Yes, it’s been a long time since I’ve written anything here. I know, you needn’t point it out to me. I’m offering no excuses or remorse. Shit happens, and I’m lazy and overcommitted. So, there you go. Maybe I’ll do better for a while again. Maybe not. It seems I have a new distraction in life.
My beautiful new daughter, Megan, who I’ve begun referring to as “my little nutmeg”, was born on June 7th at 6:30 pm. She weighed 9 lbs, 1 oz at birth and measured 21 inches. She came out looking fully cooked, without much of that cheesy, vernix stuff, and lacking the purply-wrinkly old-person look of most babies. Her skin was smooth as…well, a baby’s butt, and she thus far seems to have a reasonibly pleasant disposition. Granted, I realize now that means very little as I’m learning that even the most pleasant children like to test the “how much can I piss off mommy” waters by the time they’re 2 or 2 and a half. Drew, our oldest child, likes to swim out to the “no, Mommy, I’m not taking a nap” bouy without a life jacket. Sure, we usually get him back to shore (meaning bed), but not without a whole lot of screaming and flailing about. But I digress. I’ll address two-year old tamptrums in the future.
I usually have some kind of entertaining side story or commentary to go along a child’s birth, either about man’s futility in the delivery room, or a sitcom-esque race to get home from the job interview in time for the arrival. This time, no such drama. The baby was a week overdue, and we had to go have a test to make sure everything was a-ok prior to induction the following day. Having a sneaky suspicion and not wanting to drive back home to get The Bag if they sent us directly on to the hospital, I put it in the car. The nice Doctor looking at the test results (whom I think might have been a recipient of a little Puddinette payolla) decided not to wait one more day for induction and sent us to the hospital to get that baby going. 5 hours later, the little Puddin Spice was pushed out of her nice cozy womb and into the World as We Know It. Yes, of course she was a little ticked. I think she takes after me and was planning to come out, you know, when she was ready. A little later. Maybe tomorrow.
I have only one anecdote from the baby birthing. When my alarm went off the morning before, Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” was playing. That horrible song (come on, seriously, B-A-N-A-N-A-S? That’s what passes for music these days?) is quite an earworm, and it infected my wife before I beat it back with the snooze button. So as she lay on her bed in the birthing suite, enjoying a nice popsicle and 5 hours of labor pains, she complained to me that the song was stuck in her head.
Foolish woman. Little did she know that just a few days before, a friend of mine mentioned that he’d just returned from Vegas and was dragged, forcibly, by his better half to see Barry Manilow. As soon as I heard that, a thousand images flashed through my head of that curly-haired bastard (Manilow, not my friend) and his little beagle. It was like I had heard some secret spy codeword that instantly unlocked a covert assassination mission, a mastery of the Ninjitsu, and the skill to perform cardiac surgery with a dead bluegill. Except I didn’t get any of that cool stuff. No sir, not me. My secret repressed spy knowledge apparently includes the full lyrics to the music of Barry Manilow. I write the songs, indeed.
As soon as the word Manilow had left his lips, my poor, feverish brain was infected with “Copacobana”. And now that you’ve read that word, I’m sure you know how it is. Copa comes in, but don’t come out. I can just see you stooped over your respective keyboards, cringing with the knowledge that you can hear the melody in your own heads taking control. Welcome to the club…now you’re screwed like me. Well, not really like me, but a little
So, anyway, the poor Puddinette thought she had it bad with “Hollaback” and complained that she was going to have that song stuck in her head all day…labor or not. I laughed and asked if she wanted me to fix that for her. She nearly pleaded to take the pain that no epidural could touch away. I brought her torture with a single word. “Copacobana”, I said to her. Her contractions that day didn’t come close to causing the pain and suffering that I did. But hey, at least I took care of her Stefani problem, right?
Megan’s just lucky we didn’t name her Lola.
Anyway, without further ado, I give you…pictures
Puddintopia 