The DUMBEST pants EVER!

Here in Sweden, there is a fashion trend among young men that is, frankly, ridiculous. And I REALLY hope it's isolated at least to Europe. The trend right now (and for the past 2 years we've been here) is a tangent on the gangsta style of wearing one's baggy jeans around one's ass. These chowderheads have taken it a step further, though, and made the jeans skin-tight with what I have to call an abbreviated crotch that makes the waistline run only a few inches above the joint of the legs. The effect is having awful, awful underwear all bunched up and hanging out over a waist that would otherwise be exposing the majority of the kid's ass! Strangely, it's only the boys wearing these things, even though they're very similar to the thong-exposers in the US a few years back.
Anyway, it was only a matter of time before this started going to even newer extremes, and one night while on the bus, my wife and I saw the result. Ladies and gents, I present to you now, The Dumbest Pants Ever!

No, your eyes do not deceive you: those are skin-tight jeans from the knees down, and HammerTime parachuters from the knee up! I truly could not believe my eyes when I saw these. Thankfully, they're the only pair I've seen so far...

Having a baby!

If you're reading this, you probably already know...but my lovely wife and I are having a baby! And VERY soon. It's due April 25, and here's one of our only pics of it thus far (from months ago):

With the impending fatherhood comes all sorts of feelings, but I have to confess I'm not as anxious as I once was. When the baby first started to show, I was filled with what can only be described as mild panic at the concept of spending the next 20 or so years of my life raising another human being. I'm not sure I did such a great job with my own upbringing (what there was for me to do of it), so how can I be expected to do a better job with a new one? I don't know that I can, but I also don't know that I can't, so all I can do is what parents have done for time immemorial: do my best.
Of course, this wasn't by accident -- having a baby, that is. The wife and I have wanted to since...well, since we fell in love, I think. We had to weigh some issues before settling, though, and chief among these was why have a baby to begin with! Of course, any loving couple wants some issue of their love to nurture and adore, but let's face facts: the world sucks, it's overcrowded, and neither my wife nor I feel entirely comfortable bringing another life onto the planet to fill it even more and then just suffer through existence. So, why have a child?
What it came down to is pretty much narcissism. Similar to my attitude on teaching, we kind of came down to the concept that if a person feels they can do a good job at something (in this case, making a human), then they should do it. The world does suck, and it is overcrowded, but it won't get better with the worst parents having the biggest families! My wife and I feel like we can do a solid job of raising a rational, decent human being, who will hopefully have some talents with which to improve life on this planet in his or her (we don't know the sex yet!) brief time on it. Whether we're successful only time will tell, but we intend to give it a better shot than just raising another blob of meat to take up space, energy and food. Obviously, we have high hopes but they feel attainable. We'll see how we're feeling after a year or so of nothing but feeding and changing diapers, though...
Wish us luck!