So I know it’s been a week or so since my last entry (which actually appears on my old blog site, not this one), but things have been a little busy on this side of the monitor. As anyone who visits this site regularly will see, the Epic website has undergone a complete overhaul. And basically…overhauls take time. 
A lot of time this week has been spent adding redirects from the old site, getting everything set up and organized, and really just putting the finishing touches on the transition. But rest assured, the entries are picking up again as of now! I still have the second Next Big Thing cast job to post, and that’s coming, but I did want to take a moment to get this particular entry written.
Everyone says that having a child changes your life forever, and while you can go into that with a certain degree of “expecting the unexpected,” there are still moments that catch you off guard. Some can be a little rough, such as encountering baby “headbanging” or full-throttle spit-ups. But every now and then, you get struck by a wonderful moment that serves to remind you what parenthood is all about.
One of those moments happened to me recently while I was cradling Levi, waiting for him to fall asleep. He’s almost 6-months old now, so it just takes a small amount of pacing with him after he’s had his bottle to zonk him out for a bit. It creates the perfect opportunity to set him down in his crib so you can get things done while he sleeps. So this scenario came up a couple weeks ago. He’d had his bottle, his eyes were slowly fading, and I was just holding him against my shoulder pacing around the house. Once I was confident that he was almost ready to be placed down, I walked quietly into the nursery and stood in the dark with him by the crib.
Back and forth I swayed, just holding him there, waiting for him to reach that point where there was zero chance he’d wake up once I’d set him down. I’d place him down, then get working on some book stuff, or audio stuff, or things around the house, or whatever multitude of “me time” I could scrounge while he slept. “Just five more minutes, and he’ll be good to put down,” I thought to myself. Just five more minutes. Five more minutes passed, and I rocked him some more. “I want to be safe, so another five minutes just to be positive he’s out.” Back and forth, back and forth, I swayed on while his head stayed on my shoulder. Just five more minutes.
As you can probably guess by this point, those five minutes came and went, and there I was, still holding him and swaying. And it struck me right then in that moment that there was nothing else – not Epic-related, not fun-related, not related to anything – that I’d rather be doing than just holding him while he slept. And so I stopped counting minutes, let the other things I’d thought about doing fade away, and just took in that moment knowing that it’d only last so long.
That’s what kids do to you – that’s the experience of bringing a child into the world. I’ll never forget that moment, and since then I’m rarely in a rush to put Levi down when he’s fallen asleep. What else could possibly rival holding that precious little boy? I can’t think of anything.
What kind of “Dad Moments” or “Mom Moments” have you guys had, or are you looking forward to, those of you who are on the road to parenthood?