Hardly Workin'

Another cute gift came in today, this one from my mother and step-father. My birthday is on April 3rd, the same day as out baby shower. As is to be expected (and as is greatly necessary), most birthday gifts are likely to have a theme of "soon-to-arrive twins." The gift from these two was certainly no exception.

First, a little background: as you may know from my other posts, I'm a graduate student in philosophy and, as you may guess, the market for folks with MAs in philosophy is rather minimal. I had originally planned to go on to obtain my PhD, but the field is ridiculously competitive--both to get into a PhD program as well as to obtain a full time, permanent position afterwards--and both my passion and my confidence in my abilities are waning. Amanda's job is willing to give her a significant degree of mobility by allowing her to work from home just as she has been doing for the past year and a half. Couple all of this with my own desire to have a trade and be able to contribute more financially and we arrive at a situation wherein we are free to do just about anything. The "anything" we've chosen to do is to move to St. George, Utah, where my brother has a flourishing contracting business. Every time we've visited them, I've gone to work with my brother. We laugh and play while also busting butt and the visits are always such special, wonderful times. Every time we leave, I get pretty teary-eyed and miss him and his wonderful wife and kids. Over the years, he has half-jokingly asked if I wanted to come out and work with him. I think he's still in shock since I asked him if he was really serious about the offer. The point of this long-winded story is to give a little background as to why I'm leaving academia for contracting and to explain this adorable birthday gift from my parents:

Take a closer look.

Pretty darn cute, no? It's a tool belt with a few key work elements and a handful of baby supplies. I can't imagine wearing it while diapering a child, however. I foresee being the one who conducts the bleary-eyed 2:00 am changings and, from what I understand, caulk makes very poor diaper rash paste.

My step-father wrote a pretty adorable poem to accompany the gift:
Speaking of gifts, we had perhaps the cutest card to ever be mailed arrive not too long ago, without warning. We get to see our niece, Grace, only once every few months. She adores Amanda but has seemed a bit hesitant about this whole baby thing. I'm not sure if this card was to her or to the boys, but in either case it had to be shared:

The inside card was just a piece of white paper with the word "baby" emblazoned on it in bold, red letters. Absolutely adorable, needless to say.

We were in a news lull for a bit and I was quite busy, hence my infrequent updates. I expect to return to regular posts again, however, as appointments are growing more frequent and more changes are taking place. Look out for a Fatherhood Friday post tomorrow in which I'm going to give a general update and pose a very serious question about c-sections, twins and breech babies.