I'm an Uncle!!!

I just got word that my niece was born to my little brother and his wife/ serious girlfriend. (Actually I’m not entirely sure of the technical legalities of their relationship, but for simplicity of style I’ll refer to her as “the wife”.)

My mother e-mailed me this:
Arrived 2/27/06, 10:44pm denver time
Wt.7 lbs., 14 oz.
Everyone is doing well, tired. Kyle says she is beautiful, thick black curly hair, Amy's mouth, Kyle's eyes!
Name: still being decided! Photos should be online soon

The photos are on-line now and can be seen here. The baby's name is apparently Haven Aria Dae Swagman.

My sister wrote about the new baby on her blog as well.


Obviously I haven’t seen the baby yet. Nor for that matter met the wife. Nor seen my brother for the past year and a half. (And the last time I saw him there was a silly argument about whether or not he had the habit of slamming the door in the morning).

That’s what happens when you live overseas I guess. People’s lives move on without you, and you loose touch with things. (I was just home during Winter break, but because of the pregnancy my brother and his wife weren’t able to travel home for the holidays, so they stayed put in Colorado.)

As Rob pointed out in his post “The Dam fertility of it All”, a lot of our friends are becoming parents. As someone who’s still single, and trying hard not to think about how old I’m getting, I’m not entirely comfortable with this. I felt like I was just getting used to the fact that all my friends are married, and now all of a sudden parenthood is starting. Nothing says adulthood like parenthood.

But it’s different when it’s your little brother. I mean hell, I remember when he was a baby himself.

He was adopted, so I don’t remember the day he was born. But I remember the day he came off the plane. I was in kindergarten, and my parents told me not to take the bus home from school because they were going to pick me up and take me directly to the airport.

I forgot and stood in line for the bus anyway. Fortunately my parents caught me before the bus arrived, but I still got a lecture about how much trouble I would have caused if I had gotten on the bus and ridden away.

There were a bunch of babies coming off the plane from Korea. They were each wrapped in different blankets, and my mother showed me which blanket my brother would come in. Me and my sister went up to the front of the aisle and watched as all the babies were carried off. My brother was the first one off the plane, and I recognized the blanket, but for whatever reason didn’t think it was really him. I don’t even remember why anymore. I guess something in the back of my mind was saying, “Nah, that can’t be right. What are the odds that he would be the first one off the plane? Besides, when you see him, something inside of you will snap and you’ll know for sure.”

After all the babies had been carried off the plane, and my sister and I were still standing there waiting, I began to suspect that the first baby really was in fact my brother. We walked back to my parents, and saw my mother was already holding the baby.

I think anyone who has younger siblings, adopted or not, can relate to this, but there is a really exciting feeling when you first see the baby. Even though you know it’s coming, there’s still a huge sense of, “Wow, this little guy is going to be part of my life forever now. And there he is right in front of me.”
And you also think to yourself, “When he becomes my age, will he be fun to play with? What will he be like when he gets older? When I’m five years older, will I want to play with him, or will I have outgrown all the stuff I do now?” All sorts of questions like that go through your head.

He alternated a lot between laughing and crying, with no apparent reason that I could discern at the time. Before we had left the airport he started crying. My sister and I made faces at him and hopped around on one leg, and then he started laughing. There was a moment when I thought that I had this baby thing all figured out, but then he got tired of our funny faces and hoping around and he would still cry. I figured what works once should logically work a second time, but for all my efforts I couldn’t make him laugh again.

I suppose, as antidotes go, all of that is probably pretty lame. But the point is I can very clearly remember him as a baby himself, and now he’s got his own little baby girl.

Which is of course how life works. By the time I’m 65, I’m sure they’ll will be lots of people who I will have seen grow from infancy to parenthood, and I’ll probably be the annoying old man in the back of church telling everyone, “I remember when you were just a baby yourself.”

But for right now this is the first time when someone whom I can so clearly remember as a baby becomes a parent himself. And so it seems appropriate to mark it here on this blog.

Link of the Day
Japanese democracy took a large step backwards with the arrest and conviction of three people for posting antiwar fliers.