Here is the lil' dude's mama at exactly one-week past our due date.
Weird that I was in the kitchen . . . it would be three more days before the lil' dude would finally make her appearance. Finally!
So, why the lil' dude? Which sounds so . . . dude-ish. Male, rough, unsoft. That's because the Dad and I thought for-shizz we were having a baby boy. We knew from the get-go we wished to have a delivery surprise, but we needed to call the growing bump something. We chose not to share our intended names with anyone. This made grandmas mad. Then, the lil' dude added insult to injury and showed up 10 days late! That last week+, I told the Dad if anyone held up the boy/girl envelope in front of me, I would've jumped on top of them and tore into that bitch like a club kid on E.
My otherwise calm, excited mood was flagging, fast. I could not plan anything else. I had every single piece of baby clothing in yellow, green, white, and brown. And I filled in the blanks with blue, because, ummm, we were so having a boy. I had raging insomnia, and a implicit need to bake. From scratch. I needed to have that baby. I needed to know if I had a son or a daughter.
Here is the first official photo of the lil' dude!
When we were in the hospital waiting for the Pitocin to kick in, we saw about 11 nurses.
"What are we having?" they'd all ask.
"Can I have a Reuben?" I'd smile softly, sweetly.
"No. Are you having a boy or a girl?" they'd scowl.
"We don't know, technically, but we're sure it's a boy," the Dad would say, slipping me another stolen graham cracker as the nurse turned her back for one sweet second.
So we sat, for 31.5 hours, hooked up to about 87 wires and tubes, me eating contraband crackers and apple juice, the Dad ignoring text messages and sitting patiently through One More Episode of "The Baby Story".
"Isn't it a little late for that?" the nurses would joke.
"Can I have a Reuben?" I would ask as I watched them leave the room.
No for real, here is your baby. She really belongs to you! (If you look close, you can see the Dad's delicious eyelashes, the most fab trait he would pass on to his lucky daughter!)
When the doctor came in to catch our squirmy kid, she flipped my gown up for 2.1 seconds to look at my giant belly and said, "Oh. We're having a girl today," as she put on her gloves and fashioned a ponytail on top of her head.
It only cost us $12,000 for her to be right.
4 minutes later, when she said, "GIRL!" and held the lil' dude up by her ankles (something still random to me, is this 1950?), I said in a much-louder echo, "GIRL"? and promptly burst into tears.
The Dad said, "You got your girl."
To which I said, "So did you."
When the nurse asked what her name was, I said it out loud for the first time. We had a baby girl, our lil' dude.
Told you about the pacifier on the way home! The combination of that, and the song "I Love the Cocaine" by Buckcherry, on the radio lulled her to sleep quickly.
When we were settled in our room later, and Mama had polished off an entire plate of cold roast beef dinner, with my fingers, it began to be a little more real. Girl.
The gifts of pink and the bears and striped outfits piled up. Girl.
Visitors would say, "Hi you little-bitty baby girl!" Girl.
I had packed a sensible green outfit to bring the lil' dude home in.
"It looks like pink barfed in her closet, and I don't mean the singer," someone would say.
The lil' dude was born on a Friday. I don't think I dressed her in pink until the following Wednesday . . . then things got all outta control! Christmas was just two weeks away . . . and to this day, it just don't stop. Girl! We have a little girl with one helluva tough nickname. Unless you count the ones like Cakers, Monkey, Peanut, You Lil' Missy . . . etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment