My Defining Days of the Decade: #1

Exactly one year, to the day, after I originally planned to finish my Brendan’s Defining Days of the Decade series, I’ve finally done it. (Well, except for the “honorable mentions”, which I’ll write up… er, probably sometime next year.) Yeah, it took way too long — we’re one-tenth of the way through a new decade already! — but we’ve finally arrived at #1 on the list. So, at long last, without further ado, here it is: the complete list of my “Defining Days” of 2000-2009:

#12: May 15, 2003: Becky and I Graduate From College
#11: November 7, 2000: The Election of a Lifetime
#10: August 14, 2003: The Great Northeast Blackout
#9: September 15, 2008: The Economy Implodes — And I Get A Job
#8: July 3, 2004: Becky and I Get Engaged
#7: July 2, 2000: The Day I Fell In Love
#6: August 26, 2005: “Get The Hell Out”
#5: April 30, 2007: Holy Crap, I’m Gonna Be A Daddy
#4: October 15, 2005: A Football Game for the Ages
#3: September 11, 2001: “You Guys, You All Have To Wake Up!”
#2 (tied): March 7, 2005 and December 30, 2005: Our Wedding Day(s)

And Number One…

(tied) December 31, 2007 and July 13, 2009: The Births of Our Children

It’s the biggest cliché in the world, the most obvious and unremarkable answer to the question, What was the happiest/greatest/most memorable/important/defining day of your life? Virtually everyone with kids will say it was the day(s) when their kid(s) was/were born. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this — from celebrities, athletes, whomever. The rank order always seems to be (1) kids’ births; (2) wedding day; (3) other stuff. Before I had kids, I always thought this was a little lame, perhaps attributable to guys pandering to their wives or trying to be politically correct.

I was wrong. Like many clichéd statements, this one is oft-repeated for a simple reason: it’s absolutely true.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, changes your life — to the point that the word “changes” seems grossly inadequate; “revolutionizes” or “utterly remakes” would be more appropriate — the way having a child does. Everything before the birth becomes instantly obsolete, recalled like the quaint mental remnant of a far distant past. One day, your life is a certain way, and then you have a kid, and it’s a completely different way. Oh yeah, and then you go from having one kid to two kids… and it’s completely different again.

What came before, the life you lived prior to the birth of your child(ren), seems like a fog, an impossibly long-ago and far-away memory. As I recently tweeted, when I think back on the time before December 31, 2007, I feel a bit like Gandalf the White, trying to recall the time before his death and rebirth on Zirakzigil after defeating the Balrog. Yes… Gandalf… that was what they used to call me. Gandalf the Grey. It feels just about that distant.

This might seem to suggest that perhaps 12/31/07 — the birth date of my firstborn child — should stand alone atop this list, with 7/13/09 maybe number two or number three. But, first of all, I wasn’t going to do anything that could be perceived as “ranking” my children. Just not happening. 🙂 Secondly and more to the point, Loyacita’s birth was, in its own way, just as profoundly impactful as Loyette’s. I’ve heard it crudely said that, when it comes to kids, “one is an accessory; two is a lifestyle.” That’s a joke, of course, and as I said, it’s a crude formulation — but there’s also more than a grain of truth to it.

(Incidentally, for any blog newbies who might be reading this, “Loyette” and “Loyacita” are, obviously, not our children’s real names. They’re online nicknames, used in this space to prevent the girls from being instantly Google-able from birth. So, for instance, it’ll at least be a little bit harder for some teenage classmate to someday Google one of their names, find this blog post, and embarrass them with their father’s gushing parental prose.)

Much like Loyette’s birth, Loyacita’s birth also marks a very distinct dividing line between “before” and “after” eras of my life, and our life as a family. For just about a year-and-a-half, Loyette was an only child, and we had one kiddo to dote on, and manage, and take care of, and raise. And then suddenly we had two little goobers, and suddenly Loyette had a sister, adding inexpressible richness to her life and ours. As the P.R. hacks at Apple would say, except in this case it’s actually true: “This changes everything. Again.”

Becky’s due date with Loyette was December 31, 2007 — New Year’s Eve. In the days leading up to that date, we talked, half-jokingly, about hoping the baby would be born by then, not only to alleviate Becky’s late-third-trimester discomfort, but also to get the various child tax deductions and credits for the entire calendar year 2007 (a not-insignificant chunk of change; ultimately, it basically funded our trip to Connecticut for Tim Stevens’s wedding in July 2008). But of course what we really wanted was a healthy baby and a healthy mommy; the exact date, and the tax write-off, were insignificant in the grant scheme of things.

Even so, when Becky and I went to bed late on December 30, after eating dinner with her parents (who had just arrived that day from Arizona for their month-long, help-out-with-the-new-baby visit) and watching the movie “Knocked Up” on DVD, I confess I was ever-so-slightly disappointed that we were still at home, and not in the hospital. Perhaps Becky’s sudden last-minute craving for cashews should have tipped me off that something big was about to happen, but hey, she was a pregnant lady; they have cravings. All in all, the odds now seemed heavily stacked against that tax deduction. It looked like Loyette would be born sometime in 2008.

Before we closed our eyes and went to sleep, the clock struck midnight, and I said jokingly to Becky, “Hey, it’s December 31. If you’ve got a ‘bun in the oven,’ you should be doing ‘ding!’ right now.”

Some joke. Shortly after 2:00 AM, Becky poked me awake and said, “I think my water just broke.”

Never, ever, have I so quickly roused myself from sleep, and on just a few hours’ rest, no less. I’m nothing like Becky’s dad, whose years of medical training and experience being “on call” have taught him how to go from sound asleep to wide awake and alert at the drop of a hat (as I learned when I stepped on that scorpion). But, just this one time, that’s exactly how I was. I snapped into action instantly, practically leaping out of bed, grabbing the phone, calling the doctor, gathering our stuff, and preparing to head out the door. I made the long-awaited drive to Park West Medical Center, where we checked in sometime in the 3:00 AM hour. They promptly confirmed that Becky was, indeed, in labor, and sent us up to the labor & delivery ward.

We sent texts to a handful of relatives and close friends, informing them of the news. And then we waited. At first, Becky’s labor was relatively painless, and progressed gradually. If I remember correctly, I think I was able to catch a few winks, and then I know I went down to the hospital cafeteria and had some breakfast — including a big plate of eggs, the very same “last meal” before becoming a dad that my father (a fanatical egg-lover) had at Hartford Hospital when my mom was in labor with me.

Eventually, the labor sped up, and Becky got quite uncomfortable, quite fast. In the course of maybe a half-hour, she went from wanting to see how long she could go without pain relief, to begging for an epidural ASAP. This led to our most memorable delivery-related story, as I — not Becky, but me — nearly crushed her hand from squeezing it so hard, and almost passed out/threw up, thanks to a major freakout about the epidural. The whole needle-near-the-spine concept always made me a little bit queasy, even when we were talking about it generally at our childbirth/parenting class, so when things went every-so-slightly amiss in Becky’s case, with the anesthesiologist needing to shut down the first epidural and start over from scratch because of a heart-rate spike or some such thing, I nearly lost it. Becky says I turned a whitish-green color and looked like I was about to pass out. I ultimately staggered to the floor across the room, got myself a glass of water, and calmed down. Needless to say, the nurses were teasing me about this for the rest of the time we were in the hospital. 🙂

In any event, after that minor hiccup, the epidural was successfully inserted, and Becky went from feeling acute pain to just feeling a ton of pressure. Things continue to progress and, before too long, it was time to start pushing. She was a real champ at that, taking only about 20 minutes from the start of pushing to Loyette’s birth.

Loyette was born at 2:13 PM, weighing 7 points, 14 ounces and measuring 21 inches. When she emerged, she initially looked quite a bit like a greenish alien, and didn’t take her first breath for a few seconds. (Thankfully, I’d read all the baby books that explain how normal this is, or I might have been scared for those few seconds.) Then she gasped, made a raspy cough-like sound… and started scream-crying. Not that I blame her: can you imagine how disconcerting that must be, to go from a warm, soft, quiet womb, to the cold air and harsh lights of a hospital room, with all sorts of other creatures poking and prodding and cleaning and testing you? I’d scream-cry too!

Anyway, I promptly went over to where the nurses had taken Loyette to do the initial, immediately after-birth stuff that they have to do before the baby can be brought back to mom (we’re talking just a couple minutes). During that time, I was able to talk/coo at her a little, and it was evident that she recognized my voice, just like the books said she would from all that “talking to the belly” I’d done in the preceding months. My voice really seemed to give her some measure of comfort amid all the strange weirdness that was happening in her suddenly enlarged world. And then I put out my finger, and she grabbed it with her teeny, tiny little hand. That… that was special.

Shortly before midnight, while Becky was in the bathroom and Loyette was sleeping, I realized I had a golden opportunity to use the “HAPPY NEW YEAR” banner I’d bought on a whim at Wal-Mart some time before, and placed in our hospital bag just in case, to create a photo for the ages to post on the blog at midnight. So I took the picture…

…and then set to work on the blog post, which I timed to appear at precisely midnight (and which would get Instalanched). Underneath the photo, it read:

A new year, a new baby, the miracle of new life, and a new chapter in our lives. Never has the turning of the calendar’s page meant so much to us. What an amazing day.

From our family to yours, have a very Happy New Year!!

The second of the two “tied” Defining Days had a much more orderly beginning. Loyacita had been due July 8, 2009, and there was much speculation about a possible Fourth of July baby (given that Becky was born on Flag Day, me on the day before Halloween, and Loyette on New Year’s Eve), fueled by Becky’s strongly held motherly belief that this kid was coming early. But the days passed, and passed, and no baby came. Before we knew it, the calendar had turned to July 13, which had been set some time earlier as our induction date if the baby hadn’t arrived yet. (January 7 was that date for Loyette, incidentally.) So instead of a 2:00 AM wake-up call, we did everything in a planned and orderly fashion, leaving Loyette with Grandma & Grandpa and heading to the hospital at the arranged time in the morning to get things moving at last.

The strangest thing about that stay in the hospital was the very fact of leaving Loyette behind, particularly for the purpose of going and having another baby. In a strange but very acute way, it felt like we were somehow “cheating” on her. To be suddenly toddler-less, and wrapped once again in the hospital cocoon of labor and then delivery and then those intensive first few hours, felt like a completely different world from the one we’d by then grown accustomed to with Loyette at home. Some confused subconscious part of my brain almost thought that Loyette had somehow regressed into a tiny baby again — the idea that we now had two of them was simply very hard to compute with the older one temporarily absent from the picture.

But I digress. Anyway, we got checked in and settled, and before long they started the process of trying to induce labor. This time, there were no epidural dramas, but for a while it seemed like things were stalling. We watched several hours of the Lord of the Rings DVDs that I’d brought to the hospital, in case we needed to kill time. Becky posted a bunch of Facebook status updates. And we waited.

Then, rather suddenly as I recall, things began to speed up, and the next thing we knew, the “pushing” phase was starting up again. This time, it took all of four minutes. Literally, the delivering doctor had only just gotten set up and ready, and suddenly it was time to catch the baby. Loyacita was born at 2:41 PM, weighing 8 pounds, 10 ounces.

What followed is a bit of a blur, as these things tend to be. Again, there was the initial alien appearance, the first cry, the tender finger-grabbing. Then, before long, there were moments like this:

And pictures like this:

Becky was too exhausted for visitors that first day, and thought it would also probably be better for if we waited. So we kept to ourselves and our new baby that night — and then the next morning, Grandma and Grandpa brought Loyette in to meet her new little sister. Loyette was tender with Loyacita, previewing the wonderfully close and sweet relationship they’d develop in the time to come.

But above all, what she really wanted was to see Mommy & Daddy again. Not fully understanding why we’d left the previous morning, despite all our attempts to explain it (hey — she was 17 months old), she was just absolutely beside herself with joy and relief to see us again… and absolutely beside herself with dismay and horror when it was time to leave. Grandma and Grandpa later said she was screaming like a banshee all the way out through the hospital. Poor thing.

When we brought Loyacita home from the hospital the next day, we were nervous about how Loyette would adjust to this new reality. Again, her primary reaction was simply relief and joy that we were home (and clinginess — she didn’t want let us out of her sight for days). I’ve always loved the picture below, taken just a short time after we returned, for how well it expresses that moment in time:

What was amazing, though, ws how quickly, over the course of just a few days, Loyette completely accepted Loyacita as a new member of the family. She used to have a habit of doing a sort of “roll call,” naming out loud everyone in the family (adding, say, Grandma and Grandpa or Papa and Nana during a lengthier visit), and it was almost immediate that the word “Baby” was added to the roll call, symbolically initiating Loyacita into Loyette’s permament world.

That was the beginning of an amazing relationship; watching the two of them grow up and develop their sisterly bonds has been the greatest joy of the last year-and-a-half of my life, culminating in recent weeks with Loyacita finally becoming a confident walker to the point that they are now just constantly following each other around the house, playing together, and generally being incredibly cute in how they relate to one another (like last night, when they were both “reading” books in Loyette’s room for maybe 15 or 20 minutes, and when I walked in, Loyette informed me, “No, Daddy, you have to leave. We need our privacy.” LOL!)

I could go on and on forever about the joys of those little girls. I won’t, because we try not to blog about them too much, and because I don’t want this blog post to become a completely soggy and utterly clichéd mess. But what’s certain, indeed it goes without saying, is how utterly and inescapably central their respective entrances into our lives were to my life in the last decade.

Are there more days like December 31, 2007 and July 13, 2009 in our future? Perhaps. Who knows? We’re young yet. 🙂 But at least for now, those dates are without rival. They represent, without question, the seminal events of my entire life to date. And they certainly belong right at the top of this list: the Defining Days of my Decade.