As the exhaustion settles into a low hum, some things come back...
February 20th, 2007 (10:58 a.m)
Some random images and observations from the days of birth:
- The security guards at the hospital are kind of sullen until you tell them you think you might be having a baby. Then they spring out of their chairs, hastily finding their courtesy, as if the Queen had walked in. Kinda sweet, really.
- Going downstairs at the hospital late one night and realizing that the lobby was populated by about a dozen pregnant women, all in their bathrobes, slowly shuffling around in wide circles. I don't know if it was a technique to wait out labor or what, but it was very odd, very zombiesh, navigating these slowly shuffling, tired women.
- Trying to get the baby in the car seat when we were leaving the hospital was an embarassment. Me in the backseat of the car, slamming the thing around, fighting with straps while my wife stood outside the car, holding the baby in her 1892 Little House on the Prairie christening dress while my inlaws looked on in mute horror, probably wondering how I would ever keep my family fed and clothed.
- I don't care what kind of fast-food junkie you are -- after three days of eating nothing but fried-chicken sandwiches from the hospital food court, you'll look to your spouse and groan, "I could really use a vegetable right now." Of course, then I went to a southern cooking restaurant and ordered fried squash and green beans steeped in ham -- but they were still vegetables!
" There was never a child so lovely but his mother
was glad to get
him to sleep."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
February 18th, 2007 (12:39 a.m)
We were watching Battlestar Galactica when the missus came into the room, and, with a furrowed brow, began poring over her pregnancy books.
"What are you looking for?" I asked, with no small amount of trepidation.
"I'm not sure, but my water might have just broken," she said. "That or your spawn's big ol' head is pressing on my bladder."
So we did what any good geeks would do. We finished watching Battlestar, with my wife checking on things during the commercial breaks. When Battlestar ended, she started feeling some cramps, so we headed to the hospital, just to be on the safe side.
I took a leisurely pace up the interstate -- we both figured it was a false alarm, and that the nurses would send us back home. I thought, briefly, about driving like a madman past the local speed trap, just so I could get try to get one of those police escorts to the hospital like they always have in the movies. But we went on to the hospital, where they checked out the wife. She was already dilated 6 cm out of a possible 10. So much for false alarms.
So by about 2 a.m., we were in the labor and delivery room, with the missus getting pricked like a pincushion by the nurse trying to insert the IV -- "ghost veins," said, but we're not so sure. Various nurses came in to put sensors on my wife's belly, and plenty more poked their heads in to see if she wanted drugs. We called family members, so that they could have plenty of time to hit the road and get to the hospital.
As the hours rolled on, the contractions got closer and more vivid, and I sat there feeling increasingly useless.
Somewhere along the way, after hours of contractions, they gave her an injection to get the contractions closer together. They had the doctor ready to come in. Soon, the nurse got my wife to start pushing -- or rather, she would have, except right after the first round of pushing, the phone rang. The nurse answered, and we could hear the following:
"She just started pushing."
<inaudible contradiction on the other end of the phone>
"But she just started pushing."
<more inaudible arguing>
"OK, I'll get her back on her breathing. But tell the doctor he needs to get here fast."
Turns out we'd gotten caught in the dreaded shift change. The original doctor's shift was ending, so we had to wait for the next doctor to get in. So after they'd primed my wife's spirits for some heavy-duty pushing, she had to lay back and endure some more contractions.
Once the doctor got there and the contractions were coming more quickly, the real work began. The nurse, thankfully, was a real drill sergeant -- exactly what we needed. The 10 minutes our classes had devoted to breathing exercises had left me pretty much useless.
At this point, my wife had apparently decided that drugs weren't an option, or maybe she'd just forgotten about them. She seemed to be in a great deal of pain; maybe it had broken her brain.
I know she was exhausted. Because her water had broken near my wife's bedtime, she'd gone nearly 24 hours without sleep. She was literally falling asleep between contractions. I was having a hard time keeping my thoughts together -- no telling how bad it was for my wife.
After a lot of pushing, the baby wasn't getting any closer to coming out, so they had my wife try different positions to get the baby to shift a little.
The nurse was very excited about this. "I can't believe I'm getting to do this!" she exclaimed. "Most of the time, people are on the drugs, so we can't do this!"
I half expected my wife to pimp slap the nurse, or at least pimp slap me by proxy, but she didn't.
And pretty soon, apparently, the baby had indeed shifted. They got my wife back in position, the doctor came in, and, a few minutes later, the wee bairn was born.
As the baby's coming out, as a father, you're trying to sneak a peek past the umbilical cord to see what the baby's gender is. When you see that it's a female, you're certainly not disappointed, not by any stretch, but you do realize that your worries just tripled over the next 18 years.
That may sound sexist, but it really only comes from this point of view: I can understand young male stupidity. I've been there. I have insight. Young female stupidity? You might as well ask me to decipher runes on the side of a UFO.
But at any rate, we spent a few days at the hospital, letting the baby get poked and prodded. Exhaustion set in on the first day, with both of us too tired to keep our eyes open. Friends and family came through to congratulate us -- overall, it's a bit of a blur now.
We've had the little one at home for about five days now, and we had to take her to the doctor yesterday. She hadn't been producing dirty diapers at the rate she needed to, and the doctor said that she hadn't been getting enough food, and that while the wife was getting the breastfeeding momentum going, for us to supplement the breastfeeding with formula and pumped breast milk. It's been an extra level of stress, not knowing whenever she's feeding whether she's getting enough food. But we'll get it figured out. We've been keeping an eye on the diapers, and her next appointment is in a few days.
There's so much stuff I'm already forgetting, but it's been quite the whirlwind. But one thing's for certain. Our child refuses to sleep at night. Oh, she'll sleep all day, but let night fall and she'll wail like a banshee until dawn.
Just like her dad, really.
"Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice..."
-- What, like that's a good thing?
From "Fire and Ice,"
with no apologies to Robert Frost, that snowy-evening-loving, ice-craving, sleigh-riding
son of a ...
February 11th, 2007 (12:51 a.m)
Well, it's winter, and we have guests, so that means just one thing: the heat must go out. Yea, verily, 'tis like the return of the swallows to Capistrano, or the return of the Monarch butterflies to their dwindling forest home down in Mexico.
Every winter it seems, we follow the same pattern. The missus' family comes to visit, the temperatures drop outside, and the heating unit dies. This makes the third time (although to be fair, one was during that horrendous ice storm that knocked the entire region out for weeks), and this is with a brand new heating/air unit. At the moment, I'm sitting here, listening to a fan that won't go off as it blows cold air into the house, while the thermostat says it's trying to heat the house, yet the interior temperature has dropped from 72 to 65 in a couple of hours. And this on a night where it will be about 25 degrees by dawn.
Yay.
I can take it when the air conditioning goes out in the summer. We lived blissfully without AC for years throughout many a hot summer. There's this neat little trick called shade trees, an ancient secret that seems to have been lost from the knowledge of modern-day subdivision developers. It's true! You let a tree or two actually grow taller than your house, in the immediate vicinity of your house, and it lessens the effects of the summer sun.
Unfortunately, this is winter, the devil's own season, and once again, the heat's dead, the gas logs in the fireplace won't light despite my best efforts, and I'm contemplating a move to the Florida Keys.
I swear, if this happens during one more family visit, I'm going to be convinced that one of my in-laws has the power of directing tiny thermonuclear pulses at all my electronics...
"Heed!" Redux
February 11th, 2007 (12:26 a.m)
Realizing that some folks might not get the So I Married an Axe Murderer references in the last post (and, really, the fewer folks who dwell on the existence of that movie, the better), I offer this:
"Look at the size of that boy's heed!"
-- Stuart Mackenzie, So I Married an Axe Murderer
February 9th, 2007 (12:17 a.m)
We're about two weeks away from baby-day (give or take about two weeks -- it could happen in the next five minutes for all I know), and we're still not ready. No name picked, the crib is in parts on the bedroom floor (some parts are missing), and the doctor told my wife today that the impending arrival looks to be "sizeable."
This is a sore spot with my wife, as it would be with any woman. "Sizeable" implies a wee version of Jethro Bodine coming out with a gravy-sopped biscuit already in his hand. "Sizeable" implies a friend's son who's only 9 months old, but who's wearing an 18-month-old's clothes. But with my genetics, "sizeable" also implies a big head.
This is a peculiar bit of slander perpetrated by my sister, who saw one oddly-angled picture of me as a baby, and began a decade of claiming that I looked like a bobble-head doll throughout my childhood. I don't think I had a big head, or if I did, I grew into it. I certainly didn't hear anyone complaining about it when my big ol' noggin' was providing much needed shade, or when it was inadvertently saving the rest of my grammar school dodgeball teams because I couldn't get it out of the way of the ball in time.
It reminds me of one of the few decent parts of So I Married an Axe Murderer, in which the Scottish grandfather riffs on the size of his grandson's giant head, finishing up with (if memory serves):
"He'll be crying himself to sleep tonight on his giant pillow."
I'd be more worried about the child inheriting my long torso. I swear, half the time, I look like a wiener dog standing on its hind legs.
A goat-footed balloon man looks at 40 (or 400, or 4000...)
(with apologies to e.e. cummings)
The missus and I went to see Pan's Laybyrinth this past week. This makes two movies in three weeks for us. I think, as the baby gets closer, we're trying to stock up on outside experiences. To hear everyone talk, we'll shortly turn into wan, sleep-deprived slaves of the wee one, never seeing the light of day, putting our hands up to hold our heads in sorrow, only to find that our hands are covered in viscous bodily fluids.
But anyway, Pan's Labyrinth:
Quite a film. Dark and disturbing, alternating grim images of the Spanish Civil War with the dark, moonlit fantasy world in which a young girl immerses herself. There are some haunting scenes in this one, and not all of them from the fantasy elements.
In fact, I think the commercials and trailers fail to give an accurate picture of Pan's Labyrinth. Granted, admitting that you have a patiently-paced, subtitled movie set in an obscure (to Americans) period in history is probably box office poison, but the fantasy elements really make up a very small part of the movie. The bulk of the story concerns rebels, sadistic capitans, struggles with childbirth, loyalty, and man's brutality toward his fellow man.
But the fantasy elements take just the right tone. The faun (mossy and creaky and jagged of bark, like he's as old as the Earth) who acts as guide to this fairyland shifts like shadows between lighthearted servant and menace -- his motives are never clear. Another denizen has no eyes in its face, pressing eyeballs into gouged slits into its hands when it wishes to see. Like the original fairy tales that the Grimms and others collected, this fairy tale is full of danger, and it's not certain that the girls' quests are any safer than the real world and its gunshots.
There is one advantage, though, to people not knowing what they're in for. As we sat through the previews (including an Oh.My.God. preview for 300), and the start of the movie, it was apparent that one couple was not going to shut up. When it became obvious that the subtitles weren't going to end, however, the couple left. I wanted to dance in the aisles, I was so happy to see them go. It's easy for me to be pulled out of even the most engrossing films by clueless or rude people, and Pan's Labyrinth is definitely a move deserving of full attention.