You are the greatest gift, though you barely exist. You have existed in my heart for years. I have written to you and for you in my journals these past ten years. I have thought much about the life I will prepare for you.

I will not turn you into a task. You will not be my list of do's and dont's. You are mine. You come from me. I will honor your life with my fullest attention.

I will not make you an idol. I will live a balanced life, and show you how to do the same. You shall have everything that is mine. Nothing will be withheld from you.

I wait to meet you face to face with great anticipation. Your arrival will mark a miraculous moment in my life. You will teach me what I have forgotten: to see the world with eyes of wonder, fear, astonishment, and joy. You will draw from me latent wisdom and understanding.

I have not met you, but you are no stranger. Flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. You are a part of me. I am a part of you. When you suffer, I suffer. When you rejoice, I rejoice. Your suffering cannot go unnoticed by me. Your hopes and dreams are more precious than a lifetime of fame. Your success is my success.

You will live with possibilities I never knew. I will encourage your creativity, your curiosity, and your passion. You have my blessing to be exactly who God made you to be. And I will be every bit the father you need to make the journey. And should I fail, your heavenly Father will cover you and protect you with his love.

It is not long now. Soon, we will meet, face to face. Enjoy the journey, my beloved.

-- Pappa

We can't wait to have my family back in the area. We're hoping to have monthly, if not weekly, Shabbat dinners in our home with family and let our parents help us out with babysitting when the first kid comes along.

Please keep my family in your prayers. They are still looking for work.

Have a great one!

I am destined to smell good this year. Common gifts I received from family members this years were colognes and Barnes & Noble gift cards. Apparently I need to both groom and educate myself better.

We enjoyed some good eats while we were there. The main holiday dish this year was beef brisket, and it was good! We also hit up a sandwich shop called McAllisters (not sure about spelling) near UCO that makes a killer reuben sandwich. Last night we tried The Cheesecake Factory for the first time. Wow. It was awesome. I’m not a huge cheesecake fan, but the Tiramisu was slammin’.

Perhaps the best parts of the time we spent with the family were the personal and homemade gifts a few people gave. My wife made an excellent gift for my grandparents. Needless to say, I don’t think a single female in the house made it through the gift giving process without shedding at least a few tears. It was one of our best Christmases ever.

We’re getting ready right now to go visit Heather’s sister. I am beginning to love the holidays more and more.

A few couples including my grandparents (Howard and Judy Dessinger), David and Caroline Shorter, and Russ and Christy Hemati have gone a step further by writing a Christmas letter. I love the Christmas letter. A year-end summary tells me what I’ve missed, and reminds me why even great distances cannot keep me from caring.

In light of the heartwarming effect Christmas letters have on me, I am inspired to write my own. Most of our friends and family don’t spend much time on the Internet, much less reading blogs like this. In order to keep in touch with most of the people we love, emails and/or conventional letters are still more successful.

So this year, we will send out our first family Christmas letter. It’s exciting to begin traditions, especially if you can recognize them as such from the beginning. It is a husband’s privilege to feel he has contributed to the formation of traditions within his family.

I am grateful, and pleased to know that many years from now, we will have a tradition in place which will be treasured for years to come by friends, family, and our children.

We've experienced a couple mini crises over the past 24 hours. My wife lost her wedding ring last night, which is simply heartbreaking for her. I even took apart the sink pipes to check, but no luck so far. Heather's mom is praying that the ring will appear somewhere soon. I don't have the faith to really pray for that, but I'll take it if it comes. I got the crap beat out of me on the basketball court last night. My foot hit a major wet spot on the floor and slid out from under me while the rest of me decided to fall in a crumpled heap, resulting in the first splits I've performed in my entire life. I'm suddenly very grateful for the butterfly stretches I started doing a week ago. Doing the splits still hurt like hell, but I might have been temporarily disabled if not for the stretches.

We're waiting for my sister to arrive from Tulsa. She spent the day with our grandparents. They're awesome people. I miss them. It's unfortunate that they couldn't make it this year. Reason number one for convincing the family to move to DFW. Once my sis arrives, we'll dig into some tasty grub. Right now, the women are talking health and kittens. I'm going into the living room to catch the Cowboys with my dad. Happy Holidays, everyone! I have much to be thankful for.

That also has nothing to do with why I posted his photograph. Truth be told, I miss him. Both he and his wife are dear friends of ours, and we rarely see them. Now Russ is a father and Christi is a mother. They have been translated into another phase of existence. This is beautiful. It is also lonely.

It’s a loneliness that only those of you who allow yourselves to indulge in a little self absorption would likely recognize. When you can go to a wedding, a funeral, a birth, a celebration, and walk away with a sad loneliness and sense of personal loss, you have arrived at the type of feeling to which I refer.

Russ will never be a bachelor again. He will never not be a father. He is forever something else. Something much more, perhaps, yet still something “other”. It’s not that I wish he would return to his former state. I do not wish him to undo his lifelong covenant with his bride. But the past is something never to be regained, and significant events state this truth clearly to those of us paying attention. Once you pass a milestone, it becomes yet another marker in time you will never recover.

The miracle, though, is that this man is a father. Yes, it is a miracle that the baby was conceived, carried to term, and born. But I see a miracle in Russ. I see a man in the process of development, nurtured and challenged by the march of time.

Though younger than me by a year or two, he has learned some valuable lessons about living and treating one’s neighbor that I still struggle to learn. He has patented the ability to nurture a fragile person without wounding his or her ego. He knows how to listen, to ask the right type of questions, and to speak with a heart that expresses true concern for the other person’s well-being. And now he is a father.

Our beliefs are not identical. For all I know, he may think of me as a radical charismatic. We do not see eye to eye on everything, but I have high hopes for this child, and any children to follow. They have a blessed future: two loving parents devoted to truth and to the tender expression of it to those in need.

The miracle of life is that sometimes a child is born into the right family.

The outside wasn't hideous, mind you. No, it was just plain, bare, and altogether uninteresting. I had not realized how uninteresting until I noticed how many neighbors were suddenly waving as they passed by. Apparently we were doing something to our yard which they highly approved of. I took the glass half full point of view and took it as a compliment to our choice of shrubs and plants. Rainy weather couldn't stop us!

We were green machines. We stared down severe thunderstorms without flinching a muscle or twitching an eyelid. We were fearless. We were courageous. We were fierce. We were really stinkin' tired. I mean TIRED!!! Have you ever taken an axe and tried to hack thick tree roots out of your way? Luckily, I only broke one shovel and cut two fingers throughout the process. Considering the conditions and strength of our opponent, those were acceptable casualties.

Nah... It wasn't a battle. Well, it was in a way. But it was more like an adventure. I discovered Calloway's, a paradise of flowers, shrubs, trees, and vines. I wanted to buy everything - well, everything that suits my taste (i.e., not girly looking flowers or your traditional boring perennial greenery). I would have spent much more had my wife not been present and ready to smite me with a spade. Who knew that I, the guy who rarely even cares to go outside, would find a nursery to be so delightful? I will discuss some of our new plants when I have photos to post.

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