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Planting Trees

Creeva on July 14th, 2008

You would think that on a blog named parent phobia, that when I start a blog post off with the title “Planting Trees” that I’m going to be speaking in the metaphorical sense.   Well, your half right.

Today I slept in late and did my normal computing activities.  I knew I had to wake up early tomorrow so I proceeded to mow my lawn.  On a side note if you turn your mower upside down and it doesn’t start, you need to replace your air filter.  I’m not a normal out in the yard kind of guy.   I’m a in the artificial light sit at the computer kind of guy, much to the chagrin to my “I love the outdoors” wife.   But I stayed outside I finished the yard and proceeded to weed.

As I was weeding I noticed that there was some saplings growing here and there.   Now they weren’t in a spot where I wanted them to stay, but I didn’t need to outright kill them.   I spent hours (I said I don’t take the best care of my lawn) taking out saplings from here or there and replacing them in along the edge of my properties.  The varieties were Oak and some such tree I can’t identify.   Xie came outside and helped with about half of the planting.   Quite a few of the Oak saplings came from my gutters, we will go back to the fact I don’t care.

All said and done almost 40 saplings were planted, with another 10 - 20 to go tomorrow (more if I find another stash.  Not all the saplings could be saved, some were mangled trying to remove them.   It wasn’t in the cards for those trees.   Currently on the property we had 16 trees - so now we have a total of 56, with of course more coming.   This means less grass for me to mow in the long term.

Now for the metaphorical part of the discussion.   Being a parent is a lot like plantings trees.  You will push ideas down to your child and hope some of them take root.  I know all the trees I planted won’t survived, but it cost me nothing other then a day of planting.   Exposure to ideas, even those you don’t agree with is important.   Your child needs to understand your views as much as they need to arrive at their own conclusions.  You shouldn’t expect your child to be a clone of yourself, nor should you even want that.

This of course is just a the metaphor that I came up while I was working.   Take it for what it is, but it still was alot of physical labor.

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My Blog Announcement of the Pregnancy

Creeva on July 2nd, 2008

Normally in the future I plan on posting all pregnancy and parenting stuff here first and move it over to my other blog.  However with the announcement of the pregnancy I placed it on my home blog first.

Here is what I posted under the title “I’m Going to be a Father“:

In the picture above is my maternal grandfather and my great grandfather, it seems I am going to be joining on them on the ability to reproduce and pass down genetic material to the next generation. Yes I am going to be a father, Xie want and annouced the pregnancy on Twitter just a few hours ago with the following message:

As of yesterday I am 7 weeks pregnant - coming from the person who would never in a million years want kids, I am very excited & happy

I sent the follow up:

@xielanthia congratulations who is the father……nm

Then I sent this:

As of yesterday @xielanthia is 7 weeks pregnant and I’m going to be a father - wish us luck - we’ll need it.

So we have announced to the Web 2.0 World (WTW? W2W?) that we are having a baby and doing it in true web fashion. We have known for about 3 weeks and over that time eeked the information out to family and friends. The first person I told was the IPS guys I played SWG with that I have constant e-mail communication with. The first family that knew was my in-laws and followed by Xie’s grandmother (I wish she had a blog i could link to). Then it was ghoulishcharm. From there I told my father and my brother who was also there. I went and told my grandparents last Sunday and drove over to tell my sister, but she already knew it seems that she found out from my father who knew the week before.

I did find out from my sisters that my grandparents had already known about the pregnancy (having heard it through her) but yet they acted like they didn’t know anything. Welcome to my family, we can act surprise even if we have known something for months. I know I used to unwrap my Christmas presents before hand and rewrap them - I got that trick from my godmother.

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