INKED! 'Welcome Home' baby Brown, sister won't bite

I’ll start off by saying, “I refuse to buy a mini-van,” even though I’m starting to feel like a Duggar.

The Duggar family is that religious baby cult on TV with 19 kids — and counting. The mom has fallopian tubes of steel and the dad, sperm enriched with uranium and super powers.

Realizing two children does not make life lived in a shoe a la the nursery rhyme, it does seem like a lot for us, a couple who spent our first 12 years together flying solo and didn’t have our first daughter until we were 31. Now, on the cusp of 37 (my birthday is next week and The Wife’s in about three weeks), we are the proud parents of a newborn.

While you were all waiting in anticipation for the latest INKED! column last week (or so I’m telling myself), I was busy helping The Wife with our 2-day-old son, Tyler Ness Brown. He’s 9 days as of this printing.

Tyler was born at El Centro Regional Medical Center on Feb. 2 at 9:50 a.m. A strapping 8 pounds, 12 ounces and 21 1/4 inches long, and born as nature intended it, you could imagine The Wife has needed my assistance, even if you don’t want to imagine it.

As I sit here writing — for the first time in the last week between taking Riley to school, making meals, changing diapers, going to the gym (me time, moms) and more solo trips to Target than has ever been recorded by another human being — I’m getting in the mood with a little lullaby album of Metallica songs. “Master of Puppets” played on the glockenspiel is no less heavy than through a stack of Marshalls, believe me.

This has been one cool week-plus, I must say. Throughout the pregnancy my daughter maintained she would hate her little brother and would have nothing to do with him. I’m happy to report while she still says she doesn’t like him, she spends every waking moment sitting at his feet, playing with his hands and gleefully counting the moments till she gets to see me groan over changing another brown Brown diaper.

Riley’s teacher, Alexa Horne at McCabe, has made the adjustment for Riley even easier by making a kindergarten class project out of it. The class is in the final stages of preparing a book of what bit of advice or lesson each one of Riley’s 18 classmates would impart to Tyler, and they even signed a blanket for him. Thanks, Mrs. Horne, you’re the best.

This time, this gift of a new baby and our first son, is the reward for a really tough year and a half of trying to have another child. I’ve let this out once or twice, but Tyler’s birth is the third official pregnancy The Wife has had in around 18 months. The first two ended in miscarriage and were emotionally devastating for both of us, especially her.

The fact that Tyler is here and with us, completing our family for now, is so incredibly awesome, few words can explain the feeling. Relief, however, is one of them; relief that we made it, that he made it.

We actually thought about all of the names that would signify the journey and the result, such as Chance, Miles, Lucky and the like. In the end, though, Riley liked “Tyler” and Priscilla and I loved “Ness.” And yes, Ness is for Social Distortion founder Mike Ness. The Wife has a ridiculous crush on that midget vegan punk, and truth be told, we’ve seen Social D together in concert about five or six times in the last 17 years.

If this column seems too random, it probably is. Sleep is a rare commodity in the early days of a newborn and coherent thought comes with some effort. But it’s worth it.

And by the way, “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)” played with chimes does take on a formerly missing funky quality.