caroline and me, part one
(hannah and me, part twenty-four)
((it's a girl!))


so, you are a girl, huh? i think i had in my mind all along that you were a girl. i don't really know why, but i think i did. maybe having that in mind made the news today feel different than when we found out hannah was a girl. not that i was disappointed in the least to discover that our first child would be a girl, but i think it's a very typical "boy" want for a dad to have a son. to mold the son into a better version of him. to teach him how to throw, kick and catch. to scratch and spit. to cuss. to mold him into a ballplayer of some sort. to coach him. train him. alienate him because i am living vicariously through him. make up just in time with him to take in a couple of college championships and then reap the rewards of that first big professional league contract. all of those images were just too much not to dwell on to some degree the first time. i think it's just a "boy" thing to want a boy. but then along came hannah...

and hannah changed everything. hannah paved and is paving the way for you, caroline, as we speak. i didn't really know how to be a dad to a girl, but i think i am figuring it out. i am figuring it out and hopefully some of that enlightenment can translate into fewer bumps and bruises, figuratively (...ok, maybe some literal bumps and bruises), than hannah has had to live through. you'll reap the rewards of my and your mommy's wisdom in all sorts of ways. and so, today, on this your day of gender-awareness, i will introduce you to a few things that you can expect from your daddy and mommy of two girls and the home you will be born into.

1) first off, you have a wonderful mommy. she loves you more than anything already, and she'll love you even more when you get here. we now have experience with the whole "my heart just got bigger" feeling after a child is born, and we can't wait to experience that again because of you. she's a good cook. she works very hard. and she's very patient with your daddy. she cries sometimes for very not-obvious reasons, but give her time. she'll explain herself. she'll probably cry a lot with you after you are born, but they will be happy tears. you'll have to just trust me on this. as mommies go, you could do a lot, lot worse.

2) you have a big sister. her name is hannah. she is my first baby girl and is the most wonderful gift i have ever been presented with. that is, until you make it here. she's a little rowdy and can be downright emotional at times (i do not yet know if this comes from mommy or if it is, according to the rumor, all girls.) but she will be the most wonderful big sister to you. she has been practicing with our kitties. mostly with spud. she will have to be more careful with you than she is with spud. poor spud. but if her interaction with her cousin emma is any indication, she is going to take very good care of you.

3) you will have two kitties when you come home (we'll save the punkin obituary for another post. she's still with us, but we got confirmation yesterday that her time is short.) the big one is spud. the little annoying one is softball. they will make you laugh. hannah is crafting a house adaptation of the movie shrek 2(which you'll see) as we speak with spud in the role of puss'n'boots and softball playing donkey. it's going to be awesome.

4) you will have a puppy that you won't see much when you first come home. when the weather gets colder, we'll introduce you to her. her name is KAMmie. she is very sweet.

5) of course, you will also have a daddy. i am him. he is me. daddy is silly i am told, but daddy, too, already loves you very much. i've also been told that hannah has me wrapped around her finger, which is true. she and i get along famously. but hannah is very good at sharing. and i am thinking that she will let you have part of me to wrap around your finger too. if you would allow me that, i would be honored. i don't cook and i cuss (and those are two of my better traits) but i've figured out something very important...

i know how to love someone. in every sense of the word. and caroline, i promise you this. i will love you like nobody's business. in every sense of the word.

i'll be honest. some of those "boy" images flashed through my mind again this morning. but i've packed them away. somewhere in the back of my mind. whether or not they ever come to fruition is far less important today than is the fact that i know caroline (somethingorother) o'kelley is growing in mommy's belly. how lucky i am. i can't wait to see you. i can't wait for mommy and hannah to see you. we are going to make a pretty good team.

i promise.

"you look different"
(et cetera)

over the last two days, i have had more than ten people tell me that "something about you is different." it's tickled me to no end, because i can't really figure out if the comment is just small talk or if the person making the comment is genuinely perplexed because something has changed with my appearance. i want to just snap back, "it's the shit in my hair, people!!!", but that would be rude and unnecessary. especially if the comment is more than just small talk. it's funny, though, putting "product" in my hair reminds me of why i have been shaving it for close to five years now. because "fixing" my hair, even if it only takes, like, an extra thirty seconds, is a pain in the ass that you don't have to deal with when you have no hair. and so, as cool as getting a haircut was and is, i don't know if the shears won't make an appearance sooner rather than later. i am sure this little rant is of tremendous interest to you, dear reader, but i am glad i am not a girl for so, so many reasons. "fixing" my hair falls on the the list somewhere below "pregnancy", "make-up" and "time of the month".

a quick punkin update. she seems like herself. still no word from the vet as of lunchtime today. she has a hard time eating and drinking it seems and sleeps all the time, but that second point just makes her a cat, not a sick cat. i'll keep updating...

i'll join the throng of the amazed as far as the turnout for the alabama spring game is concerned. you can't really sell me that this game was "meaningless", because if you believe that, you are stupid. i mean, it was the first time new systems on offense and defense were open to the public. but having to turn away folks from a glorified game of two-hand touch is just cool. i hope the excitement can last through the first loss of next season, which is going to come sometime in september. we'll see.

of my many man-crushes, tim hudson is making me most proud these days. if you put a gun to my head right now and told me i had to pick one man that i would hold hands with, it would be tim hudson. the braves have taken 4 of 6 from the mets so far and are still in first place with ten percent of the season behind us. tomorrow, chipper jones will break his ankle putting on his shoe.

why have you not heard anything about softball here yet? because we haven't freaking started!!! it looks like we are good to go for tomorrow. just checked weather.com, and it informed me that it is going to storm tomorrow. no, really. this isn't like the chipper jones comment above. it's real. mother nature hates our softball team.

four days and counting 'til hannah knows if she'll have a brother or a sister. wow. i'll unveil the news to as many of you as i have e-mail addresses for as soon as i get home friday morning.

and other things.

be careful what you wish for
(hannah and me, part twenty-three)


for going on i can't remember how long, i've wished out loud to anyone that may visit the house or listen if it's on my mind for one thing. to be rid of the three cats that currently share our home with us. it's not as much that spud refuses to get his lazy ass up and get a job. or that softball won't clean the catpan. or that punkin absolutely will not do laundry even if i threaten to withhold food and water. it's not really any of that. it's the hair. the freaking cat hair. it's everywhere. and most folks that have heard me rant against the cats know that in the same breath that i wish for them to be gone, i will make it a point to say that it's not the cats that i loathe but the sitting down anywhere in the house (other than my and sarah's bedroom...the only cat hair-free zone) followed by getting up with a layer of fur attached. cats make good companions i suppose. they are fairly low maintenance. they eat, sleep and poop, but save for food and fresh litter, they are really no financial burden at all. with cats, even ours, outside of the hair there aren't many worries.

that is, until now.

punkin is sick. punkin is the oldest of our kitties. she's been with me for somewhere over ten years now. i can't really remember exactly how old she is, but i know she's lived in four different houses/apartments with me if i am counting correctly. we noticed over the last couple of weeks little drops of blood on the floor in the kitchen every couple of days and wondered if one of the cats had scratched themselves and were bleeding here and there. it wasn't 'til wednesday, that we found a key (and gross) piece of evidence along with blood on punkin's mouth that we knew something major may be wrong. we took punkin in to see the vet yesterday morning and received the news yesterday afternoon that she probably had kitty cancer. a lump in her mouth that it looks like will be confirmed as a cancerous tumor early next week. long story short, the prognosis isn't good. any procedure to remove the tumor (considering where it's located) could seriously alter her quality of life and even with (expensive) surgery followed by (even more expensive) kitty chemo, there is no guarantee that punkin would live much longer.

and so it's a sad day and will be a sad weekend at the o'kelley's as we contemplate what our plan will be for punkin's final days. i am most sad for hannah, though, for a couple reasons. one, the older she gets, the more attached she is getting to all her pets. and two, only in the last few months have she and punkin seemed to bond (notice the pictures of the two of them napping with spud on her website). she couldn't wait to pick her up from the doctor today and bring her home. at this point, i have zero idea how in the world we are going to tell her that punkin may not be living with us for much longer. i am glad i have sarah to help me with this. if it were up to me, i would just have to lie.

"daddy, where's punkin?"
"she left, sweetheart."
"she left? where did she go?"
"um. she left to go live with brian...in florida...at the beach. yeah, she went to the beach. like us."
"punkin went to the beach?"
"yep."
"is she coming back."
"..."
"when is punkin coming back, daddy?"
"you wanna go to mcdonald's?"

i don't know if working at a pet store has made me any more sympathetic to something like the loss of a pet. i've always appreciated how pleasant a pet around the house can be. but i also know, in the grand scheme of things, they are just a pet. a member of the family for sure. but i don't know how long i will actually grieve for punkin when we no longer have her around anymore. i don't want to sound callous. maybe some of the stuff that i've had going on in my head the last few months won't allow me to place too much weight into losing a furry friend. but i am very sad for hannah. she's not old enough for a life and death talk. i can't explain degrees of loss to her.

i can just tell her that punkin loved her very much. because she would show her attention. and let her take naps on the couch with her when daddy would push her away. i can let her enjoy what time we have left with punkin and hope that she's old enough to store fond memories of her to recollect many years later.

oh, punkin.

reconnecting


wow. to be quite honest, it didn't take that long to catch up on everything i "missed" while we were away at the beach this weekend. i still had espn in my room, so the sports part was covered. "unplugging" from the world was nice in a way. waking up and not worrying about e-mails or work was refreshing. i got a good bit of sleep each night and so for the most part, i have no complaints with the last few days. sure, saturday had plenty of awkward moments, the moments that i prepared myself for before leaving. friday, though, hardly had any. friday was just a nice family-filled day (mostly at the pool since hannah was not a huge fan of the ocean) capped off with a very nice dinner and way too much wine. good times to be sure. good enough that it whet our appetite to find a long weekend sometime this summer to take a real "family" vacation. so if for none other than that reason, the weekend away was a success. here's to getting back to the beach soon.

i talked with chris hicks (my oldest friend and best man in my wedding) for as long yesterday afternoon as we had in months. most of the conversation centered around my being around his daughter this weekend. unfortunately for me (but moreso for his daughter), i was also around the guy that is currently dating chris' ex-wife. he seems like a nice enough guy. he's older than us. i am not sure if he'd know the difference between a baseball and a basketball, but i don't say that to knock him as much as i say it to relay that we don't have a whole lot in common. he's divorced too. he has a 13 year-old daughter. if i read the indications correctly, he's about to have a 3 year-old stepdaughter in the not too distant future. which leads me back to chris. when he and his wife were struggling at the tail-end of their relationship, we swore to each other that whatever happened, our friendship was so tried and true that we would stay close. things would be different after the divorce for sure. there would be no more built-in excuses to see each other at their house for dinner or i wouldn't be going over while the girls were out to play playstation. but we had been there for each other for so long and through so much, that this decision was bound to be just another bump in the road. just like us going to different high schools. taking different paths through college. him seeing me through my own parents divorce and it's repercussions. my seeing him through his brothers problems and jail time. it would be a bump for sure, but one that we'd hop over together.

much like any relationship i suppose, it takes two to tango. and i have to admit, my part in the dance lacked just as much as chris'. he went absolutely frat-tastic in his way of life. "living a dream" that he had given up a long time ago. there was always that side of chris. he just kept in in check. or i did. or his parents or significant other did. who knows. the "dream" he was living, though, and the life that i continued to lead just didn't jive. for better or for worse, we didn't and don't talk as much as we used to and hardly ever hang out.

i read a blog this morning that conveyed thoughts that i have heard before. about how sometimes with friends, we just grow apart, and i am sure there is something to be said for that. but i think history and perspective also would tell us that there are some friends that we had or have that we never truly loved. i think if you love someone, you don't ever, and i mean EVER, give up hope that if the relationship has fallen into a valley that you can somehow climb up the other side.

i'll tie this up by saying this. saturday wasn't really uncomfortable. but i found myself, time and time again, feeling really bad for chris that some other dude was taking care of and loving on savannah. and when i got home, i wanted to call him and tell him that. i wanted to tell him that, despite his fault in his marriage gone wrong, that i was on his side. that i wouldn't be having dinner or playing playstation with his replacement any time soon.

there are friends. and there are family. and then there friends and family that you fight for. no matter how disconnected you've become. no matter how much time has passed. no matter how wrong you may think they are/were. i consider myself very lucky that i have a number of people in my life that fall into this category. most of them know who they are only because i won't leave them the hell alone.

reconnecting.

out of sight, out of mind


starting this afternoon, i will be out of touch with the internet world for three days. yikes. i certainly have grown to love my internet, my e-mail, my blog, my daily "must reads". but alas, i will be leaving these things for a weekend at the beach that, as of this morning, i feel kind of weird about. it's not the beach part that feels off. it's the fact that one of our roommates will be the guy that is dating my best man's ex-wife. i wish i could tell you that my attitude about this happenstance is good, but it's not. what will i say? what in the world might we talk about? do i even want to talk to him? i don't know. who the hell knows. and absolutely not.

i am good at putting on a nice face even when i am uncomfortable (one of the things i inherited from my father.). and i have a feeling that this weekend "getaway" will have more than it's share of uncomfortable moments.

but, it could be worse. i could be holed up with the guy in birmingham. or kalamazoo with elvis. or in a room with all of don imus' corporate sponsors. but i am not. i'll be with sarah and a hannah that is incredibly excited about being "at da beach". so, that will be fun. with mommy tied up with wedding stuff all weekend, i think the baby girl and i will have a lot of fun finding ways not to be around bizarro chris hicks.

sayonara, internet. see ya monday.

to know or not know your audience
(deciding to go left, right or straight at the crossroads of holy week services)


i cannot condemn anyone on this, because i have been just as guilty as the next worship leader. emphasizing the "passion" of jesus so hard during holy week that i kind of felt bad about myself if i didn't make at least one person cry out of sheer will. jesus dying for us is a hard concept to deal with anyway. any person, let alone jesus, being faux-tried, beaten and crucified even though he did nothing wrong is an incredibly hard pill to swallow. and when you are telling the story to a congregation of any size the first time (or the second or the third or the fourth...), you want to make sure that the congregation feels the IMMENSE WEIGHT of jesus' experience. you can do this any number of ways. you can ridicule the congregation for wanting to "skip right to easter". you can make many, many dramatic pauses. you can dance around in mime. you can turn off the lights. you can play a mel gibson movie. among who knows how many other things. but what do you do when the audience knows the story already? what do you do when the audience has already grieved for jesus at last year's funeral? is it really fair for you to chastise their love for their god because the experience of holy week is different this year? because they aren't loosing grasp of their emotions and crying uncontrollably at the reading or hearing of the story as documented in scripture?

i've had a difficult time with these thoughts this year and in past years. i remember hearing (second hand, of course) that a young person and their parent didn't agree with having a lock-in after the good friday service a couple years ago. they didn't agree that it was time for us to start "the celebration of life" part yet. it was "too soon". and i respected those thoughts. i truly did. i just didn't agree. the best memorials (to me) are the ones that understand and acknowledge the impact of the person we are grieving and celebrate that impact. can i not be sad? of course you/i can. i am sad every time i think of my lost grandparents, but i celebrate their memory now. i don't grieve it on the anniversary of their passing every single year.

the same idea can be applied to easter morning services. i'll admit my expectations were low (having heard the preacher a couple times before) yesterday, but i will say that i was looking to be inspired yesterday morning. but what was presented was a retelling of the first easter morning experience. and while i appreciated the retelling, i wasn't inspired in the least. i knew that story too. i wanted more.

so, what are worship leaders to do? do you prepare for the "easter only's" and preach on easter morning to the folks that pack your sanctuary once, maybe twice a year? should pastors use their super-serious voices and pick emotional people to read scripture on good friday? or in both cases, are there "outside the box" ways to put a new spin on a very familiar story. i would argue the latter. i definitely wish for that.

i don't want to be jaded towards holy week and easter morning. lord knows, literally, that my convictions and beliefs tell me that easter is and should be the most holy of any day on the calendar. but i also have no interest in being ridiculed about wanting to "skip to easter" when that is exactly what i want to do. it's not that i am want to gloss over jesus' sacrifice. it's that i get it. and i've mourned it. and i do remember and appreciate it. but i want to be inspired. and i don't want to feel like i am back in third grade sunday school.

from experience, i know how hard it is to walk the line between creative and traditional. i hope it's not bad to hope and wish for more of the former and less of the latter.

but i do.

shave and a haircut


when faced with trials in your life, what do you do? when someone calls into question your work ethic and the question is 100 percent valid, how will you respond? when you fail to show respect for your co-workers by not pulling your load, what will be your next step?

i pondered these questions in the few minutes that it took to get a haircut yesterday. this haircut was my first in i cannot remember how many years. i can't really explain why i chose to get a haircut instead of going upstairs, pulling out my clippers and my one guard and just taking it all off like i've done once a month for just this side of forever. it wasn't a decision i made after any real reflection and in the grand scheme of things the decision will be moot and the hair will be back in a couple weeks. it was an interesting experience nonetheless. hannah was with me and sat politely and quietly as the lady took her shears to my head. hannah was probably fascinated for this was the first time in her life that she had seen anyone other than daddy or mommy take shears to my head. the lady commented several times about hannah, but i had trouble concentrating. not that i didn't want to talk about hannah, i just couldn't get the above questions out of my head.

in different but so many words, the lady and third manager (of three) at the store was asked these questions. her response? she threatened to quit.

"how about that?" i thought to myself. in the face of adversity and discomfort all brought upon her by her own actions (or lack thereof), she chose the easy way out. there was no owning up to her culpability. there was no sure-fire acknowledgement of her laziness followed by a vow to do better. she just moped and said that she wanted to quit. my thought process after hearing this was two-fold. my first? "HELL YEAH!!!" finally, some dead weight dropped from the sinking ship that is our staff. granted, the dead weight would not be forced to walk the plank. it was more that she had just tripped over a rope on the deck and fell over, but it was a small victory nonetheless. my second? "shit." if she quits, i am going to have a really hard time getting away to the beach next weekend. not that i really am worried about that. she was bluffing. hard. asking for sympathy in the passive-aggressive way that everything out of my control is handled at the store. if it were up to me, i would have called her hand so hard that you would have thought that i was holding pocket aces and the river just turned over the other two. (how about that poker reference, huh? stupid poker. the only con to having espn.) but it's not up to me fully. i can voice my displeasure to anyone that will listen, but the "resignation" would have to be accepted by the market director. and by market director i mean king of the passive aggressive army that is pet supplies "plus" as i know it.

i know this all sounds silly. i don't want to be a whiner. i still like my job for the most part. i like most of the staff all of the time and all of the staff some of the time. i do wish joseph and beandon and dustin and april were still around to lighten things up. i do like my job. i just wish i could make it better. maybe sooner rather than later. who knows.

i guess i bring this up here because easter sunday is a couple days away and we'll all hear about the renewal and new hope that i wrote about tuesday all weekend long. i hope that those of us that hear the good news can hang onto it for longer than through lunchtime on sunday (sorry to go all rick owen on you.). i do hope that i and we can hear it and know that it's ok to want things to be better. in our life. at our job. and striving for that "better". we don't have to be conniving. we don't have to step on toes. we just have to call a spade a spade. if something's not working out, then just change it. if something's in the way of you/us being truly happy and able to live out a more meaningful life for our god, then remove it. those of you that know me know that i am all about second chances, but when second chances become tenth and fiftieth and hundredth chances and nothing has gotten any better, well, you've done all you can do.

god so loved us that he sent jesus to help us be better. not to be content with our belief in his sacrifice and wallow in mediocrity. not to hold tight to our comfort zones and allow "it is what it is" to be our life motto. he gave us reason and the ultimate second chance to be better. to be happy. to move on from something we aren't good at or that isn't working out to something fulfilling.

we'll see how that works out for us (me) this year.

spring is here
(hannah and me, part twenty-two)


there is something very beautiful about opening day in major league baseball. this fact has been presented in thousands of beautiful and articulate ways that i won't try and mirror or flat out plagiarize here, but with baseball, more than any other sport, opening day brings with it a sense of hope. it doesn't matter how poorly your team performed the year prior (and the braves sucked it up). it doesn't matter if the "experts" predict that you'll finish in first or in last, because if you are a true fan, you can rationalize many conceivable ways that this could be "the year" for your team. i've enjoyed observing from afar the perennially lousy kansas city royals nation attach it's hopes to a 23 year-old third baseman. i enjoyed even more seeing those royals steal the collective breath from the 160 million dollar red sox yesterday. how expectations can change with just one game. "what if the sawx lose every game curt schilling pitches???" that would suck for them as a team. even worse for their fans that have dreamed of their second world series in four years and have pinned their respective tail to a japanese donkey that has never pitched in a major league game. good luck with that. my braves, on the other hand? well, they are 1-0 with a shortstop on pace to hit 324 home runs this season. that is what's great about opening day. everything is exaggerated. everything seems bigger. everything seems more important. everything seems new. filled with hope. filled with wonderful expectations that will only be met for one team's group of fans come october, but expectations that all fans are able to share for one day.

which, naturally, brings me to hannah. the last couple of days have been a little rough around the edges. there have been several reminders that for whatever reason, good or bad...deserved or not, my parents are not what i wish them to be. to be fair, i have to believe that they could throw the same sentiment back at me if they wanted. "why don't you call?" "boy, i wish i saw hannah more." "i sure wish you were as super cool as ken and angel." it's tough to take some days. tougher still on others. never easy. but that's the bed we've all gotten ourselves into. i wish for my relationships with both of them to be like sarah's and marie's. i wish, sometimes, for just a hint of a "normal" family. but those wishes are fleeting. i am more grounded in reality now than i used to be, and most days that it is a good thing. most days that keeps me from wishing.

another thing that keeps me from dwelling on things that make me unhappy is my baby girl. i know she does the same for her mommy. it's hard as a married couple, when it's convenient to take out the ills of your day on your spouse to always be as loving and full of support as your significant other might need. but all we have to do is find hannah. and she smiles at us. or wrestles spud to the ground. or puts her hands on her hips and shakes her booty. or gives us hugs and kisses. or tells us that she loves us "thiiiiiiiissssssss much". everything about her is exaggerated. everything about her seems bigger and better than the sum of the parts of an otherwise "long day." everything seems more important because it is more important. and everything about her is new. and filled with hope. even in her daily routines, something changes to keep those routines fresh and us on our toes. something as simple as walking to the car or up to bed can be the lasting image of the day.

opening day is great. and so are the undefeated braves (at least for one more day). a little dose of hannah is better.

hannah, you're the bomb.