Yesterday was my son Andy’s 5th birthday!  This was an event that leaves me with some fairly paradoxical feelings.  I can’t believe that it has already been 5 years since he was born as the time does seem to fly quickly.  On the other hand, he has become such an integrated and vital part of our family that the time before he was there now feels a lot like a part of a different life.

Becoming a parent is unquestionably the best thing that I have ever done, with only the decision to marry my wonderful wife even coming close.  I’m well aware that I run the risk of becoming potentially intolerably sappy and sentimental in this post, but I simply don’t know how to accurately express my feelings towards my family without sounding that way.  For any readers of this blog that are turned off by an excess of sentiment, I’ll try to post a review of the new James Bond movie in the next day or two.

After 5 years, a bit of reflection pretty much comes automatically.  One thing that I’ve often heard repeated, both before and after becoming a father, is that parenthood involves a lot of sacrifice.  While I definitely understand the meaning behind such statements, I’m not so inclined to agree that “sacrifice” is really the right word.  Unquestionably, there are a lot of things that my wife and I did before Andy’s arrival that are much less common, if they still occur at all.  Reductions range from such small-scale activities as TV and movie viewing or nights out with friends, all the way up to substantial changes in vacation planning, major purchases and pretty much every other major life decision.

I tend to look at these as trade-offs rather than sacrifices, though, as the pleasures and benefits of being a father push way into the background any significant thoughts about what I might be missing.  While such activities as visiting a theme park or going to the movies have become more complicated (and in some ways restrictive), and often more tiring, I also find them to be rewarding in a whole new way.  Andy is mostly in a constant state of discovery and I find it tremendously rewarding to share with him many of the things that have brought a lot of joy to my own life.

The day to day routine is also full of moments that I treasure.  I absolutely love hearing Andy tell me about his day when I get home from work.  When I ask him about what he did at school, his answer always starts excitedly with "I played!", but it doesn’t usually take too much effort to coax longer and more detailed stories out of him.  His stories can be rather hard to follow and don’t always make a lot of sense, but they are told with a compellingly breathless enthusiasm that is usually a delight.

Andy has a tremendous imagination, so his stories of the days activities are often filled with rather colorful stories about pretending games involving such favorite things as cars, airplanes, fire trucks, and hotels.  Like many kids his age, he has an imaginary friend, but in his case that friend is an airplane who goes on all kinds of interesting adventures, although a lot of them seem to be more focused on the hotels where it stays rather than on the actual exotic (or not so exotic) destinations. 

Another favorite pretending game of Andy’s is bringing people imaginary food items.  During phone calls with his grandparents (via speakerphone), he likes to occasionally run off and then come back and announce that he is delivering some food item to them.  They get a big kick out of that.  He was similarly providing imaginary appetizers to our friends while we were waiting at a restaurant for our table during a dinner party a few weeks ago.  After finishing his cake at his birthday party last night, he also had to go around and serve other pretend food to many of the party-goers.

As I just mentioned, we did have a big birthday party yesterday afternoon.  We have been taking Andy to a class at the local Gymboree facility for a couple years.  For his party yesterday, we rented the facility for a couple hours and had a party for Andy and 19 other kids from his pre-school and Gymboree classes.  We were fortunate enough to be able to arrange for his usual Gymboree teacher to host and run the event, which ended up being a huge success.  The teacher did an outstanding job of providing a pretty much perfect mix of organized activities and free play time and really kept the kids all highly entertained for two hours.  It was a lot of fun and an event that I think will be pretty memorable both for Andy and for us.

Yesterday’s party brings me full circle back to the trade-offs that come from being a parent, but my hesitance to call them sacrifices.  Yesterday, many of our long time friends (most are not parents) spent what sounds like an exceptionally fun day at Disneyland.  I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading the various reports from and about their day.  Six years ago, I’m pretty sure my wife and I would have been there as well and it sounds like we would have had a great time.  Andy’s birthday party is absolutely where I wanted to be yesterday, though. 

This week marks the 12th anniversary since I moved from Columbus, Ohio to Southern California.  Those 12 years have resulted in so many major changes in almost every aspect of my life that looking back at that move almost feels like I’m looking back at a different lifetime.

My father (who has now retired to Florida) was a social worker and typically worked in non-profit or government agencies that didn’t always have a lot of long-term stability.  As a result, we moved around a lot.  Prior to my move to California, I lived for various lengths of time in Illinois, Iowa, Florida, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio.  As long as I can remember, though, I always had a dream of eventually settling in the Los Angeles area once I grew up and was on my own.  I never really liked the cold mid-western winters (I don’t care for snow) and the stories of the very mild Southern California weather along with my affinity for the entertainment industry combined to form a very appealing destination.

After finishing college in Milwaukee, I actually sent a lot of resumes and applications out to various California-based companies, but without any success.  I ended up spending that summer with my parents back in Ohio and then found a job with Columbus-based CompuServe, the online information service pioneer.  Although I spent the next 4 1/2 years living and working in Columbus, I never really lost the interest in a life in California and I even privately set a 5-year goal for eventually figuring out how to make that change.

In 1995, my sister and I started having conversations about vacationing together in Los Angeles.  She lived in Orlando (actually still does), so our idea was for each of us to fly out there separately, but split the cost of hotel accommodations, rental car, and other expenses.  We ended up actually making the trip in September of that year.  Other than a family trip when I was too young to remember, this was my first actual visit to the Los Angeles area.  During those 10-days, we visited many common tourist destinations (Hollywood, Disneyland, Universal Studios, Magic  Mountain, Santa Monica Pier, Griffith Park, Century City, Beverly Hills, etc.) and, thanks to a friend that I knew from the old GEnie information service, we even were able to visit the Paramount studio lot and the non-public part of the Universal lot.  As a special splurge, we even ate dinner at Wolfgang Puck’s famous Spago restaurant one night.

My reaction to this vacation was that my expectations for the area were pretty much met.  What had been a personal dream based largely on stories and reputation was now much more rooted in reality.  I returned to Columbus determined to start a very concentrated job search with a goal of getting moved as soon as possible.  Of course, it didn’t hurt that I was starting to see the future at CompuServe as somewhat limited with the rise of AOL to industry leader and the growing influence of the World Wide Web.  I was increasingly aware that my career would benefit from a change of employer, regardless of whether I moved or not.

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