Well, our Thanksgiving vacation is coming to a close.  We have a little more Oklahoma time left today, but we fly out this afternoon and head back home.  It has been a great trip and we are bummed to see it come to an end.  We have had an awesome time hanging out with as many friends and family as we could.  Toss in too much Thanksgiving food, preggo cravings, and a baby shower and it has been quite a trip!  But as we have blown past another Thanksgiving, I want to continue giving thanks for the things that have happened even this week as we start another year.  Here is a brief list of just a few of the things that I am already thankful for.

• Thanksgiving Trip – A massive thank you goes out to Lee!  Thank you so much!  Without you, this would not have happened!  So glad we got to see you and hang out for a bit.
• Family & Friends – We love you all so much and can’t believe we have been so blessed with awesome families and friends surrounding and supporting us.  We would fall apart without you guys!  Wish we could spend even more time with all of you.  (Chris and Randi, we love you guys and will miss you!  Keep us updated.  Wish we could spend more time with you before you leave!  We will definitely be praying for you!)
• Baby Shower – Yeah for gifts for our baby girl!  Those are fun.  But more than that, thank you to all of you who were a part of the shower and putting it together!  The food was great and the company was even better!  We had a blast spending the evening with you all and wish we could do it more often.  Thank you to all of you who drove in to spend time with us and support us as we are trying to figure out how to bring a baby into this world right!  All of you mean the world to us!

Don’t save up all your giving thanks until next Thanksgiving!  Tell them thank you now!

So I am starting to wonder how I am going to do in prison.  No I haven’t done anything too deserving of that yet, but I am pretty sure I am getting closer and closer by the day.  You see, I have started to realize that I am having a baby girl and there is a good chance she will be gorgeous just like her mom.  Yeah, that’s nice and cute and fun and all until she hits about 12.  Then it becomes a massive problem.  Then every boy in the world has become my worst nightmare.  See when you have a boy, you only have to worry about that one boy.  When a girl comes along, you then have to worry about EVERY SINGLE boy in the WORLD!  I am not a fan of that.

My daughter will not be dating for a good long time (at least until her mother tries to convince me otherwise…she can’t be quite convincing…) and at that point when I decide to let her out of her bedroom for the first time in her life, these young punks will have to come over to MY house and see all the large knives I keep out on the table for quick access.  I thought about golf clubs, but I don’t think that sends the right signal.  The kid should fear for his jugular if he messes with my baby girl in a way I deem inappropriate.  So yeah, like I said.  I’m working on my prison life for my future.

Those of you out there with daughters, what have you done to scare the crap out of the boys?  Those of you without daughters or with daughters prior to that age, what are your plans to do?  I wanna know!

I’m not much of a planner, but I like to be prepared.  Does that make sense?  Doesn’t matter.  That’s how I am.  Maybe I need to plan somethings but not everything.  Well, now that we are pregnant and have our first baby on the way, I have been trying to plan/prepare for certain things.  But the hard part is that I have never done this before!  And to add to it, everyone does it differently.  And then add to that, every baby is different.  Awesome.  Sounds like I’m planning and preparing for something that you can’t really do either for.  Well, I’m still gonna try.

Right now I am working on budgeting for a baby.  It’s a big deal to me (as I am sure it should be).  But like I said, I have never done this before.  It’s one thing to budget for a wife and a dog.  They are easy.  He wants food and she wants shopping money.  Ok.  Cool.  Here’s what we got.  But to add a baby to that I now I have to figure out diapers and wipes and formula and baby food and trash bags for throwing away all those things and car seats and massive bows (judging from the size of them they have to be pretty expensive) and who knows what else.  And I am pretty sure there have to be other things that I don’t know about.  What about toys and stuffed animals?  Dolls?!  I don’t have a clue how much a Barbie costs!  I bet if I can keep the “little girls have the cutest clothes” thinking to a minimum we might not be completely broke.

But, even with all that, it is funny how priorities change.  Security and safety is higher on my list than it was before.  Of course I want my wife safe, but now it is different.  Cable and internet are not as high as they used to be (but that could be because of the iPhone).  I haven’t had a poker bank roll in forever and that’s not because I lost it all.  But try as I might, I still don’t know what is about to come or really how to handle it.  I am gonna do my best, which won’t be enough, AND trust that God will take care of the rest.  I might not know what I’m about to have to pay for, but I know God does and He will provide for us!  (God, if you could go ahead and email me the budget spreadsheet, that would be great!)

Honesty and Craigslist more and more often seem to be two things that don’t go together.  And when it comes to honestly, I think there is either 1st Place (being honest) or 2nd Place (the first loser).  It seems the more I use Craigslist the more I wish it was eBay.  There are great deals to be had, but sometimes it is so difficult to wade through the load of crap to get to something that isn’t a complete waste of time.

Just a couple weeks ago we decided it was time to find a crib for our baby.  Kara-Kae was very excited about this and ready to get one.  So she decided on the crib she wanted for our baby girl and set out to keep me happy in the process by finding the best price on this Da Vinci crib.  Low and behold (as my mom would say) the best price on the exact crib she wanted was a post on Craigslist from a girl in Anaheim!  Sweet.  The perfect crib at a great price is hard to pass up.  So it was time to get it.  Through back and forth conversations with this girl about the crib, KK’s blog and her wanting to check out our church, KK got all the details about it and found out that the baby had only slept in it twice.  So it should be like new!  The girl was about to leave the country for work so we decided to go see it before she left.  Unfortunately that meant we had to go in the evening to see the crib in a dark garage.

Once we had arrived, we were told that the crib was in great shape and that the kid had only slept in it like five times and played in it like 10 times.  (Wait…what happened to only two times???)  The crib wasn’t in the shape it was promised in, but in the dark it seems to be ok.  We made the deal, gathered the parts and headed home.  Once we got home and got the crib into the light we could see it for what it really was.  If the kid had only been in it a few times, those few times must have been extended periods of time.  It was pretty beat up.  But, we had seen some of that and it was very fixable.  Then as we were checking to make sure all the parts were there we discovered that the instructions didn’t say Da Vinci anywhere on them.  Turns out the crib was made by a company called Jardine Enterprises.  If you go google them you will notice that the dominating topic is that in the past several years they have recalled 300,000 cribs because they were unsafe and endangered the babies.  Awesome.  And on top of that, we didn’t get a single piece of hardware for the matching changing table we purchased with the crib!

So we immediately started trying to get back in touch with the girl hoping that she would be civil and honest (which I’m not sure why I even had hopes that she might considering she listed a completely different crib, which I’m sure had nothing to do with the fact that hers had been recalled a few years back and had even posted pictures of the crib she claimed it was) and work with us.  Nope.  Not a chance.  She didn’t care one bit that the item was falsely listed and that we had been straight up lied to and misled.  She didn’t care.  She had her money and was not interested one bit in being honest about it.  Yes, we should have checked it closer before we bought it.  Yes, we should not have trusted someone who seemed to be a nice person interested in our lives and church.  Yes, we have learned to no longer trust ANYONE on Craigslist.  But, she still knew she was not telling the truth and never even thought to mention that it was something completely different than what we were expecting.  I think I’ll save her to my favorite sellers list and give her a 2nd Place ribbon for her efforts.

But, through the whole thing God took care of us.  I hope that some day she checks out a church, even if it’s not ours.  And then God took care of our baby too.  Because the crib had been recalled in the past, we decided to try to see if they would still take it back.  They did!  We just received a voucher to Babies ‘R’ Us for MORE than what we purchased the crib for so that now we can get a brand new crib that is exactly what we want and exactly what we think it is!  Thank you God for taking care of us in our moment of weakness of trusting someone from Craigslist.  Take that crib lady.

All my life (well ever since I have really known what was going on) I have wondered how anyone could ever be a deadbeat parent.  It has just never made sense in my head.  How could you not be a part of your children’s/family’s lives?  It just doesn’t make sense.  Blah, blah, blah, we didn’t mean to get pregnant, I was drunk, she doesn’t want me around, excuses, excuses, excuses.  I don’t wanna hear you stupid crap.  The fact is that you took part in something that carries major consequences with it and whether you were thinking straight or not, you knew what could happen.

Like I said before, I just can’t understand this process.  I don’t understand that decision.  I can’t rationalize it.  My wife and I are only halfway through our pregnancy and I already know that I love that little girl so much that I don’t even understand it.  How could I ever not do my job and take care of my responsibility to her and my wife?  How could I ever not be there for her?  Yes, I know there will be hard times.  Life is often full of those times.  There will be times that she doesn’t like me.  There will be times that I have to be the bad guy.  But that doesn’t change the fact that I love her more than I can explain (except that by explaining that I can’t explain it I have explained it)!  It doesn’t change the fact that I will always want the best for her and will do everything I can to help her understand these things.  She needs to know that she is loved.  She needs to know that from her daddy.

Deadbeat “dad” is NOT an option.  It’s not even a good term!  You don’t even deserve the title of dad if it is proceeded by deadbeat.  I am censoring myself right here because I can’t give it a better name other than deadbeat that doesn’t involve words that I’m not supposed to say.  I guess this just get’s me fired up.  It’s just stupid.  I don’t know that you can sanely rationalize it any other way.  It is NOT an option.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce you to my baby girl!  This is the very first video of her to ever be posted on the internet as I am sure there will be plenty more as she makes noises, learns to crawl, learns to walk, etc.  So, you all enjoy!

She is gorgeous!  Wow, God is AWESOME!