Carter Edwin Neal
Posted by Seth | Filed under Random Musing
Wow… I’m really tired. I’m not sure we are even going to understand how our lives have just changed. Our little boy is so cute. And now he has a name!
Introducing Carter Edwin Neal, born 6lbs 6oz and 19″ long and healthy as… you know, something we all think of as being very healthy. Carter was my choice, Jill was more partial to Luke, but we agreed on Carter because if he turned out to be a she instead we would have gone with Jill’s name. Marriage.
These were taken this morning. Very cute.
The Little One
Posted by Seth | Filed under Random Musing
So Jill wasn’t kidding!
At 5am this morning she started feeling contractions, at 9am I called the midwife on call, at 1pm we arrived at the U of U hospital (and Melissa, our favorite midwife was on call!) and Jill was 6cm, at 3pm Jill was at 9cm (oh, and I’m sick as a dog… damz…), at 5pm Jill starting going into hard labor and at 7.12pm The Little One was born!
OH! And The Little One is a He!
That’s mom and The Little Boy about an hour after. He went for food about an hour in… even though he doesn’t totally get it yet! But he will. He’s my son after all!
Oh, and here’s a picture of Melissa our midwife who stayed 3 hours after her shift had ended! I’m telling you, she is the best.
Oh, and one last story. Or the first one… whatever. Tonight was supposed to be our last hypnobirthing class! Obviously we didn’t make it, but the class did a tour of the hospital so I saw them! And, if you want to know, Jill did awesome and the hypnobirthing was totally the right way to go. Obviously I’m not going to say something as stupid as “it was easy” but Jill was impressive even if was the hardest thing she’s ever done!
More later… I’m tired and a bit delirious!
HOLY $&#%!
Posted by Seth | Filed under Random Musing
So Jill says she is in labor…
…
Right now!
The Little One cometh.
Hypnobirthing…
Posted by Seth | Filed under Random Musing
OK, so Jill and I have been going to birthing classes as we anticipate The Little One. And that’s exactly what we say. And if people want to believe that means lamaze class or whatever that’s fine with us because truthfully we are a little embarrassed to be going. If there is one thing good conservative Christians aren’t suppose to be about it is hippie-psycho babble. Now, I know… there is already some debate about the whole “good conservative Christian” thing, but that’s another post.
Hypnobirthing is the birthing class Oprah would take if she were ever with child and in need of such a class. In fact, I would describe Hypnobirthing as more philosophy than actual technique. For instance, there are “laws” we went over in our first class such as “The Law of Harmonious Attraction” (which of course gets back to the Oprah comment above).
But here’s the thing; we think we like it! Not so much the psycho babble parts; but the birth is a natural event not a medical intervention parts! Imagine that. Our midwife (Melissa, whom we LOVE) really encouraged us to participate and we are glad we did. It’ll be exciting to see how all this plays out as we await The Little One.
Injustice…
Posted by Seth | Filed under Random Musing
I’ve always had an over-inflated sense of what was right and what was wrong. Sometimes that served me well; like when my sixth grade friend said we should hide in a ditch and shoot at oncoming cars with his new bee-bee gun I said, “Hellz no, my dad will literally kick my ass into next week” or something like that. And when the cops handcuffed Bruce after he shot out the driver side window of an old VW bug and put some half blind guy in the ER for stitches I knew that my sense of right and wrong had done its job.
Its sometimes not served me as well… but that’s another post.
What’s harder though, is when I see injustice and I feel powerless to stop it. Big injustices suck, but so do the small ones. For instance, my wife and I are looking to buy a new (used) car in anticipation of The Little Guy. One ad in the paper caught my eye for a 2002 Corolla with 16k miles on it. The lady selling it was nice and even said that our baby was going to be a boy and very smart. Which I thought was real nice. But, she really wanted more than we could afford and so we told her we had to think about it. I decided to do my due diligence and looked up the car’s VIN on Carfax.com.
The short and long of it was that this car didn’t have 16k miles on it because it had been in a wreck in LA with 32k miles on it. I was pissed, but what really steamed me was I knew some sucker was going to get taken by this fortune teller and I was powerless to do anything about it save picketing her hair salon. I don’t know why, but crap like this just pisses me off.
The good news is we got a car for The Little Guy. A 2002 Camry with 36K miles on it and only one owner! Sadly it was owned by this old guy whose kids decided dad wasn’t safe behind the wheel anymore, but we’ll take it still.
Blog Update: July 26
Posted by Seth | Filed under Random Musing
At the SLC Bees game. Literally sweating my ass off and its 9PM! DAMNZ! Anyway, want to start writing more often here, even though I have nothing to say! And that after 2 beers (my father-in-law is in town, what else am I suppose to drink?)!
That and I want to try my new WP iPhone app…
Yea, that just happened. … Let it soak in a bit…
OK, I’m out.
Fear and Trembling…
Posted by Seth | Filed under Fun, Reflections
Our culture is consumed by fear. Its all the rage. Afraid of Osama; afraid of the world melting; afraid that we won’t get to keep our happy little lives the way they are. In many ways there isn’t anything more wrong with our collective consciousness’s than this fear mongering we are so adept at.
But there is something God given about fear. Not the kind we usually practice, or the spiritual kind that you may think I’m referring too… but the primal kind. I came across this picture this week and just can’t stop staring at it… its a picture of fear and trembling and somehow its making me a little more whole.
Why are you poor?
Posted by Seth | Filed under Rants
So I was in Barnes & Noble paging through some books I had no intention of buying because I'm cheap… sipping my $4 latte (yes, there was a hint of sarcastic irony there) and came across a book called "Poor People" by a certain William Vollmann–I'm sure his friends call him Bill. Anyway, Bill, who has written quite a few books on social issues according to the publisher decided to write a book detailing his interactions with poor people around the world (including folks in Thailand) and asking them simply, Why are you poor?!
Well, as you can imagine, this was pretty interesting if not all together depressing… which I suppose could be expected as I sipped my coffee and was reminded that half the world lives on less than a couple bucks a day! At any rate, some of his stories were really quite intriguing as he retold his interviews with these different people and I'd encourage you to waste some time paging through this book if you ever get the chance.
But one thing really stuck out to me… it was the poor in places like the U.S. and Japan who really "felt poor" even though they had much more compared to the others in the book from places like Thailand and Kenya because they had a much deeper sense of "relative poverty". In other words, the people around them had so much more than they had they felt much poorer; where as people in Kenya, who live in poverty, have less than others around them but it wasn't as if they had so much less that they felt completely isolated from the society around them.
Maybe not the most profound stuff ever, but it did make me wonder how I make people around me feel poor and vice versa.
Hi Oscar…
Posted by Seth | Filed under Films
Well, I watched the Oscar’s last night with Jill… and I know I’m not suppose to like Ellen since she is openly gay bla, bla, bla… the fact is I laughed my butt off most of the night. Seriously… she was funny. And so was the musical performance by Will Farrell and Jack Black. Good stuff…
Since I’m not a huge Oscar winner one of the things I was surprised about was that they gave awards for best short film in two categories (animated and live action). Maybe this isn’t news, but I love short films. They are fun to watch (my iPod is full of them), fun to make (although I’m no Spielberg) and can actually teach you alot about the art of story telling (probably my favorite past-time).
Shorts International is the leading short film “distributor” and I’d recommend you check them out for short films that have found some “success”; you can find many of their titles on iTunes as well. As well, if you ever get a chance to participate in a project like the 48 Hour Film Project do it.
Anyway… this post is pretty pointless… I’ll post two short films that I like by just “regular” dudes like you and me… the first is actually the first short film that really got me excited… it was released June 2001. You may have seen it, its called Duality. It’s on YouTube now (as is everything); you can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQPefmq6PKY
[youtube]hQPefmq6PKY[/youtube]
This next one is just funny and I like funny… You can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rYDiUNkZeY
[youtube]7rYDiUNkZeY[/youtube]
Wii…(!)
Posted by Seth | Filed under Fun
Have you played Nintendo’s new video game console the Wii? Dude… it’s awesome. I mean, I like playing video games and stuff, but this thing is off the hook, crazy-fun to play. After playing it, I dreamt about playing it-fun. In fact, I still day-dream about playing it.
Well, anyway, the bad news is Jill is not that interested in me getting one. But I’ve still been looking into the “world of wii” and its pretty funny the stuff out there on this console. One blog I’ve been looking at has some dude’s experiment to get in shape by playing the Wii. You may think that’s funny if you’ve never played the Wii… but if you’ve played then you know he’s dead serious.
Anyway, go check out this dude’s update here: http://wiinintendo.net/2007/01/15/wii-sports-experiment-results/ its great stuff.
What can be said that hasn't already be said? Well, actually, a lot as it turns out.
