Super-Double-Plus Secret Blog

Originally, this blog was going to be called "Beat on the Brat," but I should have figured out that someone would have thought of that by now. So, instead, you get the lame-ish title that it does in fact have. Of course, "Beat on the Brat" would probably have seemed embarrassing itself in a few months, and at least this way I don't have to worry about nice men showing up at my house to ask me why I'm beating my child.

Which doesn't, technically speaking, exist yet. Hence the gender-neutral name.

If you're reading this post, and it's before late September 2007, you must either have randomly come across this blog or you know me and are rather clever. My wife (Melissa) found out a couple of weeks ago that she's pregnant. This is very much an expected, planned, and hoped-for event. This won't be that sort of blog. We're not not telling folks about it yet out of any perversity, but just because things are early and if anything were to happen with the pregnancy, we'd rather just deal with it quitely ourselves than have to go around to all the folks we'd told about the good news to tell them about the bad news, too.

Now that I think about, I may have to reassess that existence claim. I guess if the pregnancy continues, then our kid does in fact exist, in some sense, now (in a sort of acorn-to-oak-tree sense). S/he's just very, very small. On the other hand, should (mighty agnost forbid) something go wrong, it'll be perfectly natural to think of this as losing a pregnancy, but not really as losing a child. I'm a philosopher, and this sort of metaphysics still makes my head hurt a little.

But I digress.

Anyway, the fact that we haven't told folks yet doesn't stop me from thinking about it. I'm worrying about how to baby-proof a house that features two cats, lots of wobbly bookshelves, a glass table top, and bunches of tiny gaming dice. I'm doing standard-issue gen-X parent things like reading Punk Rock Dad and The Future Generation (and The Moral Judgment of the Child and Parenting Beyond Belief, when I get done), putting Ramones onesies on the baby wishlist, and, well, starting a blog. I figure that this is something like the 21st Century equivalent of the scrapbook, only more confessional and involving less paste and dust.

So this will be a place for me to gather my thoughts and reflect. It'll be relatively straightforward and uncensored, and I'm sure somewhat stream-of-consciousness at times, so I hope there's nothing here that will scar my future child (or my parents). Maybe I can even get Melissa to contribute from time to time. We'll see.