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Friends, business associates, and people I’ve met on planes,
Happy New Year and welcome to 2007. All I can say is it’s about time!
For the Hennenhoefer family, 2006 started off on a high note with the arrival of our second son on January 23rd. After six hours of labor my wife gave birth to a healthy 9lb boy, Nathaniel Sterling Hennenhoefer. Despite our planning, it was a natural birth with delivery only four minutes after we arrived at the hospital room.
A few hours after Nathaniel was born, 2006 started taking a turn for the worse. I fell ill and ended up spending the night on the bathroom floor in the maternity ward. You might think a hospital is the ideal place to get sick, but it turns out it’s not. Hospital staff is not permitted to say anything that sounds like medical advice to a non-patient. Instead, the nurses brought me water and asked if I realized I looked quite pale. To a sleep deprived person who’s been mistaken for an albino in the past, this comes across as friendly chitchat.
Finally, after wandering down to the ER, I was given abdominal surgery for blockage caused by a combination of broccoli and a Meckel’s Diverticulum. The surgery was followed by nine days in the hospital, 12 staples, and a six-week recovery that I’m still trying to schedule. Again, for all the people I emailed or talked to while in the hospital, sorry about that. I was on a lot of drugs and it took the nurses a few days to confiscate my blackberry.
All in all, the hospital stay was not a big deal for me. Modern medicine is a wonderful thing and they had me on the good stuff. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for my wife, Alisa. Although the hospital will extend maternity stay for an extra day if the father is having surgery, an Invisible Fence / Baby-LoJack technology attached to the wrists of maternity patients prevents them from leaving to visit other floors. Alas, she was restricted to the maternity ward while I enjoyed my post-surgery pain killers.
Once Alisa got home her mother came to the rescue; or tried, rather. During the first night of her stay at the Hennenhoefer house she fell and broke both feet. A visit to the emergency room ended with Alisa’s mother being confined to a wheelchair for six weeks.
The following week Alisa totaled my car. Fortunately she was unharmed, just a little shaken up…
I want to thank everyone for their help and for wishing me well after my surgery. However, there is one minor detail that must be addressed. Since there is some confusion over the protocol for these types of things, I’ll just be blunt. It turns out that motherhood trumps surgery. Trust me on this. If you see us out and about, the proper greeting would be something like this:
Alisa dear, you look great! A 9lb baby without any drugs is simply amazing! Nate is the cutest baby ever… As for you, Eric, you really need to plan your emergency room surgeries better. Do you have any idea how hard it is to bring home a new baby all alone? At least you’re recovered now. Someone needs to buy Alisa a lot of flowers…
With respect to the actual child raising part, 2006 left a lot to be desired. Even easy-going infants like Nate are a lot of work. And Ethan, who was enjoying his terrible twos at the time, was in a highly active state. Up until a month ago his favorite activity was biting other kids; his rationalization is that they’re fun to eat. Whether or not his friends are fun to eat, it was no fun getting banned from all the play groups and having Alisa and I summoned to the director’s office for special counseling. When does it get easier?
Life is a lot easier now that the little ones are almost one and three. They’re definitely still crazy, but less so. On a typical day Ethan will pounding on my door because he needs to tell me something very important. Seconds later he’ll be dancing around singing “Jingle Snakes”, all while completely naked.
As for my free time, it is fleeting. I used to read books and keep up with the movies, but these days I get my kicks from individually wrapped snacks. Thankfully, I’ve managed to keep up with Battlestar Galactica, House, and the Colbert Report. I find that the dark drama and satire help to balance out the over-cheery songs from Dora the Explorer and Twinkle Twinkle that haunt me wherever we go.
Some of my other adventures include attending a Colbert Report filming at Bikini Bar and Grill in Austin, racing go-karts, orienteering with Navy Seals, sailing off the coast of San Diego, smuggling toothpaste onto airplanes, having lunch with a Congressman, saving Perl the Cat with a month of feeding out of a syringe, driving a skid steer, and building a castle with the little ones. I guess I’ve kept pretty busy.
On the professional front I’ve kept myself very busy with two extracurricular activities in 2006. I’m President of the Austin Chapter of the Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO). As this is only one chapter in a large global organization, I was sent to President’s School in D.C. for three days to learn my new job. Research has shown that entrepreneurs individually are unmanageable, but if you can get them organized great things will happen. Armed with my new training and gold EO lapel pin, I’ve been working to get the word out about EO and help pull together all the
My other activity is the Design Verification Club (www.dvclub.org). The DVClub started a couple of years ago as an
On the work front, everything is going great at Obsidian. Our little startup company will be ten years old next month. The microprocessor segment continues to be hot so there’s always more work to do than time in the day. It’s a good problem to have and it means our next problem will be finding more talent, in case you happen to be looking.
My partners Rob and Becky are well. Rob and his wife, Sara, are up to three kids and a minivan. Becky continues her obsessive ways and shares my excitement for the end of 2006. We made it through last year and 2007 has a lot of potential.
I hope everyone had a wonderful 2006 and the New Year is starting off on a positive note. I look forward to catching up.
Eric
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