An actual update. Maybe.

Life is great.

We’re spending more and more time prepping for the baby. Natural home births take a little more preparation than making sure the hospital bag is packed. We started going to a new birthing class, one that uses the Bradley Method [eye-bleedingly bad website design warning], and we’re very happy with it. Bradley emphasizes extremely hands-on, practical advice for the father-to-be, effectively training him as the primary birthing coach. Which is fine with me, because the more I feel prepared, the more sanguine I am. Not that I’m in the least worried to start with; one of the issues I had with the previous birthing class we attended was it’s emphasis on fears. The teacher kept on trying to get us to reveal all our deep fear and and trepidation about birth… and I had nothing. Birth is normal and natural, not a medical emergency, and Stacey has done this before. Premature fear and worry serve no purpose in this process.

If I have any concern right now, it’s that I might burst from a surfeit of love. I love my wife, my family, my unborn child, my dear friends so much sometimes it feels like too much for me.

That, and balancing my professional and personal/emotional lives. When I allow myself to feel, I feel so very, very much. Back when I worked at Raytheon there were periods when I would pay hardly any attention to my work because I was so busy having amazingly deep conversations online, and mundane matters like work just seemed to fade into insignificance. And I could get away with that there, and still make up the work before it was badly overdue. That’s not really a possibility now. There’s a reason I hardly ever journal any more. I’m so busy at work. At a smaller company there is no downtime, never a lack of work to be done. And I have more responsibilities now, and I’m just plain more committed to my work.

So it’s difficult as I feel myself transitioning into a more emotional, relationship-centered phase. I’ve been reviving a relationship with a dearly loved longtime friend, and there’s that old tendency to just let work fade into the background, but that’s just not an option. For the first time I’m having to really consciously think about striking that balance between being emotionally present and awake, and being in charge of an important project on a tight schedule. The context switches between left brain and right brain can be jarring at times. As I put it in an IM conversation the other day:

For me life is always a balancing act between the extremely hardheaded left-brain engineer, and the boy crying out at the edge of the world. I accept and cherish both sides; but it can be difficult to buckle down and work on the days when I am feeling “near to the surface”, as I call it.