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I can’t say that posting to my blog has been a top priority since Torrin arrived. Two primary reasons have prevented any serious attempts at writing for the last few months:
1. Baby’s don’t sleep when you want to, at least not at first – if at all.
2. Baby’s don’t sleep, so you don’t sleep, so you can’t think.

He sleeps the better part of the night now, but I’ve learned that this concept has many meanings across many different types of people.

A sleeping baby to non-parents is this imagined concept of a pleasant time in parenting. This fact only bolsters the concept that no description can ever replace experience. The words “you just can’t understand until you’ve gone through it” gains power over time.

I wonder a bit over the quantity of excellent and precise advice I’ve pitched to the side because I felt my ‘view’ was great enough to predict my own situations. Basically, I need a tally sheet of all the ‘I-told-you-so’ moments no one ever collected.

Truth be told, when it came to babies not sleeping and parent not sleeping for the first few months, I figured that was true, I just didn’t grasp the severity of the warning. You know, the waiter at the Mexican restaurant warns you as he sets the plate down “It’s very hot”, and then you shift it with your bare fingers because rotating your plate 5 degrees counterclockwise brings the food into some optimal eating angle.

Like the jackass you have become, you swear a bit and declare with perfect idiocy, “Ow, that’s HOT!”

But, there are other truths I tossed aside that were more powerful and positive then burnt finger tips and tired eyes.

I couldn’t be happier as a father. True to the words I’ve been told many times over, it’s one of, if not **the**, most rewarding things you can do with your life. I’ve struggled to put any reasonable analogy on it, and I think the great poets of our time have probably scratched their skulls to the bone trying to fine a better way of putting it.

The only way I can find to do it justice is the same thing parent’s have done for generations, much to the chagrin of young listeners who are not parents, but merely innocent bystanders.

We brag about our kids, because it’s the only way we can express what we feel. When you get some cool new thing in your life, you don’t say how it made you happy, you just go on and on about your new cool thing, and you go into details about it that any human being with a pulse couldn’t care less about.

I plan on capturing, as best as memory can serve, the final moments of not being a parent and the first moments of being a parent sometime down the road. I’ve outlined ideas, brainstormed tactics, attempted raw writing and it’s all failed to be satisfying to read, much less share. Sometimes, capturing the greatness of a moment, tracing down the lines of this paradigm shift require a tactic of not trying to capture anything at all.

There is a rawness that needs to be maintained. I’ll sand the edges a bit, feathering down a few moments with something soft and warm, but the process itself is jagged and wrenching. Most of my attempts at writing this down have sounded more negative than positive, more painful than joyous, and I think I’ve tried to hard to be journalistic about something I’d be inclined to call spiritual.

But for now, my baby sleeps. Torrin rests, his head resting so slightly to his right, as if trying to remember his last warm moment at the breast. He sighs occasionally, breathing contentment into the house, and helping me remember how satisfying a good sigh can be.

Our children remind us how good things can be.