My apologies for the delay in writing this blog, but it's been kind of a crazy week.
Last week Tris and I took the last round of pregnancy pictures. I think this one was my favorite:
I had this plan to write a blog post with this picture and have it ready to post before we went to the hospital. Last Wednesday night Tris woke me up with one of her hourly trips to the bathroom and I just couldn't go back to sleep. I starting thinking about what I was going to write for the blog. One possible topic could be our story. I've been thinking a lot about mine and Tris' story lately. How we met, when I knew I was in love with her, when I knew I wanted to ask her to be my bride, all that sort of stuff. Its a strange feeling to connect the dots from the moment I saw her for the first time to now, watching our baby move around in her belly. I hadn't quite flushed the whole thing out because at 2:35 in the morning, she said out loud "my water broke." Just like the movies! That was just the thing they said wouldn't happen in all of our books and our birthing classes. Everyone says, "it's not like they portray it in the movies", but it was. And like a whirlwind, we had a baby in about 8 hours. I won't go into all the details of labor and whatnot, but man it was crazy.
*NOTE - The girl flailing her arms about is half of our best friends, the Etheredges. This is Brandi doing the Macarena for (or telling a story to) Tris. Tris and I have been blessed with the best friends on earth. The Etheredges are the most selfless people I've ever known, and they've always been there when we needed them. They mean the world to us.
Here is the first picture taken of Reid Chapman:
Actually it was probably the 3rd, but this was the first "good" one of Reid.
We went super traditional with this baby in that we didn't find out the sex, we wanted to keep it a surprise. It drove us nuts the whole 9 months but it was really fun in the hospital. Tris was convinced it was going to be a girl, and so was my mother-in-law (and i guess everyone else). Call me crazy, but doesn't it defeat the purpose of having it be a surprise if you go ahead and resign yourself to it being one or the other? I really didn't care if it was going to be a boy or a girl. I really wanted a son, for a lot of the same reasons Bill Cosby also wanted a son... but I also knew I'd be a great dad to a little girl. (although those little girls grow into teenage girls, and I want NOTHING to do with raising a teenage girl.) So you can imagine my joy when I saw his.... well... that it was a boy. Tris' reaction was "what!?!" It was awesome.
I don't know how to put the feeling of being a father into words. Nothing seems to suffice. When I've been asked this week, I answer with the generic "awesome", "surreal", "crazy", "wonderful", "amazing", but I don't really know how to put it into words. When people told me "it'll change your life", they weren't kidding. It sounds way too generic, but it's true.
Now this is not an easy thing. Reid hasn't learned to be considerate of his parents sleep patterns yet and for some weird reason he likes to pretend his neck is made of jello. He also thinks its HILARIOUS to pee (and poo) on us. Once he starts talking back to us, we're going to have a chat about that.
Thanks so much for everyone's thoughts, prayers, and advice. We truly do have the best core group of friends anyone could ever ask for. Now just keep praying Reid learns to sleep when he's supposed to and that his parents do their best to not mess him up. Here's a few more pics from Reids first few days. I apologize for all the sleeping pictures (that's what he seems to do best right now.) I promise there will be many more to come of him not sleeping.
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