Alex and Maya

They don't know it yet, but they're going to be best friends. Dear Alex has been wonderful about welcoming Dear Maya into our lives, as chaotic and unsettling as it has been. The first few days home from the hospital have been easy for me, though I've lost some sleep sympathetically with Beautiful Wife, it hasn't been all that bad - that'll come later, when there's no more baby-nurse, and I take over the middle-of-the-night shift to give BW a break. I remember more of that long grind of feed, burp, change in the weeks and months later once the excitement and charm of the first few days wears off.
Like Dear Alex, I hold the dense little bundle of baby that is Dear Maya, and feel love and wonder and joy without any concept of how much change this new little soul will engender.

Welcome

Welcome to the world, you feisty little girl. Your cries made me laugh, and made me weep and hold my beautiful wife's hand even harder. You soooo wanted to be out of there, and here you are. This world's a cool place.

Signs

A few nights ago I had one of my recurring, mercifully but infrequent "Apocalypse Dreams" in which civilization crumbles to burning ruin, but normal every-day stuff keeps happening anyway - this one ended a little differently, in an operating room with BW and an impressive array of surgical props, including a wall of X-ray plates that looked oddly like ultrasound images. I got a chance to look at them a little bit, and saw a little tag on one of them that said "Male" - Aha, we're having a boy.

Two days ago I was walking up 6th Avenue from my office to get myself a cup of coffee at a local Starbucks. I'd happened to cross to the east side of the avenue because of what looked like a little commotion with some smoke and a firetruck. I happened to look over to see what was going on as the building exploded with a cinematic fireball and the sound of a loud and otherworldly hissing as the windows blew out and shattered glass scattered onto the avenue. The orange and black fireball rolled up into a mushroom cloud of fire as I ran for the corner. Wow. Just like in the movies.*

Last night, Beautiful Wife went to bed as usual, then got up, mentioning that she might be "leaking" uh, as in "honey, my water broke and I'm going into labor". Wow, just like that. That fast, and eerily reminiscent of how it went for the birth of Dear Alex, though this time we were a bit better prepared, with bags packed and plans made, more or less...


*It was a Con-Ed transformer explosion in the basement, no one was hurt - the building had been evacuated.