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. 

Tiny Heroes Doing What They Have To

Tiny Heroes: Batman and Robin
Every so often I end up on a conference call or in a meeting where the purpose of the meeting or the issues being discussed have little to do with me, or leave me limited room to contribute. If that sounds like it might be boring, let me tell you it absolutely is every bit as dull as it sounds. That said it's also an opportunity. On those occasions when I'm in a meeting or on a call where I don't need to be very involved I pull out my notebook and pencil and draw whatever comes to mind. Today this is what came of listening to one of the developers on my team walk a client through a fairly technical process.

I've always thought it was odd that Batman is dressed in head-to-toe black, with a cape to break up the contours of his body and a mask that covers his entire face, but Robin jumping around in brightly colored underroos was hilariously unfair. I have to assume this conversation was a fairly regular thing, especially when Dick Grasyon was younger. 

Is this Selling Out, Giving Up, or Moving On?

To understand where this post is coming from it's necessary to have the proper context. The picture on the right should pretty clearly sum up my motivation for the decisions I've made in the last couple of weeks.

This is a sonogram image of the baby my wife and I are expecting in October. We found out Mildly Sensational is pregnant at the end of January. As soon as we found out she was pregnant I started giving some serious thought to my priorities and what they should be. 

For a while now some of the people in the company I work for have made it clear that my pursuit of some kind of acting career outside the boundaries of their organization wasn't working for them. It wouldn't be untrue to say there were some very oblique threats to my job related to the time I sometimes had to take for auditions. 

Right now my job is the only income, and my insurance is the only thing guaranteeing that my wife can work with the awesome obstetrician who delivered our first. After many years of struggling I had to put responsibility and ambition on the scales opposing each other. Responsibility far out-weighted my ambition. 

Almost two weeks ago I contacted my manager, my commercial agent, and my theatrical agent and asked them to remove me from their rosters. In essence I took any hope of an acting career and set it aside. 

This has been the most difficult two weeks I've had in a while. Acting is something I've wanted to do for a long, long time, and I'd had some minor successes. Nothing that would propel me into being able to do it full-time, but some positive steps. But I recognized that it was time to, as my Granddad Randels would put it, "do what I have to."

It's been painful. I can't watch Actor's Studio and listen to great actors talk about what a wonderful thing it is that they get to act for a living. There's a pang in my heart when I drive past trucks lined up on the side of the road and lights and "flags" have been set up for a film shoot. There's a little piece of my mind that says, "this is the closest I'm ever going to get; staring wistfully at a film crew at work as I drive by." 

It has to be done. It's the right decision, for right now. Maybe it's something I'll be able to get back to. For now I'm grateful that I have this as an outlet for my creativity. I'm grateful for my wife and our daughter who give me all the reason I need to say I'm doing the right thing. I'm grateful for my friends who support me. 

For now I just hang on, do what I have to, and hope there are bigger and better things on the horizon.