Pack Lightly Ella Says (in a kind of mumbly gurgle)

So here's the thing, I'm rendered hopelessly optimistic by the impending birth of one Ella Tsubaki DeWagner. I'm at often times speechless (a staggeringly difficult task if you knew me), and other times I need reminding to breath between giant gulps of words and endless run on sentences and ideas (much easier to imagine even at first introduction). I smile a lot. I can't stop thinking and planning and believing that our life will be so much different from all of those around us even if I know and understand that the concept is absurd. It feels different already. I wake up early and fall asleep late and work...work, the one all consuming, recurring thing in my endlessly annoying know-it-all diatribe through days and nights and friendships and fresh endeavours doesn't quite seem so important anymore. Saving the world (or thinking I was) used to be my subtle but obsessive vanity, now it's my distraction. I'd like to lend a hand to problem practice but I sure as hell don't want to coach the team anymore. I'm alarmingly un-distressed at a lot of things I should be very distressed about. Now it seems I shrug more than I grimace. I'm endlessly curious and staggeringly creative and I want to draw pictures and write stories and take photos and buy things I would have never bought before and all of it, every crazed and illogical part of it feels soooo good...especially the shrugging.

Ella is changing things and she's not even here yet.

She makes California feel more urgent than ever and those season tickets more about memories than Major League Baseball or Big Ten whatever it is they're trying to play down there on that court. She makes me want to read more and write more and laugh and run and smile even when smiling is the last thing I can imagine doing. She makes me better and there's still three months before we're actually introduced. She has me looking for apartments in Oceanside even though we don't know if we'll even need one?

I'm knackered.

But the best part? I can't stop hugging my wife. I can't stop kissing her and touching her and talking to her and I really can't find any reason or need to be apart from her for any fraction of any second of any day in any week. I just don't want to and it was frightening how much I didn't want to before Ella started making her body a home. Now it must be sickening to everyone around us. Her hugs feel better than hot showers and I loves me some hot showers. How's that for nauseating affection? Pretty pukey huh? For sure.

If you thought I was naively optimistic before I suppose my newest state of the union perspective looks downright dumb, idiotic even. In the face of world wide economic crisis and turmoil I've decided that I like buying stuffed elephants for my soon to be similarly carefree and careless daughter. I enjoy children's books very much and kind of like the idea of running through life clueless for awhile. It beats the hell out of navigating the overwhelming array of grown-up shenanigans we so regularly assume as our own.

Ella has taught me that the only baggage I need to be lugging around with me is the stuff that I packed myself. That's good advice and happens to meet all Federal Aviation guidelines which is awfully nice. Never leave your bags unattended they say or if you want to avoid the whole hassle don't pack a thing. It turns out we don't need much at all, hardly a thing in fact, which frees up an awful lot of room for all those stuffed elephants and baseball tickets.

Of course it's easy for me to type in pleasant metaphors about packing lightly when I'm not carrying around a few pounds of daughter front and center. I can still tie my shoes and lie on my stomach...makes hot shower analogies pretty easy to lob about when June's the one bearing all the burden at present. Shrug...hey, the sun's out!