P.C. Shannon

The fact that I’m having a son is slowly starting to sink in. I’m trying to figure out how to brush up on my sports skills. Not that I’ve ever been terribly athletic, or that my boy will be playing any time soon, but it’s an important job for a dad.

It’s not the only one, of course. Over the holidays, I heard Judd Apatow reviewing DVDs on NPR. One of them was a documentary about a cinematographer made by the man’s son. Apatow said that one of the best parts of the DVD wasn’t even in the film itself. It was an extra about the filmmaker showing the work to his father and finally getting the old man’s approval, which in Apatow’s estimation the guy had probably been striving for all his life. It really drove home to me—as though it needed emphasizing—the importance and uniqueness of the relationship between father and son.

I’ve started that, too. I’ve been talking to the stinker a bit, and the other day I felt him kick (or perhaps punch). That was pretty cool.

A picture is worth a thousand words:

We went to see The Nutcracker last night. My favorite part is the snowflakes, but for the first time, I was also enamored of the children queuing up to get gifts from Herr Silberhaus. I was thinking about how exciting it would be to have a child on stage (Did I mention that I love ballet?). Ballerinas are adorable, of course, but I also loved Billy Elliot.

Caroline and I are about halfway through our first pregnancy, and it’s been a very interesting experience. Seeing the heartbeat on the ultrasound and hearing it having both been very powerful, moving experiences. Hopefully, we’ll find out the child’s sex later this week, and that will definitely increase our connection to the baby. At last we’ll be able to narrow our constant wrangling over names.

I’m sure that I will be overwhelmed when the baby is born and that nothing will really prepare me for that. But in the meantime, my sense of duty is already growing. This really came home to me when James Kim and his family were missing in Oregon. It was a strangely personal story as I get CNet videos on my TiVo and was already familiar with James. But when I read about him and his wife fighting for their kids’ survival, it resonated in a way that it wouldn’t have before the baby.