Friday, January 5, 2007

Happy Birthday Colin!

Sorry, couldn't resist.  Sums me up in a nutshell.  Heh.  Well, how do I sum up Colin's birth, which happened exactly 17 years, 14 hours ago?  For my first childbirth experience, it's a freakin' miracle that I went back and birthed two more.  Seriously.  First of all, he was due December 23 of 1989.  Everyone was staring at me all through Christmas, as if waiting for the Jiffy Pop to open up.  Didn't happen.  I started having some hefty Braxton-Hicks contractions and promptly quit working.  Heh.  Joke was on me, I went 2 weeks longer.  My boss had started watching me walk (or should I say Lumber?) down the hall and comment, "Liz, you look deFORMED!"  Gee thanks so much!

Finally we reported to the hospital on January 4 of 1990 (David still hasn't forgiven me for not getting that tax deduction).  After TWENTY FOUR hours of sheer misery and pain (epidural didn't work on one half of my very enormous belly) and screaming in pain and crying and begging and doing all the things I swore I would never do (never say never, EVER!) the doctor used salad tongs to forcibly remove the child from my body.  When they brought him to me after they had cleaned him up, I didn't know what the hell to do with him.  All I wanted to do was take a nap that lasted a few weeks.  And stop the pain in my bottom.  He was very cute, and his mouth was opening and shutting like a little kitten, but it just wasn't REAL to me.  Here was MY baby, but it wasn't mine, they must have been kidding, fer shure.  But they let us take him home.  And he was the most beautiful, cherubic, angel-haired, rosebud mouthed baby.  And content, slept through the night at 6 weeks.  We called him our little Potato, and he was a sweet one.  His goodness suckered us into having another one, who shrieked with colic for 6 MONTHS (no lie!) and thus risked being chucked out the window on more than one occasion, and who cut the cords on the mini blinds and small appliances, and was in the ER for stitches 7 (count 'em SEVEN) times before he was 10.  But I digress.

And now Colin's all grown up, driving a car, needing to shave, talking all deep and stuff.  What the heck happened?  My God, you are so cruel to make time crawl when we are young, and swoosh by us in the batting of an eye when we are old. 

Happy Birthday, my beautiful boy!