fl development

North Carolina Deco

emploids going back to work after the holiday

At about 4 AM Friday morning my wife and I left our house and drove about an hour and a half along the windy lakeshore down to the hospital. Almost 24 hours later, just after midnight on Saturday the 8th, my wife gave birth to our third child, and second daughter. It was a long long day. Every kid is different and the way which they come into this world is different too. I remember our first like it was yesterday. We weren't really prepared at all and we knew so little. We were so naive. It was also a long and crazy couple days. Difficult moments that I told myself I never wanted to forget. Life is precious. I remember our second. That one was much quicker, but our car broke down on the side of the road in the middle of the night in the middle of a snowstorm in the middle of nowhere. An ambulance took my wife the rest of the way. A police car took my son and I. Five hours later we had a baby. There's always a trade-off. Things are always balanced somewhere. We can't predict what's going to happen to us. We can't predict the person we will marry. We can't predict the jobs we will have. We can't predict where we might end up. We can't predict the kids we are going to have. We can't predict how their briths are going to go, who they are going to be, or what's going to happen in their lives 20 years later. We can't predict the way the world will go. It seems like God always finds a way to surprise us, for good and bad. Maybe that's one of the final beauties of life. I didn't think I wanted kids for a while, I couldn't imagine myself ever having them in my 20s. They didn't fit into my image of my life. But I changed and I couldn't believe that feeling when we had our son. I couldn't actually believe that I was a dad. I could never have imagined it before then. It was cataclysmic in the most positive way and now I know that it's most likely the best thing I will ever do. I knew my wife when we were 16, I've known her for more than half my life and damnit does that feel strange and it sure makes me feel old, and never did I imagine that we would actually end up having kids together. "WTF", to put it in colloquial terms. She's so strong, smart, brave, beautiful, creative, and I'd post a picture of her holding our daughter right after she did all the work over all the hours but she would kill me if I did, so I didn't. It's difficult not to become overwhelmed with emotion when I think about those things in those moments. The things we work through, the places we go, the hard things we don't like to talk about, the struggles we overcome alone and together, how we grow, who we become, and where we end up. I think when you are a parent you just become more of everything. More intense, more harsh, more complicated, more powerful, more mean, more soft, and more emotional; more human. It's good to be human.