On the Birth of a Son

So folks, I thank you for your patience.  It has been some time since I have posted because Eamon Charles McDonald has arrived.  He was a healthy 9 lbs on the dot, born the day after Thanksgiving at around 1:30 in the afternoon.  My family has expanded yet again. 

   This puts my average at a baby every two years and really leaves me feeling old.  We had Liam two months before I turned 21, and here I am, a month before my thirty-first birthday with five kids.  One of the things this does is give me a totally different perspective on everything from my peers.  Most of the people I went to high school with are young professionals, only just getting married, maybe having their first child.  I, on the other hand, have spent the last decade caring for small children.  While my friends were going to frat parties and cleaning up their own puke, I was cleaning up someone else's puke. While they were travelling around the world, I was changing diapers.  Which is the better path?  I don't know.  Is it better to have kids young, or live an adventure and save kids until later?  I couldn't say.  I only know that I have chosen; and though I sometimes see a post on facebook from a friend or relative in Italy or Australia, China or South America and get a little jealous, I know that for me the choice was right.  My children are my great adventure, my greatest accomplishment.

  In the end my gift to the world may not be a cure for cancer or the discovery of some previously unkown civilization, it may not be best selling books or blockbuster movies.  My gift is a generation of well-adjusted, intelligent men and women, who may very well go on to do all those things and more.