Famous P

A Picture

Awright, time to give this baby a spin...the blogging system that is. Not the child. I would never spin a child. As the PSA's say spinning, stirring or otherwise rotating your baby about any axis will bruise the vodka. And god forbid our vodka tonic should be bruised. Anyway, I'm posting this, the first picture of our baby.

There was one before this during the first ultrasound when I got to hear my child's heartbeat for the first time. That was probably the most momentous sound I think I have ever heard. Up until that point, the idea that we were pregnant, or rather that my wife was pregnant and I was just nervous, was just that, an idea. It seemed quaint and thus distant, light, airy, small, insignificant, insubstantial, not really a part of reality. I guess you could say that it was the last stage of denial. But that heartbeat came out of the speakers at 179 beats per minute and everything changed. I spent the whole day fighting the urge to cry and then later on, after the wife had gone to sleep, I wept like a child.

But this picture is a bit more identifiable than that one. In the lower left corner is the head. The little arm/flippers are above it, curled up in, surprisingly, the fetal position. The tyke is just over two centimeters here, soon to be a gargantuan mutant death machine, an unstoppable killing machine dispensing justice and ice cream...hey, a guy can dream can't he?

I'm Back!

Ok, now where was I?... It seems like so long ago. Yeah, I guess it was. But that what's happen when you get a bun in the oven (or I should say more properly, that's what happens when your wife gets a bun in the oven), sell your house, move to a different city, lose your job and all your friends (well, another parenthetical aside, I didn't really lose them but just moved away which I suppose is really how we always are as humans...OK, I'll shut up now.) and don't have an internet connection and all that good stuff.

But not we've got bandwidth out the wazoo (I am told that my wife's wazoo will hurt for several weeks after delivery) and I have all the time I could have ever wanted...If only I had something to do! Yeah, there is that dissertation thingy. I have every intention of finishing it, really I do. But I've been too busy making the world safe for my baby, which I guess means that I do have something to do and/or have in fact been doing it. Maybe too well? AI might agree about that one.

But it's funny how adamant I've become about such things as the process of maturation (is there a word for the process of pregnancy as it occurs? Other than pregnancy that is...OK, I'll shut up now) continues. I am afraid now in ways I've never been before. Not for myself but for my child. And for my wife as well in new and different ways from what I've ever felt before. She's going to be flying over the Fourth of July weekend and suddenly I have these terrible visions of terror in my head. I've become prey to my worst nightmares, as if I wasn't already paranoid enough. I just know I'm going to drive my kid crazy, following them around like the secret service or something, wanting to be there, knowing I can't, that large parts of life are sheer tedium and endless boredom and the dull repetitive thud of routine and that's precisely what makes the interruptions so terrifying. Indeed, it's what makes the interruptions interruptions. One minute you're going along in your nice little placid life and then all of the sudden WHAM!

Hey, this is starting to sound familiar...