My wife and I recently brought our (thankfully healthy) son home from the hospital, and since my thoughts are a bit disorganized with all the events of the past week, I'll just add some of my thoughts here with further updates to come:

• Without melodramatizing what everyone already knows, birth is a pretty amazing thing to witness. Some of my friends know about my ideas on overpopulation, and thus decided to challenge the very idea of me having children, wondering how I could possibly believe that having a child could be a good thing. More on this silliness in a bit.
• The initial wave of overwhelming emotion has given way to the late nights with diaper changes and feedings, but the amazement of birth is something I'll never forget. My wife and I laughed in the labor & delivery room about how some women get their hair and makeup done up before they go in to have scheduled inductions or scheduled C-Sections, marveling at the lack of perspective some people have. Even in the middle of labor, we were able to affirm that however our child turns out, at least we have the proper perspective and have done things to ensure our child sees his parents as much as possible during the first few years.
• The medical attention was top notch, which furthered my belief that socialized medicine simply can't work - we would not be able to have the same pre- and post-natal care for women or babies in our society if health care was another entitlement. We saw a variety of nurses, doctors, and everything was prioritized so that the health of the child came first, even before silly bureaucracy. Do you really want your government telling you, for example, whether or not your child should be circumsized?
• My son was named after my father, a family tradition stretching back centuries in our lineage. He is currently seeing the same doctor I saw growing up, which was also a strangely emotional moment; to walk back into that doctor's office and see the same doctor, older but still sharp as a whip, looking over my son and determining that he is in good health.
• Silly personal drama subsides, at least for the time being. The neighbors downstairs with the loud TV? Sure, it'll still bother me, but when my baby is crying in the middle of the night for food or a diaper change, I won't really care. Do I check in with work every night after I get home, after a full day of work? If I have time - where beforehand, I would do it automatically to ensure I didn't miss anything.
• As for overpopulation, births and babies would be so much more special and important if people didn't reproduce without the ability to take care of the child. Just from having a decent little home, an internet connection and phone line, a roof, clean water, and food, our baby already beats about 95% of the world's population in terms of his standard of living. So this birth was more of a life-affirming process than I could have imagined, especially as it relates to overpopulation. People who would challenge me on this idea don't understand things like replacement value or what smart reproduction is about. We take the baby home and it's our job to take care of him with the resources to which we have access; it just so happens we're not reproducing in a project or a village where resources are scarce. Does it matter how we got here or why? Not really, because wealthy or poor, how you care for your child is important, it just so happens that with poverty comes greater neglect; the two are correlated. Luckily, our child was not born into poverty and I can only hope - and do the best I can - to ensure he never experiences it. How could we, though, buy into Pentti Linkola's theory on humanity, some people might ask? These people only read the "bad" stuff that offends people in Linkola's message - humans are fine as long as they don't destroy their own home (the surrounding environment) and as long as they maintain population levels and resource consumption below levels at which nature's ability to refresh are not disturbed. In this, the birth of our son was truly a life-affirming event as we will do all we can to ensure he knows how precious human life is - not every single individual human life when reproduction is reckless, but that humanity itself can be precious when we do the right things.

In terms of all the good, fuzzy stuff, the baby has great grandparents who love him very much, and aunts and uncles who will be all over him with love and affection. Luckily for him, this was never in doubt.