Well...birth happened.

I have a kid.  A beautiful daughter to be exact.

It's unbelievable, really.  In some ways, things don't feel all that different, but of course in every other way, my life will never be the same.

I expected to have overwhelming feelings of emotion and love, but honestly, things just felt very numb with a surge of emotional tears here and there.  Maybe that's just the way my psyche was trying to deal with it.  I went to Mass later that day after the birth and half expected the readings to absolutely floor me like God stepped forth from the tabernacle with a personal message (maybe this is always the case and I just miss it).  However, the readings felt like their normal, interesting if I really pay attention selves and not hand-delivered as if the Kingdom of God was business as usual - in its macro-ly awesome, but not always wish-granting-genie way. 

Then the whole sleep deprivation thing.  Going into this, one of the things I was most nervous about was the fragmented lack of sleep.  Though it's tough at times, I'm surprised at how much I don't feel like a zombie.  Maybe it's the adrenaline or maybe my body knows that this will be life for the foreseeable future and is just dealing with it.  It's only been five days so we'll see.

While we're talking about sleep, I've never spent the night at a hospital, let alone two nights.  It was quite a weird experience like a combination of luxury hotel and prison.  I could sort of come and go as I pleased per my wife, but she on the other hand, being hooked up to an IV, needed to be supervised even to go to the bathroom.  Walking around the hospital, there were all kinds of people around (great for a people watcher like myself).  While I was there experiencing one of the greatest days of my life, walking by the surgery unit, I could see people weeping over the death of a loved one.  How can one place be both a place of so much joy and simultaneously, so much sorrow?

But back to the more mundane, poopie diapers haven't felt that gross.  Sure, they're gross, I suppose, but changing them feels more like a mildly unpleasant act of love as opposed to say cleaning the vomit off the communal dorm bathroom floor after a weekend of partying (by other people) for my buddy Jesus.  It's funny, the thing that bugs me more is the inefficiency of wasting diapers.  I mean, do you wait a few minutes longer while your child sits in their own feces knowing that the motherlode is about to arrive?  Or do you change the diaper for hygiene's sake only to have to change it again a few minutes later when boom (goes the dynamite)!.  Of course, I do the latter, but gah....the inefficiency.

And on a final note, though life feels both normal and crazy at the same time, one thing I am enjoying beside my SUPER cute daughter is that life is so much simpler right now.  My days used to be filled with commitment after commitment with complex first world problems with either too many or too few options, but these days, I just lounge around waiting for the next need that I can meet for my wife or my daughter.  It's pretty dope.