The happy recap:

On April 10, 2009 at 11:20pm New York time, my son was born. This is a sentence that at various times in my life I feared, rejected, considered with apprehension, or embraced, depending on the phase I was in at the time. Looking back I realize that this may have been the closest to perfect timing I’ve ever experienced in an action that I did not have complete control over. And now that Theodore is here, I get to live out a new phase in my life (along with my lovely wife of course), a waypoint at which my life’s course is reset.

A little background: From 2004 to 2007 I took an assignment in Moscow. I was 34 when I arrived in Russia; a recently divorced mid-career specialist in search of new experiences and distance from certain events, both historical and personal. When I returned to the US in October 2007, I left something very important in Moscow; the love of my life. I met her with about four months left on my tour, which is much more typical of my bad timing. Luckily for me, circumstances provided me with four additional months, giving us enough time to plan our next steps and deciding which of us would move and when. We settled on Julia following me to New York in 2008. We considered a destination wedding in South Africa, and meanwhile, worked out several trips between Moscow and New York, along with trips to Budapest and Toronto.

It was sometime during a Moscow visit in the summer that our little guy became a reality. That trip included us taking an overnight train to St. Petersburg, and staying in a quaint little European style hotel right in the heart of the city. We found out about the pregnancy just before our trip to Cape Town, which we had decided to make a vacation along with a side trip to Dubrovnik, Croatia for the wedding of our close friends Ed and Katya. Since we didn’t know the sex of the baby yet, we referred to our unborn child as “Mishka,” which is the Russian diminutive for a bear. Julia and I often referred to little kids as “Mishki” (the plural) since they teeter and stomp around like little cubs. In a bit of foreshadowing, Julia and I have a picture from the Moscow Circus feeding a baby bear condensed milk and smiling proudly. Little did we know at the time that we’d be feeding a mishka of our very own just a little later in our lives.

In December Julia made the trip here, and on a snowy day we got married at Borough Hall in Staten Island, with my Mom as witness and the Manhattan skyline as a backdrop. I actually went into the office a few hours before the ceremony to catch up on some paperwork, leading a friend to tease us that it was very chic to get married on my lunch hour. We began two processes that required research, introspection and a devotion to detail; finding the right doctor and beginning the immigration process for Julia. The winter of 2008-2009 was our nesting period, though our renovation is, as of this writing, an ongoing project finally within sight of end.
And on the 10th day of April, Theodore Joseph emerged from his hibernation.