Hey Jude: One month of Dadding

At 6:58pm on 22 August 2026, we welcomed Jude Derek Craske into the world.

Our boy arrived with ferocious lungs and a magenta hue, erupting into our lives with a force only matched by the wave of love that crashed around us in that delivery suite.

I couldn’t decide who to marvel at more, our beautiful son or my incredible wife – so I breathed in both.

I also didn’t know what feelings or emotions to turn to.

Love. Pride. Excitement. Love. Nervousness. Joy. Love. Protectiveness. Exhaustion.

Love. Love. Love.  

So I pirouetted between them while also feeling all of them.

Especially the love.

Our worlds changed, we blinked, and now a month has passed.

The way these past few weeks flew by served as a stark reminder: it’s been almost a year since I published anything on this website.

As that time has worn on, it's felt harder and harder to know what to say or write, and the silence only kept yawning louder.

I even considered if I could justify having my own little corner of the internet anymore.

Cards on the table, I didn’t think the demands and tiredness of being a new dad would be conducive to ending that almost-year-long streak.

But after the blur of these first few weeks of parenthood, I found myself determined to write something, anything, to break it.

Maybe it was because so much has felt enormous and raw of late. Maybe I needed an outlet. Maybe it could be a means of processing things.

In light of this yearning to create, I am re-embracing this website as my creative playground.

And if I can help, teach something, elicit feelings, encourage discussion or otherwise engage with folks along the way – well, that's just swell.

But beneath and before all that, there's writing in its purest form: for ourselves.

So I wrote. For me.

Lots of you landed here by means of a blank flatplan template. Some of you are friends and family. Others might have arrived purely by chance or accident.

Whichever category you fall into, thanks for being here, even if just for a little while.