My, oh my, what has gotten me here?
Was it Steph’s soft touch or 9 pints of beer?
What exactly did lead me to this?
A pregnancy test begun with a kiss?
I can’t recall us planting the seed.
Yet, a flower bloomed instead of a weed.
It’s blissful just to hold your small palm.
Yet, I mourn for days of time, youth, and calm.
I was a young man, eons ago.
Now I’ve gone gray and my body is slow.
Thank you dear Worm for aging me fast.
You bring me joy, but I still miss my past.
(In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, I’ve poured out my heart to someone special in my life. Words are a mere trifle of all I truly feel in my heart.)
To my dearest:
I love you so much that I can’t wait to see you after a long, weary day.
You help me to block out all the noise and chatter of my mind.
You envelop me in your warmth and my skin tingles under your moist kisses.
You never question my motives and always listen to me without judging.
I feel as if I can tell you anything.
My voice becomes as sweet as a songbird in your stead.
I’ve shown you every side of myself, even the darkest places.
You never turn away.
I could spend every waking hour with you.
You are a respite for my mind and body.
You are my sanctuary, my meditation.
And when we part ways after our brief union, I am left standing in a dreamy fog.
Speechless.
Dear shower head, you bring me peace and calm.
I never appreciated you so much before the baby came into our life. Please never leave me.
I love you…especially in pulsating massage mode.
Love is in the air!
I entered Gavin in a cutest baby contest. I’m a little sheepish about this. (SHAMELESS PLUG: If you read Pregnancy & Newborn Magazine, you can vote for the Worm.) I never thought I would ever do such a thing. I’m a man, for crying out loud! (Which is something men don’t do, by the way.) So, why would I even think to do this?
I know every mother thinks their kid is the most beautiful thing in the universe, but that’s hormones playing with a woman’s mind! I’m not a woman and I don’t even have hormones! (At times, Steph thinks that I barely even have a heart!) What’s gotten into me? Does spending too much time with a baby generate estrogens in a man? (Why is my underwear suddenly more baggy in the front?)
Is my sanity in fatherhood spiraling out of control? Is SAHD life making me soft? (Am I growing man boobs?)
I feel like a different man. Not quite a wo-man, but a more sensitive man…I guess I would say a Wham!-man. I’m no longer a Bad Boy. For certain, Last Christmas, I was a manly man. (How many Wham! song references can I make?) Now, I’m a sopping, photo-taking, face-wiping, diaper-changing shadow of my former self.
Is this going to lead to professional photo shoots in Gavin’s future? Yes. Will I be his driver for his future road-trip beauty pageants all over America? Yes!
The ultimate question is….Will I teach him how to toss a baton? Yes!
We’ll be kicking ass and taking names, my Little Miss Sunshine. Toddlers and Tiaras? Hell no, Toddlers and Testicles.
Look out for us on the baby beauty pageant circuit. We’ll be in the old Land Cruiser.
Photolicious!
WordPress is a great platform for me to blog from. On top of being laid out nicely, there’s a page that provides statistics on how many views I get, how many people clicked my pictures, where people are visiting my site from. This last statistic is interesting for me. Facebook seems to be where viewers notice my MVG blurbs and click through. That’s great! And thank you from the bottom of my heart. There are also Google (I can’t believe that I’m getting a spelling error for ‘google’. The google came way before the Google! Get it right WordPress spellcheck! Sorry, I digress.) search terms that people use to find my webpage. It even lets me know what people are searching for when they click to my website. For instance, if I do a Google search for funniest dad blog in the universe, the results don’t even show mevsgavin.com. But, let’s imagine that my blog shows up on the first page and I click through to get to mevsgavin.com. That is a statistic that I can see.
Well, last night I was looking at the stats for MevsGavin.com and I saw that someone came through Google search engine. The search terms were ‘child pornography’. Yep. If that creeps you out, then you’re probably not a pedophile. But if it doesn’t creep you out, then maybe you should seek out some counseling. Ok, you should seriously seek out counseling. (In case you were wondering, on one of my other posts, I typed out those two words. Google spiders find everything, huh?)
Anyhow, it got me thinking about what Steph told me when I started to blog about our life. (She’s a savvy blog reader and has about 100 of them in her Google reader thing…so I defer to her opinion on all things blog-related.) She said that I would be attracting some disturbed as well as normal people, especially as more readers get interested. I just didn’t realize how soon the crazies would start knocking on my blog.
This is one of those things that you know happens on the internet, but you don’t really think about it until it affects you. And it slapped me in the face last night. After doing a double take at the WordPress statistics screen, I looked a third time. Yep, there it was under Google search terms, correctly spelled. I got the weird butterflies in the stomach feeling. And then I wondered about my blog and whether or not I should keep doing this.
But, then I started thinking even without the involvement of rum. I’m not going to stop writing this blog because some wacko wants to see naked pics of my kid. I’m going to keep writing this blog so that my friends and family can share in watching my son grow into a lovely human being. I’m going to keep writing this blog so I can share my family’s struggles and victories with child rearing. I’m going to keep writing this blog so other parents can see Gavin doing the same zany stuff their kids do. I’m going to keep writing this blog so that people can see that raising kids is a wonderful experience.
So, if you have a desire to look at fatherhood from a stay-at-home dad (SAHD), you are always welcome here. If you have a desire for lewd behavior with children, you’d better knuckle up. Someone may want to sit you down and have a “come to Tebow” talk.
You Want Somma Dis!?!
Image via Wikipedia
Forget what I said in an earlier post about losing 30 minutes of my life. I wasn’t in my right mind. Today, Tebow shines on my brain and blesses me with a stroke of genius!
I’m driving along and I see the usual signs on the local freeway: merging traffic, exit only, carpool – 2 or more…wait, 2 or more? I’ve got two or more in the car. In fact, I’ve got three in the car at the moment! Me, Gavin and Duncan = 3! I can’t believe it! I’m 2 or more! I’m 2 or more! The sign doesn’t say anything about the description of 2 or more, just 2 or more! The pint-sized progeny finally has a purpose.
Wow! So, now I’m entitled (well, aren’t all Californians entitled?) to a new entitlement! I can use the carpool lane!
I see myself saving minutes of freeway driving every week now. Added up over the course of a few months, I may save enough time to go for a good mountain biking excursion!
All I need is to do is bring the baby wherever I go. Rush hour traffic? No problem. Put the baby in the car. Morning traffic? No problem. Put the baby in the car! (What else has he got to do? Nothing! He’s a baby!) Minutes saved from traffic will become hours and hours will become days! This baby isn’t a time vortex anymore, he’s a time machine!
I finally understand why having kids is so rewarding. Thank you, Tebow! Hallelujah!
Gavin is the gift that keeps on giving…on the freeway!
Gavin – 5; Dad – 3
There’s a knock at the front door. Duncan starts to bark his head off. I’m in the middle of getting dressed. So, naturally I ask Gavin to answer the front door. But the Worm gives me that faraway look as if we don’t speak the same language. Even if he knew what I was saying, he’s still too short to reach the knob. Useless…but adorably so!
Thinking it could be Ed McMahon with Publisher’s Clearing House, I race to the front door half-naked (or half-dressed, depending on how you look at it) and expect to see a large check and balloons in my face. But all I got was an old man. No Ed. No check. No million dollars.
Does this lollipop make me look younger?
As if he plucked my cherries right off their tree, he muttered “Hi there. Is your mom or dad home?”
Immediately, I wonder if this guy is serious. I look him dead in the eyes for a hint of sarcasm. Nada. To make matters worse, the most mature thing I could retort was “What?”
“Are your parents home?”
Holy s#!t. He’s for real. (It’s California, people. So, I give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s just smoked a blunt for his cataracts or high blood pressure.)
“No, my mommy’s not home. Sorry.” I close the door and don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
So I turn towards the hallway mirror, reassuringly pat myself on the back and say to the incredibly dashing and handsome creature before me “I’m grown! I may have the body of a prepubescent teenager, but I have underarm hair, nose hair, and even some curly ear hair! I ooze manliness and maturity!”
Then I dust off the guns, cock them both back and hit another incredible double biceps flex in the mirror. “Yeah, I’m a MAN dammit. No mistake about it. That old guy must have been blind.”
Image via Wikipedia
I recently learned that I am in an interracial marriage. And on top of that, I’ve got a little interracial half-Indian, half-German baby. (See what happens when winter comes and you need to stay warm at night?)
When I was single, I never really thought about what my other half (other half = Steph) would look like. I just hoped that my future partner would have the usual things that one looks for in a possible match: likes long walks on the beach, enjoys rubbing my feet, great at cooking for me, excellent at fixing old trucks, easy to manipulate going, love of laundry the great outdoors…that sort of thing. It’s hard enough finding someone to spend the rest of your life with, let alone finding someone that is of the same color and ancestry. So, Steph and I met and fell in love…you know, kind of like Othello and Desdemona, kind of. Okay, not really, but imagine a colored guy meeting an uncolored girl and falling in love. That was us.
I came across an article the other day that got me thinking. Had I lived in the U.S. about 50 years ago, some states wouldn’t allow me to marry Steph. (In case you didn’t read the ‘About Us’ page, Steph’s a cracker and I’m a dot head.) It wasn’t until 1967 that interracial marriage was allowed by the Supreme Court. Therefore, if we were in 1967, I would be blogging about something else, like segregated white and colored water fountains and what the water tasted like from each.
Ok, so we’re here and now and we have a biracial baby. (I don’t ever really think about it until Steph and I get the stares…you know, the look that says “Wow, I didn’t know it was genetically possible for colored people and white people to make babies. Aren’t they different species?”) I have hope that the Worm doesn’t face the ridicule and ignorance still festering in some portions of society. I hope that the Worm doesn’t have to hear the racial slurs that I heard growing up in an ignorant, backwards part of the country. I hope that he doesn’t have to be ashamed that he’s ‘different’ looking than other kids. And as a shout-out to Martin Luther King Jr., I hope that the Worm “will one day live in a nation where he will not be judged by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.” (I also have hope that Gavin’s basketball skills will pay our bills speak for themselves one day.)
Thank you MLK Jr. for giving your life to show us something greater than our fears, our humanity. (I know it was a few days ago people, but I took the day off. If you’re uptight about it, pretend I wrote this post for next MLK day.)
One day, we will all be beige.
Below is the article that I was reading at the time…
http://shine.yahoo.com/love-sex/tender-photos-unearthed-turbulent-time-235100316.html
Me vs. Gavin 