Who's Your Daddy?

So It Begins

Hi,
My name is Jeff English. I am a freelance copywriter here in Baton Rouge and the owner of a company called, Creative English Communication Consultants. I partner with companies developing communication strategies and helping them deliver messages to their audience through a variety of mediums: web sites, television, radio, print, social media and just about everything but smoke signals. I’m fortunate enough to work for a range of clients, one of which is Woman’s. At home, I have a wonderful little five year old girl named Campbell and an incredible, beautiful, intelligent, funny, outgoing, free-spirited wife named Kendra who I know will be reading this. Did I mention she is beautiful? I am also going to be a father for the second time, which is why the lovely (and persuasive) ladies in the Woman’s marketing department asked me to write this blog. I’m not getting paid for it. Like I said, they can be persuasive and they are pretty nice to me, too. And they’ll be reading this. Did I mention how nice they are?

So, I’m a little behind on this blog because we’re about halfway through this pregnancy; however, I’ll go ahead and add to this as things progressed over the course of the last few months. First, we’ll travel back in time to December when I first found out about this pregnancy thing. (Cue “Wayne’s World” travel-back-in-time music). If you don’t know what that is, Google it, youngster.

It was a December morning, 2009. I must say that I am not a morning person and neither is my lovely wife. However, she is usually a little more chipper than I because she awakens first due to the fact that Campbell usually worms her way in the bed at about 6:30, snuggles and doses with Kendra, and then begins to proclaim that she wants breakfast because she is “STARVING!” I stay on my side and try to cram a few more minutes of sleep into the day. Like I said, I’m no morning person. On this glorious morning, Campbell had slept late for some odd reason and we were awake, but alone. Kendra said she had something to tell me and mentioned that we were going to have another baby. Since I am forbidden to include expletives in this blog, I cannot write my first reaction. Now before you get the wrong idea, I was not upset, just stunned. You see, we had Campbell in April 2005. We were blessed with a fairly easy birth (I can hear all the ladies now telling me “ain’t nothing easy ‘bout birthin’ no baby) and a healthy child that now talks non-stop. However, when we decided it was time for niño numero dos, things weren’t quite as easy. We are not as young as some first-time parents (but my wife is younger than me…and looks it, too, and that’s all I’m saying), so we thought it might be harder. In fact, after a couple of years, we’d resigned ourselves that another child wasn’t in the cards and that we’d just love and appreciate Campbell, even though she was rarely quiet enough for us to actually tell her. So, there I am staring up at the ceiling thinking about this baby thing. OH! And I also forgot to mention, I’m a planner. If you’re not married to one, then I’ll explain. It’s not that I don’t like being spontaneous; most of the time I just like to know what we’re doing in the future. I like to know that we’re going to go to Live After Five on Friday and then work in the yard Saturday morning. We’ll have my parents over to dinner Saturday…OK, I’m going to grill Sunday and then we’ll watch a movie that night. However, if things change a bit, I don’t have a melt down, but I can get agitated sometimes. I just like to plan things out. Plus it was morning for goodness sake. So, as a practical “guy,” my first thought was, “Wow, two kids! Boy, our schedule is going to change. What time will we have to start getting up in the morning? What are we going to do about school? I hope Campbell gets into the Baton Rouge Center for Visual and Performing Arts so we don’t have to pay for school tuition and daycare. Daycare! We need to get on a list somewhere.” All this is rushing through my head when Kendra says, “So, what do you think?” This is the point in the marriage where most men are smart enough to lie, show off their acting chops and exclaim how excited they are. I was just kinda’ smart—smart enough not to go into everything that was racing through my fog-filled brain, but dumb enough not to be “excited.” I honestly mentioned that I was a little shocked and we hadn’t planned for this, but I was going to be excited, just let me go to the bathroom and splash a little cold water on my face. My wife is a pretty cool chick who knows me and probably sensed that I needed a little time to process things, and as long as I didn’t run from the room screaming…well, things were going to be okay. Off to the sink I plodded and, as the cold water dripped off my nose and I gazed into the 42-year-old face in the mirror that was coming to grips with the fact that there was going to be an addition to the household, I heard the words, “I’m STARVING” echo from the bedroom and I just had to smile.