Distractions

When I think about the baby in terms of just another thing going on in my life, I actually find myself getting--I don't know if this is really the right word--annoyed.

"Blah blah blah work and blah blah blah Mom and blah blah blah house and blah blah blah groceries and blah blah blah aikido and blah blah blah poker and blah blah blah [wife] and blah blah blah BABY?!?"

And lately I have a lot of Mom-related stuff going on, so I haven't exactly been completely focused on the birth, despite the fact that we had our first gynecologist appointment last weekend. Impending fatherhood has almost been an after-thought the last week or so.

So last night as I got in bed I picked up the Baby Manual (a.k.a. Daddy Smarts - A Guide to Fatherhood or whatever) and read another 1/4 of the book, as I haven't even cracked it in a week. (The book is OK, but that's another entry. I'll reserve judgement until after I've finished the entire thing.) The first couple chapters were dedicated to more pragmatic and--frankly--obvious issues such as finances, the fact that there's a good chance your wife might tear off your nutsack like a paper towel as a result of her hormonal imbalance, you know...stuff like that.

But then I got to Chapter Eight: "What kind of Dad will I be?" And it's not that what Richardson wrote was all that illuminating or anything, but as I read ("you should think long and hard about what kind of father you want to be"), I realized that I have been thinking about this, for a lot longer than we've been pregnant in fact, and I'm probably way ahead of the curve on this one and then everything else in my life kind of evaporated and all that was left was this image of some kid--my kid, our kid--looking up at me with a big goofy grin on its face and I then noticed that I was no longer reading at all, that I had set the book down on my chest and I was just lying there next to my already sleeping wife, smiling.