now entering gamer parenthood

On August 30th at 7:37 pm I became a father to a beautiful baby girl. She definitely takes after my wife.

After nine months of waiting, I finally met the little person that was growing inside my wife. The biology of pregnancy is quite amazing when you think about it - and while the most well-meaning people will often try and scare you with stuff that can go wrong, or things your wife should be eating, or the right time to buy a crib - I constantly fell back on the advice of our prenatal class instructor: this is supposed to work.

As an expectant parent, everyone tells you it's this huge life changing experience that you will never forget for as long as you live, and there isn't anything else out there that comes close to the way parenting enriches your life. Alongside the incessant advice-giving, I have to admit I was completely skeptical of the gravity of the event to come. I really had no idea how wrong I could be.

I was there for everything. I saw the birth. And as much as the Life network and the movies shown at the hospital try to prepare you for what to expect, there's really no replacement for actually witnessing it. Yes there is blood and gore and pain and the squeezing of hands and all that other stuff people love to mention when talking about childbirth, but none of it matters when you see that tiny human come into the world.

From that moment on priorities change. They have to. For the last two weeks I've been learning to be a parent. Dealing with crying jags. Changing diapers at 3 a.m. I have begun to make lists. Things that I have to do, things that I should do, and things that I would like to do. Everything related to the baby is in the first list. Housework (and sometimes feeding ourselves!) ends up in the second list. Gaming, and everything related to my computer, has been in the last category, if that.

At first I was a little uneasy about the lifestyle change. Like everyone else who has grown up in a generation where education, career and technology are everything, it was very easy for me to push the idea of raising a family aside for the time being. When my wife and I got married we both knew we wanted children…eventually. After we moved into the new house, we started thinking about it seriously. Just in time for Christmas, we found out we would be parents.

Now I have to find a new balance. And it doesn't bother me that much. I have to admit I've watched a lot of T.V., more than I have in the last five years combined. Commercials still mostly suck, daytime television is for the unemployed (bad movies galore and every commercial break is an ad for going back to school), and in the evenings I've watched the Red Sox go from struggling ball club to a full-on end-of-season collapse. I'm often used as a pillow for our little one's sleeping arrangements, leaving me pretty much incapacitated for most of the day. While this sedentary lifestyle may not be for me, I know it gets better.

It's exciting to watch this little person sneeze for the first time, or grab my finger, or vomit all over my wife's back. I watch in amazement as our golden retriever tries to comfort our baby with a drool-caked toy, or the way she is always sleeping wherever the baby is. It's been so much fun, I've pretty much forgotten about everything else. The best part is that baby has no idea if we're doing anything "wrong"; they have nothing to compare to. It's very reassuring.

Things may slow down here for a while, but as I find equilibrium within this new life production should return to normal. I may even start polishing off some of my forgotten unfinished reviews to maintain some semblance of an update schedule. In the meantime I'll game whenever I have an appropriate opportunity.

Last year I shared the fact that I got a dog with the entire internet. I battled my most primal urges to post a photo, out of fear of becoming that kind of weblog. This time is different.