Dragon Blossom, or the Story of Emile’s Birth
To no one’s surprise, it is 3:08 in the morning and I am awake, groggily awake. Unlike past bouts of insomnia, on nights when I couldn’t sleep because oh, I was going to start 3rd grade, or when I had to get up this early to make a flight, I am awake by means of a constant prodding from my son, Emile. And despite the sleep deprivation and little ways that it steals sensibility from a person (such as forgetting how to open a door), just writing his name in a blog post thrills me. I’m so happy he’s here with us.
Also unsurprisingly, my wife’s child announced his need to be born on his own terms. Neither she nor I lacks for obstinacy, and both of us have an automatic resistance reflex when we’re told what to do. I’m not a huge fan of DNA as fatalistic decider for human behavior, but I admit there are things like family patterns. And proclaiming that just because Susanne went into labor two days before our scheduled induction means the little one is as stubborn as each of us is premature but fun. Because I’m zonked out these days, I’ll take fun as a sustaining activity.
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Taking a few steps back to the last Monday in August, we were informed that our appointment would be moved earlier by an hour because our regular doctor had called in sick. So we met with another doctor in the practice. Instead of Sarah Palin’s doppelganger, who I’ve come to really like, we got a woman who looked like a soccer mom of 8 children. All I knew about her before this appointment was that she’s the doctor who does the circumcisions in the practice, and she’s kind of klutzy. Those are two tastes that I’m sure don’t taste great together, but on this day, I could be unconcerned with her gracefulness and focus on Susanne’s internal exam. Had our own doctor Palin been doing the examination, we’d have a clear idea of when to try to induce; as it was, we were going to have to wait for the fill-in to contact Susanne’s doctor, who would then call us, probably on Tuesday.
This whole life creation thing makes for an unpredictable voyage, and not just because Susanne and I have been coming at it from an alternative place—I get that not every baby started out with their parents combing through medical histories and sperm count data. And I hereby note, for what it’s worth, that I may hear some unusual rantings when our child is 14 or so about how they entered into this world, in the midst of their teenage angst. I’m okay with that. We’re still going to sit through the six-week course at St. Mary’s Hospital, with the pillows brought in from home clutched to our chests as we watch painfully accurate portrayals of live births on a wide screen in the training room. Vernix is a necessary substance, I’m sure, but it does not do wonders for anyone’s look. 
Our unborn dragon is now at 23 weeks and counting, and as Babycenter.com tells me, can hear sounds pretty well, so I broke out my iPod and played a little Billie Holiday the other day, thanks be to Susanne’s unending patience. One book I found suggests that I should play loud sounds in proximity to her uterus so that they won’t bother the dragon as much once it’s out in the world with us. I’m not sure I can pass off needing to vacuum our bedroom, as we have hardwood floors in there. Maybe I’ll blame it on the dust bunnies that have huddled under our bed. Protection in numbers won’t save those buggers from the Electrolux, after all. 
We received an audience with Sarah Palin again today (read, the family practitioner who looks like Sarah Palin), and after waiting only 45 minutes, she joined us for Susanne’s latest exam. After a string of additional symptoms, like sudden, cataclysmic leg cramps, stubborn heartburn, and the mucous that accompanies late spring pollen bursts, Sarah Palin grabbed her fetal heartbeat monitor and pushed around searching for sound.
It’s an obvious statement to say that things change during pregnancy. A pregnant woman’s blood volume increases, as does her basal temperature. There are countless tales about mood swings, cravings, nausea, and old wives’ advice to predict what sex the baby will be, and some of these things are fun but many of them begin to annoy the mother and father to be because quickly, they’ve heard of these things.
We tromped over to our local radiology lab on Monday to get a look at the little one, still lovingly referred to as Susanne’s “parasite,” and were amazed at how much more development has happened in the last 12 weeks. There were definitely leaping hearts in the room watching every heart flutter and gulp of the wee one’s mouth.
Where once we were used to a monthly routine of trying to conceive, which came with its own arc of emotions, we’ve had regular prenatal visits with the good doctor here in Walla Walla. The good news is, she’s more than competent, a fixture in the city for newborn delivery, and there are no more fingers crossed visits in which we plunk down a lot of money and spend down our reserves of hope that we get knocked up. As folks know, we are happy to have a fetus in formation.
I pride myself on cooking well, and across cuisines, ingredients, and meals of the day. If someone can’t eat a certain kind of food—close friends know I never eat raw tomatoes—I enjoy coming up with substitutes, different recipes, and so on. Cooking to me represents an ever-shifting journey that feels at times like archaeology. There is literally nothing I can come up with in the kitchen that hasn’t been done by someone else before me, so I at least attempt to hold that history sacred when I’m fixing up a dish.
Truth be told, Susanne and I were looking for more than writing sanctuary in our temporary move to Seattle last fall. We were also hoping to make progress on the baby front. And by “progress,” I mean that we’d crossed our fingers that with the help of some expert fertility staff, we would conceive.
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