It Began in June ... and Will Never End

Late on the night of June 21, 2004, I became but a part of the family chain instead of one of the last links. My wife and I had a baby girl, Reilly Vail, and all of the sudden I was responsible for a whole lot more than the dirty clothes I was wearing and the unpaid cable bill on my coffee table.

Reilly was born healthy, and very big, much to the chagrin of my wife, though in the end we were both relieved that all went as well as it did. We spent a few days in the infant ICU monitoring what we thought was low blood sugar - it turned out to be more of faulty test procedure than an actual problem. Again, relief settled in. Without this extra time in the hospital, I might not have made it.

As we all know, babies can be a bit difficult, especially for the newborn mommies and daddies. Overnight you are expected to know all kinds of things not about bringing a child into this world, but about maintaining a child in this world. What To Expect When You Are Expecting is great and all, but once the baby is out you start to realize that the problems are just beginning.
I am one of those people who like to read up a bit on any upcoming endeavor, yet not read so much that I am locked into certain expectations. After reading a bit here and there on child rearing, I decided that the books might not be the best idea - not if I were to stay sane. If you were to follow every rule of every book, I am certain the child would absolutely messed up, physically and mentally. But where else do you turn?

I have one younger sister who is in likely a greater deal of shock about being an aunt than I am about being a dad, which does me little good. My wife and I can always turn to our parents, which we often do, but there are the memories of all the things they did that pissed you off, and the fact that technology has changed since you were a child. Invariably this leads to comments like, "Changing tables? We didn't have those when I was going through the nightmare of changing your diapers! We changed you on the saw horse when your dad wasn't using it while building our own home from scratch. You're just renting. You have no discipline..." Blah, blah, blah. As soon as you get there, and it happens at breakneck speed, the conversation is done. But that's not the worst of it, as I would soon discover.

My wife and I met during the summer prior to our senior year of school at the University of San Francisco. Her family hails from the great San Joaquin Valley of central California, whereas I had traveled west from the Colorado Front Range. Upon graduation we moved to the Los Angeles area where we found plenty of sun, and living in Playa del Rey airport noise. There is something very L.A. about lying on a sunny beach talking, only to pause for about 10 seconds as a 747 comes screaming overhead en route to Japan, and then the talking resumes. This is normal, and thought to be relaxing. Only in L.A. is feeling your insides shake from the turbulence of jet engines soaring a mere couple hundred feet above your head considered relaxing, but I digress...

We found plenty of sun, a good amount of fun, and no jobs anyone with a college degree should have to take. So we didn't take them. We had some money saved up from graduation, so we played. And we played some more. Then we were broke. Upon landing in these uncertain waters, with no lifeboat around to take us to the bank with good news, we moved to Colorado where I took a job with the family business. A few weeks after starting the new job, we found out we were expecting. And at that time the worst part of my education on children began, and it has only picked up steam since.

My parents each have 4 siblings. Needless to say, this has led to a great number of children and thus are cousins to yours truly. On my mother's side I am the oldest - a solid position to be in, though the blame always fell to me when cousins would bite each other, break things, or draw on priceless works of art, because I was the babysitter of the crew, regardless of my age. However, on my father's side my sister and I were at the bottom of the chain. This too had its perks, but also meant that the terms "atomic wedgie" and "swirly" were all too familiar. My parents began this small business in 1983 and since it has become the Great Jackson Employer! Of the 17 fulltime employees now here, 12 are family members. Aunts, uncles, cousins, my sister, my parents - we all work for the biz. This is truly a great place to be, but it has been shown that just because you grow up doesn't mean your elders are willing to part with their advice giving ways.

Everybody "knows" how you should raise your child. Everybody, that is, except you. What people often fail to realize is that they might not have been the best parent, or at least have made some mistakes along the way. This is hard because I love my family, and know that they love me, but it is a lot easier to tell someone you might not see outside of the workplace to shove it up their ass than someone who you will likely see wearing a reindeer sweater and drinking eggnog at the holiday family function tomorrow night. Advice flows from all sides, all the time. It is as if all of those pregnancy and first year books jumped up and started following me around, spitting out the words like a deranged audio file, always at my heels!

So before we even had a child, I had to worry about stocking up on diapers, arranging the nursery in this way or that, buying formula (or are you gonna' just breast feed? You know I read somewhere...), buying toys, keeping everything together in terms of my wife and I's mental well being, getting car seats, et al. What I didn't know how to do seems to be the things they should teach you first: here is how to hold a child, how to feed a child, how to change the child's diaper. These are the things that count the most when you are sitting there staring into your newborn's eyes. Because you start to tear up thinking about the untold potential that you now hold in your arms! Thinking about how great it is that you have been a part of bringing this little life into the world! Thinking about how much money you are going to need to make to stay afloat, much less at the level of life you have enjoyed up to this point! And then it hits you ... this child just pooped all over the front of my shirt. So you move her around, ever so delicately, so she doesn't smear poop all over the both of you. At this point your other arm is now covered in pee, and she is smiling at you. Then some sort of vomitous mass flies out of her at ungodly speeds and travels great distances, covering everything the first two fluids missed (yes, the poop is a liquid at this point). And she smiles again. Then her face starts to turn. She looks confused. You are certainly confused! And the screaming begins. At this point I think I froze. And salvation came flying through the door.

Starting at that very moment, the nurses at the hospital saved me and started me off on the course I needed to take everyday there forward. They showed me how to do everything! How to feed her in a way that she felt most comfortable. How to place the burp rag on your shoulder and how to burp her most effectively. How to place the clean diaper under the dirty one during the exchange so if she got all willy-nilly and decided to "go" right at that crucial moment, you would still be more or less covered. And this is rarely the case, but when she does let all fly at this time, I thank the nurses in my head. These are the things that would have killed me that first week had we not stayed for a few days. I'm a guy. I never held babies. I certainly never changed diapers. I never fed infants. I kicked my own ass with my skateboard due to a great lack of ability and balance. I wasn't interested. But now I have to be. And it is the best thing in this world. And now I hear that familiar, though suddenly distant, sound in my friends voices when I talk about spit up and poopy diapers. I can appreciate their take on this, but, and I never thought I'd say it, but I can also now appreciate a solid poop versus the liquid form that came before. It shows my daughter is growing, and it shows I am growing with her. But the kid in me can't wait to teach her about atomic wedgies and swirlys ...