One Day, Lad, All This Will Be Yours...

Hello, everyone. I have finally burst forth from the abyss.¹ Allow me to once again beg your forgiveness for taking so long between posts. I am truly and deeply sorry and you are totally right to be suuuuper mad about the length of time between my last post and this one...

Ha! Take a look at the post date of my last post! 7 months ago! Which, not coincidentally, is just a little longer than my daughter's age! I bet you just feel terrible about making me grovel now, don't you?! Mwahaha my evil plan worked!²

So today, dear reader,³ you and I are going to take an eye-opening foray into the crazy, intimidating, scary, and somehow still exciting transition from not-parenthood to parenthood. As I am just 7 months removed from this transition, I'm pretty much an expert on the subject,⁴ and I will now bestow my knowledge upon you like a wise sage...uh...bestows...his knowledge on people.²

When you are expecting your first child, literally every single person you encounter has advice for you.⁶ Literally everyone. Even the 17-year-old cashier at Macy's had some "wisdom" he wished to bestow on us because, you know, he clearly knew everything about raising children. The good news, or so you think as a yet-to-be parent, is that those who do have children are also giving you advice. Their advice is what you listen to. You dwell on it. You log it away in that special "nuggets of wisdom" place in your brain. Sometimes, if you feel that a piece of advice is particularly wise, you even go crazy and write it down. Then, the day arrives. Your little one joins you. And it takes about 13 seconds for you to realize that every single thing anyone told you during the pregnancy was completely useless and not even slightly practical. Yup. Sorry to burst your bubble, almost-parents, but better that it's burst now than when a tiny human is screaming in your ear and you haven't slept in 3 or 7 days (you can't remember) and you're pretty sure you don't have clothes to wear tomorrow and you're hungry even though you're 20% positive you just ate (or was that yesterday?) and you're not entirely certain where your spouse is and...wait, did you just black out? Where's the baby? Where's the baby?! Oh. You're still holding her and she's still screaming; everything's cool.

As I've thought about it, I've realized that the useless advice that you hear when you're expecting your first child really does serve a purpose, albeit an unexpected one. Instead of helping you prepare for what's to come,⁸ it instead helps⁹ you in your journey to parenthood.

First and foremost, get ready for people to tell you that you aren't going to sleep. Seriously, you need to mentally prepare yourself for this crap. Every. Single. Person. Is going to tell you this, sometimes multiple times in the same conversation. You'll start a conversation about the pregnancy, they will tell you that are you about to experience some serious sleep deprivation, you will chuckle out of politeness because that joke has already stopped being funny just 2 weeks in, the conversation will diverge to another topic. Then this will happen:

You: "Great movie, though, I totally recommend it."

Them: "Cool I'll go watch it...person who will never sleep again! Ha! You see what I did? I brought attention back to the fact that you're about to have difficulty sleeping! It's funny because you're going to have a tiny screaming human who doesn't understand sleep yet! Classic!"

So yea, that's going to be a thing. Try to have fun with it.¹⁰ Aside from this "you're never going to sleep" tidbit, some people will also give you other advice to help you in your journey to being responsible for a young life.

Some of this advice, for instance, will be encouraging. When we were expecting Audrey, my boss would tell me on a weekly basis how awesome being a daddy was and how amazing it was coming home and getting stampeded by his two girls as they screamed "Daaaaadddddyyyyy!"¹¹ Some of it is a little ambiguous and slightly frightening. Many many people told me something along the lines of "Your life will forever be changed once you have that kid; there's no going back.", which sounds like it's either some weird kind of encouragement or...a veiled threat. And then, there are the people who throw any and all caution to the wind, who skip the "slightly frightening" advice, and who jump straight into the purely terrifying.

There was one guy at work who had a ~6-month-old when Stephanie and I found out she was pregnant.¹³ This child of his was not sleeping,¹⁴ which of course meant that he was not sleeping. Our first conversation on the topic of having a first child went like this:

Him: "Hey, I heard your wife is expecting."

Me: "Yea, we're excited! I'm nervous, obviously, but I can't wait to..."

Him (donning an intensely serious and slightly horrified look): "Nothing can prepare you for how little sleep you're about to get."

Me (frightened, taken aback): "...I....uh...ha...ha...?"

At this point, he continued to stare at me as I slowly backed out of the kitchen. As I was about to leave his line of site, he called out after me with a zombie-like "Good luck." Yea, that wasn't horrifying at all. To make matters worse, from that day forward, every single time he saw me - even if we were just walking by each other - he would give me that same stare for several silent seconds before asking "You ready?" Um. No? Please kill me now? You know what, I'm just gonna go back to my desk, don't worry about it. Please...please don't actually kill me.

At this point, you're probably wondering why I'm telling you all this. Until I spoke up, you were blissfully unaware, thinking that all of the advice you've been getting is stuff that is going to help you once your child joins you. But now that you know that your comfortable world is a pile of lies built to protect you from the harsh reality that is about to knock it, and the rest of your life, to pieces, allow me to reassure you.¹⁵ I, The Great Chris Sellek,¹⁶ am about to give you the advice you've been looking for. Over the next blog post or few, I will advise you. My advice will be practical. It will tell you some of what you can expect from having a new child and it won't even have to do with sleep deprivation. And it will explain the reasoning behind some of the advice you've been getting that doesn't quite make sense to someone who has never had their life forever ruin...uh...changed¹⁷ by an infant. So join me as you prepare to welcome this little half-you/half-your-significant-other into the world and I will help you be 100% ready for anything and everything that that little baby is getting ready to throw at you.<sup>18




1</sup> I have no idea what this means.

² I...uh...I don't sleep anymore.

³ I hate this phrase. None of you are dear to me, it was a lie.

⁴ Pretty sure that's how being an expert works.

⁵ This is a disembodied footnote. Seriously, nothing leads here. Hey, have you guys ever wondered why your third gimp arm is even there? No? Oh. Uh. Yea, neither have I.

⁶ No one cares about you if you've already had another kid. Sorry.<sup>7

7</sup> I am not.

⁸ Which is what things called advice generally do...

⁹ Or hinders...

¹⁰ Or at least try not to stab anyone.

¹¹ This sounds like the best thing ever and Audrey needs to hurry up and start doing this, already.<sup>12

12</sup> She is 7 months old.

¹³ I almost typed "found out we were pregnant", since that is a phrase people use for some stupid reason. We most certainly were not pregnant, thank God. If there was even a chance that I'd have to go through pregnancy, I would have chosen to remain celibate at around Audrey's age.<sup>12

14</sup> Hilarious!

¹⁵ Is....is it working?

¹⁶ You all have to call me that now.

¹⁷ It's a joke, people.

¹⁸ Chris is not legally responsible for the things your infant can and absolutely will do that he does not prepare you for.

What's That? You Say We're on Right Now?

........I don't believe you.¹

So hey everyone. Welcome to another addition of pure awesome. Are you ready for the best 10 minutes of the next two weeks? If you're a slow reader, it'll be even longer than that! Yea! This blog is so great! Cat GIFs! The Constitution! Raptors! Inordinate amounts of cash! Whoo!²

I recently made a post on Reddit that seemed to get much attention and so I figured I'd share my thoughts here as well. Why is that, in 2014, I can't get people to just give me an address to wherever it is I'm going? Once again, it is currently the year 2014. That's two, zero, one, four. I hold, in my pocket, a computer more powerful than the one that took man to the moon.⁵ Why, then, does everyone who knows my desired location insist on giving me directions? Every single freaking time:

Them: "Hey, do you need directions to our friend's house for the axe-sharpening get-together?"

Me: "No, I'm actually really bad with directions and I have a terrible memory, just give me the address."

Them: "No, it's really easy, listen!"

No. I'm not lying to you, "Them", I'm actually very very bad with directions and I have a horrible memory. I don't care how easy you think it is, just give me the address and I'll plug it into my personal supercomputer that was made exactly for situations such as this and it'll tell me how to get there.

I always end up politely ignoring them completely when this happens while they explain their ridiculous directions using just landmarks and no street names and which invariably include stupid instructions 47 steps in such as "If you get to the stadium, you've gone too far." Hey, Them, I wouldn't even get too far to begin with if my phone was actively telling me how to get there as I traveled. Amazing thing, this technology.

And if you're ever lucky enough that they actually give you the address after you tell them that directions aren't your "thing", don't get too excited. You know why? Because they're about to tell you the directions anyway. Why are they about to give you the directions even though they just gave you the address for the sole purpose of getting you to your destination without using directions? BECAUSE REASONS OKAY.

For those reading who are the aforementioned "Them",⁷ don't try to explain yourselves. There's no good reason behind this. "Oh, but the GPS will take you this weird way. It'll make you..." I'm sorry, but I'm going to stop you because your argument already doesn't make sense. I don't use a GPS to get me from point A to point B in the most efficient way possible, I use a GPS to get me from point A to point B at all because I'm directionally challenged. If I am unsure of my destination's location and I am able to get from where I currently am to there, we can mark a tally in the win column for me because I just won the game.⁹ I'd rather it take me 10 more minutes to get to where I'm going because I'm using a GPS and it sometimes doesn't think exactly like a human than get lost and end up getting shot because I ended up in Durham when I was trying to get to the beach.¹⁰

So. If I ask you for an address to get somewhere, please...just give me the address. You'll be saving both of us a whole lot of time. Also, I won't get shot because of you. And if I did get shot because of you, I would totally haunt you, which would really suck because I'd just constantly pitch you my next "totally awesome and hilarious and ingenious and comic genius"² blog post idea. More than likely while you tried to sleep. And it wouldn't even matter if you tried sleeping during the day or something to throw me off because I'd be a ghost and I'm at least 27% certain that ghosts don't sleep.¹¹

¹ Don't understand? Your fault. I've undoubtedly told you to watch Anchorman countless times on this blog already.

² I'll stop making this joke when you prove that this doesn't actually work.³

³ Don't understand? Your fault. Should have read my last post.⁴

⁴ Yea, that was a plug. For myself. And guess what else? I HAVE NO SHAME.

⁵ This is not an exaggeration.⁶

⁶ No, seriously. I know this is my blog and the word "seriously" is carelessly tossed around and brutally abused like a pterodactyl who stopped being a cool pet forever ago, but this one is actually, seriously serious (see point 2).

⁷ I have such a massive audience, there's bound to be at least one or two of you reading.⁸

⁸ Here's looking at you, Jake.

⁹ And, unfortunately for you, you've just lost it.

¹⁰ I live in Wake Forest.

¹¹ I don't...know very much about ghosts.

The picture. Because this is probably what most of you actually come here for.