Every dad I talked to prior to my son being born told me it would happen and it just didn’t register because I had heard it so many times.

“As soon as you see your child for the first time your entire outlook on life changes completely”, they told me.

Many guys I’ve talked to can’t remember their emotions at that exact moment but luckily for me my mother-in-law caught it on camera the first time I saw my son.

Yep, thats my face at the exact moment I first saw my son. In that face you can see excitement, fear, shock, awe, sleep deprivation, and unconditional love. If you look at it longer I’m sure you can find more emotions but from a one second glance those are the ones I was able to come up with. The exact time this photo was taken was 6:52 pm on July 8th. My wife and I had been up since 3 am that morning when she first began feeling contractions. I did the thing all the books said to do and started writing down the times of the contractions and how long they lasted using the stopwatch on my iPhone (contraction timing – there’s an app for that).

I put “sleep deprivation” in the description of the picture above only because at the time that photo was taken I thought I was “sleep deprived” and thought  I really knew what those words meant. I didn’t. The truth is that the night (early morning) that my wife went into labor I had gone to bed at 10 pm. So I had slept a good five hours straight before she woke me up to tell me about her contractions. Not to scare any future dads expecting their first child anytime soon out there but I have not slept more than three hours in one stretch in the three weeks since my son was born. In fact, the nights we spent in the hospital were the worst as nurses and doctors came in constantly to check my on my wife and baby by taking their vital signs, blood pressure, etc… The longest stretch of sleep in the hospital uninterrupted may have been 90 minutes.

I hadn’t slept much in the days leading up to his birth either. The week before our son was born we had a terrible storm in Memphis and I woke up one morning to the damage in the pictures you see below:

It was the middle of summer in the south with temperatures near 100 degrees and my pregnant wife (who was already sweating when I had the AC on 65 degrees in the house) was going to have to deal with no power and AC for who knows how long. If my wife went into labor we would’t even be able to bring our son home to his nursery that we had worked so hard on. The insurance claims department wasn’t much help and it would eventually take the adjuster 3 weeks to view the damage (after we were home with my son). Luckily we had a great contractor who was able to get the majority of the work finished in just a few days after getting approval from our local agency. However, I will always be able to tell my son that I met our homeowner’s insurance deductible and our health insurance deductible within the same seven day period in July 2015.

I learned pretty quickly that there is no fairy tale wand that makes all the world perfect when you become a parent. The problems you had before the baby will still be there after the baby comes….you’ll just care about those other problems (including lack of sleep) a whole lot less….

That moment I became a dad changed everything just like every other dad had always told me. I just didn’t grasp it until that moment and until you’re a dad for the first time…you won’t either.

I think my favorite part of that day besides seeing my son for the first time was seeing both of my parents get to see my son for the first time. They both drove separately from Georgia after I called early that morning to say that the hospital had decided to keep  us and that “this is it”. My mom got to the hospital a few hours before our son was born and my dad got there a few hours after. As I watched them look my son I realized that the torch had been passed.

My identity was no longer kid, sales rep, athlete, journalist, Ole Miss Grad (Hotty Toddy!) or anything I had been referred to in the past. I was now  “husband and dad” and I realized that raising the baby that came screaming into this world a few hours earlier would be my greatest legacy when I looked back on my life 50 years from now.  I also realized that he would totally consume my life from here on out (hence this blog).