My wife’s 10-year high school reunion + my niece’s 1st birthday party + a Cardinals game with my brothers and nephew = a moment of reflection.

Remember in middle school when your parents were oppressive and mean and stupid, and you swore you’d never be like them? And remember when you grew up to be exactly like them because you realized at some point that they were sickeningly correct in the way they mistreated you? Okay, maybe its not always that extreme, but we’re all aware of the stereotype, and now that I’m officially a father, it’s time I started weighing-in on the topic.

For me, the last seven weeks since Avery’s birth were a blur of crying, eating, and pooping (and Avery had her issues, too), so I hadn’t had a lot of time to reflect on what kind of dad I was being compared to the kind I had always expected to be. A part of that comes from the fact that I didn’t have many presuppositions about the kind of dad I would be (sometimes, being chronically laid-back can be a little boring). If I had to sum up my expectations, I would say I wanted to emulate Norman Maclean’s father on “A River Runs Through It."

Yes, I wanted to be a Presbyterian pastor from prohibition-era Montana. I guess, what I really wanted was to be straight-forward, firm, loving, slow to anger, wise, and Godly. The fly fishing was just a perk.

And that hadn’t changed after seven weeks of fatherhood, but, well, expectations and execution sometimes differ on the finer points. Here are some examples of things I HAD done since Avery plopped into my lap:

I changed my first diaper. Seriously, my first. As a physical therapist, I’d cleaned up blood, dissected a cadaver, debrided necrotic tissue (cut dead skin out of wounds), and wiped an adult’s rear-end, but the idea of baby poo turned my stomach, until I did it a couple hundred times.

I watched "Through the Wormhole” not because I was interested in the origin of time, but because Morgan Freeman’s voice put Avery to sleep.

I learned to swaddle, and did it at every opportunity. Seriously, I would have wrapped that child in a tablecloth if it got her to to sleep.

I matched exact pitch with Avery’s super-sonic wail to see if it would cancel out the sound like those fancy-pants headphones. It didn’t. You know what else doesn’t work? Blowing in a screaming baby’s mouth, mocking them, giving them a “duck face,” and telling them they’re acting childish.

And things I still hadn’t done:

Talked in “baby voice.” It irritated me. I would not be caught dead lowering myself to some stereotypical infant language.

Talked for Avery. “She says thank you” irritated me to no end. “NO, she doesn’t say thank you, because she’s a month old, and if you think you heard her say ‘thank you,’ may I suggest you stop listening to the voices in your head.”

Tried breast milk. Apparently body-builders were buying the stuff (at top dollar) and using it for protein shakes, but if that’s what it took, I was fine looking like this guy and relying on my charming personality to snag one of these lovely Owensville class of 2004 alumni (my wife is on the far left peeking over the front row, fyi):

So as my moment of reflection came to an end, I realized I wasn’t doing too bad with Avery. I helped with feeding her, changing her diapers, swaddling her, rocking her to sleep, and taking incriminating photos of her for blackmail when she was older. She was still alive, and I’d only hit her head on a couple things. Obviously, the challenges would increase every month, so you can expect frequent moments of daddy reflection, but for the moment, I hadn’t completely violated my mission statement of WWJMD (what would John Maclean do?)