've waited."

"One more big push... 10. Relax," the nurse said to close the round. 

Those were the words repeated in various forms for the 59 minutes it took for Amanda to push Eliza out into the world and the bright fluorescent lights of the delivery room at St. Joseph Hospital in Tacoma. 

Her stats: 8 pounds, 11 ounces. 21-inches long and a full head of black hair. 100-percent perfect. 

We had waited a long time for this moment. Four years since we started trying, two years of fertility treatments. Three lost embryos earlier in the year, including one transferred with Eliza. But she made it, and she was healthy.  

Like our journey to become parents, Eliza's birth didn't go as we had planned. 

On Friday, October 9 at 2 p.m., Amanda's water broke while she was napping at home. I was working upstairs and Amanda's parents, Roger and Sheree, were on watch. Sheree hollered up the stairs to me, "Amanda's had a spontaneous rupture of membranes!" which is nurse-speak for Amanda's water breaking. All nurses I've met like to speak in technical terms to medical laymen. 

I ran downstairs to confirm the news. Amanda was already in the shower. I immediately started repacking, which was totally unnecessary because a) we were packed just fine and b) labor takes a long time. I knew that, but I wanted to feel like I was doing something productive. Amanda called the nurses at the hospital who told us to come in at 2 a.m. if active labor didn't start earlier.

For the next several hours, we passed the time impatiently like 7-year-olds on Christmas Eve but coped like adults: We cleaned the house. We went for a walk. We ate dinner. Amanda baked some knock-off (but better) Starbucks pumpkin bread. I tried renting the new Avengers movie but the streaming kept stalling. It felt like forever. 

Not much was happening, so we went to bed with alarms set for 1:15 a.m., or about two hours later.

We woke up from our nap and set off for the hospital on that early Saturday morning. We had to check-in at the emergency room, per protocol, and briefly witnessed the type of folks who hang out at the emergency room at that time of day -- a few with real issues, a few looking for a prescription medicine fix. 

In short time we were wheeled off to our first of many rooms, which I'll call the "Not Sure Room." It's the room where a lot of women go if they're not sure they're in labor yet. Many are sent back home. In our case, we weren't sure that Amanda's water broke or if she peed herself (it's common for pregnant women to occasionally lose bladder control based upon where the baby sits). 

Amanda took a test and we got confirmation that Amanda's water had in fact broke, and the baby needed to come out within the next 12 hours or so to prevent chances of infection. We walked across the floor to our second room, the "Labor Room."

The irony of being in the Labor Room was that there still wasn't much labor happening. At 4 a.m. I crashed on the cot in the room to sleep. We sent Roger home, and Sheree stayed on watch through the early morning.

In the late morning there still wasn't much happening. At 7:30 a.m. the nurses started Amanda on a pill to try and get things started. No luck. At 9 a.m. they started her on a low dose of pitocin, or "The Pit," to induce labor. We weren't thrilled to start pitocin after learning in labor class how it intensifies labor, but we didn't have a choice. 

We sent Sheree home to rest. Amanda and I got bored waiting for contractions to pick up. We ran out of things to talk about. The nurses came in and out of the room every 30 minutes to crank up the pit dosage and warned Amanda of a long labor ahead. 

At 1 p.m., nearly one day after her water broke, Amanda finally started active labor. The Pit lived up to its reputation. Labor hit Amanda like a wrecking ball. She went from a relaxed state to intense contractions that she took leaning over the side of the hospital bed. We talked through her breathing exercises, which helped me too as I slightly panicked watching my wife handle the worst pain of her life.

Amanda asked for some relief and the nurses put something in her IV that made her nauseous. Soon she was leaning over a puke bag during contractions. I called Sheree to have her come back to the hospital. We needed back-up. Amanda asked for an epidural and a light at the end of the labor tunnel. 

Sheree arrived and helped us get through this phase of labor. Whereas I felt increasingly helpless as the contractions got increasingly intense, Sheree locked eyes with Amanda and coached her to focus. It was a true mother-daughter connection. Amanda dilated from 1 centimeters to 7 centimeters in three hours, and we were moved to the Delivery Room. Amanda had done a lot of hard work by the time she got the epidural at 4 p.m. She got the relief she was looking for and rested a couple hours. 

By this time I got hungry for dinner and walked across the street from the hospital with Roger to Ezell's for some fried chicken. I told the cashier we were having a baby in the next few hours and scored a free slice of peach cobbler. That put a skip in my step. 

I slammed the food with Roger and Sheree in the Waiting Room and went back to the Delivery Room. Amanda was getting prepped to push and we started the real work with Sheree alongside just before 6 p.m.  

The nurse told Sheree and I to each grab a leg and gave Amanda a crash course in pushing with an epidural. It's a lot of effort without a lot of sensation. 

"Deep breath in," the delivery nurse said. "And push on the way out... 1, 2, 3..."

After 30 minutes of pushing, Amanda developed a fever and the baby's heart rate had shot up -- neither were good signs. It created an urgency to get the baby born soon to avoid a c-section. We saw meconium (baby poop) start to come out with the pushes, which was also a sign that the baby was in distress. I think that knowledge drove Amanda that much harder.

At this point, I'll pause and say that Amanda was so impressive through this experience. Words cannot express how appreciative and humbled I am by her perseverance through this day, the entire pregnancy and infertility treatment. I am so proud of my wife. 

Witnessing a birth is one of the most incredible experiences and life-changing. I have a new appreciation for women and what their bodies are designed to do. Before having a child, a lot of people talk about "looking south of the equator." Well, my friends, I say put that trip on your bucket list. You don't get to see a miracle every day.

I started to get emotional when the head was cresting. It's probably strange to read that but you have to understand that I was seeing a part of my child for the first time. I saw the cowlick on the back of her head and it was like mine. After that point, it only took a couple more big pushes until the head was born and another push for the shoulders and the rest of her body. 

Eliza was Barney-purple when she came into the world with a cry at 6:51 p.m. on October 10. I matched that with a hard cry of my own. She was placed on Amanda's chest and the nurses roughed her up a bit to help her adjust to the outside world. I grabbed my camera and took photos. Eliza made her instinctual breast crawl and latched for the first time. I cut the cord with a single snip. Sheree took a few photos for us. It all happened so fast over the course of Eliza's first hour of life. 

Eliza was born on a dark and stormy night. 

It's as fun to type that as it is true. The views on the 14th floor of St. Joseph's Hospital are excellent, but we could hardly see a few feet outside the window that night. The rain blew sideways and flooded Stadium Bowl. It was all so intense and appropriate to me. If getting married on a rainy day is good luck, then being born in a northwest monsoon must be a blessing. 

We felt relieved, we felt blessed. Our prayers were answered. 

I can finally say, happy birthday, Eliza.

The Fear of Missing Out

Last weekend, we went out in Seattle to see a movie in the theater and have dinner with friends -- on the same night. Crazy, I know. These are the things you're supposed to do before you have a child. 

Between the movie and dinner, I saw the real change coming when we were shopping at REI. Our friends' cart had dehydrated meals, a sleeping pad and new camp coffee mugs. Ours had a stroller drink holder accessory. We were already in drastically different places. I so wanted to be on the backpacking end of the register.

Ever since we crossed into the third trimester, my radius of activities has slowly gotten smaller. A few weeks ago, I had my last big outing with friends mountain biking outside of Mt. Rainier National Park. Now within two weeks of our due date, I am appropriately confined to an hour's drive from home and definite cell phone service. 

Of course, it's not fun to play when Amanda can't. Some of our favorite outdoor activities are a couple hours driving, at least a few hours hiking and often without cell phone service, which is kind of the point. We've got a social circle that gets after it on the weekends. Amanda has been feeling less ambitious as her belly has gotten bigger, but I feel... well, the same. I'm not carrying the same weight. While we're slowing down on activities, it feels like we're missing out on more of them.

Yet the change is already happening, and satisfaction doesn't come so easy when I do get to play. I'm already distracted. I played soccer this last weekend and told Amanda I'd be gone for an hour. Although the field is in our neighborhood, I wasn't going to be able to hear my cell phone if she called. I checked my watch constantly to make sure I didn't lose track of time. I thought, "Will this be my last pick-up soccer game before having the baby? When is the next time I'll be able to do this?" 

I know when the baby arrives, the flip will switch. Backpacking hauls, powder turns, or scoring a goal will be less entertaining compared to interacting with a new life I helped create. It's another step toward selflessness where all of the above is the plain opposite.

The mountains will always be there for me. So will the playing fields and adult leagues. The real fear is missing out on those fleeting moments to come: first cries, big yawns, cackles, blow outs, rolling over, first steps, first words... That's the good stuff. 

Keeping an Eye on the Exercise Prize, Fighting Dad Bod

I am hyper-aware of the Dad Bod destiny in front of me. When life gets busy -- long work days, travel, teaching, etc. -- exercise is probably the easiest activity to drop. Life is just going to get more busy from here.

Like a lot of people, Amanda and I have had stops and starts of various exercise routines. We got into workout videos at home getting fit for our wedding... 

We've done P90X-style workouts in the mornings. We've done yoga and spin classes. I've tried to work out during lunch (becoming nearly impossible to keep that time on the work calendar). I try to get on the Stadium High School stairs a few times a month. We've got a gym membership (on pause) at the YMCA. 

All this adds up to a commitment to exercise but without habits sticking. Maybe we're turning the corner on that. 

I give Amanda infinity points for her motivation to stay active during pregnancy. When she has back pain or acid reflux or just wants to sleep, it'd be easier for her to just crash on the couch all day. But she walks 4-5 miles every single day, often at the Tacoma waterfront. Her single motivation is making for an easier labor (and something about being one of those women who doesn't look pregnant from the back). I'm sure she'll benefit from the time she put in on game day. Amanda has also met some new girlfriends in the neighborhood with babies who walk every morning, so that's helpful peer pressure. 

As for me, I've recently downloaded a Fitness Buddy app that has some good workout programs to follow that take about 15 minutes in the morning. With the app, I am trying to find a motivating way to work out at home now so that I have something to do when the new baby has us on lock-down. Otherwise, the Freshman 15 may have a revival as the Fresh Fatherhood 15.