August 7, 2011 at 12:15 pm , by Nick Shell

Eight months.

In April 2007 after dating two months and having already gone to meet my parents, I flew to Sacramento to meet my wife’s family- all of them. That meant not only her parents, but also her two sisters and most of her seven brothers along with all their kids.

I was the new boyfriend.  There was no guarantee that any of the family members would ever see me again.  I could have simply been a single-serving special friend that ultimately disappeared from most peoples’ memories.  At best, I could have been, “Hey Jill, whatever happen to that guy from Alabama with dark hair?”

Instead of becoming a blurry memory, I proposed the following January and we were married seven months later.

Over the past four years, I have really grown closer to my wife’s family.  But during my most recent visit, there was a new closeness I felt to them all because now that my wife and I have our son, it has never been more official that I am grafted into the family tree; though our family branch is labeled “Shell” instead of “Tuttle.”  Though I obviously am not kin to them by blood, I am part of their family and have helped it grow.

The gathering place for all my wife’s family in Sacramento is her mom’s house.  Today I took a few pictures of some of the signs hanging on the walls there.  I have written before about how people show what they value through the art they create.  In my mother-in-law’s case, the decorations she hangs on the walls help serve as art.

My favorite sign at the house reads “These are the days we will remember forever.”  That motto is so much more clever than it may appear to be.  With me being such a desperately nostalgic guy, constantly yearning for the best of my life’s warmest memories, that sign reminds me that when I go out to California with my wife, and now my son, that I don’t have to wish for a moment in the past.  Instead, I get to enjoy warm fuzzy memories as they occur in real time.

Even though I do my darndest to capture all these stories and conversations with my wife’s side of the family, who I typically only see once a year, it must be my obsession with nostalgia that causes me to be one of the official photographers of the family.  Because even though these are the days we will remember forever, my memory is only so good.  Digital cameras definitely help.

July 26, 2011 at 9:04 pm , by Nick Shell

Eight months.

From everything I had heard about a new mom and dad’s first night away from their baby, we were supposed to be constantly distracted, wondering if our son was okay.  That every hour we would call in, checking on him.  That the quality of our time together would be compromised by the thought of something going wrong back home, feeling helpless as Jack’s parents that we couldn’t provide the best care because we weren’t physically there.

And maybe that would have been the case.  But we were blessed in that from December 2010 up until about ten days ago, we lived near family. That’s why our version of our first night away from our son was nothing like the preconceived ideas explored in the first paragraph.

As mentioned in my bio (featured right), my wife and I are “bed and breakfast people.” A lot of the time, our gifts for each other are a trip a few hours away to a typically unheard of place where there is a B&B that received good reviews online. This was the case for my 30th birthday on April 20th, 2011.  Since our son Jack was born five months earlier on November 16, 2010, we had not yet spent a night away from him.

While in Alabama for those eight months, we had lived only a few miles not only my parents but also from my sister and her husband.  My parents were more than eager to keep Jack for the night, and of course my sister and her husband were there hanging out and helping most of the time too.  Meanwhile, my wife and I were three hours away in a town called Dahlonega, Georgia. (Pictured below.)

We enjoyed the laid-back environment of the B&B, the exploration of a new town, and the adventures of visiting a new winery as well asCabbage Patch Kids “Babyland.“ I am not ashamed to say that we never called to check in on our son. Because in the care of my family, we never had any doubts. It was some much needed rest for us both.  In particular, for my wife, it was literally the first night she had in many months to actually be able to sleep through the entire night.  (Our son was not yet sleeping through the night at that point.)

You can’t put a price tag on living near family.  However, you can put a price tag on the cost of living versus the amount of income lost by moving to a small town where there just aren’t as many appropriate jobs to go around.

In addition to the invaluable life lessons we learned, another priceless benefit is that we were able to share Jack with my family during this whole time.  I try to imagine how different that not only the stories but also the pictures would be in my Dadabase posts if we had never moved away from Nashville.

The content of the past eight months would be completely different.  Instead, the stories have been forever documented and told with my parents, sister, and brother-in-law in the midst of it all.  Even though we won’t be able to watch Jack grow up in the same town as my family as we had planned, we will always have these stories and pictures to remember.  Not to mention, we only moved two and half hours away.  While that may be too far for a visit during the week, it’s not a bad drive for a weekend trip.

I know things won’t be able to be the same as they used to, regarding how close we’ve lived to my family.  But I have a feeling things won’t be that different, either.  Because you can’t put a price tag on family- no matter how close or far away you live from them.

Above picture: My sister and her husband holding their daughter and my son.

Top picture: My parents holding both of their grandchildren.