Howefitz Blog

“Noooooooo.” the father quickly replied.

“It won’t be long.” I said. “Leap Frog makes a baby blackberry.” (They do. Check it out!)

Monday, we went for an ultrasound at 24 weeks. As long as everything goes well, this will be the last pictures we see of the little tyke until he is born. It got me to thinking about all the preparation that occurs when one is having a baby.

The latest image of the latest Howelett. Isn't he cuuuute?

The sisters relate to each other...

As a Daddy Blogger, I find myself in a unique situation: I have a 15 year old step-daughter and a two year old daughter. I feel that this gives me a different perspective. I came into Kat’s life when she was four years old, so I missed the diapers and the slow development of her language skills. I’ve watched her grow up and marveled at her dreams and the decisions that she’s made. Even though I’ve had those eleven years of being a Daddy, with Calli it feels like I’m a brand new Daddy. Now I get the diapers and laugh at the way she reasons out words. Bunnies are ‘hoppies’ for instance. Doggies are ‘goggies’. With a new baby boy on the way in August, that’ll be a whole new world, as now I’m so used to girls, what do I do?

I am at work as I write this, and I am not wearing green.

Over the years it seems that I’ve become a bit of a St. Patrick Humbug. It’s not that I particularly have anything against the Irish people, or the celebration of St. Patrick. It’s just that St. Patrick’s Day serves to remind me of our current state of affairs as a nation and world.

Let me explain by trudging up my St. Patrick’s Day post from MySpace last year:

The other day I was reading a blog post over at johnchow.com entitled, ‘You Are Already Rich‘. It got me to counting my blessings and really thinking about the good in my life.

In posts such as last Friday’s ‘Fatherhood Friday‘ post that I called ‘…And They All Lived Happily Ever After…‘, I’ve talked of my family and all the blessings that they bring to my life.

Then I thought of other blessings:

As a father, I worry a great deal about the sheer volume of waste that my family and I produce. We dilligently sort the recyclables from the normal trash. Luckily for us, the recycling bin at the apartment is comingled, so we don’t have to separate the glass from the paper, etc.

But what do you do when it can’t be recycled?

Today I was happy to find the blog ‘Riding With No Hands‘, a review site of, well, near as I can tell, everything!

Kat, age 1 1/2

As I begin to write this, it’s just after 4 am in the Rocky Mountains. My beautiful wife and two children are still asleep. I’m awake on purpose. I set my alarm for this time. This is my favorite blogging hour. Some days, I miss this hour. I hit the snooze alarm a few too many times, or I do get up and get sidetracked by checking email, my twitter followers, Facebook, and MySpace. But today is special. According to Dad Blogs, today is fatherhood Friday.

As a Daddy Blogger, I’ve gotten frustrated lately that it’s fairly hard to find fellow Daddy Bloggers. Every few months or so I Google ‘Daddy Blogs‘ for something interesting. Today I hit the mother, er, fatherload:

I found dad-blogs.com.

Dad-blogs.com is an online community designed for and by bloggers who happen to be fathers. I really enjoy this site and am proud to be a member of it. I can really see the potential for dad-blogs to become THE central hub for daddy bloggers online. In just a couple of months, they’ve already attracted the likes of Wayne Parker, daddy blogger from about.com, so you know they’re gaining clout!

Calli and I at her first war protest in 2007. This was in Columbia, MO. We lived not too far away in Jamestown, MO at the time. We were mentioned in an article about the rally in the Columbia Missourian. Calli was only 7 months old.

I woke up this morning to blog, and for the life of me, I didn’t know what I’d blog about. So, I turned, as I often do, to one of my favorite blogs, dadomatic.com. The front page entry hit me square between the eyes. In a post called ‘Don’t be afraid of Change’, Jeff Turner talks about his ‘adventure days’, where he packs the family into his truck and just drives! He starts by telling of car-pooling the other day with a handful of kids:

My 15 year old step-daughter plopped down next to me last night and said, “Ya know what would be sick?”

Unsuccessfully suppressing a shudder, I asked, “No, what would be ‘sick’?”

“If you put a gallery of my artwork on your site!”

Not one to refuse anything to my kiddos, I agreed. So for the first in what I hope will become a long series, today’s work from Katrina are a couple of designs she proposed for a logo for her school. The school is called Red Canyon High School, and their mascot is a dragon. It is an Expeditionary Learning School, sort of an experimental idea that I’m sure I’ll explore in more length in the future.