32 Weeks Growing a Texas Boy

They tell me it's been 32 weeks. It seems that is roughly the amount of growth and time it takes for me to not startle when I catch a glimpse of myself in the bleary eyed hours of the night, after waking up like clockwork to go to the bathroom. I feel very much myself these days until all the sudden that I don't. So few things have been what I've expected them to be like, or what people told me they would be (often unsolicited 😅). That is one of many life metaphors I've been encountering these days...

I recently heard a vignette on KUT radio about a local Austin resident who was 5th or 6th generation Texan in his family. When his wife was pregnant with their first born son they happened to be living in Sitka, Alaska at the time. The father began to grow apprehensive as the months went by that his son wouldn't be born on Texas soil. So his brother went down to the Capitol grounds, dug up some dirt and zip locked it into a bag that he then mailed to Alaska. The father baked the soil to sterilization on a cookie sheet and placed it in a new bag. When the time came, right as his boy entered the world he held the bag underneath where his son was born and thus felt satisfied the Texas thread remained unbroken. My laugh turned into a bit of a quiet cry when I heard that story driving home from Barton Springs on a weekday morning last week. Our baby will only be a 3rd generation born Texas Sweeney boy but it still gave me some happy, proud feels. Not at all because a number of these elements came together in my life how I expected them to but they they did come together exactly as they should. And I find the sequence, timing and circumstances of them all to be really quite perfect and beautiful.