There are advantages to having this kind of relationship. The times that we did see each were always cause for celebration, because they were scarce and also tended to be around happy occasions—holidays, baptisms, weddings, vacations, etc. All of my memories of him are good ones. We never had to go through any hard times or arguments, we just had to enjoy each other's company, relax and feast together, none of which were ever a problem. As a result, I suppose I didn't know him as well as many others but right now, that doesn't seem like such a bad thing either. We only had to see each other's good sides and so that's the impression that I'll always be left with, one that may be incomplete but is no less true—a man of great faith and generous love, always joking and laughing, celebrating life and being thankful for what he was given.

As the flood of the last couple of weeks has reminded me, my memories of him are also surprisingly vivid. I remember the first day we met, an overanxious, sparsely bearded 19-year-old eager to shake the hand of his girlfriend's father and make a good impression. He was doing some kind of housework and his hands were full of some kind of chemicals, so he apologized and shrugged it off with a laugh. I remember furiously cursing his name under my breath, in disbelief that a retirement-age man (not that one could tell from watching him play) was running me around the tennis court and making me look foolish. Hustle may have earned me his respect but it didn't result in many wins. I remember the long talk we had at his dining room table a few months before Dinka and I were married—after a long meal, his head rested in his hands and eyes closed in concentration—about the theological truths revealed in the Sacrament of Marriage and the beauty of married and family life. He was right about all of it. I remember grilling steaks at our first apartment on a November night in Indiana, passing a flask of cognac back and forth to stay warm and trying to prevent the howling wind from fanning the flames out of control.

I hear his voice in my head and I laugh. His phrases have become part of our vocabulary: his "special method" for accomplishing anything, calling vacation "vacancies", his pronunciation of "whole" ("HOOL!") and his oft-repeated expression of contentment, "such beautiful life." He spoke English like I played tennis, with little training and a lot of determination. I don't think he would mind me quoting this closing paragraph of an email he sent to me as an example.

My dear son in law. Our life is a big present and big task. I got a lot of presents in my life, but the task to learn English properly I failed. Otherwise, I believe this will not be the main reason for staying in purgatory for long time.

Fittingly, he ends with a joke. He loved to tell jokes and had a whole (HOOL!) army of them at his disposal, collected from seventy years and three languages. He would always make Dinka translate them, no matter how untranslatable, and then laugh again at the translation, nudging me to join in.

All of this is not to say that our relationship was purely superficial. I learned a lot from him, through our conversations but mostly by his example, about being a Catholic, a husband and a father. It's on the topic of fatherhood where thinking about this starts to get tough. I always felt that fatherhood was one of things that most closely brought us together. When I became a father, I joined him in what was one of the defining experiences of his life and he shared in my joy as a fellow father and as a grandfather. When I think about everything from our kids' perspective, knowing how much they meant to him (and vice versa) and seeing the sadness in their eyes, it's too much to bear.

Veronika and Ivan have taken a sudden interest in jokes lately, not so much in the content but as an excuse to burst into uncontrollable laughter. They've been very disappointed in what little I've been able to provide, bringing me to the sad realization that I'm going to have to Google "funny kids jokes." After I deferred joke-telling again the other night, Veronika thought for a minute and then said, "Papa? When we get to heaven, will Deda be able to tell us jokes there?" I responded the only way I knew how: "I think so, baby."

It was an amazing few days, by any measure. First and foremost, to see my brother—my lifelong sports opponent, sparring partner, economics teacher, hip hop conspirator, etc.—getting married, as happy as I have ever seen him, filled me with unspeakable joy. My feelings about marriage are well-documented elsewhere on this site but needless to say, I am so happy to see them begin their new life together, knowing the gifts that marriage can bring. The days surrounding the wedding were almost equally overwhelming—so many friends and relatives gathered together, laughing and having a great time, swept up in the spirit of the weekend. Then to be able to include Noni and Ivan in all of that and see all my happiness multiplied in them, that just sent me over the edge.

So congratulations, Phil and Julie. I wish you a life with more superlatives than this humble website can hold.

• Lying on a blanket, Veronika on one shoulder and Ivan on my chest, watching the local fireworks. Ivan clung to me, half-scared, half-excited, but calling out the colors of the fireworks as they appeared.
• Watching Team America on the evening of the Fourth—sitting in a lawn chair, Maker's Mark on the rocks, with the movie projected onto the side of a garage.
• Playing the accordion in the cool night air for the neighborhood to hear.
• Ivan and Veronika making the best of a rain-soaked visit to the Bronx Zoo by showering under a dripping overhang.
• Three servings of Manhattan's best gelato from Grom (Stracciatella, Crema di Grom, and Hazelnut).
• Veronika and Ivan pretending to deliver each other's babies on a living room floor after Saturday's dinner.
• Having the best grill-roasted whole chicken that I have ever made.
• Nikola's face lighting up every time he saw me (or at least that's how I remember it).

Our time is very full lately, during the week and on the weekends, but there are worse things than having a full life, especially when it fills you up in return.

In the lives of a two- and four-year-old, there are so many subtleties of behavior and personality that might never be seen or easily overlooked during a handful of weekday hours and weekends together. Given their pace of development, by the next time one is available to notice they could already be gone. In the course of a week, there could be a hundred moments so fleeting that one wouldn't remember them in a month but that, in that moment, can cause a heart to swell up and feel like it could burst. There's the way Ivan's face flushes when he's scared and excited by a movie, the tone of voice he uses when retelling a fond memory, the inflections in his words that let you know that he just wants to be included, and the way his face beams when he knows you're proud of him. There's the extra strength in the hug that you get from Veronika when you drop her off and pick her up from preschool, the way she carries herself a little differently with freshly painted nails, the gentle way she holds her baby brother, and the pride in her voice and on her face when he's on her mind. There's also this new one, whose little chest continues to quickly rise and fall as he sleeps despite the fact that I can't get my mind around him actually having shown up.

There's a part of me that can't reconcile that I have been given such a precious gift without the time or ability to fully appreciate it. I have no doubt that being a stay-at-home parent is difficult, probably more difficult than any job I will ever have—I believe that and will continue to write it in every Mother's Day card until the end of time—but it is also a privilege, to be a witness to the smallest details of these miraculous young lives, to have an opportunity to understand them like no one else. After a week of doing just that, that's exactly how I feel—privileged.

• Name: Nikola Phillip Souzek
• Pronunciation: NEE-ko-lah
• Date of birth: May 8, 2008 at 4:27 a.m.
• Height: 21.5 inches (54.61 cm)
• Weight: 9 lbs 4 oz (4.2 kg)
• Eyes: Um, dark.
• Hair: Medium brown fuzz.

I am more amazed with Dinka every time I see her go through labor and she keeps getting better. If there was some kind of Academy Awards for giving birth, we would definitely be nominated in several categories this year. Dinka and Nikola are resting happily at our heavenly birth center, waiting for me to bring the rest of the family to see him and deliver breakfast. And I do not want to keep my family waiting.

- "Are you going to (or why don't you) move to Wisconsin/Minnesota/Austria?"
- "How do you pronounce your son's name again?"

These are reminders of the life-long issues that Dinka and I brought on ourselves when we got married. There was never any doubt about the decision to get married and when—at a certain point, we both just knew that this is how things had to be and that we'd have to figure out a way to make everything else work. So there's no possibility for regret (lucky for us, I suppose), but there's also nothing that can be done to unburden oneself of the consequences of that decision.

It's hard to explain to people the lump in my throat and the heaviness in my heart when I consider the impossibility of our situation. There is no way to successfully straddle the geographical divide between our families. Our kids will grow up without being in close contact with one or both sets of grandparents for extended periods of time. There will be distant cousins that could have been close friends, uncles that cannot pick up the kids on a whim to take them fishing, aunts whose cooking they will never grow to love. One pair of grandparents will always be living with their grandkids—that and the memory of Veronika and Ivan's joy in spending time with them is enough to make me pause. Every Easter, Christmas, baptism and birth will always be missing something.

So what's the right thing to do? What's most fair to our families, most fair to our family? I wish I knew. For now, we choose an awkward compromise—to live without either of them (which is "fair", I suppose) and try to visit everyone equally. We don't choose sides, but then we also lose by narrowing the possibility of a close relationship with anyone.

The same is true of choosing names for our children. We exhaust the lists, searching for that one perfect name that we love and that will be accepted and pronounceable in three languages, a perfect compromise. But it doesn't exist (I think Veronika is the closest we'll ever come). So we choose a middle ground, awkward for at least some, trying to please everyone and maintain our own identity at once.

We cannot give our children the lives that we had and loved growing up, but we will give them our life, multi-cultural and bilingual and transatlantic as it is, and our example to them—that in the end, love is all that matters and that everything else can be overcome.

Times like these trigger some kind of survival mechanism in me. I compartmentalize everything, family included, into categories and tasks, make lists to prioritize and worry over, and then put my head down and power through. This is a good approach for getting things done and for forgetting why you're doing them. I have come up for air a few times this year—sledding with the kids, a long weekend in Minneapolis, a Mets game last weekend—but for the most part the last three months have been a long slog through an endless list of tedious tasks that left little time to spend with the family that I'm doing everything for and not a trace of creative inspiration. The nose-to-the-grindstone method is also a frighteningly effective way to pass the time. I woke up earlier this week to discover that Dinka's 38-week appointment with the midwife was that afternoon. As in, two weeks to go, time to buckle down. I thought I was already buckled.

While I'd like to say that this is all about to change, that soon my work will be done and I'll have time to answer my emails, take pictures and watch movies (these are as lofty as my goals get these days), I'm not sure that will be the case. My hope is that no matter how many items are left on my lists when the baby is born, his birth will remind me of my real priorities and let the rest wash away or at least wait patiently. No pressure, son.

After a wonderfully quiet weekend at home, the first in a long time, I can recommend two more things without reservation: Paris, je t'aime and spending task-free time with children. Both will remind you of the fullness of life and send you beaming into the night.

I ain't getting out of bed today
Nine to five to survive, there's gotta be a better way
Waking up early to punch in the clock
How I look, a grown man with my lunch in a box
But my kids need socks and shoes, I'm walking through...

Those first few bars, summing up the Sunday night/end of vacation feelings, and the 9th Wonder beat were enough to cover me in a fresh coat of goosebumps as my shoes started thudding as they caught the front of the treadmill. I pushed those tiny iPod earbuds as hard as the treadmill was pushing me. On top of that, it's the new year now and while I'm not big on resolutions, I never miss an opportunity to reflect on where I've been and think about where I'd like to be going and how. You can imagine my reaction to the chorus:

(Yesterday I) Felt the most hated
I thought I couldn't take it, I fought until I made it
(And today I'm) Feelin' brand new
I got nothin' to lose, get out my way, move

I started to think about the coming year: people are getting married, babies are being born, things are in motion. Change is coming and I am ready to embrace it, not in the sense of replacing what I already have but rather building on it for an even better future. I am filled with hope for this new year, for myself, my family and the world around me. Happy new year, everybody, let's make it a good one.

• Simplify: a constant theme in my life.
• Reduce volume of data: I have come to accept that I am not the kind of person that can or wants to fill a busy, three-column CSS layout with content. If you want to see more, the archives and about page should provide everything you'd ever need. I think this mode of presentation is a better reflection of me, or at least what I'm striving for.
• Allow more photography and flexibility in posts: I can post higher resolution pictures without text, text without pictures, or a combination of the two. Since I seem to shoot a lot more than write these days, I'm hoping to make this a venue for non-kids site pictures.
• Reduce complexity: less work equals better. Some of this you'll notice (links moved to del.icio.us) and some you won't (clean-up of CSS and Movable Type messes) but either way, know that I will be happier maintaining this version of the site.

I like how it turned out. I'm not happy with everything yet but I reached the point where I had to get it out there or give up on it for good, so it's being kicked from the nest on the eve of our year-end vacation. The font you see in the titles and banner is Futura which I've had a crush on for a while. The post titles are generated via this dynamic text replacement technique I read about at A List Apart.

Let me know what you like and don't like, what's broken or doesn't make sense, what you can't find or figure out. Here's hoping that 2008 is a year of renewal for the Republic.

That's all to be expected, you say, nothing but another perfect, sun-soaked beach weekend for the Souzeks. The unexpected came in the last half of Saturday. After a long morning of swimming and role-playing ("I'm a baby duck and you're a mama duck," etc.) in the hotel pool, we headed to Newport for some clams, mansions and more of the Atlantic. Our van, specifically those parts concerned with providing electricity to the vehicle, had other ideas. In the end, we only lost a few hours of our trip but the anxiety that accompanied having a car break down—on vacation, an hour away from the hotel, with two antsy kids in carseats, on an early Saturday evening when everyone was closing up shop until Monday morning—was enough to run us ragged. But the most interesting parts of this already interesting evening were the places we ended when we were at our wit's end. For instance, the first time our car refused to start, it was here:

Then hours later, after multiple calls to AAA, desperately searching for the solace of a mechanic's open arms and playing out every possible Sunday/Monday scenario in our heads, Dinka dropped me off at a park with the kids while she went to look for some long-overdue dinner. This was the view from the park (click the image for full size):

Hours of frustration and worry punctuated by breathtaking, otherworldly beauty. Places like these have a graceful but overwhelming way of putting one's life into perspective. As I drove home on Sunday with these images still alive in my head, I thought about how it's always possible to react to difficult situations in the way that I had been coerced into reacting by my surroundings. That kneeler in the garden in front of Our Lady of Fatima is always there, the sun rises and sets in the big sky every day. If we remember to seek these places out, in the world or in our minds, a more peaceful path (not to mention less anxiety, quarreling, stomachaches) is not much farther.

This beautiful pair of coincidences reminded me of Anthony Doerr's memoir, Four Seasons in Rome, which I finished last week. I became acquainted with him through his letters and essays on The Morning News and jumped at the chance to win a copy of his new book. His descriptive power as a writer is matched only by his wonder at the natural world, even the familiar. Take for instance this passage from "We are Mapmakers", a letter about visiting his childhood home for the holidays:

Everything is familiar and new all at once: the slickness of well water in the shower; the leafless hardwoods ringing my parents' house; the smells of slush, gasoline, and wood in the garage... I have not been to Novelty in almost two years. I have not lived here in a decade. But to return to where I grew up, these six acres beside a pond, is to wander through a thicket of memories. My feet know which paths to take through the snow; my hands find the two hollows in the sycamore where I used to practice my pull-ups.

His journal entries from Rome are as breathtaking as I imagine the city to be. He sees beauty and poetry everywhere—in the pine trees and the light, fountains and funerals, the overwhelming history and the smiles of passers-by. But to my point, as a parent of similarly young children, the most memorable passages were those in which he contrasted the exhaustion and tedium that accompany the mundane tasks of raising children with those rare moments when all time seems to be suspended and all you can do is drown in the love that they bring into your life, the new perspective they bring to your world. I hope he (and you) will not mind if I quote one of my favorites at length:

After a month it got so we could not remember whose diaper had been changed, who had been given what medicine, or even what day it was. There were nights when Owen screamed from dusk until dawn. There were nights when we had poured enough milk bottles and changed enough diapers and stayed awake enough consecutive hours that the rituals seemed to become somehow consecrated. I would stand dry-eyed over Henry as he stared up at the ceiling at three or four in the morning, and in something like a waking dream he would seem so wise and sensible that he became like some ancient philosopher.

He never cried, not even when his alarm went off. Swaddled in his Moses basket, wires trailing out the bottom, his monitor flashing green, green, green, his entire four-pound body motionless except his eyelids, it seemed his understood everything I was working so hard to understand: his mother's love, his brother's ceaseless crying; he was already forgiving me for my shortcomings as a father; he was the the distillation of a dozen generations, my grandpa's grandpa's grandpa, all stripped into a single flame and stowed still-burning inside the thin slip of his ribs. I'd hold him at the window and he's stare out into the night, blue tributaries of veins pulsing in his neck, his big eyelids slipping down now and then, and it would feel as if tethers were falling away, and the two of us were gently rising, though the glass, through the trees, through interweaving layers of atmosphere, into whatever was beyond the sky.

This experience of finding the eternal in the everyday seems to motivate much of what I do (reading, watching films, vacation) and what I try to express (writing, photography). I hope these photos give you at least a piece of the joy that went into taking them:

Rhode Island '07

On Saturday we went to the John Mayer show in Hartford (a delayed Mother's Day present), which featured Ben Folds as an opening act. I used to be a big fan of The Five while they were together but never got a chance to see them in concert. Hearing Ben Folds perform some of the old material that night was a bit jarring—it was so out of context in my current life and so reminiscent of my late high school/early college years that I felt like I was looking through a photo album of my former life, detached by time but still intimately connected by nature of being my past. I remembered the faces of the people I used to listen to the music with, saw pictures of the places I lived then, and relived some of the emotions of those adolescent years. It was vivid to the point of being uncomfortable and I was a little relieved when his set ended and I could stop the attempts at internal reconciliation. John Mayer put on a great show, full of contagious, youthful enthusiasm and flexing his musical muscles as much as he could within the expectations of a top 40 crowd. Who knows, maybe one day I'll hear "Gravity" (which I heard for the first time that night) and be taken back to the cool breeze of the amphitheater that night and the white spotlights that shone over his back as he sang "Keep me where the light is."

Although it wasn't played that night, one song that the concert did shake loose was "3x5" from his first album, especially the part about seeing a sunrise that "brought [him] back to life." That's kind of what last weekend was like for me, shedding all the busyness of the past few months, reestablishing my priorities, and feeling my roots again. On Sunday I had this "Oh yeah, so that's who I am" moment and wondered where I had been for so long. The timing couldn't have been better—this weekend our family of four heads to the Rhode Island shore for more of that resuscitation. If hearing a few old albums can inspire all of this, you can imagine the buckets of emotion that I'll bring back after a few days on the beach with this lot. That's what I call being kept where the light is.

I loved being there with/for him through this experience. Swimming lessons are a nice metaphor for parenthood and my favorite kind at that—obvious. For my part, I'm telling him, "I know this place is big and scary and you don't know what to do yet, but I'm right here with you and I'm going to teach you. You'll see, it's pretty cool and you're going to love it." And for Ivan, it's first about learning to trust me (you know, someone that's not his mother) and then letting go a little bit at a time, venturing out with a safety net. (I suppose that the other way to look at this is forced bonding through subjection to a hostile environment: "You will die without me! Love me!") As he clung to my neck, I felt a tremendous rush of proud-and-protective-father-type feelings.

Ivan and I have had some tough times over the past year-plus and moments like that go a long way in helping us both keep going. Sunday's rocky trip to the airport to pick up Grandma reminded me that he and I still have a lot to work through and that there will be some spectacular battles of will in our future, but we'll keep pressing on. The Father's Day card I received Sunday morning and have looked at ten times since then assures me of that: