I must apologize for my rampant absenteeism, good reader. “I Fought The Lawn” was created to chronicle changes in my life, and while change has been happening all the time over the past four months it’s also left me completely *devoid* of time to chronicle it. Go figure. Regardless, I’ll just get to it.
I have taken a new job – and moved to a new town to take it. Yeah, those are both big things, let me tell you. While I still work for my company, the professional situation and politicking at my old job had gotten so ridiculous that I requested a transfer some months ago. My company [who has been very good about this, incidentally] subsequently looked around and found a position in health care in London, Ontario. That’s about two and half hours from Pickering, so it meant moving. After some negotiation back and forth and after speaking about it at length with family and friends, Tania and I decided to make the move from the Pick.
With my company supplying me with a nifty apartment in downtown London to live Monday through Friday, I went to work a little over three months ago and only returned home on weekends. I thought it was going to be absolutely miserable being away from my family for five out of seven days, but I must be truthful and say that it wasn’t as difficult as expected. I found I was able to concentrate fully on work and really throw myself into it, and that made the time pass faster. My only real concerns were Tania and the house: Tan was six months pregnant when I first started working for St. Joe’s, and she’d have to sell our house while I was away.
Timing was absolutely everything, and we understood that from the get-go. Our house had to be sold before the end of my third month out there as my company would expect me to be self-sufficient by then… which also meant that we had to have a new house to settle into by that time, too. Three weekends spent at open houses and with a wonderful real estate agent we hired on resulted in our new home, which is fabulous beyond our expectations and in which we have now inhebited. Because our old furniture was rather crappy, we sprang for a whole new living room suite and treated ourselves to a new 46″ LCD television for Christmas. Yes, the debt keeps mounting! Selling the house in Pickering was a mind-bending chore, though, as the eventual buyers had already agreed to purchase it a week before and had subsequently pulled out of the deal only to return and re-offer two weeks later. That meant an unnecessary bridge mortgage that cost us a fair amount of profits. Bastards!
Around those two Hurculean feats we had a baby to deliver, too. Tania is an amazing woman. Think about this a moment: you’re giving birth shortly, trying to sell your home and attempting to organize a move to a new city where you don’t know anyone all at the same time. And because you had your two previous children at a Toronto hospital you trust, you really want to go there again and don’t want to have it in London. Think you could pull it off? Yeah, I couldn’t either. She did, though, and she deserves all credit for it… and she put the icing on her cake with the birth of our son.
Cameron Robert Wood was born at 6:10pm at December 8th at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. Tania’s water had broken at around 3:00 am that day [it was a Saturday, so I was home for the weekend - didn't I mention timing was everything?] and we were at the hospital by 5:30. She wasn’t dialated enough, so they asked us to go walk around the Eaton Centre. We spent a few boring hours down there looking at Christmas stuff, and finally wandered back to the hospital around 10:30. Tania was subsequently induced as she wasn’t having contractions. I don’t know what I was expecting when it came to inducement; I guess I just sort of distantly assumed they’d stick something wide and uncomfortable in her,pull the trigger, and wait for the baby to pop out after a loud “CHUNG!” sound. Whatever I was expecting, it wasn’t an IV drip.
The subseqent pain was too much for Tania to bear and so she opted for an epidural. I’ve never seen her in so much pain, and don’t want to again. I swear to God, that pain in her face and the fact that I don’t want a five-bedroom house are the two reasons I’m getting a vasectomy soon. No more kids, man – she can’t take it, and neither can I. Anyhow, the first epidural didn’t take and they weren’t getting it right, so I was pretty worried for awhile there. It finally worked the second time, however, and she calmed down some.
I’ll be honest: I wasn’t going to look at Cameron coming out and I didn’t want to cut the cord. I wasn’t sure how I’d react to seeing the mess along with the birth. But when his head popped out I found all of that stuff went right out the window. As the nurse said, it’s just too fascinating and amazing to be disgusting. There’s your wife, legs spread apart and opened up wide like something Evil Knievel is going to jump with a rocket car, and then there’s this kid coming out. It didn’t take long for him to make it out, and I cut his cord after all. He weighed in at 7 pounds 10 ounces, and measured 22 inches in length. He doesn’t cry much, he sleeps through the night, and he’s not one of the ugly babies you sometimes see. He is, in short, utterly awesome. I also don’t think he’s one of those ugly babies you see, but I’m prejudiced.
In subsequent weeks life has started to quiet down. Cam is not gaining weight at the speed he should be and so formula must be added to his bottle. Tania originally fed him directly from the breast but the kid is so strong he was hurting her. His grip is enormous, too, and so I’ve started calling him “Bam-Bam”. The kids have started at their new school and both have made friends already. Tania is slowly unpacking the house and while we live in a big mess right now it’s all falling into place. And although we didn’t have a Christmas tree this year due to time constraints, the kids made out like bandits once again. I’ll post about the holidays shortly.
New job, new house, new town, new baby… new lawn!
- BC
