We're Having a Baby!

Well, folks, I have some big news to share with y’all.  As of this writing, my wife is five months pregnant, and if everything goes according to plan, in July our second son will be born. We are unbelievably excited and a little bit nervous. Being a father has been the most emotionally satisfying, joy-producing, and wonderful experience of my life (and I’ve been to no less than six Gathering of the Juggalos), and I can’t wait to begin the process all over again. I’m a better dad than I am anything else, and, at the risk of being immodest, I’m pretty good at writing about bad movies. 

Of course, there is no perfect time to have a baby. If we’d waited until we were financially secure before having having our first child, we never would have reproduced. I wish that I could bring my second child into a world of financial stability, but I’m not sure that exists for people in my field, at this stage in my career, but I take enormous comfort in knowing that our second child will at least be born into an emotionally stable, loving family. 

The timing just seems right. We want Declan to have a sibling and we don’t want the age gap between him and his younger brother to be too big. At 41, I already feel like Methuselah whenever I’m at the playground so I wanted to have a second child before I’m eligible for the AARP. 

We took a big gamble when we had Declan just as I took a big chance when I moved to Decatur and started my own website. Those gambles could not have paid off in a bigger way. When Declan was born three and a half years ago, I had no idea what I was doing. I was making it up as I went along, but now I feel like I know how to be a dad. Perhaps more importantly, I know how much I love being a dad and how that’s changed my world in so many ways. My wife is a wonderful mother and Declan has so much love to share that I just know he’s going to be a wonderful big brother. Right now our lives revolve around him, so it’ll be a tough adjustment having to share us with a tiny little human but I know he’s up to it.

How will this affect you, the Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place reader? Well, I’ve talked with the dude who runs the site, and he’s agreed to give me a week or two of paternity leave during which we’ll be running reruns. And since the Gathering of the Juggalos is scheduled for just a few weeks after the scheduled birth, I’ll be skipping it for the first time since 2014. My fellow Juggalos, please do enjoy yourselves in my absence. 

This website is my baby. It could not be more personal or intimate so becoming a dad for the second time is going to inform my writing here, above and beyond the writing I will be doing about Little Albert Nobbs Theodore Conor4Real Alfred Yankovic Rabin, or whatever we end up calling him. I’ll probably need to scale back a little bit on the sheer volume of work I do for the site. As a freelancer/site owner, time management is central to my existence, and it will probably be impossible to maintain the insane workload I have now with a baby perpetually competing for my attention, so hopefully in the months ahead I’ll be working smarter and more efficiently. 

I actually mentioned the impending birth of our second child at the very end of the last episode of Nathan Rabin’s Happy Cast, and I believe a single person congratulated me (thanks, Jesse!), which makes me question my co-host Clint Worthington’s repeated assertion that our podcast is, in his words, “twice as popular as Serial and infinitely more lucrative.” 

Regardless, I just wanted to let y’all to know about this blessed event and the big, exciting and a little bit scary changes it portends. It's gonna be great! 

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