Feeling Like I Won the Lottery

So in this road that we travel and refer to as life, there are many moments of joy and sadness. On rare occasions these can occur together, turning a seemingly innocuous event into to something not soon forgotten.

F***ing  Mozzarella Sticks!

I have three children, not perfect but pretty damn close though and I admit, I am horribly biased. My oldest Alex, is me. Not me at 8 but me at something like 25, after I got comfortable with who I was. Juliana, our middle child is a third of me, my wife and my sister in law and she has an amazing poker face for a six year old. She is that type who can say she didn’t eat the candy bar with chocolate evidence all over hands, face and shirt, without cracking a smile or smirk, no tells what so ever. Then there is Sofia, this amazing gift from god, that scared the crap out of us with an in-utero heart condition, causing her to join us a month early and cost us a couple of weeks in the NICU. It was SVT a good problem to have that she grew out of, as our doctors predicted, by her first birthday. Sofia is my wife, to a T.

So there we are on Saturday night, to dinner with friends and their 2 kids. The restaurant is Moores, which is basically a 200 year-old bar that fed George Washington and his crew that makes hella good ribs and burgers. The place is huge and loud with many large families and lots of kids. We ended up sitting at a table that had bench seating for half and chairs for the rest. Now, as a plus size model, i prefer a chair, a real chair as bench seating and booths typically require very awkward looking "skootching" for me to get seated. Plus, there is a lack of room for expansion of the intestinal area post meal. That said, I take one for the team and sit third seat in from the closed end of the bench seat, thanks to the privacy half wall thing with my wife to my immediate right. She was sitting next to the access road to the restrooms, bar, etc. that was basically blocked by Sofia and even more so by the high chair she was sitting in.

All situated and happy, we order drinks and apps. The kids are getting loud, me and my buddy are talking dirt bikes and golf, my wife and his wife are regaling holiday horror stories from the past week. All is well in the world when the appetizers arrive. Nachos supreme with Chili on the side and an order of Mozzarella Sticks, the kids dig in, the adults too. Within minutes, half of everything is gone when my wife says, "Alex!?!?" very excitedly. I quickly look left as my son was sitting across the table and to my left, where I see him standing, eyes wide open, mouth wide open and his hands grasping at his throat, just like you would see heimlich training material. Panic, fear, anger (not at him), ENERGY. I didn't or couldn't speak. My wife as if through ESP, knew to get up just enough for me to pivot, step on the bench seat and take the two steps i needed to take to the right to be clear of her. But the baby was blocking the access road, so I had a Heartbreak Ridge moment. In an instant I saw the table next to us was empty, but it's bench seat continued all the way to a real wall, in an instant I decided to do my best at a pommel horse dismount, posting my left hand on the center of the table and swinging my fat a** (and the rest of my XXL figure) over the table and all 5 chairs on the other side of the table. I made it, almost untouched. I clipped a chair, that caused my leg to swell up like a tick and had me gimping around for a day and a half. I take 3 giant steps to get to my son, as he hacked up a long string piece of Mozzarella Stick and he started to cry. I got there pretty damn quick but the little bugger stayed calm and figured out a way to fix it himself. I held him close, he cried for a minute or two, then drank some water and went right back to having a good time with his friend as if nothing happened, except for his avoidance of the Mozzarella Sticks. My heart was racing for about a half hour and to be honest I really couldn't enjoy dinner. Poor Sofia was subjected to having all of her food effectively pre-chewed as I remained at defcon 6 for the rest of the meal. My wife and friends helped my mood by indicating how impressed they were with my svelte acrobatic feat of leaping over table and chairs in a single bound.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Did I over-react? Did I not do enough? I don't know. I feel like I did everything I could, as soon as I could with only thoughts of needing protect my child. In one split second, I thought I was going to lose my son. In the next, he was fine. It is moments like these that we should pause, reflect and be grateful for how lucky we are and how rich our lives are. That evening left me feeling very much like when Sofia was born and we had to deal with her medical condition. It was scary and she was sick, but the doctors kept reassuring us, this was an easy problem to fix, but it would take time. Once we started to trust them, we began to see others in the NICU a bed over that were not nearly as fortunate with the prognosis their little angel had received. Neither time, was a time for mourning or fear, it was time to take the lumps, do whatever you needed to and be grateful that it wasn’t worse. It could always be worse.

There are other things in my life that have given me perspective in the last few years, especially my travel to India. When you step back and think about, it's not about creating riches, it IS about creating wealth and wealth is far more than money. If I sat here today without a penny, I would still feel like the wealthiest man in the world, I have a wonderful marriage, three beautiful children, a best friend in my younger brother and an amazing, diverse extended family.

I felt like I won the lottery Saturday. And every day since.

Sincerely,

As a Guest in the Stork’s Nest ~

Papa John