Sketch Dumping on Ten Weeks to Baby 2

Work-a-Doodle: Sketch Dump Friday Edition

Work has been really difficult lately. With one thing and another August is shaping up to be the most stressful month I've had in a while. To try and preserve the last battered remains of my sanity I've been doing a little more doodling in my notebook than usual. Out of the pages of drawings filling a notebook that, honestly, should be full of notes here are a few of my favorites. 

  

T-Minus Ten Weeks

In just a little over two short months everything in my life is going to change for the second time. Mildly Sensational and I are expecting our second child in mid-October. The baby'll be a boy this time around, so we'll have one of each. 

As I sit here typing this, Mildly Sensational is asleep on the sofa behind me. Sometimes it's surprising to me that she can sleep through the vigorous pounding my martial arts strengthened fingers deliver on our innocent keyboard. It's somewhat less surprising when she's pregnant. Her first pregnancy with our daughter wore my wife out on a more or less daily basis. This time around I can tell she's fighting to stay awake by the time I get home from work.

Part of that is being pregnant while taking care of a two-year-old and all the demands she can unleash on a daily basis. The other part of that is this pregnancy is just different. 

Our daughter was always a quiet baby, even before she was born. She moved and squirmed, but didn't ever really fidget or kick. Our son subjects my wife's internal organs to a rigorous daily pounding. As she snoozes quietly on the couch I can see him moving around, kicking, and squirming. I watch and wonder, is he bored and just repositioning because staying in one place gets old, is he demanding attention form his mommy, or is it something else entirely? Some pre-natal struggle known only to babies still in the womb that they will forget immediately on being born? 

At some point during every pregnancy you get to a point where you start wondering what the new little person is going to be like. Are they going to be a happy, quiet, mild child, or a dervish of cries and poop who won't let anyone in the house get a wink of sleep? It's a short hop from there to more frightening questions like, "will I be a good father to this new little person? I think I'm doing all right with the first, but what if I can't handle two and I screw them both up?"

On moments like that I take a deep breath and assure myself that I'm doing everything I can. I'm doing the very best to ensure I screw up my kids just enough to be interesting, but not so much that they spend their lives living in a dumpster with eighteen cats and negotiating peace treaties between the banana peel pixies and the discarded fast food gnomes. 

I'm looking forward to meeting my son in October, but not without a certain degree of apprehension.

I take some small comfort in knowing that probably means I have some common sense.