Pretty Lady

I turned 40 yesterday. A quick look around the dinner table – my parents, my wife and kids, my sister and her family – I reflected on what accomplishments are truly important.

These are mine.

It’s the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life, and the one I’m proudest of.

Not just the getting married part. Heck, any two adults with the church-and-state approved mix of X and Y chromosomes can do that. What few people will tell you going in: it’s not the wedding – it’s the marriage that matters.

Nine years ago I married the love of my life. Today our relationship is as strong as its ever been, perhaps even stronger. And sometimes I wonder how it is that we managed to build this life together and why it feels so solid. I can think of two things.

First, we picked each other. Neither one of us, at first, met the arbitrary checklists we had in mind for potential mates – she wanted to marry a good Catholic boy and I was hoping to meet someone I could bring back to Florida quickly – but once we put all that aside, we discovered that we shared the fundamental values that we would eventually want to instill in our children. We don’t always agree, but we always respect each other and the little differences don’t matter much.

Second, we don’t consider failure an option. Both sets of our parents are still together after four decades of marriage. It’s not that our parents haven’t struggled at times, but they always chose the path that kept them together. The choices our parents made, we too have made. Even in our wedding, we chose symbols of life-long partnership. Instead of numbering tables, we named them after traditional anniversary gifts. Instead of tossing a bouquet, we gave it to the married couple that had been together the longest. (Uncle Lenny and Aunt Mildred – then at 55 years.) Small things – but over the course of a lifetime, it’s the small choices that decide how the course of your life flows. Dineen and I choose to be together because we cannot imagine doing anything else.

Someday, our children, in relationships of their own, will be able to look to us as an example and understand what it means to choose to share your life – your whole life – with another person. And if we keep doing what we’re doing, then our children will want to do it this way as well.

(Enjoy a few more wedding pictures)

UPDATE: Holy cow, our wedding page is still online!

Olive the Otter

Alex got to take home the class mascot for the weekend. This is one page of his journal entries (with an assist from Mommy).

Nate loves music. Everything from Christmas carols to heavy metal gets him dancing, with head bobbing and arms waving. And when he loves a song and the song ends, claps his hands and shouts, “Yay!”

This morning at mass, the last notes of the first hymn had just finished echoing through the church when Nate decided to add an Alleluia of his own: “Yay!”

He brought an extra shot of joy to the whole congregation on an already-joyous morning.

So on this Christmas, from Nate’s family to yours: “Yay!”

Kid’s Blog

A moment of levity

Originally uploaded by Dineen

Congratulations to Katie and Paul!

Pool warrior

Originally uploaded by Mike’s Flickr Account.

“Today is a good day to sunscreen my scalp.”

Seven years ago today I married the love of my life. Since then, we’ve had three different homes, lives in two different states, collectively held a half-dozen jobs, and added two amazing new people to the planet.

One thing that hasn’t changed is how easy it is for me to love this woman.

Of all the things I’ve done right in life, the most important one is this, by a long shot: I found Dineen, and convinced her to make our lives together. And our lives are both impossibly better for it.

Seven down, 993 to go.

I have a metal comb. It’s the single material possession I inherited from my grandfather, Alex. His name I carry as my middle name, and have bestowed to my first son.

Grandpa Alex was a barber. He had a barber shop in his house in a small town in Ohio, and that metal comb is one of the tools of his trade. I don’t remember how it came to me, but either my grandmother or my father must have passed it along.

My son Alex knows the story of his great-grandfather, since I’ve told it to him several times. He likes to use the comb on my hair, especially when it’s wet from the shower, to comb it into a three-year-old’s version of a neat coif.

Today, as he walked over to me, comb in hand, Alex told his mother, “This is my comb, from when I was a barber.”

No one’s taught Alex about the wheel of life yet, but I think he gets it.

We’re in New York, visiting Dineen’s parents for Christmas. Her father has just finished making us breakfast, her mother is at work, and Dineen is upstairs taking a shower. Alex is playing with a Fisher-Price bus, running over plastic pedestrians at criminally negligent speeds.

Nate, as he has done many times, grabbed my hand and pulled himself to standing in the kitchen. Then he let go, and stood unassisted for about ten seconds. Still not breaking new territory.

Then, he took a step, unaided. And another. And then fell crashing to the ground.

But it’s two steps, by himself, and he seems eager to try more. Seeing Nate’s first steps was a better Christmas gift than anything that comes in a box.

First we hit some clubs down in Ybor City, finally ending up in a champagne-soaked, half-naked orgy of New Year festivities where we caroused until the sun came up.

Wait, that’s not what happened.

For reasons that will be obvious to even the most casual readers of this site, we all celebrated the arrival of the New Year in full-bore domesticated style, butts planted on the couch watching TV. Drinking and nudity were had in abundance, but primarily in the form of nursing and diaper changes. Some drug use, too – with cough syrup as the drug of choice for the three of us fighting off sinus infections.

The real excitement of the evening was skipping all the Times Square tripe on the tube and catching up on the first half of the first season of Lost. I highly recommend it, by the way; both the show and the DVD set as a means of watching it. We scoffed at the commercial breaks; we popped episodes one after another like crack-flavored potato chips. The power went out shortly after midnight – probably the result of a badly-supervised teenager with too many fireworks at his disposal – so we switched the DVDs over to my laptop until the battery was almost dead. The power came on just as we crawled into bed about three in the morning.

The biggest change of the coming year, my newborn son, continues to be an enigma to me. The tricks of handling a newborn have long faded from my memory as Alex has grown up into a wonderful boy with ever-better communications skills. When Nate is unhappy, Nate just screams or cries, and there’s almost nothing Daddy can do to console him. Even Alex, who has been very loving so far, muttered at one point, “Baby go home!”

Dineen will be taking a few weeks off work and her mother is staying with us for a bit longer, so between the two of them they’ll be able to get Nate adjusted to living here, which will allow the rest of us to adjust to Nate living here. In the meantime, we’ll all be struggling to get enough sleep. I may end up taking involuntary naps at work.

The couch, it beckons.

We are proud to announce the birth of Nathaniel Dennis Wasylik, born at 8:17 pm on Wednesday, December 28.

He arrived with emphasis, weighing in at 9 pounds, 7 ounces, and measuring 22 inches in length.

Mother and son are happy, healthy, and looking forward to coming home in a couple of days. Nate is also looking forward to meeting his big brother Alex.

Dineen has been having contractions this morning so it looks like we’ll be headed to the hospital.

Other updates will be at the Kid’s Corner blog.

The waiting is the hardest part…

When one becomes pregnant, there are two questions that typically need answers. That is, assuming one already knows who the father of one’s baby is. The two questions are:

1. Are we really pregnant?
2. When is the baby due?

The first question is the easiest. In my case, the answer is a universal “no,” but Dineen of course is now pregnant for her second time.

The second question is a bit trickier. Doctors, who prefer to show their patients that they know something about this whole “having a baby” thing, invoke a complicated formula, plugging in important data such as date of last menstrual period, length of menstrual cycle, length of previous pregnancies, position during conception, health insurance deductible, current phase of the moon, parents’ astrological signs, and the most current BCS Football rankings.

After gathering all that data, they insert it into the Automagic Black Box Due Date Predictor and Presto! You have been assigned a due date. I do mean that the due date is “assigned” rather than “determined” or even “estimated” because the due date calculation seems about that arbitrary. Anyone familiar with the process knows that a “normal” childbirth can occur anywhere from two weeks prior to two weeks after the due date, interventions aside.

That’s a four week range in which the baby just might mosey out. Chew on that for a moment. Once that window opens, there’s a whole month of uncertainty – one unpredictable day in which everything, and I mean everything, drops but this One Big Thing.

When my son was born, we went through the same experience. His due date was June 6. The date loomed large on my work calendar, as I had several major projects that all had to be complete before I could take any significant time off. I have to admit, the mania I felt at that time led to some mixed results from a work-product standpoint. And that was in June.

This baby, the one Dineen carries now, is “due” today. For the last two weeks, we’ve been in suspended animation – trying to get everything ready for the baby at home, clearing the decks at work, praying we’d got all our Christmas shopping done, educating Alex about what to expect – and now the appointed day has arrived. The baby shows no signs yet of being ready to come out in the next few days.

But you never know – it could happen anytime within the next fortnight. So I’ve got my catcher’s mitt ready, just in case.

Dineen’s just about ready to pop, except that she’s not really ready to pop yet.

Dineen wants everyone to take a guess!

With Alex, we had people guess when he might arrive and what his name might be at the showers and at our big bar-b-cue. Since we aren’t having any pre-baby parties or showers this time around, I thought it would still be fun to have people guess when Thumper will show up and whether he or she will be a he or a she.

The game is at ExpectNet and the game name is “Thumper”

So let’s say I drive up to a McDonald’s drive-through window with my son. The boy, who is two and a half, typically ges the kid’s meal. Being two and a half, he pretty much eats anything in nugget form, and disdains foods not available as nuggets (unless they serve as a vehicle for ketchup – but that’s a story for another day).

Let’s further imagine that my son sees Chicken Little serving as their spokes-animal for thier childrens’ meals – which of course include the Chicken McNugget variety my son loves so well… with ketchup.

What happens when he inevtiably figures this out? What do I tell him when he asks why a chicken is trying to persuade him to eat chopped, deep-fried, ketchup-smothered chunks of himself?

I guess I’ll have to tell him that Chicken Little just isn’t as smart as the Chick-fil-a cows.

My son not only likes to watch football; my son not only knows how to do the Seminole chop; he also knows to do it on the band’s cue. His mommy is so proud.

Dineen found that an Amazon.com search for “christmas stocking” includes some results which might surprise Mrs. Claus.