Due Date vs. Snowpocalyse Two: Who Wins?

Harts, in happier cold-weather climes

Today is February 12th. Hilary's due date with Baby Boy #2 is the 15th. Currently we are at home due to an ice storm that overnight is supposed to transition seamlessly into a snowstorm. The roads are impassable. These are the facts of the case, and they are undisputed.

It's a very strange world we occupy.* Life begins and ends on this planet at every waking moment, which means that no matter what is happening, good or bad, someone is being brought into the world in the midst of it. But you never think it's going to happen to you, right?

* I mean this in a micro sense, but certainly the same could be said on a macro scale as well.

We are coming to the end of Day 2 of "Snowpocalypse Two: The Snowpocalypsing" in Atlanta, and tomorrow looks to be more of the same, which is to say we'll be home another day with no reasonable thought of leaving house. And Hilary could go at any minute.

Which means, we are really, really hoping we hit that due date.

In the immediate lead up to Jamie's birth, I remember the overwhelming anxiety of knowing that my world could be turned upside down at any minute. Minutes felt like hours, hours like days, and days like longer-seeming days.

I wasn't ready, and therefore I didn't want it to happen. But that was all existential. This time? This is legit. This is an actual crisis, or at least a potential crisis if the wheels get put in motion.

Hilary has developed some sciatica-like symptoms in the late stages of her pregnancy. Every time she moves, she winces in pain. To the untrained eye, these bear a striking resemblance to the onset of contractions. Each time it happens, I nearly need a change of underwear.

An aside.

Often times in sports, a player will make a mistake in a game of huge magnitude that in a losing effort ends up being the thing they are remembered for the rest of their lives. Chris Webber's phantom timeout. Buckner's booted grounder. For the old timers, Merkle's Boner. But sometimes that mistake doesn't preclude victory, and it becomes just another footnote of history.**

** The best example I can come up with from recent vintage? Ahmad Bradshaw's excuse-me touchdown from the Giants-Patriots Super Bowl a couple years back. 

That's kind of the situation we find ourselves in right now. Our cousins, who live a mile or so from the hospital we are scheduled to deliver at, offered to host us for the duration of the storm. We declined, mostly because this entire weather situation seems like a gross overreaction to what happened here a couple weeks ago, but also because Jamie was born 5 days late (and even that was after an induction), and I've convinced myself it'll go down the same way this time as well. Or because we are morons.

This will either make for a charming anecdote we can share making small talk at parties, or it will be a truly life-altering experience. What will we do if Hilary goes into labor and we can't drive our car on the road? This could legitimately happen. Even as I sit here typing this thought, thinking there is no way this could happen, THIS COULD SERIOUSLY HAPPEN. For fuck's sake, I could be writing this very sentence and Hilary could scream out in agony and I'll have no choice but to start furiously googling how to deliver a baby at home.***

***Though I am sure someone has made a fairly easy to follow DIY video on YouTube.

I've mentioned before on this blog that my friends have a saying that everything always works out for Micah, and I am sure that line of thinking led to us bypassing the safe play of staying closer to the hospital just in case. And again, even though it would be PERFECTLY FUCKING RATIONAL for this baby to be born in the next 24 hours, I still pretty much believe that everything will turn out just fine. Which grand scheme it will, no matter if the baby arrives via the careful hands of an obstetrician or via catcher's mitt.

I guess the most important thing out of all of this is that Hilary and I made the choice to stay home together. Because if this was just my idea that I talked her into, then tomorrow we'd be introducing Itoldyouso Hart to the world.

I kid of course, Hilary is not that mean-spirited or vindictive, two traits we hope to avoid passing along to our soon-to-be child. Instead we want him to be honest, to be selfless, and to be compassionate.

But more than anything, right now, we want him to be patient.

This Again? Thoughts on having a second child

Everything changes when you have a kid. This is not news - everyone we knew with children told us this before Jamie was born, and it doesn't take a quantum physicist to understand why. New priorities, new hours, new sacrifices, all the stereotypical stuff.

However, as we charge into the final weeks before Baby #2's supposed due date, I am struck by how, much like before Jamie was born, everything in our lives seems at peace, in equilibrium. We have our routines -- we know who is doing what and when, and there is comfort in knowing that everything is taken care of.

Right now there is normalcy, which puts my frame of mind right back where we were P.J. (pre-Jamie) -- clinging desperately to the present and wondering how in the world we'll survive the coming changes. 

One was hard? Fuck you - two looks hard. All the effort required by a newborn, with the added bonus of a two-year old who is going to lose his shit for 15 minutes if you don't play Cat Stevens' "Moonshadow" on the Apple TV IMMEDIATELY. 

Plus, there's no mystery anymore. We know what's coming, and I'm convinced it's worse knowing our fate than not knowing before Jamie arrived.

In no particular order, the things I'm least looking forward to:

1 - Irregular sleep. No one likes the lack of sleep early parenthood requires, but it's not so much the tiredness or irritability that bothers me. It's that very, very specific sensation of closing your eyes, blinking, and being told that 2-3 hours have passed and it's time to feed the baby again. There is nothing quite like it, like the world is playing a practical joke on you.

My dad has often told the story of the time early in my parents' marriage when my mom came home from school in the afternoon and laid down to take a nap.  While she slept, my dad proceeded to change the times on all the clocks, then woke her up to say it was time for her to get up and make dinner, which she proceeded to do, even though it was like 2:30 in the afternoon. Pretty solid prank to be honest, and one I imagine would be way more difficult to pull off today. Yet that's what I think back to every time this happened with Jamie -- that only a minute or two had passed, and my dad was somewhere in the house controlling blackout shades and with some app that allows him to remotely control all the digital clocks on the premises. 

I kid of course about this scenario. I know it's not the reality, plus my father is roughly as handy with his phone as the fetus in Hilary's womb. He's one of America's leaders in Jewish culture, education, and pocket dials.

2 - Cleaning bottles. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck cleaning bottles. It's not just that they have to be cleaned every night (though again - fuuuuuuuuuuuuck), it's that my definition of clean is diametrically opposite Hilary's. Palestinians and Israelis are closer to defining the terms of a viable two-state solution than Hilary and I are to agreeing at which point a used bottle becomes clean. 

My definition: Rinse with soap and water. Finis.

Her definition: Purchase all-new cleaning supplies. Sterilize entire kitchen. Purify self in the waters of Lake Minnetonka. Put on full-body hazmat suit. Shrink self Innerspace-style to fit within interior of bottles. Rigorously cover every square millimeter with NASA-grade disinfectant. Repeat process thricely.

Oh, do I exaggerate? Whose side are you on anyway?

I do not look forward to cleaning bottles.

3 - Jamie. As if to prove how myopic every parent is in regards to their family, I'm quite certain that no set of parents has ever so lavishly heaped attention on a child as we have Jamie. He already hates it when I wake him up in the morning instead of Hilary, so he is in for a rude awakening when his brother gets here. 

I am hopeful he will adjust well to a new sibling, and in truth our friends' eldest children all seem to be adjusting pretty well. But, as I say, surely they all did a better job avoiding spoiling them.

We spend a lot of time talking about whether or not Jamie understands what is happening. He's super verbal (like his old man), so he talks about baby brother, but as far as I know, baby brother makes as much sense to him as a concept as a sensible 401K plan.

Yes, change is in store for us, and no matter how often we've dealt with change in the past and survived, it still feels like this time will be different. I guess we'll find out one way or the other soon enough.