Nashville

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Flying from Nashville to Sacramento with a Baby

August 2, 2011 at 12:15 am , by 

Eight months.

Here’s to the land of In-N-Out Burger and Jamba Juice!

This evening, the three of us will be boarding a plane to Sacramento, California. My wife, who is from there and is one of ten kids, obviously has a lot of family out there and this will be the first time that they will be meeting Jack.  When it comes to this trip, I have preconceived ideas about what will happen.

On my list of pro’s, there’s the fact that once we get there, we will be having a very relaxing, enjoyable time hanging out with the family.  In addition to seeing everyone, I look forward to running each day amidst the palm trees during the perfectly cool, Sacramento mornings.

I will not be bringing my laptop, therefore I am taking a break from The Dadabase for a few days. Basically, I am unplugging from the real world. Granted, I’ll be taking my camera, along with a notebook, to bookmark the stories involving Jack that will ultimately become Dadabase posts.

The downside to all this is that we have to get there and come back, on a plane, with an eight month old little boy.  I just can’t convince myself that I will find that process to be less than slightly unnerving.

I am remembering myself from ten years ago as a 20 year old guy who got so annoyed by having to sit near a crying baby on a plane.  Now, I will be the parent of that baby; for six hours there and six hours back.

One good thing about the flights is Jack has entered his phase of being obsessed with his mommy.  If she’s in the room and not holding him, he’s upset, for the most part.  At least he will get plenty of “mommy minutes.”

It’s stressful to think that after spending so much effort to get him on a mostly predictable sleeping schedule, that he will be spending nearly a week in a time zone that is two hours behind what he is used to.  Will that mean he’s ready for sleep an hour before dinner and that he will wake up full of energy at 4 AM?  I already know the answer.

You take the good with the bad and call it life:  Sacramento will be splendid as it always is, but flying to the other coast with an infant will be rough.  It’s the sweet and the sour; I accept it as my reality.

It will most likely be nearly a week before I publish a new post. Please don’t think that I have abandoned this blog.  Instead, I cordially invite you to catch up on my 130+ other posts here in the meantime; as well as Parents.com’s other bloggers.

To find my older stuff you may have missed, just look to the right of the screen where it says “archives.”  They go all the way back to April 2010 when I began daddy blogging; my wife was just a couple of months pregnant back then.

Wish me luck and sanity for the flight.  I will surely need it.  Seriously, I am so craving an In-N-Out burger all of the sudden.

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I Was Supposed to Be in Nashville Tonight, But…

July 16, 2011 at 10:57 pm , by 

Eight months.

Ask me if I’ve had a stressful day.

“Nick Shell, have you had a stressful day today?”

YES.

Today was the big move back to Nashville. However, I type this post from a shady motel in a nameless town halfway between my hometown and Nashville. Though at least my wife and son should nearly be to Nashville by now.  Actually, they were both here with me for a few hours but then we came up with this plan to have my wife drive my car to Nashville and for me to stay here with her broken down car until the morning, when my dad and brother-in-law will drive up from my hometown with a spare car for me to get to Nashville and something to tow my wife’s car back to my hometown so they can hopefully get it fixed.

I just didn’t feel good about my wife and son staying in a motel with me where there very possibly could be a drug dealer staying in the room next to me.

That’s right, of all days, my wife’s car decided to die today.  At least we made it to a motel in time.  Thank God we didn’t get stranded on the side of the road! Because both of our cars were loaded to the ceiling with our belongings, so that would have been a nightmare trying to get our son and his car seat into my car when there were literally no free square feet.

Other things we are thankful for, regarding this event are that A) we weren’t in a car accident, B) this didn’t happen on Sunday afternoon when it would have been much more of a struggle to make it to work on Monday when we start our jobs back, C) my dad and brother-in-law are driving here to help so that we didn’t have to pay a tow truck, D) I’m remembering to save my receipts from this “business trip,” and E) even if this motel is so musty that I refuse to let my bare feet touch the carpet, at least they have free WiFi so I can document this story while I’m stillvery much in the story.

So as we move back to Nashville with the spare change we have left in our savings, now we had to put $68.54 on our credit card for this motel room. And we’re followers of Dave Ramsey, who teaches that it is a cardinal sin to use a credit card.  Therefore, this is painful.

I’m totally rethinking my current life motto, which was the name of the previous post: “Nothing to Lose; Everything to Gain Back.”  Maybe I should take out the “nothing to lose” part.  Granted, I’m aware that at any moment anything I have can be taken away, but when I said “nothing to lose” I meant it in the sense that we had been humbled.  But okay, maybe my new life motto needs to be something like this:

“Please, God, let me keep what I still have, please let us get back on our feet financially now that we know what we are doing, please let my wife’s car get healed without costing us too much more, and let us gain back everything and more that we gave up in the move to be close to family plus the cost of starting back over because financially we couldn’t make it work back in my hometown. We will work very hard, I promise.  Sorry we spent all that money on Starbucks over the past four years. But seriously, we are so much better now at financially planning our lives. So, God, please?”

That motto seems kind of wordy to me.  But I can’t think of anything more true and relevant.

I will close with two requests.

The first is that you, the reader, will leave me a comment letting me know about inevitable typos in this post.  My wife always does my editing for me, but in this case, that’s not an option. (I’m okay with sentence fragments, though; they’re part of my style.) Typically, there are at least five typos.  Can you find them? I will be so grateful for your help.

The second request is to any clever car companies out there.  Let’s make a deal. You see, it has pretty much become an annual event that my wife’s car breaks down and costs us at least $1,000. In fact, this is actually the second time we’ve been stranded at a motel in the middle of nowhere because her car broke down. So just think about this:

Clever car companies, any of you, if you were to want some major free publicity on this widely read daddy blog on Parents.com, you would definitely get it if you gave my wife a new car. You know, like one of those baby-friendly cars that gets really good gas milage and is good for the environment… the whole “go green” thing that everybody’s always talking about. We’re those kind of people.

Imagine all the pictures of the car that would show up on this daily blog of mine, all the hyperlinks to your company, the way your brand would be represented by an All-American everyday dad, his beautiful wife, and their awesome little son… they way your brand would become the heroic answer in a viral sensation. I mean, that’s just product placement at its finest, if you ask me.

So… any takers?

This is where tonight’s Dadabase post written.

 

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The Bittersweet Move Back to Nashville: July 16th

July 11, 2011 at 10:38 pm , by 

Seven months.

Yes, you did read that right.  No, this isn’t a rerun from March.  This coming Saturday on July 16th as Jack turns eight months old, we return to Music City for keeps.

Imagine you’re me.  You were raised in the Eighties and were taught that money isn’t everything but that being happy is.  You were constantly told that if you really believe, you can achieve your dreams.  So at age 29, you decide to choose happiness over money and move your wife and 3 week old son back to your hometown to be close to family.  You willingly choose less money and less busyness with the purest intentions.

Enter four months of unemployment, then living from savings despite eventually getting a job.  Then after eight months since moving, you come to the realization that it is not a choice to move your family back to Nashville, but simply the only option.

It’s ironic how it took me four months to find a job and how my wife was sent countless rejection letters for all the places she applied, never landing a job that would keep us from dipping into savings every month; yet in a matter of just a few days and few emails, both my wife and I have jobs lined up in Nashville where we will begin Monday, July 18th.

Our former employers are taking us back.  It’s that simple.  Granted, this means we have to put Jack in daycare.  We will barely see him on weekdays because by the time I drive him home from daycare, he will only be awake for an hour before it’s his bedtime.

So, how do I feel about this?  Bittersweet.

We came here truly believing that we would be spending the rest of our lives here; thinking it would be the last time we would have to unpack our things. And when it seemed our expectations were being threatened, we only tried that much harder to make this work.  But our resistance was futile.

As I have mentioned before, a married man can never stop thinking about his need to provide for his family. So imagine what kind of psychological toil this constant wondering has taken on my own sanity.  For the fact we will be able to pay our bills without dipping into what’s left of our savings; well, that’s more relieving than I can say.  But yes, we will have to move away from my family and they won’t see Jack as much as they used to.

He and his cousin were going to be attending the same school and be in the same grade.  Not now, though.  It’s only a 2 and a half hour drive, but still, things will be somewhat different.

By this point, I am nearly emotionless when it comes having to repack our lives again.  Because again, it’s not a choice to be made; it’s the only option.

So I am accepting my fate.  I was not meant to live in my hometown with my family.  Instead, I was meant to live and work in Nashville, one of my favorite cities in the world.

I am choosing to move forward and be positive about it.  There have been a lot of things we’ve missed tremendously about Nashville: Our church, our friends, our quirky restaurants, proximity to Country music stars, and surprisingly more than you would think, shopping for groceries at Publix, where shopping is a pleasure.

As much as I enjoyed growing up in my hometown and the great memories I always have, it has ultimately proven to be the wrong fit for the 2011 version of me, which includes my wife and son.  And that’s not my hometown’s fault.  It’s just that Nashville is simply where we belong.

My wife and I met there.  My wife was baptized there.  We got married there.  Our son was born there.  Heck, even this blog was born there.

One of our mutually favorite movies is Away We Go, starring John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph.  As they prepare for the birth of their first child, they travel to several cities to figure out where their new home as a family is.  It’s obviously very relatable for my wife and me.

After sticking it out this long, we were obviously more than willing to make this thing work in my hometown.  But now it’s time to return to where our home, as a family, is.

Need another pop culture reference?  This reminds me of the best TV show ever made (and that ever will be made), Lost.  Those who crashed on the island were “chosen” by the island for a purpose.  Even when six of them eventually found a way to leave and go back to their homes, they ultimately had to return because the island still needed them there.

For us, Nashville is the island.  We just need to watch out for those darn polar bears.

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dad from day one: Will We Be Moving Jack Back to Nashville? (Part 2)

Week 18 (4 months).

“So take your lessons hard… and when your car crash comes don‘t be misled.”
Convince yourself that everything is alright, ’cause it already is.” – “For Nancy” by Pete Yorn

In last week’s cliffhanger episode, I closed by saying that I was counting on a miracle in order to remain in Alabama, knowing that our savings we had been living off of since December 4th would be running out in the next few weeks and that every door and window had closed for us  regarding a long term job.  And more importantly, I needed a job with good insurance, since there are 3 of us now.  I avoid drama at all costs, but in order to be true to the reality of “dad from day one”, I couldn’t play down the real life happenings of coming to terms with the fact that our leap of faith may end with us moving back to Nashville, despite all our efforts to move to Alabama.

That was last Wednesday. It literally felt like my world was collapsing in on me, which I realize is no comparison to the literal collapsing that occurred in Japan last week, but still, it was the most intense thing I have ever lived through.  Maybe a better comparison is that it was like being in a car wreck, where I was in the driver’s seat, running the car through a guard rail, causing my family to be flipped upside down a few times as the car rolled over, not knowing if we were looking up or down.

It helped me to literally understand the phrase, “hell of a week”.  I never so literally felt such a heavy, demonic presence around me.  Not like dark storm clouds and a violent storm; more like a silent, heavy overcast.  It was so subtle, yet terrifying.  I truly felt that my family was caught between two spiritual worlds- with one army that wanted us here and one army that wanted us gone. With that being said, there must be some serious unseen reason why my family should or shouldn’t be living here in Alabama.

But as I had always expected, the scarier that things got in my real life during this move, it would only make it that much more obvious when God miraculously provided for us. In order for this real life story to be more legit, it had to be obvious that it was no coincidence if things worked out in the end.  I, the protagonist, had to be that desperate and completely dependent for God’s intervention.  And I couldn’t just paint God as a genie who grants wishes.  Also, like Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son Isaac, I had to be willing to give it all up.  I had to become humbled more than I ever have before.

As I put it last week, “Perhaps there’s a thin line between bravery and foolishness. The way I see it, that thin line in my case is actually having a steady job.”  I could also compare it to that “bankrupt/million/bankrupt” wedge on Wheel of Fortune.

That was last Wednesday.  Less than 24 hours later, in what felt like a loopy dream, I found myself in a job interview at the place I truly had my heart set on when I moved here.  (Interestingly, this is not the position I referred to last week; this is something completely different.)  It’s a Marketing position for one of the world’s largest playground equipment companies.  I know it’s the perfect fit for me.  Today I took my drug test, so unless there was something extra in the brownies last night, I start this coming Monday (March 28th).

But… the good news isn’t over yet.  God is more creative than that for this story.

Something else happened in the past week that is pretty dang awesome. Something that I didn’t initiate.  Instead, out of nowhere, I was approached. It’s bigger than just simply having one of my articles or “dad from day one” entries being published in a magazine.  I don’t think it would be wise to give away all the details at this point, but just know that it involves me signing a contract, it will take “dad from day one” to a whole new level and audience, it means I will be teaming up with a major publishing company (in a regular paying gig), and it should officially begin within the next month or two…

So, that is what has happened since “Part 1”.  What a week.  Granted, I realize now more than ever, there is no where telling where anyone may end up for the duration of their lives.  I honestly never would have believed that I would ever have moved back to Alabama, or more importantly, that I would ever want to. But as far as my own plans, I want roots again.  I want solid ground.  I want anchorage.  I don’t want to even think about moving again.

Admittedly, I wouldn’t be surprised if all this dramatic struggle is a necessary part of the story of “dad from day one”.  With rare exceptions like the movie Napoleon Dynamite, a strong plot is vital to build a solid story line- not to mention, it’s absolutely necessary for character development.

So, will we be moving Jack back to Nashville?  With an exciting and fulfilling job starting Monday here in Fort Payne, a big secret “dad from day one” reveal coming up in the next month or so, and a juicy income tax return coming our way soon, I suppose it’s as safe as possible to say that we can keep our anchor down in Alabama.

It’s the ultimate irony that we moved to Alabama to settle down, yet it has been such an unsettling experience until now. And it’s pretty interesting, too, how these doors opened the very week that the winter season ended and the spring season began.  Man, the symbolism.  The dead of winter surrenders to the resurrected life of spring.

Please, God, let this good ending and new beginning be real.

“You got to go through hell before you get to heaven… ‘Cause it’s here that I’ve got to stay.” – “Jet Airliner” by The Steve Miller Band

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dad from day one: Will We Be Moving Jack Back to Nashville? (Part 1)

Week 17 (4 months).

*While this entry is actually the 5th chapter of my series entitled “God-Nudged Leap of Faith”, it is just as relevant to “dad from day one” as well. Therefore, I consider it a cross-over episode.

A few weeks from now, on April 4th, it will be four months since my wife and I took our God-nudged leap of faith.  We carefully planned and prayed over our decision to leave our secured careers behind in Nashville to live in a small blue collar town in Alabama where my family lives.  Having our first child, a son named Jack who was born on November 16, 2010, was a big part of the motivation to move.  It made sense to slow down our pace of life, not only for ourselves, but for him.  We wanted Jack to be surrounded by his grandparents, aunt, and uncle.

My wife and I both were born in 1981.  As children of the 1980’s, we were always told that you can do anything if you really believed in your dreams.  Maybe that’s why we were brave enough to take this leap of faith.  Maybe that’s what got us into this situation: Having almost depleted our savings and unable to land the right jobs back in my small hometown, we are now at a breaking point.

But in this moment, I don’t feel brave. Perhaps there’s a thin line between bravery and foolishness.  The way I see it, that thin line in my case is actually having a steady job.  It’s not a matter of the choice that we may have to move back to Nashville- it’s simply the only option if at least one of us doesn’t get a job within the next 2 and a half weeks.  We need to make the most responsible decision at this point.

That 2 and a half week deadline is both how long our savings will last us as well as how long it should take to know if the most recent job I applied for will be mine or go to someone else.  I can’t say that there were truly no job opportunities for me here.  The first week we were here, I interviewed and was offered a job that was similar to my one in Nashville for the past five years- however, I found out during the interview that it meant working every Saturday and three nights a week.  So I turned them down.  Looking back, it’s easier to say I should have jumped at the chance.  But at the time, I felt that it defeated the purpose of moving here if I couldn’t spend Saturday’s and many evenings with my family.

And the day I published the last chapter of this series, I interviewed and was offered a job as an account representative.  It seemed like the perfect fit at first, but soon I realized I was the wrong guy for the job- like an accountant trying to do a computer administrator’s job or a forklift operator trying to work in a cubicle on the phone.  I was very appreciative, and maybe too honest to not waste their time, but after a week and a half, I had to face the inevitable and re-entered the gloomy world of “much qualified but unemployed”.

My heart was set on raising my son in the same small town I loved while growing up.  But it’s starting to seem like I’m playing Red Rover and I just can’t break through the other side.  And while all of my family’s lives and futures will change if end up moving back to Nashville, I think of how Baby Jack’s life will be the most effected.  Nashville is a wonderful city; after all, it’s where my wife and I met and got married. But his grandparents (my parents) had set their hearts on seeing him nearly every day (the house we live now in is barely a half a mile from them).  And Jack won’t get to grow up with his cousin (my sister is due with her first child in July, who will be in the same school grade as him) as closely.

We chose love over money.  We chose faith over security.  I would love to believe that this story ends the way I intended.  But unless God provides a miracle, because that’s the only saving option, then we have to count our losses (emotional, physical, and financial) and abandon our simple dream.

In Nashville, Jack will have to be raised by babysitters while my wife and I work. As compared to living in Alabama, my sister was going to babysit him since she is going on maternity leave for awhile.  That’s hard for me to grasp.  It makes me think of a divorce in that Jack will only see his family (other than my wife and I, of course) on most weekends.  That’s not what I had my heart set on.

My intentions were good.  My heart was right. My faith was real. My God can still intervene.

One of the main reasons I decided to write this God-nudged leap of faith series was to show how God would provide for my family.  He has always provided for me before.  I just can’t imagine this story ending with this all being for just character building experience.  Not that God’s faithfulness and providence depends on my story.  So to be fair, no matter how this story ends, I will continue writing it- even if we have to pack our lives back up and return to Nashville (where I could go back to my gracious former employer).

I realize that our willingness to move back to Nashville away from family could simply be like Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac.  Maybe it’s simply a test of our faith.  But I also fully realize that despite all it took to get here, we may be required to actually make the sacrifice. For the next two and a half weeks, I will be looking for that ram caught in the bushes, like Abraham was given.  I’m counting on a miraculous whirlwind to catch me and carry me either to safety on the ground, or back up to where I leaped from in the first place.

Like Bruce Springsteen said in the first track of my favorite album of his, The Rising: “In God’s hands our fate is complete… I’m countin’ on a miracle to come through.”

It’s in God’s hands, where it’s always been.