I didn’t realize this at first, but Brenden is the first male Box in the generation after mine. I have a few cousins with the Box name, but all of them either have no children or have girls. So at least for now, it’s up to little Brenden to continue the family name. No pressure, buddy!

Here are a couple of related pictures that I found after I put together the first gallery. One shows three generations of Boxes: my dad, me, and Brenden. The other shows Dad (now known as Grampy) and Brenden. Since Dad is our family photographer and often has a camera in hand, he doesn’t show up in many of our pictures. He actually took many of the pictures in the gallery from yesterday.

It’s been a memorable week to say the least, but it’s also given me the opportunity to reflect a bit. Here are a few things I’ve observed:

• When your wife is going in for major abdominal surgery to rescue your struggling unborn son, you don’t want the C-team doctors and nurses on the job. You want the A-team. We got the A-team at Baylor Irving with Dr. Dominique and nurses Teri and Cari, and we are so thankful for them.
• As a corollary, when I’m on the job, I want to be the A-team. That means I have to work a little harder, pay closer attention, and care more than I have to.
• Nothing makes you reevaluate your priorities like wondering whether your wife and child are going to be OK.
• My sister’s job as a labor and delivery nurse has some parallels to my own job that I hadn’t noticed before. We both have safety as our top concern in an environment that requires gathering information, analyzing it, and making educated guesses. She cares for a laboring mother with the goal of a safe delivery for mother and baby. Ideally, the delivery will go according to the mother’s wishes (or birth plan, if you will), but sometimes it doesn’t work out that way, perhaps changing the planned normal delivery into a c-section. I launch flights and hopes that my plan gets the flight to its planned destination on time, but sometimes the weather or air traffic doesn’t cooperate, forcing the flight to divert to an alternate airport and then try again later.
• Dirty diapers really are more tolerable when they belong to your own kid.
• Grandparents really, really, really like having grandchildren.
• Babies make weird noises.
• No matter which parenting philosophy you choose, you can find plenty of people who disagree with it, and you might disagree with it yourself at times.
• Sometimes babies make sense, and other times they don’t, and that’s OK.