One thing that I often struggle with when writing this column is how personal I want to get with all of you. Over the past few years that I have been writing this thing, I have shared my engagement and wedding with you. I've shared the pregnancy and birth of my son, and a million other things in between.
The reason, I feel, that I share so much of my life with readers whom I have never met and would not know if I saw them, is that to truly connect with the readers, I have to be real with you.
I try, sometimes in vain, to be funny and to skew my stories to entertain, but throughout all of it I try to be honest and real.
However, the past few months I have devoted to writing columns about the male species and how we interact with the world around us.
But this week I want to step away from that and get back to being open and honest about my life.
In late December, my wife and I found out that we would be welcoming a second child to our family and in recent weeks we discovered that it was going to be another little boy.
He will not be arriving until August, but now that we've learned that my son will be having a brother to kick around has sent us back to the pre-baby moments of trying to make sure that we and everything is ready for his arrival.
I can remember very well the panic and uncertainty that I felt as we awaited the birth of my first son. I had no idea what to expect and, looking back, that is probably the best thing.
Now that I know what's coming, I'm a little freaked out.
The midnight feedings, the meticulous cleaning and preparing of bottles, the monosyllabic communication and the clothing that is riddled with snap buttons that seem to go on forever.
I cannot say enough about how easy my first son has been. He started sleeping through the night after only a couple months and the past two years have flown by, but what now?
There is an incredible anxiety in waiting these nine months, and please don't take the word anxiety to mean worry and panic. I mean anxiety as in anxiousness to see and experience this little person that you have to wait three-fourths of a year to meet.
I laugh at times because I truly believe that the nine months that a woman is pregnant is not so much for the benefit of the growing child, but for the benefit of the unprepared and panicky parents.
I swear I just took down that crib and relegated most of the baby items (i.e. swing, bouncer and other objects designed to keep the baby active and in one place) to the basement and now I have to get it all back upstairs again.
Plus, I have no desire to get into the Rubbermaid bins that are stacked three deep and four or five high full of clothes that I did not sort because, as I told my wife, ''I can get that all figured out later!''
There is a type of starting over that we are going to have to do when this little guy arrives, but there is nothing in my life that I've ever done that has been as terrifying and wonderful an experience as raising my first son.
Most of the time you will hear a parent talking about how they had to wake up a bunch of times throughout the night to do feedings, burpings and general baby bouncing, but those times are times that I really cherish ... at times.
Sure, there were a few late / early hours that were not a lot of fun, but then there were those when he and I would sit on the old rocking chair my father used to rock me in as a baby, and in the dark realizing that this little person, this baby boy was why I am here.
I also know that I won't encourage this next child to talk and walk as soon as my son who was talking and motoring around the house at nine months, because once they figure those two things out, that is all they do for the rest of their lives.
Honestly, my son hasn't stopped moving or talking, except while he's sleeping, in more than a year.
But it is the best job I've ever had, and getting to experience it all over again is so exciting, plus, as this one grows out of those clothes in the basement, they get packed up and sent away. Ahhh, to have storage space ... what I could do.