Filed under: life
Sometimes I wish I had somehow found a way to save all those Myspace blogs before I closed my account because that was the blog where I kept my “baby blog” posts, and I never bothered to save them after I posted.
Those blogs were all about my son Garrett: From the first pic of Andrea’s positive pregnancy test, to the doctor’s confirmation and due date, to the first sound of his heart beat (at 10 weeks), to his 3D ultrasound photos (the “gun show” pic comes to mind), to seeing him stick his butt up in the womb each night while we lay in bed so we could pat it, and finally into Andrea’s legendary labor and delivery – going 100% natural and delivering him in just over 4 hours. Then the nervousness as he was taken away to a precautionary unit to get the baby poo cleaned up since he had pooped in the womb (which is non-toxic, but can cause breathing problems).
My baby blogs logged all that, and it blows my mind that 1 year ago today Garrett joined us outside the womb.
On one hand it seems like only yesterday because I can remember almost every detail about the day and night of the delivery. On the other hand, so much has happened in these 12 months that it seems like we should be celebrating 5 years of life outside the womb!
The strangest thing about Garrett’s delivery was my first instinctual reaction to his arrival. I anticipated a lot of emotion on my part – God knows the build up was there. But when the moment finally came, I watched his little head crest, then finally emerge from Andrea, and I saw him cleaned up and crying for the first time, there were no tears and no big “moment” from me. When I saw him for the first time I just sort of knew him… it was like seeing a person I had known for a long time but hadn’t seen for some time, and loved deeply. Fortress-deep.
When he was released from the precautionary unit at 4am (or was it 3am… he was delivered on the night of setting the clocks back last year), it was surreal. I was crashed on a pull-out sofa in Andrea’s hospital room, neither of us sleeping when the nurses brought him in to us. When they left and it was just the three of us, I just remember having a smile that I couldn’t contain. After a while we thought he was tired and we wanted to get a few hours of sleep, too, but when we tried to put him to sleep he didn’t want any of it. He wanted to check us out, and we happily abliged.
The emotion hit me as I was driving back to the hospital after driving home for a shower, to feed the dogs, etc. the following morning. I was on I-71 when all that happened finally hit. I was glad for it, too, because I am not a man who believes that being a parent is a right, something I deserve.
I’m not going to try and give justice to what that feels like… to be a father/parent for the first time. All the firsts… and they keep coming every day… but those first few days and weeks… and this first year – wow.
