Huh? What Happened?

Hello again. I'm back in the pool myself, sort of.

I guess I knew adopting a two year old baby girl was going to annihilate my daily routine. (How did I know? My friends all told me, and with great glee.) The immediate upshot: I traded journaling, book-reading, lyric-writing, and, yup, BLOGGING for cuddling, diaper-changing, scrape-prevention, and general silliness.

I'm sticking with the silliness and scrape-prevention, but now am going to experiment with squeezing a little blogging and lyric-writing in between cuddles. We'll see how it goes.

Although my daily life has been turned upside down again (my first daughter Coco turned our family life upside down for the first time almost 12 years ago), I have little to say about the diapers and sleep interruptions and other little inconveniences. It was pretty funny how many people told me before Lily came that having two kids is "ten times harder" than having one. Really? Maybe it's twice as hard, twice as expensive, etc... But ten times? Why is everyone so eager to complain about children? And these are all people with nannies or day care or babysitters. I can understand (a little) complaining about the first kid; after all, you had no idea what to expect, you don't know what just hit you. But once you go in for a second, it's a little harder to act surprised.

I suppose being a man I am probably not shouldering my full share of child-rearing duties, so maybe I'm not the person to ask how hard it is.

All that aside, though, the thing that's most amazed me about bringing Lily into my life is the love. I guess when you take care of someone, you start to love them. It's automatic, and that's that. She's still a total mystery to me, I feel like there's a tiny stranger in the house and she's taken over the operation. And all that makes sense, she's a baby and her needs are immediate and prior. But how has this love sprung up out of nowhere? Because that's what has happened. Before we went to the Philippines, I was afraid it wouldn't happen, that I wouldn't figure out how to love Lily. Now the big surprise is that it has happened by stealth. I didn't notice falling in love with her, I just fell.