TEAM LAST CALL

In December, I started growing a beard that, while it’s probably just coincidence, definitely helped the Eagles get into the playoffs. It was a mighty beard, a beard of hope, a beard to light the way in dark times. It was a beard you can believe in.

Then, of course, the Eagles got trounced in the NFC Championship Game, and I assumed that my beard’s magical powers had fizzled out. As it turns out, quite the opposite was true – as I discovered less than a week after the Super Bowl, when my wife’s pregnancy test came up positive.

My wife and I had been trying to conceive for several disappointing – and, I might add, beardless – months by that point, and things just weren’t looking good. But then I grew my beard of virility and our dream was realized. And now, my face clad in furry manliness, I am preparing to enter the magical world of diapers and singing purple dinosaurs and sleep deprivation called fatherhood.

Our magical beard-induced pregnancy is terrific for a number of reasons, including the fact that I’ll finally have a proper photo for my profile on Facebook, where, unless you’re holding a baby, your friends literally can’t even see you. Plus, until the baby comes in October, we get to use the sweet parking spaces at the grocery store. And in December, we can give all of our friends and family the greatest gift of their lives, a Christmas card with our family’s picture on it.

One potential problem with the pregnancy is that I kind of don’t like kids. My sister’s kids are two of the most magnificent creatures on Earth, but beyond that, I just don’t care for children. The crying, the pooping, the complete inability to hold their liquor – it’s just not for me. And if they have any appreciation whatsoever of the Philadelphia Eagles, they certainly don’t know how to show it. They’re messy and selfish and think the whole world revolves around them, and so do I, and that’s a bad combination.

And yet, I sit here already dizzyingly, incomprehensibly, inside-and-out saturated with love for this baby of mine, which as I write is somewhere between the size of a strawberry and a plum. It has arms and legs and is just now starting to develop facial features, including what looked in the sonogram to be the beginnings of a fine-looking beard. It also theoretically lost its tail this week, which seems like a positive thing to me. Presumably, it’s also well along in the development of its Steelers-hating gland. Good baby.

It’s mind-blowing to think that there will soon be a little person running around that got half of its genetic makeup from me. There goes its career in the NBA. It can also forget about ever figuring out the square root of anything, or the difference between baking soda and baking powder, or how to change a tire. But while it’s stranded helplessly by the side of the road waiting for AAA to show up, it’ll be able to write lots of sarcastic jokes about its own ineptitude. That’s called a life skill.

My friends have been an endless source of support throughout these early weeks of pregnancy, taking time out of their busy schedules each day to e-mail and text encouraging notes like “Say goodbye to your freedom” and “Your life is no longer your own” and “You’ve just been given a life sentence.” Neat things like that. And they’re all dads, too, so I know they’re just loving this. Suffice it to say, I’m acutely aware that my life is about to change. Forever. But I have a feeling that whatever sacrifices I have to make won’t be anything my beard and I can’t handle.

In the months since discovering my wife was pregnant, I’ve been stuck in a perpetual state of what I can only describe as excitement with a side of white-hot terror. I think about the baby approximately once every five seconds, and each time say the exact kind of word that I shouldn’t use anymore now that I’m going to be a dad. Everything I see now is viewed through the eyes of an expectant father, meaning that everything is broken down into three basic categories: bad for baby, really bad for baby and Rush Limbaugh. For example, my car is a death trap that shakes and sputters and doesn’t have functioning seatbelts in the back seat, and is therefore bad for baby. My Jack Russell is genetically programmed to hunt down and devour small animals, and seems to find small children particularly tasty, and is therefore really bad for baby. And Rush Limbaugh is a lumpy, antagonistic, pill-popping demonic gasbag, and is therefore Rush Limbaugh.

The point is, the world seems like one big, bad, dangerous place when you’ve got a baby on the way. I’m already prowling around the house like a bear protecting its young from danger, by which I mean Rush Limbaugh, even though all I’ve seen of the baby are squiggly ultrasound images of it doing backstrokes inside my wife’s belly. I love that little strawberry to a terrifying degree. Elizabeth Stone once wrote of having a baby, “It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body.” Now I’m starting to understand what she meant.