“Too much respect for your elders is, historically, almost always a bad thing. I want my daughter to love me. I don’t necessarily want her to share my taste for Irish ale or Hawaiian bud.”

— Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

Enter Hessian Hobbies (I’m about to run down to the craft store for some popsicle sticks):

Thanks to Christen McFarland for the tip!

I dropped out of my regular existence last in the middle of last week. I stopped going to work, I stopped returning phone calls, canceled a reservation at a hotel up north for this past Saturday, barely saw the light of day for 36 hours and had no clue what was happening with the Olympics in China, on the Russian border of Georgia, or in the streets of Oakland, CA. It started when she woke me up and told me that her water had broken.

We were ready for the trip to the hospital: bags were packed, we were in the hospital’s computer system so check-in would be easy. But it was 1 a.m., and my first thought was, ‘but wait, there’s still three-and-a-half weeks left.’

She was still in her underwear on the phone with the hospital less than five minutes later when I came into the kitchen, fully dressed and carrying our bags, heading for the car. We checked in around 1:30 a.m. on Wednesday and [Reader's Digest version] had a baby on our hands at 1:57 a.m. on Thursday.

There were all kinds of ins ad outs — problems with the epidural narcotic, several shift changes in nurses and midwives (who were all awesome), five long hours of pushing, 25 total hours of labor, 25 hours of no sleep, and a baby that came three-and-a-half weeks early (technically a pre-term birth, perfectly healthy nonetheless) — but in the end, it worked out. We’re the proud parents of a baby girl, 6.6 lbs, 19.6 inches long, with a full head of dark hair and her father’s charmingly crooked mouth.

I’ve experienced — and will continue to experience every day — something entirely new; there’s a new reason for being and doing; there’s a new driving force for success; and a new benchmark to weight other concerns against. Every single other concern for at least the next 18 years. It’s hard to put into words exactly what that makes me feel: empowered and humbled, prideful and scared fucking shitless. It all a little conflicting to say the least.

Above all, though, and as fucking sappy and clichéd as this sounds, I think it might be the best thing that ever happened to me. And I’m determined to be good at it.