I'm still trying to play catch up here and my good buddy Otter Thomas over at Life of a New Dad awarded me the Keepsake Blog Award a few weeks back.  Otter is fairly new at the whole dad experience, comparatively speaking, but he is a really great dad and a really great blog read.  I always feel so much nerdier after reading his blog, especially when he talks about all the manly stuff he does.  I usually go back to painting my toes and watching the soaps I recorded during the day while I was too busy reading Cosmo.

So, anyway, the rules of this award state, apparently, that I need to tell a "keepsake moment" in my life, as well as to pass on the love to some of my fellow bloggers.  I'm supposed to come up with ten of them, so let's see how this goes. I'm sure I can easily come up with ten, but most of the people I read are dad bloggers and I really don't think SciFi Dad will be putting this thing up on HIS blog. ;)  James over at LIAYF...hmmm, maybe, but let's just play this one by ear, shall we?

Let's go back to the day that I became a father for my story:

Intellectually I knew that I was going to be a father, of course.  It was fairly obvious the closer we got to the big day, especially since our house was getting filled up with baby clothes, baby cribs, and all the other baby accessories.  Emotionally, however, it didn't really hit me.  I went through life much like before not really understanding the huge change that was about to happen in our lives.  My wife and I took all of the different baby care classes to prepare ourselves and to learn how to actually clothe the child and change his poopy diapers.  I had never changed a diaper in MY life prior to this.  Diapers were what happened to OTHER people.  

We even bought all of the different baby books:  1,001 Baby Names, What to Expect When You Have No Clue What You Are Doing, Babies for Dummies, and This Side of the Baby UP, Stupid.  And we both faithfully read each and every book and marked the babies growth progress week to week.  We went to all of the different baby appointments and listened to the heart beat and cried (with joy!) over the different sonograms.

Still, to me anyway, it wasn't REAL yet.  Maybe it's because, as the father, the baby is not growing inside of me and I don't get to feel it moving around all of the time.  Sure, I got to feel him playing Rocky with my wife's insides on occasion, but it was still something that happens to somebody else.

That all changed one day back in August 2002 when my wife went to one of the only doctor's appointments that I missed and her baby level stuff was all out of whack.  The baby "was under stress" and they needed to induce labor a week early.  I had one of the few "oh hell" moments in my life (my wedding day was another, which shall be another post someday) and I promptly freaked out.  After a bit of pacing and trying to figure out what to do, I calmed myself down, called everybody I needed to call, got the wifes baby bag and headed off for the hospital.

We then proceeded to go through about twenty four hours of fairly brutal labor, before my wife's head nurse, "The Sargent", decided that my wife had enough and it was now time for a C-Section.  She was quickly prepped while I got dressed in my finest hospital white gown and booties and we headed off to the operating room.

They took her into the O.R. and made me wait in a very long, very lonely hallway until they called me in.  Being in that hallway, all alone, was the loneliest I have every been in my entire life.  I felt like I was in there for years of my life and this is probably where I gained most of the grey hair I have and lost the rest.

I was finally called in much to my relief and the whole procedure went lickety split.  The next thing I knew, I was holding our baby and showing him off to my wife.  On doing the c-section, the doctor had accidentally nicked Super Michael in the scalp with the scalpel, so he sent Super Michael and myself off to the intensive care unit to get a little plastic surgery.  We waited for what felt like forever, but I was put completely in charge of my brand new son while I waited.  For the first time in my life, I was solely responsible for another human being besides myself.  It was scary as hell, but I learned very quickly that I could do it.  I gained a lot of confidence during that time alone with him and the rest of the time in the hospital, I had no problem taking care of him if he needed to be cuddled or needed his diaper changed.

So, that's my keepsake moment in which I learned to be a dad and to take care of my children. It was one of the scariest days of my life, but also the day that I learned that I COULD be responsible for another human being and not break them.

And now comes the part where I award this great award to somebody else.  Although, like Otter, I feel that everybody in my blog roll deserves this, I still have to pick only a few.

First off, the mommy bloggers I really think are super cool women:

Country-Fried Mama - She was one of the first bloggers I started reading when I got back into blogging earlier this year and probably the FIRST mommy blogger I had come across.  She has really great, cute pictures of her kids all the time and has some of the funniest stories I've read.

The Kids Did WHAT?! - If I were a mommy blogger, I'd probably be Lana.  She is just a really great mom and is really very honest on her blog. 

Living It, Loving It. - And this is the OTHER Lana.  I guess I just love reading Lana blogs.  Maybe I need to talk to my shrink about this.

Life Notes - I think I started to read Maureen's blog when I did a search for bloggers in California.  At the time, I just felt like I was the only blogger in California because everybody I read was in Canada or someplace cold.  I felt guilty when people were complaining about snow while I just got back from having a swim (I'm looking at YOU Ian!).  I can't help it if it's 80 degrees F in the Winter here!

Whirlwind - Now, I live in a city.  Around people.  My kids do city things and are generally afraid of bugs.  We have Los Angeles just up the street from us.  Margaret, however, lives out in the country (at least to me) and has no problem with bugs.  Her kids probably COLLECT the things.  They EVEN have RAIN there!  Hell, our state barely has water.  He do have the Terminator as the governor, so I guess we have that.

Now the rest of these blogs are daddy blogs and I am by no means holding you guys up to having to display or take part in this whole thing.  But these are really some great blogs that I really enjoy and I just wanted to share the love.

Of course, everybody knows that my home boys SciFi Dad from Tales From the Dad Side and James at LIAYF are the first ones I think of when something like this comes up.  These two guys were some of the first blogs I read and I just felt really intimidated when I first started commenting on their blogs.  I just felt that they were both super professional and their blogs were so well done.  It was kind of like going up to a movie star and asking for their autograph.  SciFi Dad especially.  I mean that dude is EVERYWHERE and everybody knows him.  After reading them for quite some time, I really just feel both of them are really down to earth guys that I could sit around, have a beer with, and joke about each others kids. 

Which brings me to Daddy Geek Boy and Busy-Dad-E which are two of my newer reads, but still ones I try to frequent whenever the kids allow me to do something besides playing dolly and legos.

And FINALLY, yet another northern neighbor, Ian over at mare ad mare.  I think before I started reading blogs, I don't think I had ever talked to anybody from Canada.  See, I'm down here in Southern California and our closest neighbor is Mexico.  Mexico I know a lot about.  Canada?  It's cold right?  So, needless to say, I know quite a bit more about Canada know.  Namely that's it's REALLY, REALLY cold.

So there you have it, an award, my heartwarming story, and my favorite blog reads.  By the clock I see that I've taken WAY too much of your time and I still have a lot of DVRing to catch up on! :)