Photo by: A. Gastecheg
Now that Lauren is pregnant with our second child, I’ve been thinking a lot about my role and responsibilities throughout the course of this new pregancy, as well as what my duties should be during labor and childbirth, given what I learned the first time around.
For our first pregnancy, we were of course filled with excitement, curiosity, and anticipation. We went through everything hand-in-hand, including the early crises (originally doctors determined that Lauren would undergo an “abnormal” pregnancy and possible misscarriage), all of the subsequent …

While no sane person would advocate or recommend practicing denial in order to cope with this “crisis,” a more healthy way of dealing with the current financial situation in the country would be to avert our attention away from the car crash, keep our eyes on the road ahead of us, and focus on the things that we wish to manifest in our lives, instead of the things we don’t wish to experience.

Photo by: Marek Wojtal
Late in 2007, just as the holiday toy-shopping season was ramping into high gear, some of the biggest stories coming out of the $20 billion per year toy industry weren’t about the latest innovations or the next hot property. Instead, just about every headline about toys sold in the United States concerned wave after wave of toy recalls.
The major culprit, by and large, was excessive amounts lead paint used on toys originating from Chinese toy manufacturers. A major question emerging in the wake of these …

I was raised in a military family. My dad was a general, with two tours in Vietnam. His dad was also a general, cutting his teeth as one of the youngest battalion commanders of World War II, at the age of 26. I went to West Point. Joined the Infantry, trained as a Ranger, volunteered for the Airborne, jumped out of perfectly good airplanes for a living. All real man kind of stuff. I thought being a real man meant being tough. Being of few words. Doing dangerous things.

And then my wife got pregnant.