We had some downtime, and some malware, and some other things going on. We were knocked down, and we sat there for awhile, stupid and dazed. Now we rise, we open our eyes again, and we continue onward. I leave you with a photo of Zephyr, tuckered out at the end of the day on his first birthday, content and snuggled against his loving mama.
Year One
by Franz Wright
I was still standing
on a northern corner.
/
Moonlit winter clouds the color of the desperation of wolves.
Life is a sieve, time flows through like water leaving the detritus of moments;
some small memories, a flash of joy; mostly just
debris, passing unsifted, glimpses of days come one after another.
It’s been six months since last I posted.
Six months in a thirty-one year life isn’t much compared to six months in a nine month life; I mean, that’s life times three right there. I won’t play catch-up here, not all at once, but try and post more regularly going forward. Zephyr is, as one might guess, much grown, though as much a joy as ever. I love to watch him grow as much as I feel pangs of loss for each stage of his life as it passes by, never to come again.
He smiles a lot, and he cries some, and he eats crackers and is a certified explorer of all things floor; he’s his own rhythm section, and a singer, and he coos and chortles and burbles and burps, hums and thumps and sniggers and sighs, yawns and stretches, quivers his eyebrows, squinches his nose, sticks out his tongue, and yells to raise the dickens.
In short, he’s awesome. All the time awesome. Awesomely awesome.
Hopefully he can keep that up for the next seventeen plus years.
It’s hard to believe that Zephyr is over 3 months old already. In a way, he’s growing up fast, and I’d like him to slow down a little bit. Every time he smiles it breaks my heart a little, and he’s learning to laugh – right now his laugh comes out something between a chuckle and a guffaw, but it’s pretty cute all the same. He’s been an amazing little baby, in general, and the last month or so a real pleasure to be around, in particular. When people ask me how the baby is, I tell them that if I could I would just stay home and hang out with him all the time. Which is saying something because there are very few people, of any age, who wouldn’t get on my nerves if I hung out with them ALL the time. That’s how cool my baby is.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t mind if he grew up a little bit faster, in some ways. His lack of mobility, while a blessing, means he has limited means to entertain himself. And to be honest, he isn’t very interested in entertaining himself. He would MUCH rather have someone else entertain him thank-you-very-much. He gets a little tummy time every day, which is an interesting change of pace for about 5 minutes, and then he’d much rather be doing something else. We’re supposed to shoot for 30 minutes a day of tummy time, but that just ain’t gonna happen, unless it’s 10 minutes of oh-this-is-kind-of-fun followed by 20 minutes of okay-I’m-done-now piss-offed-ness. Hey, I said he was a pleasure to be around; I never said he was perfect.
I also wouldn’t mind if he could sit up on his own, hold things with a little more adroitness, and hold up his end of the conversation. Which isn’t totally fair, because he’s actually an excellent conversationalist, and eager to chat, just so long as it’s on his terms and in his own, infant patois.
Even so, I really like Zephyr at 3 months old and I’m sure that, when he is 5 months old, I’ll miss the good old days, just as much as I’ll look forward to the days to come.
Zephyr affectionately refers to Georgie as “the big brown nose”, which makes sense since that’s pretty much what he sees when Georgie gets all up in his grill. Running off the name, Georgie now has his very own “big brown nose” theme song, which goes like this:
Intro:
Big Brown Nose, Big Brown Nose,
Here comes the Big Brown Nose.
He’s got lots of spots
and floppy ears,
here he comes so dry those tears,
here comes the Big Brown Nose!
Outro:
There he goes, there he goes,
there goes the Big Brown Nose.
He’s got a little tail
that likes to wag
and two big lips that kind of sag,
there goes the Big Brown Nose!
Chorus:
Well he’s a spotted devil,
if ever I saw one;
he may be kind of messy,
but boy he sure is fun.
He’s got a tongue that’ll lick ya
and he’ll meet you at the door,
and when he goes to take a drink
it ends up on the floor!
Sleep comes in short intervals. By the time we wake, we’ve no idea how much sleep we’ve actually gotten. It becomes clear in the first couple hours of being awake, though, whether or not we’ve had enough and then, of course, it’s too late to do anything about it.
We begin each day with the best intentions: to clean the house, to rake the leaves in the yard, to walk the dog, to find time to hang out together. And then we spend the day feeding the baby, and walking around with the baby, and cuddling the baby, cleaning the baby, and changing diapers and making bottles and the days become filled with baby minutiae.
Still, the baby is breathtakingly beautiful. Every noise he makes can break your heart. Every movement seems, somehow, to be a small miracle. When he sleeps, his entire body goes limp, and we drape him over us like a tiny blanket. Awake, his dark eyes scan the room and he is completely alert. Having spent hours analyzing our book shelves (hopefully our book collections have passed judgment), he has taken to focusing more on us, our faces, studying us. Sometimes he will start crying shortly thereafter, which seems a bit critical, if you ask me.
So yeah, I may miss sleep. But I wouldn’t trade it.
Once our midwife, Constance, arrived, things got a little crazy. Not scary crazy, just crazy busy. I had already dropped the dogs off at their grandparent’s (thank goodness), but we still had one pregnant lady, one midwife, two pregnant lady’s best friends, one pregnant lady’s ten-year-old, and me, the pregnant lady’s husband. I have to say that of all of us, I was the most cool, calm, and collected. But then my job was pretty simple: say soothing things and keep my wife from collapsing during her contractions.
We had started filling up the birth tub pretty much as soon as we could, but since it held a bajillion gallons and needed to be filled to a certain point before you could turn on the heater, and since it needed to be a pretty precise 100 degrees, we were still working on getting it filled and to temperature even as things got progressively more intense. By 10:30 or so we had emptied about three hot water heater’s into the things, along with countless gallons of boiled water, and we were only about halfway to where we needed to be. Luckily we were also well above our desired temperature, so we started filling with a mix of hot and cold water (as available) to bring the water level up higher.
I’ve never actually been at a live birth before (save my own, which hardly counts), but it was obvious to me that this one was moving pretty fast, and that, like many intense experiences, that there wasn’t really time to think about things as they were happening. There was only time to do. I had lovingly prepared and set up a nice selection of birth music on our spare iPod connected to the stereo downstairs, and even though Deva Premal was playing, I doubt my wife could hear it. She was, after all, pretty much making her own music at this point, which alternated between some deep, native chanting, and the sound that Chunk makes in The Goonies when he’s relating the story of throwing up in the movie theater.
We had just gotten the birth tub to a reasonable level around 11:00 am when the wife’s water broke. Thankfully the midwife had been prepared for and even expecting this, since we’d removed the wife’s pants at this point, and thrown some towels down on the floor just moments before. There was no gunshot-like-sound, as I guess there had been when Russell was born ten years ago; what there was was a sudden gush, very much like a water balloon had suddenly been popped (which seems like a reasonable comparison). With this sure sign of progress, we helped the wife finish getting undressed, and I stripped down to my skivvies, and both the wife and I got into the birth tub.
It’s pretty easy to support someone when they’re standing in front of you and leaning against you with their arms around your neck. It’s more difficult to support someone when they’re on their knees in a birth tub and leaning against the side. So mostly I hung out on the side at this point, providing some support and more comfort and encouragement, and things moved even faster than they had before. It seemed like everyone besides the wife, the midwife, and I were on water duty at this point, filling the tub with both boiling, and cold, and then just cold water, trying to get the water level high enough that the wife didn’t have to kneel down too far to be properly submerged, and trying to get the temperature down from a roaring 101.5 degrees to a more reasonable 100 degrees. It seemed quite comfortable to me, but evidently babies care quite a bit about these things.
The sounds at this point had moved away from chanting and more towards The Goonies, which was unpleasant but at least seemed to be productive. The midwife told the wife that we were having a baby, which I think the wife took as a general sort of, that baby is going to come out eventually sort of encouragement, but which actually meant that the baby was really actually on its way out any minute now. I don’t think the wife believed it, at least not until she had pushed the head out not 10 minutes later. With that major hurdle overcome, I felt somewhat reassured that the rest would be smooth sailing. But then again, I wasn’t doing any of the hard work.
The next 10 minutes were filled with a lot of crying, plenty of swearing, some good solid breathing, moaning, chanting, humming, and a communal sense of hard work. Oh yes, and the birth tub was still getting its final touches in terms of amount and temperature of water inside it. I would say that when the baby came out it was somewhat anticlimactic. I mean, there was no thunder, the heavens didn’t open up, angels didn’t trumpet, and I knew that the hard work wasn’t even over yet. There was, however, a baby, out in the world, wrapped a couple times in its own cord, and not even half as ugly as I thought it would be. It was even pretty cute, which seems like an accomplishment right out of the womb. We got the cord situation worked out, and I was happy enough to let the midwife do the clamping and the cutting, and then I got to hold the baby in the water while the midwife (and her assistants who had also arrived at this point) got sorted. Everything had happened so quickly that she had ill time to prepare, but she seemed to be on top of everything, regardless.
It seemed like a very long time that I held the very, very, very brand new baby, there in the water. It was probably only 60 seconds or so, in reality. The baby was a little blue, so they took it up to the bed to provide some oxygen, and the wife and I got down to the business of birthing a placenta, a fairly important though at this point annoying detail we had yet to take care of. Thankfully we get to lean back for this part (I was getting sore from being on my knees, and I imagine the wife was too), and I got to sit behind her as she leaned back against me, and together we got the placenta out in just another 10 minutes or so. A very impatient 10 minutes, to be sure, especially for the wife, who had not yet had the chance to hold the baby. During this time they did their initial Apgar test, which wasn’t great, and gave the baby some oxygen, and then let Russell hold the baby up on the bed. We got to hear the baby cry a couple times, which was reassuring. The second Apgar test, 5 minutes out, was much better, the only downside being the babies color.
After we had finished with the placenta, which is even more like watching an alien being born than when the baby came out, we relaxed for a minute or two and then got out of the birth tub. The wife stood up and very nearly passed out, but steadied herself within a few seconds, and we took it slow, toweled her off, and both got out of the tub. She went to the bed to rest and (finally) to hold the baby, and I went to towel myself off and change clothes. After I changed, I got on the bed with the wife and we looked at our beautiful baby. He really was beautiful at that point, too, not in the least bit ugly, which was surprising. I swear I’m not even being biased. Of course, while he was sitting there being beautiful he also had a massive shit, we I guess he’d been holding for some time, so good for him for waiting.
Had we weighed him before the giant poo, he probably would have topped 8 pounds. I’m not even joking. As it was, after a massive clean up effort, and I changed clothes, again, he weighed in at 7lb 7oz, which seemed not only respectable but also numerologically fortuitous. We spent the next hour or so touching the baby, and cooing, and wondering at how handsome he was, and hoping he didn’t shit on us again, and wishing the birth tub would be drained already because now that the birth was over the bedroom we were in felt like a giant sauna and was not entirely pleasant. Thankfully, during that hour, our busybody friends and helpers did laundry, and emptied and removed the birth tub, and cleaned things, and got us stuff, and checked on the baby, and we got a little loopy as the adrenaline wore off and we realized what we had done.
We had a baby, and, beautiful though he was, I looked at the wife and said, “Why did we decide this was a good idea, again?”And she smiled, and nodded, and we both understood that having a baby was pretty much the craziest thing one could ever decide to do, even if he was the most lovely baby in the known universe, but that we couldn’t take it back now and, chances are, we wouldn’t even if we could.
In the end, the serious bit of labor lasted around 2 and 1/2 hours, started at about 9:00 am. At 11:22 am, our baby boy, Zephyr Dawn Ahniwa Ferrari, was born, at a healthy 7lb 7oz (less a good 8oz of poo) and a respectable 19 1/2 inches. He’s healthy, and happy, and remarkably beautiful (in case I hadn’t mentioned that), and we couldn’t be more in love.
Happy birthday, little Zephyr. We’re very much looking forward to getting to know you.
Friday night I had driven with my dad up to Bremerton to look at a car; we had sold the Scion on Tuesday and after just a few days I was already done with driving the rusty old Ford truck around. Friday night is a crappy time to buy a car, especially when your wife may go into labor at any moment, but there you are. Much better to have it done before labor than to try and find time to do it after.
So I bought the car, a 1994 Honda Accord EX Wagon, and it was a pleasant drive home on a clear night, and after that, we were in business. Now that we had a family car, we were ready to go. We were more than a week “past due” at this point, but the baby was healthy and there was still room and fluid for it to hang out in, so past due is really just academic. We were following our own schedule and it was right on track.
The wife woke me up just before 8:00 am on Saturday morning by saying, “I made potatoes and sausage. You should get up and eat them while you can because I think we’re going to have a baby today.”
I replied with an eloquent grunt and spent a good five minutes weighing my choices: be there to help my wife begin her labor / get more sleep.
I pulled myself out of bed, ate some sausage and potatoes, and proceeded to bustle.
Contractions up until that point were noticeable (to me, obviously the wife had noticed them all along), but they were something that the wife put up with quietly and privately. Saturday morning, though, they were loud and public, and I knew we were in business. By 9:00 am I had eaten my sausage and potatoes, taken a shower, and was dedicated to following the wife around to serve as her leaning post whenever a big contraction hit; they were all big contractions at this point. A little after 9:00 am we called the midwife, but told her she didn’t need to come over quiet yet, and called the birth support team (two of the wife’s best friends).
By 9:30 am the support team had arrived and we decided to call the midwife to come over. In the meantime, we began to fill the birth tub, boil lots of water, and we generally stayed quite busy. By 10:00 am or so, the midwife had arrived, and we were in business.
Zephyr Dawn was born on Saturday, December 4th, at 11:22 am and was a healthy 7lb 7oz. Mama and baby (and papa and brother) are all doing well, and enjoying some quiet family time (and surprisingly getting some pretty good sleep).
We took last week off, partially to wait for the baby and partially because there was snow and ice and school was canceled. It was an excellent week, though the wife had to adjust since she thought she would get some quiet alone time, and instead she got a full house every day except Monday. As the week progressed, though, I know she started to feel guilty that she was already burning through her maternity time and that the baby obviously had a different time table. Now here we are, starting to burn through a second week of leave, and I’m heading back to work while we wait, since I only have, at best, two weeks off for when the baby gets here. I could rant and rave about how nice it would be to get paid maternity and paternity time, about how I feel like our country doesn’t really support people who want to have babies, even those responsible families who support themselves … but I won’t rant, and I won’t rave. But it would be nice.
Yesterday we had a nice quiet day to ourselves. The rain cleared and I took Georgie to the park. We haven’t been in awhile, since we’ve been going for walks through the woods instead. The park is nice because it’s much more of an endurance contest for the dog, and when we get home he’s thoroughly worn out. It also helps wear down his nails, since we spend a good ten minutes, at least, throwing the ball around in the basketball court and he gets to run around on pavement. At home, on a friend’s advice, we had some wine, and kissed a lot. We played cribbage while we waited, and listened to some of the birth music we’d picked out, and tried our best to be patient. From about 6:30 on that evening there were some pretty good contractions, but they eased and we went to sleep.
For my part, I’ve stopped asking the wife if “anything exciting is happening”, because it just annoys her and makes her feel pressured. If I ask her how she’s doing, I try to do it in an upbeat and encouraging tone that implies that I simply care about her well-being and want her to be comfortable. Which I think annoys her slightly less. I told her last night that, at this point, I would stop asking, since the baby obviously wasn’t getting the hint, and just wait for her to tell me if anything changed. Obviously baby has its own timeline, and even though I suspect that it might be a bit lazy, baby’s calling the shots right now and won’t be rushed.
Anyway, the wine and kissing wasn’t all that bad, effective or not, so maybe we’ll try that again tonight.
I think it’s important to be thankful every day, as much as possible, and for the most part, there’s a lot to be thankful for. That said, I have nothing against picking one day to be particularly thankful, and anyway, if it weren’t for Thanksgiving I don’t know if I’d ever eat pumpkin pie, and that’s definitely something to be thankful for.
We spent Thanksgiving Day with the wife’s parents, who live just a mile away, and it was one of the more enjoyable Thanksgivings I remember in awhile. We were off the hook for bringing anything, since we didn’t know if we were going to make it or not. The plan was that if the baby came then I’d go over and get some plates to go, but as it happens the baby is still hanging out so we got to fill up on turkey and stuffing and good company. Good job, baby.
Of course, now that we got to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner it’s time for you to stop laying about, baby. Tuesday was the “not before” date, and you got past that admirably, and Thursday was the official due date, and you let us enjoy a nice family dinner. But now it’s Friday, baby, and I feel like maybe you lack motivation, or maybe you’re just lazy. Whatever the case may be, we’re getting impatient waiting for you, so really, any time now. Today would be fine. Really.
So today is Friday, and all the snow has melted, and it’s raining. Mr. Ten was disappointed that the snow is disappearing, but we told him that we almost never get snow in November, anyway, and it was surely a good sign of things to come in terms of a cold, snowy winter. And since he’s into technicalities, we pointed out that it is still autumn, after all, to which he replied that winter should really just start on the first day that it snows, and that summer, in turn, should begin on the first day that it’s really sunny and hot.
Sometimes it’s hard to argue with ten-year-old logic, even when said logic is pretty ridiculous.
While we spend today waiting for that lazy baby, we’ll go out for a walk in the woods with Georgie (our 1 1/2 year old German Shorthair Pointer), and we’ll finally get around to raking the leaves in the yard, and maybe I’ll even borrow the neighbor’s ladder so I can clear out the gutters, and the wife will do some weeding and, for the most part, we’ll keep busy. But really we’ll be looking at our watches and saying “Gee, I really wish that baby would get with the program already.”
Darth Vader wasn’t a very good father. At least, not at first. Even if you overlook a life of absenteeism, with no child support to speak of, he also ends up being an evil murderer and destroyer of worlds. Add to that the fact that he cuts off his son’s hand, and he pretty much gets worst father of the year award.
And then he saves the day.
Anyone can be a father. It’s a biological power that most men possess, and it isn’t in any way special. Being a good father takes preparation, though, and some hard work, and possibly even some strengths of character than not every man comes by naturally.
I always thought that I would be a good father. I thought of myself as patient, which seemed important. I thought that I was a good listener and an excellent teacher, that I had strong moral character and good values, and that I was, for lack of a better word, pretty cool. Thinking that you’re cool is probably the downfall of many a dad, especially when they start dealing with teenagers, but that’s neither here nor there.
When I met my wife and got engaged, I instantly became a father figure for a five-year-old, and I think I was pretty good at it. I’d be lying if I said that the idea of being a father, especially an insta-father with a five-year-old, didn’t make me balk somewhat. I pushed on anyway, mainly because when you meet the person you know you want to marry, nothing else matters that much. Besides, I traipsed off to Montreal for graduate school mere months after getting engaged, and being a part-time, long-distance fiance / step-dad wasn’t too tough, especially with my studies to keep me busy.
I’ve since finished graduate school, and got married, and become a full-time step-dad with no more excuses. And I’m not quite as excellent at it as I had hoped I would be. My levels of patience vary on a minute-to-minute basis, and I often feel too preoccupied to be a good listener or teacher. I’m still pretty cool, but all that means is that the now ten-year-old is very, very interested in anything I do or say, and that I don’t get a moment’s peace. And even saying that, I know it’s not actually true, or fair, but as a perception it’s fairly strong.
When I found out that I was going to become a father for real, I was a little overwhelmed. That’s a pretty natural response, I think. Overwhelmed, and excited, and anxious, and excited, and a little wondrous, and somewhat panicked. The man who has just found out he is going to become a father begins to simultaneously think in two different directions: how he can create more security for him and his family; and whether or not his passport is in order. Hey, we all have our moments.
The nice thing about human babies is that they take a long time to show up. For the better part of a year, the expectant father gets to work on bolstering the feelings of excitement and wonder, and subduing those of anxiety and panic. Expectant fathers get to reevaluate the qualities they feel would make them good fathers, and work to make sure that those qualities won’t disappear as soon as the baby is born.
Darth Vader was caught by surprise by fatherhood, and consequently, he was pretty miserable at it. Given time to adjust, though, and to prepare, he actually became a pretty decent father. He saved his son’s life, in the end, along with untold numbers of people in galaxies far far away.
For my part, I hope I can skip the evil part of the whole process, and get straight to being a good father. My patience is less finicky, and I try to take the time to listen and to teach, no matter how busy I might be otherwise. I think that a lot of being a good father is being right here, right now, not wondering where else you could be, or what other things you could be doing. And hey, I think I’m pretty good at that, for the most part, and I am still pretty cool, for the most part.
Welcome to my new blogging project, Roly Poly. As I tinker with the site some more, back pages like “About” and “Links” and such will begin to fill in, but for now, being that I will constantly tinker with those things rather than using this blog for what it’s actually for (that would be writing), I thought I should put those things aside for a minute and get my feet wet.
My name is Ahniwa Ferrari, and I’m 30 years old. I am, among other things: a librarian in Olympia, WA; a husband; a step-dad to a 10-year-old; a soon-to-be papa (our due date is November 25!); a gamer; a writer/poet; a lindy-hopper; a technophile; and sometimes a musician. There are other boxes I could stuff myself in, but you get the idea.
This blog is a place for me to talk about those things that I am and that interest me, mainly libraries, fatherhood, and Olympia, but also anything else that strikes my fancy. My update schedule is, starting now, at least three times per week on a M-W-F schedule, with additional posts a possibility. We’ll see how things go.
Year One
It’s hard to believe that Zephyr is over 3 months old already. In a way, he’s growing up fast, and I’d like him to slow down a little bit. Every time he smiles it breaks my heart a little, and he’s learning to laugh – right now his laugh comes out something between a chuckle and a guffaw, but it’s pretty cute all the same. He’s been an amazing little baby, in general, and the last month or so a real pleasure to be around, in particular. When people ask me how the baby is, I tell them that if I could I would just stay home and hang out with him all the time. Which is saying something because there are very few people, of any age, who wouldn’t get on my nerves if I hung out with them ALL the time. That’s how cool my baby is.
