missing the women in my life

I am about to leave on a business trip for a few days. I don't typically travel for my job, maybe once, or at the most, twice a year.

I love to travel, to see new things in new towns. But traveling for work has become less fun as I have gotten older and settled down. I am married now and have a child. Being away from my wife for a few days while traveling is less fun than traveling with her. I enjoy traveling with her for many reasons including the fact that she has a sense of direction and generally remembers when and where we are supposed to be somewhere.  But mostly because we have fun together. Now I also have to leave little A behind. She won't understand why I am not around. She will do things that she has never done before while I am gone. I know it is only a few days but at 5 1/2 months she does new things every day.

I will miss them both.

That being said there may be a plus side to traveling. Maybe I will get to sleep through the night. Past experiences at this annual meeting tell me I won't, but there is an outside chance I will.  I will get to hang out with some of my coworkers that I enjoy hanging out with and maybe get to talk about something other than A. Maybe it will be good to have a little break from the baby routine. It really is a lot of work.

I am trying to see the bright side. I will miss her so much. And my wife. Let's hope I find the hotel.

Grandpa Says "Stay straight".

Last night at 5 in the morning, as I was trying to get my daughter back to sleep after her bottle, I started to think.  There isn't much else to do while holding your child and pacing back and forth in a small room in the dark, so my mind wandered.  My thoughts turned to my childhood and my parents, as they have a lot lately.  Even though I don't remember being rocked back to sleep by my parents, I do have a lot of fond memories of childhood and I feel like my parents did a great job raising my brother and me. The one thing that keeps popping up in my head is that, other than the one time in high school when my maternal grandfather told me to "Stay straight"*,  no one ever sat me down and had an anti-drug talk with me.

What I have realized recently is that my father often made comments about how drugs where bad and that they could ruin your life.  Either commenting on something we saw in a TV show or movie or even on the news.  These comments, my father told me recently, were "by design".  And they worked.

And this is where my thoughts started to run away with me.  If, by just making some comments, you can totally influence your child's point of view on a subject, what happens with all the comments and actions that are not by design?  Little A is going to learn from everything she sees me do.  How I treat and talk to other people, how I drive, my eating habits, how much TV I watch, how I talk about my job and every other single thing I do or say has an influence on her. 

Whoa.  That is scary.

The comments I get from my wife while I am driving are starting to make a lot more sense.  Cursing at the people in the other cars while A is in the back seat is going to affect the way she acts while driving 16 years from now.  I guess I need to start watching how I act while driving, even if all those other drivers are a bunch of idiots.....

This is going to be tough.

*The time my grandpa told me to "stay straight" was while he was visiting us from Florida and I was a wise-ass know-it-all teenager.  That being said, my wise-ass response was "do you mean don't be gay or don't do drugs".  His reply was "I don't care if you're gay, just stay off the drugs".  I thought it was pretty cool that someone of his generation was open minded enough to not care if I was gay.  And come to think of it, I am guessing those more direct comments probably had some influence on me, as well, even if they didn't happen very often.

It All Began

It was my wife's birthday, 2009.  It was 5:00 in the morning.  I heard her go to the bathroom which was not a usual occurrence at that time and I fell right back to sleep.  She came back in a few minutes later, woke me and said "i think you're going to be a daddy".

Little "A" is now almost 6 months old and it has been a crazy whirlwind of a time.  It has been amazing to watch her grow and learn.  Starting with her early vocal sounds turning in to syllables to watching her learn to use her hands.  Her first 2 teeth coming in and now learning to sit on her own. It hasn't always been easy.  We have been tired and frustrated.  She has had colds and pains from teething.  She has eczema and is always itchy.  But it has all been worth it. As soon as I see that little girl nothing else matters.  She is lovely.