Happy Leap Day 2020

Before heading to bed this Saturday, this February 29th, I thought I should go check out my old posts and see if I wrote anything on the other leap years.

When I saw that I had contributed on both leap years in question (2012 and 2016), I decided to stave off bed and write a little acknowledgement.

It was funny, reading those right before writhing this. In 2012 we'd been back from Corrie's birthday trip to Central America for a few weeks, and I was still working at the restaurant. In 2016 Corrie was pregnant and we'd just returned from a trip to San Diego.

Now, in 2020, it's Saturday night and I'm assed out---hard---with a second tiny kid and in a constant state of weary. I love it, all of it, for sure, but as of right now I'm so very tired. It's a different kind of tired, different that when Cass was on wake-up-every-three-hours duty for that month after birth. That was...something else.

Anyway, happy Leap Day!

Doing the Right Thing Gets Difficult

My son had a thing, a minor routine medical procedure that the surgeon told me they do hundreds of times a year. "Routine" and "general anesthetic" don't usually go hand in hand in my imagination, and, just in case you weren't aware: general anesthetic means getting knocked out and fully unconscious.

It's way better to do this now, we were told, because it gets dangerous later in life, both for the procedure and for the chances that things develop poorly in the meantime.

This was the right thing to do.

But damn it if it didn't feel like the right thing in he moment.

He looked cute and happy and chilling and all once he relented and agreed to put on the hospital issue scrubs:

Which made what I knew was about to be happening all the more difficult and heartrending.

General anesthetic is the IV drip of sleepy knockout drugs that keep you under for the duration of the procedure, but they always have to start a person out with gas---knock out gas, nitrous oxide, AKA hippie crack.

My son is already recovering nicely, having refused pain meds (mostly) and ice (completely), and is happy to talk with anybody listening about his privates. And this is a great thing. It was the right thing.

And that's what I have to tell myself, since my experience was vastly different than his.

My son loves me and trusts me and, even as we battle often, I don't mind having a headstrong and confident boy. But, in my last moments being able to be with him in the OR, in my last moments before they shooed me out to go wait in a lobby where I could follow the progress by color coded numbers on a screen, those last moments were spent holding him down and forcing a mask of gas over his face.

He fought and fought, and held his breath like a champ. Eventually his eyes rolled back into his head and he sounded like he was hiccuping. It's always like that, dad, they told me as they walked me through the doors. I couldn't form thoughts.

They made me drop of the scrubs they'd given me, and I couldn't even talk. As I waited, a wreck, for the color code to change on the screen for over an hour, the only thoughts I had were: If this turns catastrophic, my last moments with him were gassing him out.

I nervously read a book (with the faraway monitor in my field of vision, keenly watching the color block) to keep from sobbing.

He won't remember. Won't remember any of it.

And me...I'll never forget.

My February Girls

Today is my wife, Corrie's, birthday. Yesterday she gave birth to a daughter, or second child. Now I have two February girls.

Having made it to the due date---January 30th---and sailed past it, was an accomplishment in itself. Our first baby, the extremely boyish boy Cassius, was five weeks early, and all the doctor-y folks we talked with mostly summarized our likely birth proceedings as, "Oh, don't worry, but that baby will be early, too."

That turned out to not be the case.

Not necessarily feeling it with our OB, we decided to change plans at week 37 or so, and had a series of "speed-dates" with a midwife we liked, and decided on a home-birth, mostly because our choices were limited.

The midwifery from 2016 that we'd planned to use with Cass had ended up not working out, and our opinion on the place had shifted by the end of it all. And since we were opting out of the OB and the same hospital that the Boy was born in, we were left thin of options besides home.

So, that was our new plan.

Sunday night rolls around. I finished my slides and papers for Monday, shaved, and joined a pregnant Corrie in bed. We went to sleep before 11:30. At 12:45 she was waking me up, asking me to get towels because her water had broken.

We got the bed ready for future amniotic leaks, I went back to my computer and set my substitute up, and we settled in to go back to sleep, Corrie pretty sure that we couldn't know how much time would be between the water breaking and the baby coming. It was now about 1:20.

As we laid back down, her body---which had been slowly cramping and contracting for weeks by this point---seemed to have a serious cramp, which was actually a real contraction. She breathed through it and said, "That...seemed like a real one."

Ten minutes later and another "real" one, and we texted the midwife. She texted back saying to let her know when they were five minutes apart. After another one, we started timing.

About forty minutes in, averaging eight minutes between contractions, a no-effing-around variety of contraction, they quickly picked up the pace, and started to come about ninety seconds apart. I anxiously texted the midwife again, asking her to head over.

She said she was a half-hour out. The time between her saying she was on her way and the next text, saying she was a half-hour out, may have been four minutes, but felt like twenty. I was standing around helpless, as Corrie was moaning and painfully uncomfortable for a minute every other minute. She said the contractions were getting "pushy," and there was some blood now showing up.

I texted again. The response I got was, "Call or face-time if it feels imminent and we're not there yet."

Okay. OKAY. I got this.

They arrived, Corrie moved to the bedroom proper, stayed on all-fours, and labored for about an hour before our daughter, Camille Adele, arrived. I caught her, but unassisted this time, and got to announce the sex.

Throughout all of it, Cass never woke up, despite being next door the whole time.

7 pounds 8 ounces, 21 inches long, grip like a welder and leg strength like a gymnast, our baby girl is something else.

Our Perfect Day

So, water broke at 12:45, baby came at 4:42, Cass woke up around 6:50. He was so excited; he'd been saying that he wanted a baby sister. We asked him if he wanted to go to school and tell everyone abut his new sister, or stay home with us and have a family day. 

We were ecstatic when he said he wanted to go to school. That time we needed. We spent the rest of the day taking turns cuddling and napping with the young lady. Eventually I showered and went to get the Boy, made dinner, and went back to cuddling and sleeping.

It was a perfect day, a perfect birthing day.