Remember, remember, the 4th of September

One year ago today, the alarm clock went off fairly early, so early that it was still dark outside, and roused my wife and myself from sleep. She rolled out of bed and made her way to the bathroom; I rolled out of bed, turned on the computer (conveniently right beside the bed), unmuted the speakers, and fired up iTunes. When my wife came back in the bedroom I played for her the theme song from Rocky, “Gonna Fly Now.”

My wife has never seen any of the Rocky movies (I KNOW, right? but she hates boxing, and I have to admit that the sport does play a fairly large role in the series (of which, in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve only seen the first four, as I’m convinced those are the only ones worth seeing), and she very sweetly listened to my entire breathless five-minute recap of Rocky’s entire career the other day when we came across Rocky III on cable) and up until a year ago she had never heard the theme song all the way through, which I thought was remarkable. It’s cheesy and overblown and oh-so-much a product of its times, but man, listening to “Gonna Fly Now” as a means to getting pumped up for a Big Moment is the birthright of every American in our generation. And one year ago today, we were very much headed for a Big Moment.

The alarm clock hadn’t been set to wake us up for work. It had been set to wake us up for our appointed check-in time at the hospital. I played 4 minutes and 51 seconds of bombastic horn fanfares and orchestral swells and disco guitar solos for my wife not simply to bridge a gap in her pop culture knowledge, but to get her psyched for her labor induction. We had no idea if it was going to be easy or hard, beautiful or ugly – we didn’t even know when it was going to end, and had certainly heard plenty of nightmarish stories about labor dragging on for days. But I was going to start things off on the right note, soundtrack-wise, dangit.

Induced labor was hard, in my wife’s case, as it turns out. Pushing pitocin through an IV hookup in ever-increasing amounts works as advertised, speeding along the process … you know when you have a wind-up toy that’s slowly wobbling its way across the floor and you decide you don’t want to wait for it to wind all the way down on its own so you pick it up and you manually turn the winder forward until all the internal tension is gone? You know how that sounds, kind of mechanically angry and on the verge of breaking? I’m going purely on second-hand observations here but induced labor feels like that sounds. It got kind of crazy intense at points and in the heat of the moment my wife and I forgot great huge chunks of what we had learned in childbirth class, but the Birthing Inn had good labor nurses and my wife had a good OB and everything turned out fine. One year ago today we woke up early and listened to Rocky’s theme, and before we went to sleep that very night we had a baby boy.

A year goes by fast, and our helpless-but-pretty-mellow-about-it-on-the-whole protosimian has become a much more animated bundle of energy who is thiiiiiiis close to walking on his own and talking in real words (as opposed to random sounds that capture a certain conversational spirit delightfully devoid of meaning). He is a cool, cool kid and I hope he has a happy birthday. He is, of course, utterly oblivious to the significance of today's date on the calendar. But, his favorite daycare provider is back from vacation today, so he probably will have a happy day at that.

The official party (cookout, cake, presents, possibly shots of tequila while birthday boy is napping) isn’t until Sunday, and I will of course report back on anything entertaining that transpires.