In this blogisode we discuss the very graphic birth. I warned you!
I have been absent from the blagosphere [sic] lately as I was somewhat distracted with the birth of my son, Patrick Dylan Carr. Having recently gone through the frenetic and confusing dance that is childbirth, I thought that it might be timely to write down some of my thoughts. By its nature, I expect fully that there will be graphic things covered within these posts so if you are squeamish then be warned. As well I should note that I am not a doctor nor am I a lawyer - I try to cover the medical issues as best I can as a layperson. No guarantee is implied. :)
I'm probably going to sound like I'm casting stones here so I should pause and say that the nursing staff and doctors at PGRH/UHNBC were exceptional throughout. Our baby was born healthy and without complication. We were well served on many levels and if I sound a bit whiney in parts it's in the interest of being honest and transparent, not because we have the metaphoric axe to grind.
Prenatal classes teach you a number of things but one important lesson was the imporantance of creating a birth plan. This, basically, is a small list of things that are important to you during the birth. Ours, for example, covered things like "Carol doesn't want drugs offered to her but does want an epidural", "We would prefer that interns/students be used in an observing fashion only". We spent a lot of time crafting our birth plan and were relatively happy with it.
So we went to bed on Sunday, January 2nd fully expecting another week of trying to get the labour going. With January 9th as the due date that the medical community was using, this meant that we had until January 19th to be medically induced (due date + 10 days). Carol wanted to get things started but we were content to wait.
At about 2:30 AM on Monday, January 3rd, Carol woke me to tell me that her water had broken. I was somewhat skeptical as was personally expecting the mucus plug to shed but she was quite clear. "Seriously, there is way too much fluid for this to be anything but my water breaking" was followed by "omfg get me some towels already". Lesson to those who are expecting and aren't sure if you'll know: seriously, you'll know.
We packed up again for hospital along with many towels for the car seats, I picked up the now obligatory week pass for hospital parking, and we went into LDR. The LDR nurses were skeptical that Carol's water had broken - she wasn't showing any of the big signs of labour and it's more common for mucus plug to shed. They wanted us to collect some fluid to test to make sure that it wasn't urine as well. As Carol put it, she was passing more fluid than she could ever hold in her bladder, but the hospital folks are necessarily paranoid about false positives.
In short, her water had definitely broken and at that time the hospital gave us a pair of options:
(1) Go home and wait (up to 24 hours) until contractions were coming hard and 5 minutes apart.
(2) Stay in hospital and be bed ridden for remainder of labour.
Now, we both knew that Carol was Group B Strep positive for this kid (roughly it's 50/50 on each birth) so we knew that we needed antibiotics so sending us home wasn't entirely doable. Also, our birth plan never involved bed ridden labour. We had wanted to stay mobile as long as possible, use gravity to accelerate the labour, and so on. Neither of us was a particular fan of induced labours with interventions. If you're wondering why, basically this tends to result in more damage to mom's body, is less "natural" and generally speaking increases risk of heading towards a C-section delivery.
But, once you're into the delivery cycle you are to some extent at the mercy of the doctors and hospital staff. Carol and I elected to walk around LDR a couple laps to see if we could get labour started and very quickly the growing trail of fluid around LDR confirmed that we shouldn't be discharged from hospital. The doctors ordered IV antibiotics and from that point on pretty much kept Carol in bed. This was frustrating and I think if we had to do it again we would have gone with a midwife who could have overridden the doctors back to our birth plan. (That is one definite complaint I have and I can't think of a medical reason why they forced us down the path they did.)
At 6:30 AM (hour 4) the doctors started Carol on oxytocin which accelerates the labour. Briefly they cranked the dosage up again and again approx every half hour until Carol was on max dose by 9:30 AM (hour 7).
At 10:10 AM we met the doctor would would be delivering our baby and he did the first physical exam of Carol thus far. He confirmed that she was 4 cm dialated and baby was in LOT position. So for those who are expecting, note that we went almost eight hours before the first physical exam. I personally had expected within a couple minutes of being hospital them getting out the gloves and checking.
For those who don't know, a woman goes through approx 10 cm of dialation in labour and the scale is roughly exponential. That is, it takes far more effort/time to get from 1 cm to 4 cm than it does from 4 cm to 7 cm, and so on. As I recall there are four real stages - 1-4, 5-7, 8-9 and then 10. So almost 8 hours into labour with a very large dose of oxytocin, Carol was almost through the first stage.
I don't know if I can explain the environment well but I will try. In LDR (at PGRH/UHNBC) you move from an exam room to a labour room to a recovery room during your stay. We had been in the labour since about 4:50 AM.
There is a very fancy bed that the mom labours in which costs a LOT of money - nurses said it's comparible to purchasing an Escalade - which has all sorts of weird and whacky positioning equipment in it. For example, head part of bed articulates seperately from torso articules seperately from feet. Generally you want to have the head up, feet down, which means that gravity is helping the baby come down the canal.
The room has a nice bathroom which has an enormous whirlpool bathtub for mom's who are doing water deliveries. The bathroom is a bit odd in that it has no fan and has a vented door so they can quite easily hear everything from the main room. As you'd expect there are emergency pull ropes to call for help if you need it.
The labour room itself has a couple of different areas - the nurses have a charting area at the front with their gear, the bed is center of the room, far side of the room is for the family and includes a double bed on casters along with a fridge for family in the corner. There was a curtained section off to the side of the room which had all the sanitized delivery equipment.
When we first came into the room I had correctly sourced and laid out the vomit basins, filled up one with water/ice so I had cold compresses ready, and so on. This was pretty much the bulk of my contribution to the experience.
So when Carol went into this room I had the expectation that I would be having to put my mellow pants on, keep things calm and organized and help to move things forward. I was mentally envisioning an air traffic controller. I didn't really work out this way in practice. For one, I didn't personally anticipate how keyed up I was going to be feeling. From the moment we walked into the room I felt almost violently ill and for the next day I didn't consume any calories. After getting the basins organized I went into a routine of getting a large amount of water, pounding it back, peeing it out and repeating. Carol joked after the fact that I went to the washroom more than her - I figure I was going to washroom about every 20 minutes throughout labour. This seemed to keep my nausea under control but looking back was probably my OCB manifesting itself as it was about the only thing I had control of.
Carol, unexpectedly, was the air traffic controller. She spent almost the entire labour, except the "pushing part" at the end, with her eyes closed in bed. By the time the third nurse had come by and said (metaphorically) "Holy crap, is she awake? She's the quietest delivery ever", I knew it was going to be an unusual labour. No word of a lie, she sat in a hospital bed stretched out, feet down, eyes closed and didn't make a noise for hours. I tried occasionally to hold her hand which she didn't like ("don't touch me!") and pretty much force fed her water every hour-ish but otherwise she did her own thing.
If I have never said it publicly then let me say it now: my wife is an amazing woman with incredible pain tolerance and clearly stronger than I ever could be.
So after that first doctor exam at about 10:20 AM (hour 8-ish) the doctor came back and said something to the effect of "Wow, Carol, it looks like you're in pain. Would you like some drugs to help that?". This completely was against our birth plan and no surprises at this point Carol was willing to try anything if it would help. They then proceeded to inform us that the epidural she wanted was an hour and a half wait, but they could supply some lovely morphine in the meantime.
(As an aside, my dad was a junkie and I hate morphine. I have debated getting a Medic Alert bracelet saying "don't give me effing morphine". It's an ugly disgusting drug.)
At this point Carol decided she'd try the morphine as she needed something to take the edge off. For the record, we did discuss it privately and come to an agreement at the time, and for the record the decision to give her morphine was ultimately the right one, but for the wrong reasons.
When all was said and done it wasn't until 11:10 AM (hour 9-ish) that they administered the drug, and frankly it didn't really do squat for Carol. It made her dizzy, nauseous and didn't do much for the pain regardless. It did however buy us another hour where she was waiting rather than sitting in pain. She did re-iterate that she wanted the epidural.
At 11:45 AM our knight in shining armor arrived in the form of the hospital anesthesiologist who administered the epidural. I didn't want to see the needle so helped Carol instead. Basically they raised the whole bed up (it can articulate feet in the air, it's crazy), had her sling her feet over the side so they were flush on a chair, and then she leaned forward with her arms around me holding her weight. The doctor then got into the back of her spine, put in the block, and we were through it.
It was maybe a 5-10 minute process but the results were invaluable for Carol. Immediately she confessed that she felt better than she had for hours. Pain was almost gone and instead only pressure remained. We had many nurses come by and check her with various tests, i.e. pressure, temperature, at various sites on her body and all agreed that it was one of the best epidurals ever. Incredible work.
When the doctor came back on rounds at 12:15 PM (hour 10-ish) he checked Carol and quite to his surprise found that she had jumped up to 9 cm. Basically the epidural saved hours of labour as Carol's body relaxed from the pain and baby quickly moved through.
They didn't want her running off to the bathroom so stuck in a catheter at 1:30 PM (hour 11) and we moved into the final phase of labour - the pushing.
Now this is one area that they don't teach you in prenatal because basically they don't want you accidentally pushing before it's ready. Body needs to have that 10 cm to play with and hospital staff need to be ready. What the last phase involved was many different positions - all gravity enhanced positions - and having Carol push hard along with the contractions that were occurring. This was difficult for the nursing staff as Carol didn't really make any noise/indication that contractions were occurring but basically she took my hand and would squeeze as they'd come and I'd verbally indicate this to the staff. This worked for a long while up until the last 10-15 minutes where the nurse directly put a hand on her belly and could feel the contractions herself.
To set the mental stage and to pick a common position, you have your wife with her legs up like she's getting a pelvic exam. You have 4-5 nurses scurrying around the room, occassionally checking on things but basically staying ready, and a doctor plus his medical student sitting across the room watching the pelvic region change. Now I had decided that I didn't want to watch too directly but could hear them talking about the different changes - how things twist and split, and so on. When you watch TV you only hear "baby is crowning" but trust me there is far more before you get to that late stage.
As we got into the last 10-15 minutes, Carol quit believing that the baby was coming. Personally it was easy for me to tell when we were close because the doctors suddenly suited up and a ton of machinery came out of the woodwork. Now, I had expected the forceps, suction cups, scalpels, and so on but at one point there appeared to be more machinery than people. The Monty Python sketch about the woman "and the machine that goes ping" was scarily accurate and completely inappropriately cracked me up. Of course Carol was too distracted to notice but I was enjoying myself.
In the end we finished with our favorite nurse taking a leg and me taking the other one, and I must confess that it was impossible to not see some of the details. Baby's head starts to pop out at first - this weird gray looking thing which to me resembled whale blubbler. In our case baby got stuck with the first third of his head sticking out for a good couple minutes which would have been funny at any other time. There were about ten people at this point all yelling at Carol to push because she was so close but she really didn't believe us. I said at the time and I mean it seriously that a person should really have a mirror handy just in case as it would have helped this last bit.
Anyways, head popped out and baby kept moving along. All of the sudden it was a panicked "stop pushing, pant instead!" as the umblical cord had got twisted around baby's throat on the way out. With my heart in my mouth I watched the doctor physically manhandle my baby and wife to get the cord away. That was shocking and alarming to say the least. After this the rest came out quickly - shoulders, waist, feet. I'm no medical person so I'll use a rough metaphor and say that the "stuffing and giblets fell out of the turkey" after that. I noticed that my child, although clearly grey, had little chunks of poo smeared on him... like a raisin sized poo had rubbed on him on the way out. I assume this is because baby poos/pees in the womb during his development.
All of the sudden there were nurses with big towels rubbing him vigorously - think wet puppy after a rainstorm - and he went from grey to blue. He then made his initial scream to the world - two big yells - and from that point on was basically quiet for the next six hours. They kept rubbing and he went from blue to pink in good stead and was passed to mom.
I don't have the right words to express this but the look on Carol's face when the baby was passed to her for the first time... this wet mass of pink baby reaching to her with dilated eyes... made the whole experience worthwhile. She exploded into happy tears as did many of us in close proximity. There was a profound sense of relief as our happy mellow son was finally with us.
Now there was much more than happened after that - they slathered him with cream in the eye, they gave him a shot of vitamin K in the foot, they did the full APGAR workup on him http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apgar_score where he scored a 9. He lost a point on APGAR because his skin didn't change back to full pink quickly enough which was partially due to the constriction on his windpipe during birth.
I remember standing with the nurse at the APGAR table trying to keep my hands in my pockets as I wasn't sure if I was able to touch him or not. When I asked she said "he's yours, of course", which seemed particularly poignant at the time. I elected not to have the first cuddle - he went to his mom for a good five minutes - but I got to carry him around the room while she got all stitched up.
Not to overstate it, but I didn't appreciate how long it takes to sew everything up and get all the fiddly bits out of the womb. That was a surprise to me. I'd say at least 15-20 minutes later they were still stitching up Carol.
The nurses saved the placenta so I could take pictures of it, which they strongly encouraged, because "it was heart shaped". It was a bit graphic for me but I do have pictures if any sick people ever want to see it.
There was so much more after this point, between the first change, first breastfeeding, first trip home and then the first trip back into the hospital a couple days later (those effing week parking passes!) but I think I'll cap the story there for today.
We were well served by the nurses, doctors and students. Everything was handled professionally and without major complication. If I have any objection it's that our plans didn't work out the way that we had wanted to, and I do believe that they would have had a midwife been involved. I do believe that Carol ended up with more stitches than required had the labour proceeded naturally. At the end of the day though we have a health child to show for it - Patrick Dylan Carr, born 2:41 PM, 21" and 7 lbs 13 oz.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Catching up - waiting for the labour
In this blogisode we discuss waiting for the labour to start.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I have been absent from the blagosphere [sic] lately as I was somewhat distracted with the birth of my son, Patrick Dylan Carr. Having recently gone through the frenetic and confusing dance that is childbirth, I thought that it might be timely to write down some of my thoughts. By its nature, I expect fully that there will be graphic things covered within these posts so if you are squeamish then be warned. As well I should note that I am not a doctor nor am I a lawyer - I try to cover the medical issues as best I can as a layperson. No guarantee is implied. :)
From that point on things were relatively normal for us. Carol's body continued to change. Baby was always very active, preferring to beat up on ribs and organs whenever he could. Heartburn was persistent and annoying, but overall fairly normal. We took prenatal classes which were amazing and did our tour of labour delivery (LDR) at the hospital. As far as we could be ready, we were ready.
I had always planned on taking paternity leave from work when the baby was born but as the months went on it became more important to pick a range of dates. I decided to take off January and February with a planned return to work on March 1. The baby had a whole range of due dates - initially January 18th was our first date (based on last menstrual period - LMP), Dr Tsang had put forth January 1st and BC Women's Hospital decided on January 9th. So in the end the medical system geared up for a January 9 delivery and thus my time off work seemed to be appropriate.
As the days wore down in December, we started anticipating when the baby would come. Carol had some Braxton Hicks occurring, i.e. contractions that prepare the body for the eventual labour that will occur, but otherwise nothing too exciting happened. Basically as you get closer to birth a woman will shed her mucus plug and have her water break. Granted, this doesn't occur all of the time, but our rough expectation was that mucus plug would shed a 2-3 days in advance, water would break day of birth, and so on.
As the days wore on the different significant days rolled past. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when our baby wasn't born on the 10th anniversary of my dad's death (Dec 24) and similarly when we got past Christmas itself. As we got closer to New Years we started joking about "the baby lottery". If you have the first baby of the New Year then you end up getting all sorts of gifts from the city and different businesses in town, essentially.
On December 30th Carol started having what we thought might be contractions. We calmly gathered our stuff and headed to the hospital. I remember being so confident baby was coming that I purchased a week pass for the parking. Basically, baby wasn't coming but this was another mini-crisis. Carol had gone a bit feverish and dehydrated, this was in turn causing the baby distress so for 5-6 hours we sat in LDR trying to get Carol back hydrated enough so baby would be OK. Everything was fine in the end and we went home joking about our "dry run" through LDR.
We felt confident that baby was coming soon so started doing the normal couple things to start the labour. Walking seemed to bring the contractions on so Carol and I spent Dec 31 and January 1 exploring UNBC... we wandered through every hallway and stairwell of that great institution which was thoroughly enjoyable. On Sunday, January 2nd, Carol was feeling a bit tired so we took the easier trek through Pine Centre Mall, circling it a good 10 times. We went to bed confident that we'd have to be trekking for many more days to bring on the birth. We were wrong.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I have been absent from the blagosphere [sic] lately as I was somewhat distracted with the birth of my son, Patrick Dylan Carr. Having recently gone through the frenetic and confusing dance that is childbirth, I thought that it might be timely to write down some of my thoughts. By its nature, I expect fully that there will be graphic things covered within these posts so if you are squeamish then be warned. As well I should note that I am not a doctor nor am I a lawyer - I try to cover the medical issues as best I can as a layperson. No guarantee is implied. :)
From that point on things were relatively normal for us. Carol's body continued to change. Baby was always very active, preferring to beat up on ribs and organs whenever he could. Heartburn was persistent and annoying, but overall fairly normal. We took prenatal classes which were amazing and did our tour of labour delivery (LDR) at the hospital. As far as we could be ready, we were ready.
I had always planned on taking paternity leave from work when the baby was born but as the months went on it became more important to pick a range of dates. I decided to take off January and February with a planned return to work on March 1. The baby had a whole range of due dates - initially January 18th was our first date (based on last menstrual period - LMP), Dr Tsang had put forth January 1st and BC Women's Hospital decided on January 9th. So in the end the medical system geared up for a January 9 delivery and thus my time off work seemed to be appropriate.
As the days wore down in December, we started anticipating when the baby would come. Carol had some Braxton Hicks occurring, i.e. contractions that prepare the body for the eventual labour that will occur, but otherwise nothing too exciting happened. Basically as you get closer to birth a woman will shed her mucus plug and have her water break. Granted, this doesn't occur all of the time, but our rough expectation was that mucus plug would shed a 2-3 days in advance, water would break day of birth, and so on.
As the days wore on the different significant days rolled past. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when our baby wasn't born on the 10th anniversary of my dad's death (Dec 24) and similarly when we got past Christmas itself. As we got closer to New Years we started joking about "the baby lottery". If you have the first baby of the New Year then you end up getting all sorts of gifts from the city and different businesses in town, essentially.
On December 30th Carol started having what we thought might be contractions. We calmly gathered our stuff and headed to the hospital. I remember being so confident baby was coming that I purchased a week pass for the parking. Basically, baby wasn't coming but this was another mini-crisis. Carol had gone a bit feverish and dehydrated, this was in turn causing the baby distress so for 5-6 hours we sat in LDR trying to get Carol back hydrated enough so baby would be OK. Everything was fine in the end and we went home joking about our "dry run" through LDR.
We felt confident that baby was coming soon so started doing the normal couple things to start the labour. Walking seemed to bring the contractions on so Carol and I spent Dec 31 and January 1 exploring UNBC... we wandered through every hallway and stairwell of that great institution which was thoroughly enjoyable. On Sunday, January 2nd, Carol was feeling a bit tired so we took the easier trek through Pine Centre Mall, circling it a good 10 times. We went to bed confident that we'd have to be trekking for many more days to bring on the birth. We were wrong.
Catching up - naming
In this blogisode we discuss how my son was named.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I have been absent from the blagosphere [sic] lately as I was somewhat distracted with the birth of my son, Patrick Dylan Carr. Having recently gone through the frenetic and confusing dance that is childbirth, I thought that it might be timely to write down some of my thoughts. By its nature, I expect fully that there will be graphic things covered within these posts so if you are squeamish then be warned. As well I should note that I am not a doctor nor am I a lawyer - I try to cover the medical issues as best I can as a layperson. No guarantee is implied. :)
Carol and I both had strong views on baby's names so we had to come up with a compromise on how to name the baby. We decided early on that we both would reserve veto rights but basically if it was a boy baby then I would name him and if it was a girl baby then Carol would name her. One thing that the ultrasounds did positively confirm, other than the health of our child, was that the baby was definitely a boy. (Or as one sonographer joked "if not then it's a well equipped girl!")
So how do you pick a name for your child? Do you pick the names of your father, uncles, grandparents? Do you pick a name of someone in your life that moved you personally? Do you scan through baby books and pick a name that sounds good or is deeply meaningful? Do you defer to religion and pick a name like Joseph (or Mary)?
This was probably the best part of the pregnancy for me as the decision was consequential and something that I could wrestle with for weeks on end. I made some decisions:
(1) I was determined not to give my child a name that occurred elsewhere in the family tree. My dad's name, Robert, occurs multiple times throughout both sides (at least three times within a generation). Similarly having done some research in our family genealogy, to pick a concrete example, I had found an unbroken chain four generations deep of David's. I didn't want to saddle my son with a name that had family history.
(2) I wanted to pick a name somewhat unique to my "friend network". I don't know, nor have I ever known personally, a Patrick. That's not entirely true as I had a UNBC instructor by the name of Dr Patrick Mann, (who was exceptional for the record,) but certainly I've known no Patrick's that would be on my facebook friends list.
(3) This will seem silly to non-geeks but I wanted a name that adhered to RFC1178 http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html . The important restrictions outside of uniqueness from that RFC (to save you reading) are "don't use long names", "avoid alternate spellings", "don't use antagonistic or embarrassing names". The important positive encouragements that were important were "use words/names rarely used" and "use theme names". I will discuss the thematic elements below.
(4) I wanted a name that my wife was happy with. One expression that I try to follow is "always be gracious, when it doesn't cost you anything". Since I didn't really have a back pocket name, this was easy to accomodate.
To give you an example of my random geekery and what I did to ensure my wife was happy, I sourced the US Census data on most common first names over the last 100 years. I believe this was approx 1500 names. I then wrote a database application which gave us seperate rating views with a 1-5 point scale for each of us... something like "1-never", "2-don't like", "3-indifferent", "4-like", "5-love". I then devised a ranking formula which basically ensured that a rating of 1-2 from either person would result in negative score, and then point shifted the ratings and calculated a cross product. The net result was that 1-2 rating from either would be vetoed off the list, and items with a like/love would rank high. We then each took a pass through the database - I'll comment for the record that our seperate views ensured that we couldn't see each others ranking until all scores were in - and we then took a look through the shortlist.
Now for reference I had already decided that I wanted the name Patrick so was very pleasantly surprised to find that of 1500 names the only mutual 5/5 pick was Patrick. Similarly I had wanted Dylan as a second name and our next ranked 4/5 and 5/4 picks were Dylan and Douglas. So basically my wife and I already had consensus on the name and all that the database did was force many days of data entry, some geek fun on my part, and gave raw data to support what I wanted.
Commenting briefly on the thematic element of things, I wanted (if possible) (a) to have unique initials for my child, (b) to have initials that matched an acronym, (c) to have similarity in initials throughout my family, (d) to follow an Irish/Scottish/English scheme and (e) ideally have a name that did have some potential religion symbolism. If I could get some or all of these points then I was happy.
(I do tend to overcomplicate things as I've noted ;)
So examining our current family names, I match all of these. I'm Michael Donald Carr or Mike Carr more conventially so my initials are generally MC, or MDC if uniqueness is desired. I'm a public speaker so the MC acronym is appropriate, Michael is as English/Irish/Scottish as it comes and my name in the biblical sense means "who is like God" referring to the Archangel Michael.
My wife is Carol Dawn Carr or Carol Carr, so initials are CC, or CDC if uniqueness is desired. My wife shares my love of email and the written word so CC is relevant as an acronym. Carol is an English name and in the biblical sense means "the song of joy".
My son is Patrick Dylan Carr or Patrick Carr, so initials are PC, or PDC if uniqueness is desired. There are many potential acronyms formed from "personal computer", "politically correct" or if one harkens back to NT4 domains "primary domain controller" which is essentially the head server governing a network (roughly). Patrick originates from Latin but for most people sounds Irish and I think is defensibly English/Irish. It means "noble one" and for your trivia one of the alternate version of Patrick is Pacho. I don't think anyone has guessed the Pacho connection thus far.
Also looking at initials: MDC/CDC/PDC have common suffix, MC/CC/PC are all easily visually distinct.
As with everything I probably gave the naming too much thought but it was fun regardless.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I have been absent from the blagosphere [sic] lately as I was somewhat distracted with the birth of my son, Patrick Dylan Carr. Having recently gone through the frenetic and confusing dance that is childbirth, I thought that it might be timely to write down some of my thoughts. By its nature, I expect fully that there will be graphic things covered within these posts so if you are squeamish then be warned. As well I should note that I am not a doctor nor am I a lawyer - I try to cover the medical issues as best I can as a layperson. No guarantee is implied. :)
Carol and I both had strong views on baby's names so we had to come up with a compromise on how to name the baby. We decided early on that we both would reserve veto rights but basically if it was a boy baby then I would name him and if it was a girl baby then Carol would name her. One thing that the ultrasounds did positively confirm, other than the health of our child, was that the baby was definitely a boy. (Or as one sonographer joked "if not then it's a well equipped girl!")
So how do you pick a name for your child? Do you pick the names of your father, uncles, grandparents? Do you pick a name of someone in your life that moved you personally? Do you scan through baby books and pick a name that sounds good or is deeply meaningful? Do you defer to religion and pick a name like Joseph (or Mary)?
This was probably the best part of the pregnancy for me as the decision was consequential and something that I could wrestle with for weeks on end. I made some decisions:
(1) I was determined not to give my child a name that occurred elsewhere in the family tree. My dad's name, Robert, occurs multiple times throughout both sides (at least three times within a generation). Similarly having done some research in our family genealogy, to pick a concrete example, I had found an unbroken chain four generations deep of David's. I didn't want to saddle my son with a name that had family history.
(2) I wanted to pick a name somewhat unique to my "friend network". I don't know, nor have I ever known personally, a Patrick. That's not entirely true as I had a UNBC instructor by the name of Dr Patrick Mann, (who was exceptional for the record,) but certainly I've known no Patrick's that would be on my facebook friends list.
(3) This will seem silly to non-geeks but I wanted a name that adhered to RFC1178 http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html . The important restrictions outside of uniqueness from that RFC (to save you reading) are "don't use long names", "avoid alternate spellings", "don't use antagonistic or embarrassing names". The important positive encouragements that were important were "use words/names rarely used" and "use theme names". I will discuss the thematic elements below.
(4) I wanted a name that my wife was happy with. One expression that I try to follow is "always be gracious, when it doesn't cost you anything". Since I didn't really have a back pocket name, this was easy to accomodate.
To give you an example of my random geekery and what I did to ensure my wife was happy, I sourced the US Census data on most common first names over the last 100 years. I believe this was approx 1500 names. I then wrote a database application which gave us seperate rating views with a 1-5 point scale for each of us... something like "1-never", "2-don't like", "3-indifferent", "4-like", "5-love". I then devised a ranking formula which basically ensured that a rating of 1-2 from either person would result in negative score, and then point shifted the ratings and calculated a cross product. The net result was that 1-2 rating from either would be vetoed off the list, and items with a like/love would rank high. We then each took a pass through the database - I'll comment for the record that our seperate views ensured that we couldn't see each others ranking until all scores were in - and we then took a look through the shortlist.
Now for reference I had already decided that I wanted the name Patrick so was very pleasantly surprised to find that of 1500 names the only mutual 5/5 pick was Patrick. Similarly I had wanted Dylan as a second name and our next ranked 4/5 and 5/4 picks were Dylan and Douglas. So basically my wife and I already had consensus on the name and all that the database did was force many days of data entry, some geek fun on my part, and gave raw data to support what I wanted.
Commenting briefly on the thematic element of things, I wanted (if possible) (a) to have unique initials for my child, (b) to have initials that matched an acronym, (c) to have similarity in initials throughout my family, (d) to follow an Irish/Scottish/English scheme and (e) ideally have a name that did have some potential religion symbolism. If I could get some or all of these points then I was happy.
(I do tend to overcomplicate things as I've noted ;)
So examining our current family names, I match all of these. I'm Michael Donald Carr or Mike Carr more conventially so my initials are generally MC, or MDC if uniqueness is desired. I'm a public speaker so the MC acronym is appropriate, Michael is as English/Irish/Scottish as it comes and my name in the biblical sense means "who is like God" referring to the Archangel Michael.
My wife is Carol Dawn Carr or Carol Carr, so initials are CC, or CDC if uniqueness is desired. My wife shares my love of email and the written word so CC is relevant as an acronym. Carol is an English name and in the biblical sense means "the song of joy".
My son is Patrick Dylan Carr or Patrick Carr, so initials are PC, or PDC if uniqueness is desired. There are many potential acronyms formed from "personal computer", "politically correct" or if one harkens back to NT4 domains "primary domain controller" which is essentially the head server governing a network (roughly). Patrick originates from Latin but for most people sounds Irish and I think is defensibly English/Irish. It means "noble one" and for your trivia one of the alternate version of Patrick is Pacho. I don't think anyone has guessed the Pacho connection thus far.
Also looking at initials: MDC/CDC/PDC have common suffix, MC/CC/PC are all easily visually distinct.
As with everything I probably gave the naming too much thought but it was fun regardless.
Catching up - the ultrasound complications
In this blogisode we discuss the ultrasound complications.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I have been absent from the blagosphere [sic] lately as I was somewhat distracted with the birth of my son, Patrick Dylan Carr. Having recently gone through the frenetic and confusing dance that is childbirth, I thought that it might be timely to write down some of my thoughts. By its nature, I expect fully that there will be graphic things covered within these posts so if you are squeamish then be warned. As well I should note that I am not a doctor nor am I a lawyer - I try to cover the medical issues as best I can as a layperson. No guarantee is implied. :)
After the wedding, things took a bit of a weird course. We were asked to come back into the Phoenix to have follow up ultrasounds. After the second set of these, our doctor brought us in to tell us that they had found a potential issue with the baby's development. One of the lateral ventricles in the brain was malformed and appeared far larger than anticipated. As well they felt that the baby's head was significantly "lemon shaped".
There is no way to explain what it feels like when you're told that your baby might have a serious health problem. To be honest, in this respect Google failed us as the class of issues that our baby potentially had all are very serious in how they manifest. Basically we were looking between mental retardation, immediate risk of stroke, or complete brain inactivity. There was no real good news and I think our lives have been shortened by the stress that it took to resolve this all. Seriously.
We were referred to Dr Henry Tsang who did some introductory ultrasounds that appeared to confirm baby OK, then ordered an ultrasound at the hospital which showed baby unwell, then organized a tele-ultrasound with Vancouver which showed inconclusive. I'm compressing weeks here but essentially tests on baby kept switching around in conclusion.
We were eventually given the option of either heading down to Vancouver to BC Women's Hospital to get detailed testing done in a conclusive higher-end ultrasound setup or we could take the change on the baby being OK at birth. We elected to find out and headed to Vancouver on a day's notice.
(For what it's worth, Mike's employer Winton Global Homes http://www.wintonglobal.com/ was exceptional throughout this and on a days notice pretty much gave him carte blanche to deal with baby as required. They were incredibly classy people throughout.)
We went through screening at BC Women's Hospital where they asked many questions about family history throughout - how many uncles/aunts, how many died as babies, how many had brain/developmental issues. It turned out that our family line is pretty ridiculously healthy and there were almost no indicators of potential issue with baby. We then proceeded into ultrasound which confirmed definitively that baby was entirely and completely fine.
We were fortunate enough to be able to spend time in Vancouver with Kevin Horn and have a mini-honeymoon while we were down there. Kevin was a fantastic host, as he always is, and this brief respite was well appreciated.
I have to say that the experience with baby was incredibly stressful. I've never had that feeling like my heart was going to burst for so many straight weeks - somewhat stable one moment and then the next broken down in tears. I can only say that words are insufficient to describe the experience and that it was horrific and uplifting both.
As an aside, I have commented in the past that as an adult I only cried three times before my son was conceived. It seems like a ridiculous thing now as I must have cried a hundred times during the pregnancy for everything from the sheer anticipatory happiness of having a child, to the wistfulness that my dad will never see his grandson, to the broken down stress of not sleeping for days because of the medical tests. There is absolutely nothing in this world like the experience of pregnancy and childbirth, I firmly believe, or at least there has been no experience similar for me.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I have been absent from the blagosphere [sic] lately as I was somewhat distracted with the birth of my son, Patrick Dylan Carr. Having recently gone through the frenetic and confusing dance that is childbirth, I thought that it might be timely to write down some of my thoughts. By its nature, I expect fully that there will be graphic things covered within these posts so if you are squeamish then be warned. As well I should note that I am not a doctor nor am I a lawyer - I try to cover the medical issues as best I can as a layperson. No guarantee is implied. :)
After the wedding, things took a bit of a weird course. We were asked to come back into the Phoenix to have follow up ultrasounds. After the second set of these, our doctor brought us in to tell us that they had found a potential issue with the baby's development. One of the lateral ventricles in the brain was malformed and appeared far larger than anticipated. As well they felt that the baby's head was significantly "lemon shaped".
There is no way to explain what it feels like when you're told that your baby might have a serious health problem. To be honest, in this respect Google failed us as the class of issues that our baby potentially had all are very serious in how they manifest. Basically we were looking between mental retardation, immediate risk of stroke, or complete brain inactivity. There was no real good news and I think our lives have been shortened by the stress that it took to resolve this all. Seriously.
We were referred to Dr Henry Tsang who did some introductory ultrasounds that appeared to confirm baby OK, then ordered an ultrasound at the hospital which showed baby unwell, then organized a tele-ultrasound with Vancouver which showed inconclusive. I'm compressing weeks here but essentially tests on baby kept switching around in conclusion.
We were eventually given the option of either heading down to Vancouver to BC Women's Hospital to get detailed testing done in a conclusive higher-end ultrasound setup or we could take the change on the baby being OK at birth. We elected to find out and headed to Vancouver on a day's notice.
(For what it's worth, Mike's employer Winton Global Homes http://www.wintonglobal.com/ was exceptional throughout this and on a days notice pretty much gave him carte blanche to deal with baby as required. They were incredibly classy people throughout.)
We went through screening at BC Women's Hospital where they asked many questions about family history throughout - how many uncles/aunts, how many died as babies, how many had brain/developmental issues. It turned out that our family line is pretty ridiculously healthy and there were almost no indicators of potential issue with baby. We then proceeded into ultrasound which confirmed definitively that baby was entirely and completely fine.
We were fortunate enough to be able to spend time in Vancouver with Kevin Horn and have a mini-honeymoon while we were down there. Kevin was a fantastic host, as he always is, and this brief respite was well appreciated.
I have to say that the experience with baby was incredibly stressful. I've never had that feeling like my heart was going to burst for so many straight weeks - somewhat stable one moment and then the next broken down in tears. I can only say that words are insufficient to describe the experience and that it was horrific and uplifting both.
As an aside, I have commented in the past that as an adult I only cried three times before my son was conceived. It seems like a ridiculous thing now as I must have cried a hundred times during the pregnancy for everything from the sheer anticipatory happiness of having a child, to the wistfulness that my dad will never see his grandson, to the broken down stress of not sleeping for days because of the medical tests. There is absolutely nothing in this world like the experience of pregnancy and childbirth, I firmly believe, or at least there has been no experience similar for me.
Catching up - Married
In this blogisode we discuss how I got married.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I have been absent from the blagosphere [sic] lately as I was somewhat distracted with the birth of my son, Patrick Dylan Carr. Having recently gone through the frenetic and confusing dance that is childbirth, I thought that it might be timely to write down some of my thoughts. By its nature, I expect fully that there will be graphic things covered within these posts so if you are squeamish then be warned. As well I should note that I am not a doctor nor am I a lawyer - I try to cover the medical issues as best I can as a layperson. No guarantee is implied. :)
Much sneaky collaboration ensued and we conspired to head up to Dawson Creek to talk with Carol's parents. We had decided that we weren't going to go public with news about the pregnancy but I wanted to have an opportunity to speak with Carol's dad face-to-face. Basically I took him aside privately and asked for his permission to marry his daughter. To be honest, I'm kind of surprised that he didn't figure an ulterior motive in why I was asking but he didn't, and he gave his wholehearted permission to me. Looking back, it seems a bit silly to have asked, but I wanted to be sure in my heart that I had the blessing of her family with no baby pressure imposed. It would be better to have it out verbally without that complication and resolve our issues before moving forward with words unsaid.
(For the record, I do tend to over complicate things at times. :)
We returned to Prince George and I started writing what I called "the Dad speech". This was in honor of my dad, who had passed ten years previously, but also served as an opportunity to make my proposal publicly. It was easy enough to convince my sister and kids to come in to hear about "Grandpa Bob" and easy to justify why I was taping it.
This is in two parts as my sister wanted me to cover the more grisly parts of my dad speech without her children present. My dad was an addict and some people/children find this disturbing.
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d3llrZiBdw
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_Z8KdvJfC4
I'll note for reference that there was a young gentleman at Toastmasters named Joe Turner who I was working with and who I chose to evaluate my speech. It was the first speech evaluation that he had ever done, and a bit of a dickens, but I thought he did exceptional and will always appreciate his work:
Evaluation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVss_Xozegs
After this the frantic preparations for our wedding ensued. We gave ourselves six weeks to get this all together which as far as weddings go is not a lot.
Actually, why not ask the question, why was the wedding so rushed? As I've politely put it to others, I couldn't have done anything about my child being conceived out of wedlock, but I certainly could do something about him being born out of wedlock. Carol had a limited amount of time where she would potentially be mobile and energetic enough to participate in a wedding. Similarly there is a minimum amount of time needed to plan a wedding - people need to book time off work, you need to book a venue and during the summer months they already tend to be booked up with weddings... Additionally I have some OCD as it applies to numbers and it was important to me to be married as close to my 30th birthday as possible.
It worked out that my birthday was August 12 and the wedding date needed to be August 14th. However this got even more complicated because we didn't want a religious ceremony, per say, so we needed to go through with a justice of the peace. We also had another complication in that we were both Toastmasters and thus had some particular requirements and desires for the ceremony. When we talked amongst ourselves we discovered that we both wanted the same person officiating our ceremony - Dr Peter MacMillan.
Briefly, Peter was Carol's mentor at Toastmasters as well as a colleague of Mike's on the executive. He's a sensitive compassionate man who is a strong natural speaker. He also has a wonderful ability to seamlessly work with religious material in a tasteful manner. Having Peter's involvement with the wedding was invaluable and we can't ever express how much his participation meant to the two of us.
However, because Peter is not a minister or justice of the peace this then meant that our wedding plans needed to change. In the end we were legally married August 13 in a small ceremony with Carol and myself, with Jon Stewart and Michael Alborn as witnesses. On August 14th we had the more public ceremony and had quite the turnout. You can read about some of the highlights at http://wedding.pachogrande.com/ including the wedding invitations that we sent out.
I'd love to talk more about the wedding but I'm getting a bit off track :)
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I have been absent from the blagosphere [sic] lately as I was somewhat distracted with the birth of my son, Patrick Dylan Carr. Having recently gone through the frenetic and confusing dance that is childbirth, I thought that it might be timely to write down some of my thoughts. By its nature, I expect fully that there will be graphic things covered within these posts so if you are squeamish then be warned. As well I should note that I am not a doctor nor am I a lawyer - I try to cover the medical issues as best I can as a layperson. No guarantee is implied. :)
Much sneaky collaboration ensued and we conspired to head up to Dawson Creek to talk with Carol's parents. We had decided that we weren't going to go public with news about the pregnancy but I wanted to have an opportunity to speak with Carol's dad face-to-face. Basically I took him aside privately and asked for his permission to marry his daughter. To be honest, I'm kind of surprised that he didn't figure an ulterior motive in why I was asking but he didn't, and he gave his wholehearted permission to me. Looking back, it seems a bit silly to have asked, but I wanted to be sure in my heart that I had the blessing of her family with no baby pressure imposed. It would be better to have it out verbally without that complication and resolve our issues before moving forward with words unsaid.
(For the record, I do tend to over complicate things at times. :)
We returned to Prince George and I started writing what I called "the Dad speech". This was in honor of my dad, who had passed ten years previously, but also served as an opportunity to make my proposal publicly. It was easy enough to convince my sister and kids to come in to hear about "Grandpa Bob" and easy to justify why I was taping it.
This is in two parts as my sister wanted me to cover the more grisly parts of my dad speech without her children present. My dad was an addict and some people/children find this disturbing.
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d3llrZiBdw
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_Z8KdvJfC4
I'll note for reference that there was a young gentleman at Toastmasters named Joe Turner who I was working with and who I chose to evaluate my speech. It was the first speech evaluation that he had ever done, and a bit of a dickens, but I thought he did exceptional and will always appreciate his work:
Evaluation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVss_Xozegs
After this the frantic preparations for our wedding ensued. We gave ourselves six weeks to get this all together which as far as weddings go is not a lot.
Actually, why not ask the question, why was the wedding so rushed? As I've politely put it to others, I couldn't have done anything about my child being conceived out of wedlock, but I certainly could do something about him being born out of wedlock. Carol had a limited amount of time where she would potentially be mobile and energetic enough to participate in a wedding. Similarly there is a minimum amount of time needed to plan a wedding - people need to book time off work, you need to book a venue and during the summer months they already tend to be booked up with weddings... Additionally I have some OCD as it applies to numbers and it was important to me to be married as close to my 30th birthday as possible.
It worked out that my birthday was August 12 and the wedding date needed to be August 14th. However this got even more complicated because we didn't want a religious ceremony, per say, so we needed to go through with a justice of the peace. We also had another complication in that we were both Toastmasters and thus had some particular requirements and desires for the ceremony. When we talked amongst ourselves we discovered that we both wanted the same person officiating our ceremony - Dr Peter MacMillan.
Briefly, Peter was Carol's mentor at Toastmasters as well as a colleague of Mike's on the executive. He's a sensitive compassionate man who is a strong natural speaker. He also has a wonderful ability to seamlessly work with religious material in a tasteful manner. Having Peter's involvement with the wedding was invaluable and we can't ever express how much his participation meant to the two of us.
However, because Peter is not a minister or justice of the peace this then meant that our wedding plans needed to change. In the end we were legally married August 13 in a small ceremony with Carol and myself, with Jon Stewart and Michael Alborn as witnesses. On August 14th we had the more public ceremony and had quite the turnout. You can read about some of the highlights at http://wedding.pachogrande.com/ including the wedding invitations that we sent out.
I'd love to talk more about the wedding but I'm getting a bit off track :)
Catching up - engaged
In this blogisode we discuss how I got engaged.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I have been absent from the blagosphere [sic] lately as I was somewhat distracted with the birth of my son, Patrick Dylan Carr. Having recently gone through the frenetic and confusing dance that is childbirth, I thought that it might be timely to write down some of my thoughts. By its nature, I expect fully that there will be graphic things covered within these posts so if you are squeamish then be warned. As well I should note that I am not a doctor nor am I a lawyer - I try to cover the medical issues as best I can as a layperson. No guarantee is implied. :)
I must confess that a year ago I had no idea what was coming. I was living with my girlfriend Carol and my roommate Jon. Life was relatively peaceful and wonderfully mundane. Carol and I had gotten over the normal adjustment period that comes with cohabitation with your partner, Jon and Carol were getting along splendidly, and I was filling myself on Carol's beef roasts and stews. Life was good.
I had been asked earlier in the year by our mutual friend Darcie Fillion how serious my relationship with Carol was: "She's going to be my wife and the mother of my children", I had casually remarked. At the time, both my sister and Darcie thought I was being my usual smart aleck self but there was a kernel of truth in all of this. At girlfriend #10 I was beginning to believe that I was through with the obligatory nonsense of dating, coming up on 30 I really was finished with this all, and I did believe in Carol as a permanent fixture in my life.
Why is this exactly? There were many factors but the one that I like to personally think of was four legged in nature. Carol and I share a love of dog training, particularly in the form of her dog, Erik Von Schnauzer (I didn't name him) who is a non-papered purebred miniature schnauzer. Training a dog is a difficult enough process when you're one-on-one with the dog but becomes orders of magnitude more difficult with the more people you introduce. There must be some form of common goal, some common understanding and reinforcement of the shared authority between co-trainers. To pick trivial examples, I can't be calling the dog while Carol is telling him to stay. Vocabulary needs to be shared - "off" and "down" are two very different commands - the first meaning "get out of my lap" or "quit trying to climb me" while the second means "drop onto your haunches". There needs to be some common respect - it can be challenging to train a dog to new commands (or to maintain existing standards) and often one needs to positively reinforce both the dog and co-trainer.
In short, co-training a dog generally leads to frustration for all involved. However, Carol and I quite naturally picked up on each others positive traits and both grew as trainers and owners. I think this unusual and for me was one of the strongest indicators that she was a person who would raise our children.
Don't get me wrong - Carol is smoking hot, incredibly mellow and easy to deal with, shares musical and artistic taste with me, is passionate about a number of my core hobbies, is a great cook, and has many other positive traits. These all combine to lead to her being a great girlfriend, but not necessarily a great mother. The dog training was more relevant for that, for me.
(As an aside, I bring the dog training up to communicate that everyone is different in what makes that special person click for them. I don't know anyone else, or have heard of anyone else, who found that dog training led to that "magic moment where they just knew" but for me it was as simple as that. The old cliche that "when it's meant to be, you just know" is unbelievably true, not that it's any consolation to the many painfully single emo people out there.)
I was content to let the relationship develop as it may. We were both regular Toastmasters members and we both pushed each other to develop our skills both in communications and photography. Life was good.
I remember quite clearly driving home with Carol one evening after a Toastmasters meeting... the dialog went roughly like this:
Carol: So funny story, I'm pregnant.
Mike: Oh, are you sure?
Carol: Yeah, pretty sure. I tested positive about twenty times with three different kinds of tests.
Mike: Well, we'll go to the walk-in tomorrow to get an official test. If you're pregnant do you want to have a baby?
Carol: Yeah, pretty much.
Mike: OK, marry me.
Carol: OK, sounds good.
I wish I could pretend that there was more drama, and don't get me wrong there were tears shed and much driving around town aimlessly ensued, but we were really quite OK with it. I know some people get panicked and verbally shoot from the hip, and some people get panicked and run, but we were pretty much OK with it all.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I have been absent from the blagosphere [sic] lately as I was somewhat distracted with the birth of my son, Patrick Dylan Carr. Having recently gone through the frenetic and confusing dance that is childbirth, I thought that it might be timely to write down some of my thoughts. By its nature, I expect fully that there will be graphic things covered within these posts so if you are squeamish then be warned. As well I should note that I am not a doctor nor am I a lawyer - I try to cover the medical issues as best I can as a layperson. No guarantee is implied. :)
I must confess that a year ago I had no idea what was coming. I was living with my girlfriend Carol and my roommate Jon. Life was relatively peaceful and wonderfully mundane. Carol and I had gotten over the normal adjustment period that comes with cohabitation with your partner, Jon and Carol were getting along splendidly, and I was filling myself on Carol's beef roasts and stews. Life was good.
I had been asked earlier in the year by our mutual friend Darcie Fillion how serious my relationship with Carol was: "She's going to be my wife and the mother of my children", I had casually remarked. At the time, both my sister and Darcie thought I was being my usual smart aleck self but there was a kernel of truth in all of this. At girlfriend #10 I was beginning to believe that I was through with the obligatory nonsense of dating, coming up on 30 I really was finished with this all, and I did believe in Carol as a permanent fixture in my life.
Why is this exactly? There were many factors but the one that I like to personally think of was four legged in nature. Carol and I share a love of dog training, particularly in the form of her dog, Erik Von Schnauzer (I didn't name him) who is a non-papered purebred miniature schnauzer. Training a dog is a difficult enough process when you're one-on-one with the dog but becomes orders of magnitude more difficult with the more people you introduce. There must be some form of common goal, some common understanding and reinforcement of the shared authority between co-trainers. To pick trivial examples, I can't be calling the dog while Carol is telling him to stay. Vocabulary needs to be shared - "off" and "down" are two very different commands - the first meaning "get out of my lap" or "quit trying to climb me" while the second means "drop onto your haunches". There needs to be some common respect - it can be challenging to train a dog to new commands (or to maintain existing standards) and often one needs to positively reinforce both the dog and co-trainer.
In short, co-training a dog generally leads to frustration for all involved. However, Carol and I quite naturally picked up on each others positive traits and both grew as trainers and owners. I think this unusual and for me was one of the strongest indicators that she was a person who would raise our children.
Don't get me wrong - Carol is smoking hot, incredibly mellow and easy to deal with, shares musical and artistic taste with me, is passionate about a number of my core hobbies, is a great cook, and has many other positive traits. These all combine to lead to her being a great girlfriend, but not necessarily a great mother. The dog training was more relevant for that, for me.
(As an aside, I bring the dog training up to communicate that everyone is different in what makes that special person click for them. I don't know anyone else, or have heard of anyone else, who found that dog training led to that "magic moment where they just knew" but for me it was as simple as that. The old cliche that "when it's meant to be, you just know" is unbelievably true, not that it's any consolation to the many painfully single emo people out there.)
I was content to let the relationship develop as it may. We were both regular Toastmasters members and we both pushed each other to develop our skills both in communications and photography. Life was good.
I remember quite clearly driving home with Carol one evening after a Toastmasters meeting... the dialog went roughly like this:
Carol: So funny story, I'm pregnant.
Mike: Oh, are you sure?
Carol: Yeah, pretty sure. I tested positive about twenty times with three different kinds of tests.
Mike: Well, we'll go to the walk-in tomorrow to get an official test. If you're pregnant do you want to have a baby?
Carol: Yeah, pretty much.
Mike: OK, marry me.
Carol: OK, sounds good.
I wish I could pretend that there was more drama, and don't get me wrong there were tears shed and much driving around town aimlessly ensued, but we were really quite OK with it. I know some people get panicked and verbally shoot from the hip, and some people get panicked and run, but we were pretty much OK with it all.
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