Our Road to Building a Family - Legalese, Antibiotics, Baby Food, Easter Bunnies, Car Seats, and Grandmas

It's been a while since I have sat down to write a blog, period, but it feels like it's been an especially long time since I've written one about the continued development of our little family. I hate to say it because I rather enjoy writing long, drawn out blog entries but I'm going to do my best to keep this one concise. I feel as though some bullet points are in my near future, which is probably the best mechanism available for keeping myself on topic and not getting too far off into the kind of rambling for which I'm known. This site is called Redbeard's Rambling, after all.

* Legalese

We have not had any real contact with the court system since January when we had a hearing that wound up having to be continued due to the fact that there was paperwork missing from the filing that DSS had generated. We were told then that the follow up hearing would be expedited and that it would hopefully combine several maneuvers to completing the process into one session, yet here we are roughly 4 months later and we have nothing new to share.

My wife has done what she can to keep in contact with the paralegal involved (I'll add that she's been nothing but vigilant throughout this whole shooting match) and the response we've gotten is essentially "I'll check on that for you..." then nothing else happens. I feel as though this aspect of the adoption process will grow to frustrate my wife & I substantially going forward because we are both headstrong individuals and there is literally nothing we can do to move things along. Truly "hurry up and wait" is not something either of us do all that well. Of course I say that then I'm immediately reminded of the fact that there have been several stages to this process where we could literally do nothing to impact our standing in the situation. It is what it is, and regardless of what we may encounter next we remain confident that this is just one more hurdle. The Duke is our little boy and if it takes years for him to be legally recognized as that then so be it - he'll still be ours and he'll be loved, adored, spoiled, and so many other things because that's what he deserves.

* Antibiotics

The Duke isn't unlike any other baby in that he's brand new to the world and, as such, prone to getting hit by any number of infections. This is somewhat compounded by the fact that he's in daycare and also gets to spend some time with other babies at our church while my wife & I go to "big people" church. I do love our daycare but I will be quick to label any such facility as a breeding ground for germs. Don't take that the wrong way, though - it's a good thing. After all, if he never gets any exposure to bugs his immune system won't develop as it should.

That said, Duke has had a few bouts with colds and here most recently he's gotten an ear infection. These are the kind of things an antibiotic is good for and he's currently getting the third such treatment he's received in his lifetime, this one an effort to clear up what was left of the ear infection. The tricky thing about antibiotics, though, is that they do interesting things with his digestive system and bowel movements - and by "interesting" I mean his poops are of the "OH DEAR GOD!" variety.

* Baby Food

We've begun to put Duke through his paces in regard to letting him experience different varieties of baby food. We've adopted the format of giving him a new flavor every week and thus far we have moved from bananas to peas to pears and I believe the next step is green beans.

Of those he took most easily to bananas, perhaps not surprisingly given their sweetness. I tried them myself and they are certainly quite tasty. They'd likely be a good additive to a smoothie or could even be frozen for an icy treat. The peas didn't go over so well at first as he all but rejected them. The expression he had on his face when I fed him peas was as if he meant to say "Father, what have I done? Why have you betrayed me?" Given that reaction I was shocked to find out that mixing the peas with the bananas wound up being palatable for him - go figure.

Pears yielded an entirely different reaction, one that I wasn't expecting. Evidently the pears had a tartness to them, and Duke scrunched up his face accordingly when eating them for the first time. I have video of this and it is absolutely priceless.

These are the kinds of things people who aren't parents have never had the joy of seeing. This life, this person, who is so knew to the world and all that's in it has so much to look forward to enjoying. It's simply amazing.

* Easter Bunnies

Holidays present unique opportunities for parents to dress up their children in outfits they'll likely only wear once and, on occasion, have their picture taken with a person dressed as a giant rodent. Such was the case for Duke's first Easter as we took him to one of the local malls to meet the Easter Bunny set up therein.

Our fear was that he would see the humanoid hare and respond with bloodcurdling screams of terror, as some children are prone to doing when faced with such beings. Duke's reaction was all business. He never so much as cracked a smile, which we believe was due to him having some sort of innate ability to sense when cameras are around. Catching him smiling in a photograph is about as easy to do as getting into Metallica. This being the case, we have a set of pictures of him with his first Easter Bunny experience and he looks every bit as though he'd just as soon be somewhere else. He's not sad, he's not angry, he's just kind of meh. Given some of the alternatives, I can live with that.

We considered this a dry run for our upcoming adventure to Walt Disney World in November. Even though Duke might not smile for the camera whilst in the grasp of a costumed character, hopefully he'll at least continue to be agreeable with the idea of meeting the likes of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and all their cohorts.

* Car Seats

One of the items that was very generously given to us when we first brought Duke home was his first car seat, that being a Chicco KeyFit model. We have used that seat for more than 5 months, moving it between our vehicles with a level of ease I didn't think was possible out of an infant car seat. Alas, the time has come that our little dude isn't quite as little as he used to be, hence the reason why we've recently upgraded him to a pair of Chicco NextFit convertible car seats.

As I said when I posted that photo to Facebook, my kids' car seat is cooler than your kids' car seat.

In all seriousness, my wife & I couldn't be more pleased with the Chicco brand. The seats are easy to install using either the latches built into the car or by threading one of the shoulder restraints through the seat (we used the former setup in my wife's car, the latter in my truck). They're well made with safety features that mimic technology more commonly seen in racing applications. (If I didn't know any better I'd say the headrest is actually a HANS device.) They're not exactly the cheapest things in the world but this is a matter where you get what you pay for, and in these seats Duke is going to be one safe world traveler.

* Grandmas

I sincerely don't know what we'd do without Grandmas. Not to say that Grandpas aren't special people too, mind you, as they mean plenty in the grand scheme of things, but Grandmas are a resource as valuable as platinum in my opinion.

Before I go further into this chunk of commentary I am obligated to state, for the record, that Duke has two Grandmas. My Mom has assumed the official title of Grandma, as in this is the name we're hoping he comes to know her as. Likewise, my wife's Mom is now known officially as Nene (pronounced "nee-nee"), a derivation of her actual name, that being Nita.

There have been so many occasions where the fact that my Mom lives nearby has saved my wife & I from having to use our annual or sick leave. She gives her time willingly and is always there for us no matter what the situation may be. What's more, she never seems to come to our home without a bag filled with food, diapers, wipes, or some other useful commodity. Generosity is her forte, and she is a living example of what it means to be a cheerful giver who expects nothing in return.

Nene comes to visit Duke (I first wrote that she comes to visit "us" - implying me, my wife, and Duke - but the reality of the thing is that she's here to see Duke; we just happen to live in the same house that he does) every other weekend. She stays with us, usually from Friday evening until Monday morning, and spends just shy of every second of those days in contact with her grand-baby. Sometimes she sneaks in a visit on those weekends where she wouldn't normally be in town, and sometimes Pawpaw (that being my father in-law) makes the trip as well on those occasions.

The Grands can never get enough of the Duke and it means the world to my wife & I to have them involved in his life.

As I have gotten older the value that I place on members of our family has increased by leaps and bounds. (Not because of their willingness to pitch in or to help my wife & I but because of the fact they're there. More than that, they make the effort to be there.) I attribute this to the benefit of age and maturity. Youth and the associated blinders that come with it can be blamed for seemingly innumerable foolish decisions, and I am undoubtedly guilty of such blunders as not taking advantage of the time that I had.

While I may be lacking in various cosmetic attributes - I'm still coming to terms with the ever growing bald spot on the back of my head and the streaks of grey that now run through my beard - what I've gained in wisdom and foresight is so much more meaningful. There have been many moments here lately where I have wished that certain of my family were still on this Earth to see what has become of us. I know they're watching from a much better perspective than ours, but I can't not selfishly wish they were still here instead of there.

Our Road to Building a Family - Our First Visit to the ER

It's been roughly a month since the situation I'm going to recount in this blog entry took place, and to be 100% honest with you we've been on a bit of a roller coaster ever since then regarding matters relating to the Duke's health. I don't want that to alarm anyone because he's really fine, it's just that we've had an interesting few weeks and it all began the morning of Wednesday, January 28.

Our routine is such that every weekday morning my wife & I get up between 6-6:15 AM to begin our day. My wife will get her shower and get dressed whereas I'll do what's necessary to prep Duke for his day. This always involves changing his diaper into a fresh Pampers Swaddler (they come with a Sesame Street character on them; I've grown fond of talking to the character, and I end the conversation with "I'm sorry but you're about to have a very bad day..."), sometimes a fresh outfit (depending on whether or not we re-dressed him the night before), and maybe a bottle if he's feeling hungry. Pretty standard stuff in the way of infant maintenance, and his attitude is such that he's very cheerful throughout whatever processes we're involved with. He's really quite remarkable in that regard.

The morning in question, though, Duke was not his normal self. He was fussy to the point of seeming agitated. Duke is a very warm-natured lad, much like myself, but I knew as soon as I touched his forehead that he was much warmer than what he should've been. We checked his temperature (in the most invasive manner possible - sorry, son, but it had to be done) and that verified what we both feared. He had a fever in the area of 102 at that moment. We checked it again a few minutes later and it had risen to 103.

That being the case, my wife & I - being the first time parents that we are - did what first time parents are bound to do when their baby is sick, that being to completely freak out in regard to what needs to be done next.

We threw on some clothes (I think I might have been wearing jogging pants, an old t-shirt I normally do yard work in, my cold-weather vest, a baseball cap, and a pair of Crocs - hey, at least I wasn't wearing socks with the Crocs), gathered up a few supplies for Duke in one of his travel bags, bundled him up in his car seat and drove as quickly as we could to the emergency room at the Regional Medical Center in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Why? Because that's what we had been told to do if he ever had any kind of urgent need, medically speaking.

My wife is somewhat familiar with the ER at RMC seeing as how she & I had been there several years prior when she thought she'd been bitten by a particularly nasty spider - turned out she had an infected hair follicle. (I will never let her live that down, ever.) When we got to the ER on this occasion we were somewhat haphazardly checked in by the staff at the admissions desk. (FYI: Patient identification wristbands that are sized for an adult DO NOT fit an infant.) We didn't have to wait long before we were taken into the triage area where Duke's vitals were taken. We then progressed on to an examination room where Duke was given a battery of tests to try and determine what was going on with him.

This experience made me realize that even though doctors and nurses can do amazing things these days thanks to medical science, the techniques they have for harvesting data from someone like Duke are rather infuriating to witness as a parent. At one point we waited outside the examination room while two nurses tried to get a blood and urine sample from him. Suffice to say when you hear your child screaming like he was then your instinct is to run to them, but we couldn't - we'd have only been in their way. I was able to get in on the act myself later on, though, as I was tasked with holding him in place while he was given a chest x-ray. As an aside to the unpleasantness we were all a part of then, I did get a kick out of hearing the imaging technician said "We're going to need a big one..." to his nurse when they tried to put a protective vest on me.

I'm going to fast forward through some things here, mainly because of the fact most of it involves the three of us sitting in an examination room that was the size of a jail cell while people in all manner of disarray wandered by the door (that part just about made me lose my mind - you know you've had an interesting day when one of your memories from it is the sight of a guy in a hospital gown carrying what could have been either a container of his own sick or possibly some kind of sample). What it all boils down to is that after having his blood drawn, urine collected, nose swabbed (to check for RSV and flu), chest x-rayed, and probably a few other things I've put out of my mind, we were told Duke likely has "something viral" and that we should give him some Child's Tylenol to help sooth the fever.

We were there from 7:30 AM until 1:30 PM, and "something viral" is the best they could tell us. That and a prescription for an antibiotic were our only genuine takeaways from the experience. (Apparently there's someone else in Walgreen's accounting system with the same name as the one Duke's biological mother gave him; hopefully that fellow understands why his insurance has been billed for a prescription of apple-flavored amoxicillin.) In the days following our little day trip to the ER, we learned from other parents that "something viral" is a common explanation for a lot of things when it comes to diagnoses that are given to children. I believe this is why doctors are said to be medical practitioners - they're still practicing because they haven't gotten it right yet.

Even though "something viral" is the only cause that could be determined for Duke's fever his initial blood work showed a few oddities for which we've had to take him back for several more blood draws and further examination. The results of those tests have been similarly inconclusive with everyone involved (as in the people making six-figures a year, who drive Range Rovers and wear Movado watches) more or less shrugging their shoulders while saying, "Well, it's probably his body's reaction to something viral."

I think I'm going to start using that myself as an excuse in everyday life.

"Robert, why didn't you come to work today?"
"Oh, it was something viral..."

"Robert, why haven't you paid the mortgage in 5 months?"
"Oh, it was something viral..."

"Robert, you caused World War 3, why would you do that?"
"Oh, it was something viral..."

My personal opinion of these additional tests aside (I know a lot of doctors and nurses mean well but I also know some of them look at a patient like Duke as if he were a living, breathing ATM machine), it goes without saying that we'll do whatever we need to do in order to insure his health. I just wish we weren't over a barrel with these suggestions from his doctors. Almost any other parent in the world could have refused those tests but we have to go along with whatever they say because of the fact that we can't do anything to jeopardize our standing in the adoption process. It is what it is - I'm just glad he's doing better.

And now we know better as well. You have to take a few lumps in going through this rookie parenting thing.

We seem to learn something new every day because he's changing every day. Duke just turned four months old last week. He's to a point now where he's picking up on things visually more and more, and he's learning how to use his hands better. (Jill will attest to this as he's to a point where he'll reach up and grab her lovely blond hair.) One of his latest tricks is that he can raspberry rather well and he can make a very loud "smack" with his mouth. He's measuring in the area of 14-15 pounds and is a little more than 23 inches, which his pediatrician tells us puts him right in line where he should be in terms of his physical progression.

Our Road to Building a Family - Portrait Innovations? More like Portrait Hostage Negotiations!

It goes without saying that as new parents my wife and I are constantly taking pictures and video of our son, The Duke. We make great use of the fact that our cell phones are equipped with way better than average cameras - I couldn't tell you how many of him I have on my personal device but I would say it's in the area of 100 to 150 shots at this point in time. (My wife likely has 2 or 3 times as many, and I am rather scared to consider how many my mother in-law has.) That's one of the lovely aspects of digital photography as opposed to traditional film. You can take hundreds if not thousands of photos, more or less to your hearts content, because the only concern you have is whether or not your memory card is getting full. I recall when I was a kid feeling lucky if I got 24 quality exposures out of a roll of film. (Do people even remember what a roll of film looked like?)

Those pictures are all well and good but they're not the professional, keepsake kind of photos that every family has hanging around their home. This being the case, my wife decided a few weeks back that it was high time we had some pictures taken.

If it sounds like I wasn't exactly overwhelmed with joy over the idea, you wouldn't be too far off base. It's not that I didn't agree that we ought to do what we can to document Duke's life in as grand a method as possible, rather it was the frugal side of my personality taking over. (Call me cheap if you want to, I like to think of myself as being fairly skilled at stretching a dollar and that's not a bad thing.) Actually, my frugal side didn't so much take over as it did go into a screaming, riotous conniption fit seeing as how I suspected this was going to be a pricey endeavor, and that was with me having absolutely zero knowledge of what a photo shoot with a commercial vendor goes for these days.

After we'd decided to look into having pictures taken my wife booked an appointment for us with the Picture People studio at the Buy Buy Baby location in Columbia, South Carolina. I don't think either one of us took the time to investigate what the cost of their services might be at the point in time the appointment was made. Was that a mistake? Maybe, maybe not. In hindsight it likely wouldn't have mattered as they don't seem to publish their pricing online, but that fact should have been enough of a red flag for my frugal sense to start going berserk.

We wound up visiting that Buy Buy Baby before our appointment as we were in the area and needed a few supplies. Jill got some documentation from them that included a menu of sorts with packages they were currently offering. One of the lower packages was in the area of $300.

Suffice to say that frugal me had a mild stroke at the sight of that...

We canceled the appointment with the Picture People the same day in favor of looking around at other options. Low and behold, within a few days time, my wife had located a coupon for use at a competing photography studio, that being Portrait Innovations. The coupon offered a shoot with prints for around $40 - that sounded like a great deal to me when compared to the fact that the Picture People wanted the equivalent of a car payment for their services, so we set up an appointment with them.

I forget who it was that said this to us but when we told someone about the shoot and the coupon their comment was "Oh, but you know you're going to want to buy more pictures than that!" I already had it in mind that there was a possibility we might want to add a few prints but I didn't see us spending more than $60, tops, and I gave that number to my wife as a ceiling for what I saw as being a reasonable expenditure.

Those would fall into the category of famous last words.

Our photo shoot was scheduled for 11 AM on the morning of January 17. Jill's Mom was staying with us that weekend as the three of us all had the following Monday off in observance of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. We got dressed, prepped Duke, and loaded ourselves into the car so that we could be there with time to spare.

It was around 10:35 AM when we arrived and the parking lot was rather full already by that time of day. I point that out more for the sake of describing the scene than anything else seeing as how this particular Portrait Innovations is attached to several other shops in a strip mall, so it only made sense that parking would be limited. Regardless, as we got out of the car I began to get the same feeling as I do when I have an appointment with a doctor; your appointment may be for 11 AM but what they mean is you'll be seen somewhere between 11 AM and the rapture.

When we entered the studio there appeared to be one family in the process of having photos taken and two others that were waiting to get started. The customers who were there had spread out in such a way that all the seating was taken except for one chair, which we quickly assumed possession of so as to give Duke somewhere to perch until it was our turn. I don't blame those other families for the lack of seating, I blame the business. The waiting area was big enough to have accommodated significantly more seating than what was installed. As it was, we made like a couple of horses and stood around.

By the time 11:30 rolled around the family that was already on set when we arrived had wrapped up their shoot and one of the families in front of us were roughly half way through their turn. The other family ahead of us that was still waiting to begin apparently lost their will to hang around any longer and left without saying anything to the staff. Low and behold, not five minutes passed from the point that they left to when one of the attendants came to fetch them and begin their shoot. Their loss was our gain.

We began our shoot around noon, nearly a full hour later than our appointment. Jill had told me that the plan going into this was to not only get photos of the Duke but to also have a few family portraits made, and that sounded like a fantastic idea to me. What did not sound like a fantastic idea was the photographers first pose for us as a family which would require the three of us to get on the ground.

I am 34 years old as of this writing however I will tell you that I am probably less than 10 years away from having to have some sort of procedure done to one or possibly both of my knees. I'm not immobile by any stretch of the imagination, but when you combine my joints being what they are with the fact that I'm not the most graceful of individuals anyway, you can hopefully understand why getting on the ground isn't something I often choose to do. I did it anyway because that's what was asked of me and I wanted to try my best to make the most of the situation.

The pose we wound up in had me on the ground on my left side with my right knee raised and my left arm/leg left to prop myself up. It wasn't an uncomfortable position, to be quite honest, but it became uncomfortable after my wife and Duke were added to the mix (I'm not blaming them, I'm blaming the pose!) as I wound up more or less having to support their weight with my hips and lower back. It just wasn't a good situation for my pelvis and spine, is what I'm getting at. Making matters worse were the commands of the photographer to lean in, get closer, turn your head, and keep smiling all the while even though your left femur feels like it's about to pop out of its socket. I don't know why it is photographers have to put their subjects in these odd poses - they are wholly unnatural and you can tell this in the resulting images.

We did one additional pose as a family and it was in a more traditional arrangement where my wife & I were seated on stools, holding Duke in between us. The shots we got from that pose were the best ones of the day and I would've been perfectly fine if the thing had ended there. It went on for a while longer, though, and Jill's Mom even got brought into the mix. The idea, of course, is to take as many poses as possible because then they can try to sell them to you, which brings me to the next phase of this event.

Once we were done taking photos, we sat down in front of a monitor with our photographer - a young black woman who looked to be in her early to mid 20s - to go over what we had to work with. It was then that my wife mentioned to the photog that we had a coupon; the photog more or less hushed my wife, telling her that it was only good for one pose and that we'd get a much better deal by going with one of the packages currently being offered. How much those packages were going to cost wasn't discussed at that point, though, as we first had to go through and select our favorite shots.

Remember how I mentioned earlier the fact that pricing information for packages offered by these studios isn't readily available online? Nowhere in the shop itself was there a display, menu, or any kind of signage that would clue customers in to what they'd be forking over for pictures made therein.

The pictures did look quite good for the most part, although there were a few poses (such as the one of us on the floor) that just looked weird. Once we had it narrowed down to somewhere in the area of 16 poses the photog navigated through her software to the sales module and we finally got an idea of what we were looking at in terms of cost.

The first package she showed us was $554.

FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-FOUR DOLLARS.

To put that into perspective, when I was still making payments on my truck they were $250 a month, and when we were renting a house after we got married the rent payment was $525 a month.

I think she was joking but the photog turned to me after the total charge for that package was displayed on the screen and said, "So, Dad, do you want to write a check for that today?" Joking or not, the disgust on my face and in my tone of voice was very real.

I should mention that the packages I speak of are set up in such a way that you have to buy a certain number of photos featuring a specific set of poses in order to get freebies. For example, you might select 12 poses which would qualify you for a free hardcover book, two softcover books, and a CD with all the photos burned onto it. The more poses you select the more freebies you get, and the fewer poses you select the fewer freebies you get. This whole deal is, of course, meant to make customers feel like they're getting a deal when in reality you're paying for every one of the freebies. I have no method of verifying this but I would hazard a guess and say that the photogs (who double as sales staff) are more than likely working off of commission.

We then went through the process of whittling down our selection so that we could try to get to a price point that wasn't quite so ridiculous. For me, this became like what happened last year when I took my truck in for service to get the brakes done. What I thought was going to be a $200 bill wound up being almost $600. In this instance, what I thought would be a $60 bill wound up being $100 (the package we picked was around $200 and, thankfully, Jill's Mom was generous enough to pay half of the total). We paid our due, left to have lunch (it was roughly 1:30 PM by then, and I was feeling every bit of it since the only thing I'd had to eat thus far that day was a fiber bar), then came back about an hour and a half later to pick up our photos.

I made a comment about our experience on Facebook and a friend of our family chimed in with the comment, "Been there, done that, got the t-shirt." Along those lines, the lesson I take away from this is that it's all a part of being a parent. Sure, the pictures are good and we'll undoubtedly treasure them for as long as we can, but this is one of those times we'll look back on in 10, 15, 20 years and say "Do you remember how silly this day was?" Then we'll see the pictures with that little boy and his perfectly round head, and the money won't matter. The standing around won't matter. The pain in my knees won't matter. What matters is that we have a family and we did this together as a family.

2014 - A Year in Review

Yeah, I know I'm a few weeks late with this (I say that apologetically although when you're examining the past should there be a realistic time frame in which someone has to look back in a retrospective manner?), but I have plenty of logical reasons for my first blog entry of 2015 having taken a while to make its way from my brain to the Internet. It's called being a dad and I am happy to say that of all the reasons I could have for ignoring something as ultimately frivolous (in the grand scheme of things anyway; not to discredit this fine publication but my priorities are what they are) as this here blog trust me when I say that there is none more rewarding than that.

I guess that's as suitable a segue as any into what was undoubtedly the most prolific, life-altering experience to come out of 2014, that being the culmination of the process my wife Jill and I have gone through in building our family. I won't bother recapping the entire turn of events that lead us where we are today (if you'd like, feel free to refer back to any of my blog entries that are titled "Our Road to Building a Family" as well as pretty much any blog entry my wife has made at her site - The Truesdale Times - in the past year), however I will make it known that to have what we have now is such an incredible gift. Our son - The Duke, as we'll still be referring to him until the adoption proceedings are finalized - will soon be 3 months old. He amazes me each and every day with his personality. There is nothing in the world that makes me as happy as seeing him smile and hearing him laugh. He's already changed and grown so much in the short period of time we've had him, it just makes me wish time would slow down or that I would somehow be able to appreciate it more because he'll only be this way for a short period of time. He'll be crawling soon, then he'll pull himself up to make his first steps, and before you know it he'll be graduating from college.

Oh, life - won't you take your shoes off and stay for a while? Quick, let me move on to other topics before I get any more cheesy and emotional over how awesome our little family unit became over the stretch of 2014.

Last year was full of experiences for my wife and I as we were able to travel and do some things we'd not been able to previously. I, personally, started off the year with a trip to Winston-Salem, North Carolina in pursuit of one of my hobbies, that being following independent professional wrestling promotions in the region. Jill & I made our way to Duluth, Georgia (which isn't too far away from Atlanta) for a Valentine's Day jaunt to pay a visit to a third Medieval Times castle. (We've been to their locations in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and Orlando, Florida; I won't say that we're officially on a trek to visit all the MT castles but at the same time I won't deny that it sounds like a fun endeavor.) May was a month that I think I'll remember fondly for the rest of my life seeing as how we got to go to one of our favorite vacation destinations, that being Walt Disney World, for the 2014 edition of Star Wars Weekends during which we got to meet a slew of Star Wars characters as well as see a panel that involved actors Jeremy Bulloch (Boba Fett) and Warwick Davis (Wicket). Our yearly vacation to Myrtle Beach was memorable for a number of reasons, not the least of which being the fact that I was able to reclaim the Annual Myrtle Beach Putt Putt Challenge Championship trophy for the second time. Our tires got a bit of rest towards the middle of the year but they got back onto the road around Labor Day as we ventured to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee for a weekend getaway that turned out to be an adventure. And to cap things off as far as road trips are concerned, I traveled to Gibsonville, North Carolina in October to attend a pro wrestling card held there.

I had several people pose the question "Where are y'all headed this weekend?" to me throughout 2014. I guess by that you could say that we do a good job of documenting (and publicizing) our lives seeing as how they wouldn't be asking that otherwise. The truth of the matter is that I've never been a homebody - I blame my Grandmother for this as she was exactly the same, seemingly never content to spend too much time at home, preferring to be out and about enjoying herself whether that meant taking a bus tour across the country or going shopping. I enjoy getting out, seeing the world and doing things, and I don't anticipate that changing any time soon. That being the case the answer to "Where are y'all headed this weekend?" is, quite simply, wherever we feel like it.

2014 was not without its moments of trauma, unfortunately.

We got our first dose of what it's like to be fearful for our property's health and well-being in February when a horrible ice storm assaulted our part of the world. Rarely have I felt a sense of isolation so thick as I did during the few days that we were more or less cut off from the rest of the world by the effects of the storm (we only lost power for a few hours but our home phone, television, and internet connectivity was down for several days; to make matters worse our cellular reception isn't that great where we live). And, for the record, I'll be perfectly fine if I never hear the sound of trees cracking and falling under the weight of accumulated ice. I kid you not, our neighborhood was so tense that it seemed as though there were a thousand ACME brand anvils strung up by frayed twine, all of which were waiting for just the right moment to fall - but would they fall harmlessly to the ground or calamitously onto someone's house? We were fortunate that our home wasn't damaged, thankfully, and aside from a few downed limbs we didn't have much to concern ourselves with in terms of cleanup.

Not everyone has a pet. Those people are weird, or at least I believe they are. Animals, dogs specifically, make life better in my opinion. They give us companionship and affection, and in return all they want is for us to be happy. That being the case, it's easy to understand why it's so hard to deal with when age gets the best of them and they finally come to the end of what was hopefully an adventurous life. Chewie, my Mom's beloved dachshund, left this world towards the end of 2014 and it still makes me sad to think about the fact that he's not with us anymore. I buried him behind our storage shed. When the weather is right I plan on reseeding our lawn and once the grass gets going I'll put down a marker my wife & I had made for him.

Raise your hand if you've ever thought you were going to have to fight a brush fire extending off of a 4 alarm house fire with a garden hose while wearing your pajamas and a pair of sandals in 40° weather? No takers? My hand is raised, because I've been there!

Near the end of November, just after Thanksgiving, a vacant house two doors down from ours was more or less gutted by a fire. The heat from the blaze was so intense that it melted the vinyl siding on a home that exists between ours and it. At one point I genuinely thought I was going to have to try and stave off the flames that were steadily marching across the grassy lot between the two properties but fortunately enough the local fire department arrived with haste, thus saving me the trouble. (I was ready and willing, is the point I'm trying to make.) The house was a total loss and arson investigators from South Carolina's State Law Enforcement Division were on hand in the days after the fire. I don't think there has been any progress in the case (there's been no public comment from any authorities on the matter) but it definitely seemed suspicious seeing as how no one had been there for weeks and, from what we were told, the electricity had been turned off. It's been several months since then and the house that burned still sits in the state it was left, complete with crime scene tape. It's an eyesore and I certainly hope the owners of that property will have it cleaned up sooner rather than later.

Everyone who knows me well knows how big a fan I am of professional wrestling. Always have been, more than likely always will be. (I say that even though here lately the bulk of World Wrestling Entertainment's TV programming has made me question why I bother tuning in to their shows anymore.) In recent years I have grown especially fond of supporting our local pro wrestling promotions and the talent making up those rosters. I mentioned earlier in this post how I went to Winston-Salem, NC for an event. It was around that same time that I began to hatch the idea for my very own YouTube show, which I envisioned as being something of a reality or documentary series wherein I would depict the experience of what it's like to be a fan of indie pro wrestling and what it's like to attend events put on by promotions falling into that category. Rasslin' with Redbeard is what that idea eventually became, and I'm proud to say that I was able to produce 12 episodes in 2014.



In addition, I began filming matches at the events I attend and I add those to my YouTube channel as well. My mission there has been to hopefully do my part in giving the talent that exists in our neck of the woods an opportunity to be seen by eyes that might have bigger and grander ideas for them than what they're enjoying currently. It pleases me greatly when I see individuals sharing the content I publish, not because it does anything for me, personally, but because it validates the objective I've set for this effort.



I made a point to say that last bit there because I don't know that everyone understands that seeing as how I've had to deal with a few negative reactions to what I've been doing. More so than anything, that sort of response comes from people who feel as though I'm either presenting them in a negative light or otherwise cutting into their profits by way of making their product freely available when they had machinations of selling it. The fact of the matter is that with Rasslin' with Redbeard I am sharing my personal experience as a fan who drives (several hours in some cases) to a venue, pays for a ticket, and spends money at the concession stand. Not that shelling out my hard earned cash grants me a right to do whatever I want, rather that if I offer constructive criticism it's the honest opinion of someone who's been to enough shows and seen enough matches to know what's good, what's bad, and what falls somewhere in between. Believe me when I say that I do try to stay positive in promoting indie pro wrestling as a whole because there's enough snarky commentary out here on the Internet about pro wrestling as is, hence the reason why I want to build up as opposed to tearing down. That said, if I enjoy a show, I'm going to tell you I enjoyed it and if I didn't enjoy a show, I'm going to tell you about it, too.

To those of you who've taken issue with me over any of the material I've published, please know that I make no money from doing what I do with this content. I invest my personal time, effort, funds, and materials for the exclusive purpose of (hopefully) increasing the exposure of talent and promotions because I feel like they deserve it.

2014 was a great year and, in my heart, I have high hopes for 2015. I think that this will be a stellar year for my wife & I, and our still developing little family unit. With any luck we'll soon be able to share all the details imaginable about The Duke and we'll be able to go about our lives without need for all the cloak and dagger nonsense we've had to endure. He'll be joining us on all our adventures and get to live the full, spoiled rotten life he deserves.

Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Arson (?)

We're getting to the time of year where my wife & I get extremely busy in terms of our schedules being overrun with matters of the season. For several years now it's been that we're almost always on the move usually from the second week of November right on up through the new year. If it's not a family event it's some other type of festive gathering that has us tied up, but for good reason obviously.

2014 is the first year since we've been married that we did not take a vacation the week of Veterans Day. That had become our week to take a trip seeing as how we both have the Veterans Day holiday off; the free day makes it particularly ideal for going out of town seeing as how that means we didn't have to take as much leave as we would otherwise. We took a cruise to the western Caribbean in 2011 then we went to Walt Disney World in 2012 and 2013. Not this year, though, now that The Duke is in our lives. (I don't want it to sound like I'm blaming him for us not being able to go somewhere because I know that's exactly how that last sentence would make it seem. If I had to choose between a vacation and him, I think you already know what I'd choose!) He'll be able to get out and about soon enough as he'll be getting his immunizations in the next few weeks and at that point we won't have to keep him cooped up any longer.

That said, the past few weeks have been very eventful for us. I hate to say it but we've had a bit of a string of bad luck when it comes to our vehicles. Both my truck and Jill's car have had to have work done here lately - the thermostat in her car went bad and the starter in my truck finally decided to die after having been on its last legs for about a month. My wife's father was able to get her car back in working order (he's that kind of awesome) but the truck wound up costing me in the area of $350 for parts and labor. Car repair never seems to be something people plan for, or at least I don't. I've made the statement to several people in the past that just once in my life I'd like to actually budget for tires as opposed to having to buy them on the spot as a result of absolutely having to have them when an issue arises. That's a goal to work towards, I guess.

At any rate, here's a recap of what's been going on with us here lately.

Thanksgiving

I think I look forward to Thanksgiving more so than I do just about any other holiday, including Christmas. Why? Well, I guess in my mind Thanksgiving doesn't seem like work or that a lot of showmanship is involved when you compare it to the goings on of December. With Thanksgiving you know what you're in for - time with family, lots of yummy food, and nothing else to do but sit around and watch football on TV while enjoying a plate of leftovers. Christmas, on the other hand, seems like it's so much more of a production to me. Not that I dislike Christmas, I simply prefer Thanksgiving.

For the past two years we've hosted family at our home for Thanksgiving and it has been a real treat to be able to do that. There was a point in my life where I wouldn't have believed you if you told me I'd have my own house much less that I'd have the opportunity to do something like we have with these occasions.

It's become something of a tradition that my Father in-law brings his infrared fryer and cooks the turkey for us, and that's exactly what he did this year. I'm not sure how that device works but it somehow uses propane to generate the infrared heat waves to cook whatever is inside it. (Note how I referred to it as an infrared fryer and not just an infrared turkey fryer; you can cook all sorts of things with it, not just turkeys.) Some guy who's way smarter than I'll ever be figured that out and now we have tasty Thanksgiving turkeys for which we should thank him.

My Father in-law isn't the only one who contributes to the meal, of course, as most everyone pitches in with some aspect of the menu. Case in point, my Aunt brings her potato salad which - and I'm not exaggerating here - is literally the best potato salad you'll ever have. She uses a specific type of potato, Duke's mayonnaise (which is the only mayonnaise you should ever consider using for things like potato salad), and adds in diced bell pepper which gives it a great flavor as well as giving it an interesting textural contrast to the soft (not mushy) potatoes. Other selections on this year's menu included ham, dressing, green bean casserole, deviled eggs, cranberry sauce, as well as an assortment of pies - pecan, sweet potato, coconut cream, and coconut custard.

After the meal while we were all sitting around enjoying each other's company, Jill was looking through print advertisements for sales that would be happening throughout the upcoming weekend. She brought up to me that Walmart had what sounded to be a great deal on an Xbox One bundle that included a copy of a game I've been looking forward to called HALO: The Master Chief Collection. (Long story short, I'm a HALO nut and have been since I played the first game.) The Xbox One up until a few weeks ago had been retailing for $400 but it's recently been lowered to $350 - this deal at Walmart had the console, the game, and a controller for $330. The only trick to it was the fact that it was a Thanksgiving day sale, as in one that would be kicking off at 6 PM. By the point in time my wife had discovered the sale it was creeping up on 4 PM.

In my head I was going over the logistics of the proposal. Yes, I wanted an Xbox One but did I want it at the expense of having to brave the lunacy that would certainly be the Walmart in Orangeburg, South Carolina on an occasion such as this? (As proof of that statement, I offer the story about the time I almost got run over while walking in the parking lot.) With it being so late in the day, relatively speaking, I wondered if there was already a line for the consoles and if the allotment at that location had been claimed by eager shoppers. Jill's Mom was staying with us over the weekend, and she had no issues at all with taking care of the Duke if we wanted to give it a shot, so I knew we wouldn't have to worry about his well being. All things considered we decided to go ahead and risk it - yes, we were going to Walmart on Thanksgiving, and not because we forgot the cranberry sauce.

We arrived just after 4:30 PM and I was more than a little shocked by the fact that the parking lot wasn't overflowing with cars by the time we got there. I fully expected there to be cars jammed into every conceivable spot around the property, but it was only at about half capacity which is about what it is at any given time of day (it seemed very comparable to how it is when we're typically there, to be honest). As we entered the store we were given a map detailing where specific sale items were set up. Fittingly enough, the Xbox Ones were in place behind the counter in sporting goods.

Making our way to the very back corner of the store (I've always wondered why sporting goods get stuck in one of the most remote sections of these stores) we noticed that the central portion of the space had been taped off so as to limit customer access. We could see product stacked up on pallets and wrapped in plastic - to me, they looked kind of like they were innocents being held captive and in restraints prior to being sacrificed to the oncoming horde. There were balloons labeled with the name of an item floating above the locations of each, a tactic I thought was quite clever. Also, I pointed out to my wife that many of the store associates were wearing bright yellow ponchos; we both agreed that this was most likely so that they could easily identify one another amongst the crowd.

When we got to sporting goods and I spotted the Xbox One balloon I prepared myself for the line - which I could not see from the angle of our approach because of the fact it was running down an aisle. I anticipated it being at least 30 people long and that all the consoles in stock had already been spoken for. To my amazement, there were only 9 people in line and I could see at least twice as many consoles stacked up behind the counter.

 My anxiety subsided as all we had to do now was stand around and wait for 6 PM. The goings on of the people around us provided plenty of entertainment to make the time roll by. We chatted with the people around us and we all got a real hoot out of the fact that it seemed as though the section of the store we were in was the most organized of any. As 6 PM approached we noticed that the crowd noise inside the store was incredibly loud and that there was no longer a whole lot of room to move around. About 10 minutes before 6 we heard the sound of plastic ripping followed by the shouts of a store associate who was trying to maintain order around their quadrant. I think by that point an effort geared towards maintaining order was like trying to use a fish net to catch smoke. Suddenly the notion of putting us at the back in sporting goods didn't seem like such a peculiar idea.

When 6 PM finally rolled around it quickly became evident that things weren't going well. For this sale, Walmart was offering two different Xbox One bundles at the same price point of $330, one that came with Assassin's Creed Unity and another with the Master Chief Collection as well as a free $30 Walmart gift card. We were in line in sporting goods around the gun case as they had the systems set up behind the counter there. As the sale starts those of us further back in line begin hearing rumblings from the front that the bundles aren't ringing up at the right price.

Turns out they had a different Assassin's Creed bundle that came with Kinect incorrectly mixed in with their inventory. They were ringing up at the correct price as they weren't supposed to be included in the inventory for this sale. I pointed this out to one of the clerks myself - the boxes were visibly different and no one else seemed to notice.

In advance of the sale an associate had gone through the line, counting out how many people were there to buy one of the Xbox bundles (separating the buyers from the hangers on, as it were). I believe she had our number to be somewhere in the low twenties, and she made a point to announce to everyone that they had 36 of the bundles on hand. Unfortunately that 36 included a number of the Kinect bundles - I'm sure there was at least someone in that line who didn't get a system that day.

To make matters worse a customer that was 2 spots ahead of me in line purchased then returned and re-purchased a bundle. She bought the Assassin's Creed bundle then asked for her $30 gift card. Thing was, the AC bundle didn't come with the gift card, only the Halo bundle got those. So she decides she wants to return that bundle and buy the Halo bundle instead. My point in detailing this is to say that this experience was made worse by the fact that either that customer was a crook or that the associates didn't seem to know what they were selling.

The biggest challenge we faced that evening came after I had my Xbox One in hand - that being the process of getting out of the store as well as out of the parking lot. I would love to know how many people were in the store as we left as I would assume it had to be at least 1,000 souls. We ducked, bobbed, and weaved out way down the aisles until we were out the door and into the sea of cars that was now the parking lot. When I say the lot was full it literally was full as there were people parking at businesses across the street and walking over.

I saw that there were several Orangeburg county sheriff's deputies vehicles up on the curb in front of the store as we entered; apparently they were there for crowd control and not traffic control as it took us nearly an hour to get out of the lot. I have no idea what the delay was from, other than there just being so many cars coming into the lot with nowhere for them to go. We wound up making our escape through a gap created by a pair of empty parking spaces and we got home in the area of 8:30 PM. I'm glad that I got what I wanted that evening but I severely doubt my wife and I will be making another outing like this any time soon!

Black Friday

I said we wouldn't make another outing like the one we had Thanksgiving night and yet we went out on Black Friday - go figure. Truth be told, we're not like your usual Black Friday shoppers in that we don't get up at the crack of dawn to begin the assault on your bank account. Rather we wait until around lunchtime because by then most of the real crazies are already at home or they've found somewhere with sufficient cover to allow them to crash.

I'm not going to go too deep into our experience with Black Friday this year because there's nothing too terribly interesting about the day to share. We shopped, we ate lunch (at Chicken Salad Chick - if you like chicken salad as much as we do, that's a restaurant you need to make a facet of your life), we shopped some more and then we went home. However, notice in the last sentence of the previous paragraph that I said "most" of the real crazies were out of action when we began our day...

We went to the Harbison Boulevard location of Buy Buy Baby in Columbia, SC. As we were getting in the car to head to the next shop I hear what sounded like someone yelling. I didn't pay it a whole lot of attention at first even though it seemed like the sound was somewhat nearby because I wasn't sure what I would wind up being witness to. (If I can at all avoid getting involved in a bad scene I'm going to do so at all costs.) I heard the yelling again and this time it became clear that this wasn't a sound produced by someone in distress but rather someone who was just plain pissed off.

I looked to my right and saw a young woman roughly 50 yards away, probably in her early to mid-twenties, wearing a pink hoodie who was obviously agitated. She yelled something I couldn't quite make out, stomped over to the driver's side of her vehicle, got in and slammed the door in the process. She then proceeded to crank up the car and speed off before pouncing on the brakes, putting the car into a slide with the tires smoking. I hadn't noticed yet but she stopped where she did because there was a man standing on the grass beyond the curb near a tree in the parking lot; I guess he figured he was safer there, although from the look of her she didn't appear to be the sort that would let anything get in the way of her tirade.

The two of them exchanged words. More accurately, she screamed at him about how much she hated him while he stood there trying to talk to someone on his phone. This went on for a few moments then another car pulled up behind where she was - she'd stopped in a lane of traffic, I should have bothered to point out. The driver of the other car honked their horn which didn't help matters at all as the woman got out of her car and shifted her rage to the driver of the other vehicle. Lets just say that this driver saw a couple of wild birds fly by and also got treated to an assortment of colorful metaphors.

I don't know why people get into arguments like that, never having been in one that escalated to that degree myself. Believe it or not the guy she was yelling at got into the car with her. As Tom Arnold's character in True Lies said, "Ballsy...Stupid, but ballsy." Now that I think about it, that quote kind of encompasses the notion of going out on Black Friday as a whole. Something that takes a certain amount of bravery and at least as much ignorance.

Arson (?)

During the afternoon hours of November 29, I was working in our yard assembling our Christmas decorations. We don't do anything too extravagant, just a few rope lights strung along the railings of our front porch and some net lighting in the shrubbery. Later that evening as Jill, my Mother in-law and I were settling in to watch the kickoff of the Iron Bowl our doorbell rang. This was particularly peculiar because of the fact that we don't get many visitors out our way, but especially not of the unannounced variety at night. I got up off the couch while attempting to calm down our dog who is always quick to notify us with a chorus of barks that the doorbell has, in fact, rang.

When I got to the door I saw George, who is the teenaged son of one of our neighbors. I opened the glass door and while pointing to his right he immediately said, "THAT HOUSE IS ON FIRE!"

My brain didn't instantly process what he was saying. I looked in the direction he was pointing and my eyes couldn't believe what they were seeing.

The house two doors down from ours was on fire. (I took a tiny amount of relief in this realization because at first I thought he meant the house directly beside ours. My fear there, of course, was that the fire might spread through the trees that separate the two lots and that it would then jump to our home. That house is new construction and, fortunately, is unoccupied.) "On fire" is too subtle of a description for the flames that were coming out of the house. "Blazing inferno of Hellfire", maybe, but to say it was just "on fire" is a horrible understatement.

We're all in our pajamas at this point and I was barefoot. I went back into the house to put on a pair of shoes, and of course the most readily available pair were my trusty Nike sandals. (I believe Jill told me later on that when she first went into the yard she was only wearing socks.) Jill grabbed our house phone, called 9-1-1 and alerted them to what was going on. We saw one of our other neighbors running to the house next door to the one on fire to get the elderly woman that lives there out of harms way. In the mean time, George and I were standing there watching the blaze when I realized that the grass was burning.

The flames were advancing like a tiny wave of destruction, consuming the dry, dead grass and leaves on the ground. I knew that the fire department would be on their way but I had no idea as to how long they it would take them to respond. I did the only thing I could think of doing at that moment - I went after one of our garden hoses and began unreeling it.

My first thought was to take the hose and connect it to a spigot on the house beside ours. I knew there had been water there as the builder had set out sprinklers and taken great care in making sure the fresh sod he put out got plenty of water. Apparently the water had been shut off, more than likely at the tap in the yard, because the spigot was dry. My next best option was to drag the hose back over to our house and hope that it reached far enough to do some good. I believe that hose is 250 feet in length - if it had been any shorter than that it would've been useless.

Luckily by the time I had the hose ready to go the fire department showed up. It felt like it took them 20 minutes to get there but in reality it was less than 5 minutes from when Jill made the call to 9-1-1 to when the first truck was on the scene. I was relieved, certainly, but with the adrenaline that was coursing through my system I'd be lying if I said that I was a tiny bit upset that I didn't get to earn my amateur fire fighter status by participating in the containment of the blaze. My hose may not have had the girth of theirs but I was more than ready to do what I could (no, there was no way I couldn't not make that joke here).

Bear in mind that the temperature that night was around 40°. I was wearing basketball shorts, a t-shirt, and sandals. Between the heat from the flames and the adrenaline in my system I didn't feel the cold at all - not until an hour or so later, that is, when the fire was mostly out.

We've learned since the fire that this house was nearly 100 years old and that it was built out of what's called fat lighter or fat wood. I had never heard those terms before, so if you're like me and are wondering what that means I'll tell you that essentially it means the house was built out of matches. Fat wood is typically used as kindling nowadays but in the period this home was built it wasn't uncommon to see houses made out of it because of how hard the wood is. There was likely very little that could've been done to save the house as the fire spread very quickly across those old timbers.



Once the fire was out, there wasn't much left of the house. It's difficult to see in the picture below but the majority of the structure was gutted and the roof had collapsed.

The photo below is an image of the vinyl siding on the house directly beside ours. I'm guessing here but I believe the two houses are roughly 100-150 feet apart. That's all the evidence you need to be able to understand just how hot the fire was burning. (In contrast, there is another home on the other side of the one that burned. That house is less than 20 yards away yet it suffered virtually no damage at all.)

I believe there were either 3 or 4 fire trucks that responded to the fire. In addition there were a number of volunteer firemen who drove their own vehicles, at least 1 ambulance, several Saint Matthews Police Department patrol cars, and I believe trucks from a few of our utility companies as well. I can't tell you how much we appreciate their responsiveness - it goes without saying that there were plenty of opportunities for an event like this to get out of hand, but thanks to them the damage was limited to only one piece of property.

In the next photo you can see just how much damage was done to the home.

You may be wondering about who was living there at the time. This house was actually a rental property and was vacant before the fire. We had very little interaction with the people who had been living there (they offered us a dog once; we respectfully declined) and, as a matter of fact, it had been several weeks since we had seen any cars parked at the home. Allegedly (I use the word seeing as how what I'm about to add to this story is hearsay) the electricity had been turned off, they had been evicted, and they were supposed to have been fully moved out by the day of the fire.

If that isn't a suspicious scenario I don't know what is. The day after the fire, our local police and agents from the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division poured over the scene. I have no idea where they stand with their investigation but I feel as though there's a high probability that this was a case of arson.

My faith in humanity has wavered because of this incident. It absolutely baffles me why someone would do such a thing in a crowded residential neighborhood. Did they not stop to think about what would have happened if the fire had spread? Forget the houses and the stuff in them - all that can be replaced. What about the potential for loss of life? If you have a grudge with someone, settle it with them - don't set fire to a property that's nestled in between so many other homes filled with families.

A Tribute to Chewie

When a dog comes into your life, you have a special opportunity to form a relationship that is unlike any other. A dog doesn't care how much money you make or what kind of car you drive, they aren't concerned with what team you pull for or what's going on in the realm of social media - all they care about is that you're there and that you're a part of their life. It could be accurately said, then, that the dog isn't so much an animal as they are a beloved member of your family. And so it is that when the time comes that the fur around their nose turns grey, their legs don't quite have the same pep they once did, and their little light begins to fade becomes one of the most painful moments imaginable. You realize then that the time you've had with them was a gift, one that won't last nearly long enough.

Words cannot express how sad I am right now as I'm writing this. On November 25, 2014, I lost the closest thing I've ever had to an honest to God brother.

My Mom's dog, Chewie, has crossed the rainbow bridge.

My heart hurts.

I miss my friend...

Our Road to Building a Family - 10 Things I've Learned from "The Duke"

I will be upfront in saying that with this list I'm ripping off my wife's recent post over at her blog, The Truesdale Times, wherein she discussed 10 things she's learned from the time we've had thus far with our foster/hopefully adoptive child, who will be known in these parts until further notice simply as The Duke.

10) I don't know what we would do without family & friends

I pointed out in my previous submission to this blog series the fact that my wife & I had absolutely nothing in our home that would make it a suitable dwelling for a newborn when we got the call about The Duke being available. As a matter of fact, we had gone to great lengths to prepare our home for older children as we never anticipated we'd have the opportunity to potentially adopt a baby. Everything we were told in the training sessions we were required to sit through before we could be approved as adoptive/foster parents lead us to believe we had a better shot at finding a four leaf clover, getting struck by lightning, and winning the lottery all in the same day than of getting a baby.

That said, I don't know where we'd be if not for donations and gifts from the people we're lucky enough to have as family and friends. What most couples prepare for over the course of 9 months we did in a matter of hours, but only because we are surrounded by people who love us and who were willing to participate in The Duke's life. To anyone who helped us in any way, shape, or form, we can never say thank you enough!

9) Uninterrupted periods of sleep don't exist

I have to say that this has not been so much a learning experience for me as it has been for my wife.

Before The Duke came along I would typically get in bed around 10:30 PM, watch a little TV, and finally conk out by 11:30 or midnight. I drink a fair amount of water in the evening, and as a result I have to get up usually once or twice a night to relieve myself. (Too much information? Probably, but we're not done yet with the subject of bodily excretions in this blog entry, not by a long shot!) As such, I'm somewhat accustomed to having to put myself back to sleep every night after an interruption. The biggest difference now is that the "interruption" has to be fed, have his diaper changed, and then settled back into his own slumber before I/we go back to Dreamland.

The Duke is in a pattern of becoming needy about once every 3 to 3 and a half hours. So long as we time it right even with having to tend to him we can still get a good 6 or 7 hours of sleep per night, which is about what I was getting before.

8) Burping is not only necessary, it's encouraged

If you consider how newborns receive sustenance, you'll quickly realize why it is that they need to burp. They're on a liquid diet and they're going to wind up swallowing air. That air can be quite painful once it's trapped in their tiny bellies. Their little bodies aren't finely tuned enough to be able to bust out a burp as needed, so they need some assistance in the form of a pat on the back.

That said, The Duke burps like a grown man. He has all the power and volume behind his belches that I do, which is saying something seeing as how I've got roughly 34 more years of experience in the matter than he does. I'm sure that as he grows up he'll continue to hone these skills so that he's ready to vocalize a proper burp - because being able to throw a lighthearted jab at one of your buddies through a burp is part of what being a man is all about.

7) Baby formula is ridiculously expensive

We noticed that when The Duke was on a traditional formula after we first brought him home that it appeared to be going straight through him, meaning he wasn't getting the nutrition he needed. After talking to his doctor, we switched him to a soy-based product and he's really taken to it. He was a little over 6 pounds when he was born but I would say he's closer to 8 by this point in time.

I will admit that I had never looked at formula prices before now - all I can say about the matter is holy crap, why is this stuff so expensive?! It's just a powdered mix, how can it cost that much? Are soybeans on some kind of endangered species list? You'd think he was drinking something derived from a rare earth metal. And it's not like the stuff is packaged in a glass vial that was shaped by a master craftsman then scrubbed and polished by hand. It's a can for crying out loud!

Of course I say that even though when I was still working out regularly I used to pay $20 or more for a tub of protein powder. I guess that was different seeing as how I might take one or two doses a day versus him who's taking 7 or 8 per day.

6) Daycare is ridiculous

Up until now I had only heard stories of how daycare operations are so overcrowded that many have waiting lists and that if or when you do get approval for entrance into one the costs can be staggering. Suffice to say that we can verify both of those presumptions as being factual.

5) Baby poop is a horrific example of the sort of material our bodies can produce

I discussed formula earlier in this entry and I also mentioned how The Duke is on a soy-based formula. It still baffles me, to a degree, how a person like him can ingest what is a liquid (albeit one that is certainly loaded with vegetable fiber) and then poop what is most certainly a solid. It went in one end as a fluid but it came out the other end as this oddly chunky, not quite mustard yellow but not quite beige colored matter the odor of which is somewhere between rotting animal carcass and construction site port-a-potty.

It's a visual and smell that I wasn't necessarily prepared to have to deal with. I haven't gone so far as to invest in a HAZMAT suit but I am considering purchasing one of those inclosures with the rubber gloves in them - you know, like the type you see in monster movies where a scientist needs to examine a specimen but doesn't want to touch it for fear of contamination? I may have to run a ventilation line but that's alright.

4) When it comes to interpreting the needs of a baby, science has failed us

The Duke is a grunter. As in when he makes his presence known it's not through a coo or some kind of gentle sound, it's through a "HNNNNNGH!" or a "WUUUURGH!" When he starts to grunting you can safely bet that in short order he's going to need either a bottle or a fresh diaper.

That said, our boy isn't a particularly fussy baby however there have been times where he'll cry and we have no idea what his need in that moment actually is. Are you hungry? Here's a bottle. Wait, why are you still crying? Your diaper is full? Okay, lets change it - wait, I did what I thought you needed, why are you crying now? You don't like being naked and it's chilly in the house? Well why didn't you say that to begin with?

I'm shocked there isn't some kind of gadget out there that can accurately predict what it is that a baby like The Duke needs when he begins to sound off about a given displeasure he's experiencing. I don't know what a device like that would cost but I would be willing to at least consider buying it if it existed. It would seem to be a more worthwhile product than a lot of the other seemingly useless and/or limited baby tech that's out there.

3) Babies require roughly the same amount of gear as is needed for a military deployment

Speaking of baby tech, I am dumbfounded at the volume of gear that is available these days for parents to equip and accessorize their baby. I can only compare it to the cellular phone industry in that there exists this insane, fanatical culture centered around outfitting today's children with stuff that they don't know they have and would more than likely be just as well without. What's worse is the fact that to the modern parent all of it is apparently necessary, although I would say that aspect has more to do with Mom and/or Dad wanting to maintain a particular social status level through ownership of a certain stroller, car seat, or what have you than it does with serving the needs of the child.

There are things in my house right now because of The Duke that I have no idea what they do (some of which I have no desire to learn what they do) or that I could do without because I already had a device or process that accomplished the same task. Case in point, after we brought home The Duke I bought a lidded trash can (with the little step you can press to raise the lid) and a pack of stick-on air deodorizers thinking that would be an adequate containment unit for diapers and other waste. All totaled, it cost about $11. Was it sufficient?

Someone gave us one of these things, a Diaper Genie by Playtex.

If you've ever seen the bio-hazard disposal boxes mounted on the wall of a hospital or doctor's office examination room, this is essentially the same thing only instead of needles and bloody gauze this is for poopie diapers. Depending on what model you opt for, these things will set you back anywhere from $30-$40. The kicker, though, is that it doesn't use ordinary trash bags - instead it uses a cartridge pre-loaded with a sleeve of plastic that you must cut and tie off as needed. How long will the cartridge last? Who knows but refills of these cartridges cost $7 a pop!

So, just to re-cap where we stand with my trash can versus the Diaper Genie...

My Trash Can:
- Initial investment: $11
- Recurring costs:
     * $30 for 1,000 trash bags purchased from buying club
     * $3 per pack of deodorizer inserts

Diaper Genie:
- Initial investment: $35 (I split the difference)
- Recurring costs:
     * $7 per cartridge

If you do the math, the trash can wins handily in terms of cost of ownership over the lifetime of the device. Plus, who's to say manufacturing of the refills doesn't up and stop or that a new & improved model won't come out leaving you with no way to wrangle the poopie diapers? You're left with a gun for which no one is making bullets and that's not a good thing. Also, you can continue using the trash can well into the future either in the child's room or somewhere else in the house. At some point the child won't be in diapers anymore - what will you do with the Diaper Genie then? You might have gotten your money's worth out of it by then and I guess you could hold onto it until you're wearing Depends. The latter option is a personal choice and not one I'm ready to make right just yet.

2) Stores specializing in baby gear are oddly terrifying

My wife & I went to a Buy Buy Baby location last weekend in Columbia, South Carolina. (As it turns out, BBB is a sister store to Bed Bath & Beyond - whoever owns these things has some affinity for the letter B apparently.) It was the first time I'd ever set foot inside a store that sold nothing but baby products. To say that I had a hard time digesting the entirety of the thing would be an understatement.

Why? I can't hammer it down to be totally honest with you. I guess I assumed that babies weren't so complicated that the breadth of offerings in a store like that one would be as vast as they are. Sure, a lot of it is worthless stuff that people buy because they can, but I couldn't get over how it is that all of those products exist. Because if they exist, someone bought them and uses them. Babies have gotten along for a very long time without things like the Pee Pee Teepee (I'm pursuing a patent on a rival product right now, which I'm calling the Tinkle Tent), but there's a Mom or a Dad out there right now that won't change their son's diaper without it because they're mortified at the thought he might score a head shot on one of them with a well-timed stream of whiz.

1) Priorities

There was an indie professional wrestling event last Sunday (November 2) in Cayce, SC promoted by a company called WrestleForce which I have featured previously in my Rasslin' with Redbeard YouTube show. When I'm at events like that one I typically will record the matches (provided the federation in question has voiced no opposition to my doing so) then later on I'll add them to my YouTube channel (which you can find here at this link). I don't want to toot my own horn but after that particular show I was contacted by three of the wrestlers that had performed on the show who wanted to know if I was there because they were eager to see and share footage of their matches.

I wasn't at the show. For obvious reasons.

That's not my way of saying I'll never go to another pro wrestling event; far from it, actually, as I would hope to be able to get to one or two a month even now. I had just spent the night in North Carolina the weekend before in order to attend a show in that state. Even though the building where WrestleForce runs their shows is less than 45 minutes from our house, it wouldn't be fair of me to take off two weekends in a row and leave my wife to tend to our child by herself.

Only I would use professional wrestling as an analogy for pertinent life lessons, right? It's a valid example of the fact that we're parents now and there will quite often be times where our schedules, needs, wants, and desires are going to play second fiddle to The Duke's schedule, needs, wants, and desires. Parents have to be prepared for that.

To me, sacrificing things like personal interests for the sake of being a considerate, involved parent is just one more way of showing how much you love your children. That doesn't mean giving up on your own aspirations, rather that as a parent you've got to acknowledge the responsibility that comes with the life you're charged with shaping while continuing your own life. For some that might mean not going to the movies or out to dinner as often, for others it might be that your work hours have to change or that you'll have to look at your classes to see what will be best going forward. Everyone can do it, you just have to be willing to put in the work to make it happen.

Being a Mom or Dad takes a level of maturity that a lot of people just plain don't seem to have these days, and I feel like that's why some relationships fail after children come into the picture. My wife & I aren't as young as a lot of new parents are when they bring home their first child. We're fortunate enough to have already done a lot in our lives and are fairly content with where we are emotionally and professionally. I've made the comment before that I don't have a whole lot of goals left in my life. I met a President of the United States. I've traveled abroad. I have a stable career. I was front row at a Metallica concert. I could name others but I'm sure you get the idea. Saying you've checked off a lot of items from your list of things to do isn't bad. It means I can be more in tune with allowing things to happen in my life as opposed to having to chase them as hard as I would have otherwise. It's an especially good thing now because it will allow me to enjoy being a Dad without feeling like I've got to impose my will on my wife or The Duke in order to pursue some arbitrary gain that, in the grand scheme of things, doesn't matter as much as making sure that little boy grows up to be healthy and happy.