August 11, 2025 was my five year wedding anniversary. It was also my first day of college. And it was my son's first day of preschool.
I did not plan any of it. Enrollment picked the date, not me. But I have thought about it a lot since, because it is almost too on the nose. Five years earlier we stood up in front of everyone and said we were a team. Five years later, the biggest bet of our life together started on the exact same day my son started his own first big thing, and I spent a chunk of my anniversary writing a discussion board post introducing myself to strangers. Happy anniversary, babe. I got you a syllabus.
Rewind a couple of months. The last post ended with me on a dugout floor and then on a drive home, turning fear into a plan. Here is what the plan actually was, and what it cost to say it out loud.
That summer I did the thing I do. I researched at night, quietly, until the crazy idea had a route, a timeline, and a price tag. Then I brought it to my wife, because that was the whole point. Any plan where I disappear into a screen for two years touches her life as much as mine, and I had already learned what happens when you make life decisions by announcement instead of conversation. We talked through it like a trade deadline. What we were giving up, what we were getting back, what the risk actually was. The part that scared me most was the clock, two more years of school in my thirties, until I landed on the answer I still lean on today: time passes anyways. It was going to be 2027 either way. The only question was whether I would have a degree when it got here. She said go. So I walked away from the dream job in baseball, the one I had already decided to leave on that drive home, and I bet the next two years on a version of me that did not fully exist yet.
Then the first day of the rest of my life showed up and it was mostly reading PDFs.
Nobody tells you how unglamorous the leap actually is. I went back for a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, online, at thirty-something, and I did not ease in. Four courses a trimester, two at a time in eight week terms. Leadership, communication, logic and design, and networking, while my wife was pregnant and our house still needed to be a functioning house.
Part of the plan was that I became the childcare. My son had been in full-time daycare his whole life up to that point, and the plan traded that for three and a half hours of preschool and me for the rest of the day. So my study hall was those preschool hours, all of it. Drop-off in the morning, race home, and the clock started running: assignments first while the brain was freshest, house chores stacked in the gaps between due dates. Pick-up time meant pencils down, no extensions. There is nothing like a hard deadline that walks up and hugs your leg. No heroic 4am-grind montage yet, whatever the other back-to-school dads are posting.
The course that surprised me was the one I expected the least from. Applying Leadership Principles. I signed up for a computer science degree and my first term handed me what I assumed would be a box-checking class about synergy. Then the signature assignment landed: write a graduation speech about my own leadership. My style, where it came from, what I had figured out about how I lead.
I wrote about the championship game.
It was the first time I had put the at-bat, the intentional walk, and the dugout floor into words. I typed the first draft raw and honest, basically in one sitting, and somewhere in the middle of writing it I understood the whole thing differently. Sitting in the moment, that game felt like the universe piling on. On paper, it read like a hinge. The night everything pivoted. A leadership class made me write the story you read in the last post. Homework built this blog. I do not know what grade the universe gets for delivery, but the assignment landed.
I want to be honest about the cost, too, because this series does not work if I only show you the scoreboard. In September, mid-term, my body sent an invoice. A migraine bad enough that I ended up in the ER on a Saturday. It turned out to be nothing dangerous, but sitting in a hospital bed doing the math on how I would still get the week's assignments in was maybe not the sign of a man with a balanced life. I turned everything in. I am not sure that is the brag I thought it was at the time.
The first trimester ended the last day of November. Four courses, three A's and one A minus, and honestly the grades were not the part that stuck. The first time I went to college, years ago, I was a kid chasing a baseball dream with school as the thing I did on the side, and it showed. This time every assignment happened in the margins of a real life, in preschool-hour windows, in a hospital waiting room, and the work came back better than anything I did when I had all the time in the world. Turns out the guy with no time wastes none of it.
And the truth is nobody at my kitchen table cared about the grades. My wife was growing our second kid while I typed discussion posts about leadership theory. What she cared about, what I cared about once I closed the laptop, was that the plan from that drive home was real now. And it was more than real. The old job had kept me out most evenings, and the only slice of my son I got was the morning scramble, prep and drop-off, then gone until the next one. Now I was home. I was actually raising him. This was me finally being the teammate I stood up and promised to be five years ago, building our future and growing our family together. We were doing it. One trimester down.
The winter trimester started a week later. So did everything else. Next pitch.