Two weeks ago
By Brendan Loy
Two weeks ago tonight, Becky and I were sitting on our couch, watching Law & Order reruns on our TiVo, and joking about the meaninglessness of due dates. Loyette's "scheduled" arrival was the next day, yet there was no sign of imminent labor -- which is, of course, quite typical. Only about five percent of women actually give birth on their due dates, and first babies are often late. Becky had actually published a post about due dates on her new Happy Housewife blog earlier that day, suggesting that a "due range" would be more realistic, and that "the person who invented the Due Date should be tied up while a bunch of outraged, very pregnant women throw rotten vegetables at him."
At a few minutes after midnight on the morning of December 31, as our last Law & Order of the evening was wrapping up, I noticed the time on the clock, and I said to Becky: "Hey, they say pregnant women have a 'bun in the oven,' right? Well, shouldn't you be going 'ding!' right now?" But of course, the odds being what they were, neither of us really expected anything to happen that night or day. We went to bed around 12:30 AM, fully expecting a peaceful New Year's Eve and a continuation of the "waiting game" into 2008. I had pretty much given up on getting that tax deduction.
The rest is history, of course. Barely two hours after my "ding" joke, a few minutes past 2:00 AM, Becky woke me up with the fateful words: "I think my water might have broken." It had. She marvels at how quickly I -- the normally groggy, grumpy, slow waker -- jumped out of bed, wide awake, and sprung into action. Less than an hour later, we were checked into the hospital and settling into our comfy labor & delivery room. Twelve hours later, our beautiful baby girl was born. And now, a few hours short of fourteen days later, I'm sitting on that same couch where we watched those Law & Order episodes... but I find myself inhabiting a whole new world, one in which everything revolves around the little angel who is, even as I type this, snuggled up against my belly, listening to my continuing efforts to "shush" her to sleep.
It's hard to believe it's only been two weeks. It seems like everything before December 31, 2007 was a lifetime ago. And I suppose, in a certain sense, it was -- if we measure "lifetime" on the time scale of the completely adorable creature in the fuzzy pink sleeper who is now sucking adamantly on my right index finger while I try to finish typing this sentence left-handed. :)
Happy Two-Week Birthday, Loyette.
P.S. As an aside about the events of December 30: a few hours earlier, before watching those Law & Order reruns, we watched the movie Knocked Up on DVD after dinner with Becky's parents, who had arrived in town earlier that day. We saw Knocked Up in the theater just a few days after learning we were going to have a baby, and, as it turned out, we watched it again less than 24 hours before said baby's arrival!
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