While I won't deny I love writing about my tiny little child that is currently doing back flips inside of my wife's belly (like a creep!) I also won't deny that on occasions (like every day) I am a desperately self-centered, self-pitying little fool who is not above hijacking a blog dedicated to his own unborn child in order to wax on to pathetic lengths about his own crazy little life. I knows I switched from first to third person in that last paragraph, forgive me, Mr. Whatley of ENG1101.
This week my baby turned 11 weeks old. Or perhaps negative 29 weeks old. This week I turned 26 years and 40 weeks old. This week Margaret turned 23 years and 4 weeks old. Also, this week was a horrible week.
So many things went horribly wrong this week. It's Friday, and instead of feeling relieved that the weekend is (sort of) here, I feel like a half-drowned man realizing that he's very nearly out of the current, and the shoreline isn't quite as far as it was a moment ago. I have a pretty smooth life, and duck and dodge drama with a deft dip or a delightful dance-step and generally can in no way ever be called, "depressed." My life is a little boring, and not a ton of exciting things go down, but if I had to fill out a quiz every night as I lay my wet hair on my dry pillow, I'd almost always rate each day a 7.5 out of 10 or more. Not this week though. I'm sure it's just some perverse way our brains attempt to organize a chaotic world, but it seems as if disasters come in groups - like thunderstorms. There will be a long period of sunny weather, and then three bands of storms in a row.
Monday - I don't remember Monday, really. That can only be a good sign. I know we re-planted some peppers in our garden, but then like two days later the peppers we planted a few weeks ago sprouted. PEPPER WARS! My baby reached the size of a medium goldfish. 2 1/2 - 3 inches long.
Tuesday - At work my handheld computer quit working and, long story short, I had to work 9 1/2 hours straight, without a break. After a few hours at home Margaret and I went to my sister's house. She, her husband, and their three wild indians just moved to Georgia from Los Angeles, Mexico. We had dinner over there and then sat out in the front yard watching the kids ride a bicycle, a tricycle, and some creepy little car with eyeballs. They borrowed a shovel from me, and I borrowed a BB rifle from them. Watching Siobhan, the five year old, ride a bicycle with no training wheels, take a turn, and then the bike wobble back and forth as her eyes cartoonishly pop out of her head and she comes dangerously close to scraping all the skin off of her legs with the pavement, I learned a lesson about fatherhood: I never want to have a kid. It's just too terrifying. I think I would be running behind the bike ready to dive and catch the child before he or she came close to the ground - and I'm an extremely laid back guy! My baby experienced something amazing today for the first time - the sound of his or her mother's voice. I don't think she/he can hear me yet (but maybe, I don't know) for which he/she should be grateful.
Wednesday - Wednesday started at midnight (as days often do). Wednesday is my day off, and therefore I still had not gone to sleep. I was sleeping on and off throughout The King's Speech (it's a fine movie, but best picture? Really?) when I got a phone call. This is a top secret phone call which I am completely unable to relate here, or to brag about what a good person I am, but mysterious details aside, my heroic misadventures resulted in me driving several hours, falling asleep on a stranger's couch at 5:15 a.m., waking up at 7:30 a.m., doing a few other secret agent type things, and then driving back home. Margaret was visiting her parents, so I spent the rest of the day (aside from the hour I had to work) lying on the couch feeling exceedingly crummy and fading in and out of sleep. During this time my baby was checking out it's new organs - a gallbladder, a pancreas, and some other stuff which it doesn't know the names of yet.
Thursday - I got up at 4:00 a.m. and went to work. I spent just over an hour sorting my product and loading my truck and then hopped my sprightly self up into the cab, turned on the vehicle, turned up the radio, shifted that baby into drive...and rolled forward about four feet. My transmission had magically gone out. There was no choice but to get a giant rental truck, but the local Giant Rental Trucks R Us doesn't open until 8 a.m. After a series of headaches and trials that can only have been designed by the god of drill sergeants (and basically amounted to running through mental tires, crawling under cosmic barbed wire, and leaping karmic walls) I was able to get a vehicle with which to do my job. This means my job ended up taking over ten hours straight, and I had to make over twenty phone calls. It took about half an hour on the phone with some barely-English-speaking guy from Allstate to finally get my work truck towed. In despair we went out to eat Mexican food that night, because I needed my margarita medicine. My baby, not at all fazed by my terrible day, spent most of it stretching and flexing it's rapidly developing muscles, focusing on the day when it can hit me in the eye.
Friday - Friday wasn't actually that terrible of a day, all things considered (or, at least in comparison with the three days previous). It was bad because I got the news that I needed a new transmission, it'll be over a week before my truck is ready, and my warranty - though it doesn't expire due to mileage for another 50,000 miles, it's one year past the three year warranty date. Translation: No warranty. Also, while having a rental truck is great and obviously necessary, it isn't my normal truck, and isn't the same size, or have the same features, or even the same doors. All of this makes my job much more annoying and makes it take a much longer time. Today my child tested out it's vocal cords. They are very small (since they are on a 2.5 inch creature, after all) but vibrate wonderfully and, I can only assume, in perfect tune.
And with that, ladies and gentlemen, we fold our hands neatly in our laps and smile for the cameras. We've done it folks, the first trimester is complete. Margaret hasn't thrown up ONCE.
UPDATE: It is now actually Monday, and the weekend was busy, but nothing horrible happened. I'm still in the rental truck, and still have no news on my broken truck, but the weekend was enough of a breather that I can survive this upcoming week. Also, the Hawks are miraculously up 3 games to 1 versus the Orlando Magic, and the Braves just swept the World Champion Giants. There is joy in Mudville.
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