2?

It's kind of weird because I thought I wouldn't be as nervous for this kid since I've already done it twice... but I was sooooo wrong. I've been crapping myself for the last few days. Even though Betsy isn't technically due until April 6th, the truth is Tyton was 3 weeks early and Boston was 2 weeks early. So Season* could come around the middle of March and it wouldn't be a surprise.

Well, we went to a prenatal appointment yesterday. Most of it was the same old-same old, but it was also the first time since the first couple of visits that they do a check of the cervix. Well, they told us that Betsy is dialated to a 2 and she's 50% effaced. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that Season is coming tomorrow, but it COULD.

I about shat myself. I live in Ogden and work in Salt Lake (about 45 minutes without traffic) so if Betsy's water breaks or something and I'm at work... geez. I'm really scared. On top of all this the doctor says something vague like, "Don't have this baby for at least two weeks, ok?" Like we have a great amount of control over the situation. Criminy.

So I laid awake until about 1am last night/this morning trying to figure out what our plan should be, and I think I got it figured out. I told Betsy to make sure she let me know if she was feeling different. She was reluctant at first because she didn't want me to panic and come home early every time she didn't feel well... because honestly, she doesn't feel well and all sorts of bizarre things are happening to her body everyday that "don't feel right". So then I explained the next phase of my plan: I told her to rate how different she was feeling on a scale of 1 to 10. If it's a 1, then she just farted unexpectedly or something. If it's a 2, then maybe her back hurts in a different spot than normal. If it's a 3, then maybe she's feeling some peculiar pressure going on in her belly... and so on. All the way to 10, which means the baby is crowning. If she uses this scale as it was intended then I can decide whether I need to leave work based on her rating (and she doesn't need to tell my WHY she's chosen a particular rating... just what the number is).

I also told her that I would rather leave work early every day than not be available to take my own wife to the hospital when the time comes. I am really just hoping that it can happen like it does in the movies, you know? Like, I'm just laying there peacefully in bed next to Betsy. She tries to get comfortable a few times and then sits up in bed and gets a surprised look on her face for a few seconds. Then she'll nudge me and say, "Honey? Honey? It's time." I'll mumble and say something like "Time for what?" Then she'll whisper softly, "It's time to have a baby." Then I'll push the pillow closer to my face and say, "Ok. That's nice" followed by an immediate realization that it's time to go to the hospital. Then I'll jump out of bed and say, "WHAT? IT'S TIME TO HAVE THE BABY?" I'll stumble around the room trying to get dressed, hopping on one leg while trying to get my other shoe on, and grab the bag that's been pre-packed while quietly repeating my mental checklist of things to remember. Betsy will be sitting on the bed smiling sweetly while calmly watching my humorous antics (conveniently not having contractions). I'll get halfway out of the driveway before I realize I've forgotten my own laboring wife. I'll sprint back inside and run to the bedroom only to find Betsy still sitting calmly waiting for me to help her out of bed and to the car.

You know what's probably going to happen, though, is we'll go to the Dr. next Monday and they'll say, "Well, you're dialated to a 5 so let's just schedule you to come back at 6 am tomorrow and we'll start you."
And I'll look back at the last month and think, "I had diarrhea for 5 weeks for nothing."

* Yes. Her name is Season.

Betsy

I'm not really sure how else to post this. I couldn't find an electronic version so I just scanned in the pages as jpegs. This is a brief history of my life before Betsy and then our first date. A few people have asked about it so I thought I'd post it. It's an entertaining story (if I do say so myself), but it's a LONG read so don't feel like you have to read it all at once.

Also keep in mind that I wrote this within the first year of our marriage so the details are pretty accurate. I made a special effort to refrain from exaggerating, which is something I don't normally do. Feel free to read a page a day or something. There's no pressure for you to read it all at once. It's one solid story, without obvious places to "pause", if you know what I mean.

So just click on page one and then let me know what you think. Cheers.

Senseses of Humour

Some people might wonder how my sense of humor and comedic timing could be honed to such perfection. Well it hasn't come naturally. It's taken 7 years of being mocked and tormented by bullies, 10 years of rejection by the opposite sex, 4 years of wearing a patch over my strong eye in order to strengthen the muscles behind my weak eye so it would stop "wandering" and 13 years of wearing brown glasses with bi-focals, along with a black "strap" to hold my glasses up and prevent me from using the muscles in my nose to "push" them up.

Some of it's hereditary, though. I know this because my siblings and parents are pretty funny. And my kids are pretty funny, as well, come to find out. I've decided to dedicate this post to the funny things my family has said lately. We'll start with my 2-year-old, Boston. Today I was playing with him in the front room and for some reason (probably just to see my reaction) he said, "I hate you." I asked him to repeat it since he had just, playfully, hit me and I thought he might have said, "I hit you." But when he repeated it, it was obvious he had just expressed his disdain for me. I pulled him close to me and said, "Boston. We don't say that in our house." His reply was, "Ok" short pause "Me say it outside?" I was confused for about 3 seconds then I realized why he'd ask such a question.

Now on to my wife. She's about 8 months pregnant and she's been losing her memory severely lately. If you ask her, she'll tell you she's getting more and more retarded. If you've ever been pregnant or known someone that's pregnant, they REALLY do get stupider. With my wife, it's the most obvious when she tries to use common phrases or cliches. The other day we were talking about a kid in our ward who is not very obedient. My wife's reply was this (and use the pauses while you're reading this), "That kid... he's a... um... he's a... he's a work of art." I looked at her and said, "You mean 'a piece of work'?" We both laughed, but she felt pretty dumb.

About two weeks ago, I was awakened at about 1:30am to the sound of my wife talking to my 5 year-old in the bathroom. She was encouraging him to hurry up with his bowel movement so they could both return to bed. I listened to him grunting for a few minutes and then, between contractions, I heard him say, "Oh man. This feels like a square poo." I thought I'd dreamt it, so I yelled to my wife and asked if that's, indeed, what he's said. Then we all started laughing... at 1:30 in the morning.

Sharona would be upset if I left her out, but since she hasn't "said" anything funny for a while, I'll just have to relay something funny that she does ALL the time. It's hard to catch her doing this... you have to be lucky enough to be looking right at her when it happens or you'll miss it, but if she's sitting on a hard surface such as linoleum or concrete and she farts (it's loud when it reverberates off the floor), she'll look behind her as if she's trying to figure out where the peculiar sound has originated. Why can't she put 2 and 2 together and think, "I felt the vibration against my butt at the EXACT SAME TIME I heard the sound?" Then again, maybe she's just faking... kinda like humans do. "What was that? Did you hear that? You didn't? Huh... oh well."

100 Calories, my A!

I don't know what it is about low fat food, but I think it's nasty. The other day my sister-in-law, Heather, gave us a box of those Nabisco 100-calorie packs. She told us that she thought they'd be yummy, but ended up tasting like tires. My kids were so excited until they tasted them and about threw up. So we've had them in our cupboard for a while, but none of us can bring ourselves to eat them. I'm trying to figure out why they make this crap and who on earth buys it. I've decided that these "inventors" probably can't stand the taste of them either, but they just figure "Hey. If everyone just buys a box of them one time, then we'll make enough money to make it worth the trouble... even if they only take one bite of our 'Oreo Crap Bar' and then throw the rest of the box away." It makes me glad that I don't have a weight problem and am forced to eat dung like that. The funniest part of this story is that I told my kids I wanted to take some pictures of them eating them for my blog entry and Tyton actually said this... and I quote, "Do I have to actually EAT it or can I spit it out and throw it away after you take the picture?" The fact that my 5 year old won't eat this (quote-unquote) "Sensible Solution" speaks volumes about how horrible they taste.

That's what I get... I guess.

My wife and I own a couple of pretty crappy cars. They're both really old and hammered, but we don't complain much because they get us where we need to go and get decent gas mileage. It's days like today that having cruddy cars really pays off. We went to see a movie at Century 16 in Salt Lake today. We dropped the kids off at my sister-in-laws house and we went on our Valentine's Day date... 2 days late.

So my wife is 7.5 months pregnant and wasn't really in the mood to walk a great distance and the parking lot was completely packed. We drove around for while looking for a parking spot and didn't see anything. Then I noticed a really nice, new car that had parked about 5 feet away from a snow bank and was straddling two parking spaces. I got pretty pissed because he didn't leave anywhere NEAR enough room for a car between him and the snow bank and it didn't look like there was enough room between his car and one next to it. Then my wife says, "I think you can squeeze in honey." I tell my wife to jump out because it's obvious that there won't be enough room for her to get out once I squeeze in. So she jumps out and I ease my way into the parking space. I purposely parked closer to the "irritating" car than I did to the other one so as not to bother BOTH owners.

Once I had parked, I got out of the car and stepped back to observe my talent. I had about 2 feet of room on one side and was successful in leaving about an inch and a half on the other side, pretty much gauranteeing that this dude was gonna do some sort of damage to my car when he returned and discovered what I'd done. My wife and I chuckled as we envisioned this savage realizing he has no choice but to climb through the passengers side of his brand new vehicle and crawl over the console to get to the drivers seat. I purposely locked all my doors and wrote down this douches license plate just in case he did irreparable damage. My wife and I decided we could live with a key scratch down the side of the car or even a huge dump on the hood of our car. We didn't really care cause our cars are just a tad better than the Flintstones' car.

Imagine our surprise when we returned to our station wagon after the movie to discover that crotch bag had done THIS to our car:




We laughed the whole way home as we pictured this dude trying to figure out a way to get us back and this is all he could come up with. It was a great date.

Karl Valentine

So I heard that Mr. Valentine was some sort of womanizer who invented love cards or notes or something. Then he got arrested for something and thrown in prison. I guess he fell in love with the Warden's daughter and then he was executed for being a womanizer. Then, after he was dead, someone said, "Man that dude is cool. We should Knight him or something so everyone has to call him 'Sir'." Then someone else said, "No. Not good enough. Plus, Valentine sucked at killing dragons. Let's make him a Saint." So they did.

Now that everyone is more familiar with St. Karl Valentine, can someone explain why we have to pay $5.49 USA ($7.99 Canada) for a card and envelope that says how much we love our partner? Every year I have a harder and harder time paying for that cotton-pickin' (no offense to African Americans) card. Now that I have kids, I also have to pay for a card FROM them to my wife. MAN! I'm sure my wife would rather have the cash, but her feelings would probably be hurt... deep down.

I guess I could always do the whole "homemade" card thing. But that requires what some people call "free time" and most of my "free time" isn't really "free" since I'm actually busy watching my Netflix.

Oh well.

I know...

I know I'm the type that would tell my kid to take pictures of me going poo, but that's not the case with my previous post. I realize I may never convince those that think I put my son up to taking those pictures otherwise, but I'm going to post a few examples of other times my son got ahold of our camera and started taking pictures. Notice the dates... he's been taking candid photo's for a very long time:









Ok, so this last one was a photo taken by me, but only because it was too hard for my son to photograph his own "snot-bubble".