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By the firelight, in the most comfortable chair, my son and I are at perfect peace. I wonder how this world existed for me, without him. I reflect upon all of the decisions in my life (good, bad, and seemingly irrelevant) that led us to this moment, and I'm thankful that I have been so lucky. I am humbled by the scope of the miracle of new life. Again, my perspective has changed in ways I never knew I needed. I could stare at his tiny, monkey head for hours. In fact, I do.
It occurred to me as I as I played my jillionth game of Halo 3,
sprawled out on the couch, with a newborn baby asleep on my chest, that
I could probably never get back to blogging regularly. After all,
it's now been months since I posted with any kind of consistency, and
I'm a firm believer in walking a dead weblog out to the pasture and
putting a courtesy bullet into the back of it's head. Find a nice spot
in the grass, distract it by pointing out to the wonderful internet,
talk softly about all the html you'll feed it someday, and pull the
trigger as it dreams of the bunnies and the blog entries, George. I'm
telling you, I was in the pasture, lying about bunnies with a gun to
the back of this blog's head...
...when I had an idea.
Now, don't get too excited. I've got a ton of ideas. In fact, people
that know me will tell you that I've always got some grand plan that
I'll probably never follow through on. I'm a big talker, and then I
lose focus and concoct some other scheme to occupy me. It's so much
easier to HAVE great ideas than it is to actually EXECUTE them. Not
only am I a Jack of all Trades, Master of None, I am also easily
distracted...
Wait, where was I? Oh right, the idea...
My wife and I had our second kid on Wednesday, November 12. He's a
cute little guy, I have to say, and we decided to name him Zach.
Zachary Ellis Nickerson, to be exact. Great initials, huh? ZEN. His
monogramming will be very uh...peaceful, I guess, if he ever gets
anything monogrammed. Do people still monogram stuff? You know what's
weird? "ZEN" isn't in the Scrabble dictionary. Doesn't make sense.
Sorry, I keep getting off track. It's been a while since I wrote. I
blame rustiness.
SO, back to my idea. I think maybe from here on out, this little nick
of the web will be a blog about my experiences as a dad. I thought
once, when I first started writing this blog, that I might one day try
to compile and publish my best anecdotes and snippets from here.
Looking back over my scattered entries, I realized that:
A) Nope.
B) Too scattered.
C) No consistent focus to tie everything together.
Since Zach was born, I've been inspired to write several times. It's a
feeling I haven't had about blogging in a long time. So, I'm going to
see how long I can write entries related to being a father of a 4 year
old and a newborn. My favorite entries were always the ones about
Lucy, or my memories as a kid, or a combination of both. I think I'd
like to try to write like that all the time. Who knows, maybe some day
I can write a book like MM.
I'll need a grammar pass on it from someone who actually knows where
commas go, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it (comma after
bridge? I still don't know.)
"So Shane, you're a 'daddy blogger' now?"
Well, the term kind of sucks, but for lack of a better one, yeah, I
guess so. Parenting is a never-ending source of content that inspires
me to write, and matters to me. It doesn't mean that I won't share
some of my own experiences from time to time, and it may end up going
the way of all the other things in my life I never finished, but let's
see how it goes.
That is, if anyone is still here.
Wow, was that an echo?
Man, I have been gone a long time.
