Sunday evening, I didn’t have curling due to ice maintenance. As this freed up my evening, I took my friend up on his invitation to join a group of people for dinner. Not that I actually responded to his text invitation, but whatever. It was shameful for me as I hadn’t responded the last time he had asked me to join this regularly scheduled outing when I had curling a few weeks prior. The reason was that he and his wife were expecting a baby very soon at that point and now I didn’t see a great way to ask how things were going. The last thing I wanted was to offer a reminder if something had gone seriously wrong. While I don’t think it was the easiest birth, nothing terrible actually happened and both baby and mother are healthy.

I’ve never been around a baby that young. The little guy wasn’t yet two weeks old and looked so tiny in his stroller setup. Even his brother, who is only about three years old himself, dwarfed him. He was sleeping so I didn’t dare touch the baby, but I could not help watching him. There is just something magical about new life like that. Maybe I wouldn’t feel that way if I had to wake up every few hours to feed the newborn, but that’s not where I am in life.

After people ate, a few of us went outside the restaurant into a fenced area where the children can run around and play. The fascination of the evening was in seeing who could find the biggest stick to use in a futile attempt to fell a large tree. One child found such stick and the others became very upset when they were unable to find a similar stick. This one was the older brother of the newborn and a child I’ve gotten to know and who knows me now that we live in the same city, a child who indirectly influenced my own life when he was a baby in a stroller. His little world has changed forever, but he’ll adjust and be better for it.