Although I'd been through the baby thing before, having started raising my first two kids more than thirty years before, Mark was new to the game when Sam came home in early 2003.

We had parented our foster son, T, for a couple of years, but he was two-years-old when that process began, so baby stuff was behind him.

As with many grownup guys in our world, Mark had a passing familiarity with infants ... he know roughly what shape they were, and was aware of their prodigious abilities to manufacture fluids ... but had never been the sort to grab and cuddle every baby that crossed his path, or coo uncontrollably, or snuffle neck folds in hopes of finding the allusive whiff that if bottled could be called, "Essence of Innocence: It Will Melt Your Heart.".

Sam was his first.

He started falling in love when our referral photo came through in an email, and the few additional shots we received added weight and appendages to the ever-growing love monkey that rode us day and night. Still, however, he admitted to me later, there was a niggle of worry that he would be underwhelmed when they met.

That did not happen. In fact he was so OVERWHELMED, awash with, overtaken by, engulfed by, immersed in ... you get the idea: it was intense ... love and all that comes with love at the first glance of Sam in the flesh that to this day he has a hard time talking about it without getting a bit choked up. And he can forget about ever being able to tell the story of the first moments with his son without a huge smile on his face.

This photo was taken a couple of days after we returned home. Sam was 14-weeks-old ... he was a moose ...and Mark was a first-time father to his baby son.