Bon is still in the hospital, she’s holding up fine, at first blush the proceedure was successful and she’ll be back online tomorrow… I reiterate. bon is good.

and there, my friends, ends the coverage of your regularly scheduled programming.

When we decided to take another walk down the road that never seems to follow any path that we expect were were a little… timid. Three tries: eleven starkly beautiful hours with our 2 pound warrior in 2005, 36 anxious weeks of waiting the O-man in 2006, and an early term miscarriage late last year. Not terrifyingly great odds when you add to the fact that I’d had two early miscarriages in my first real legal partnership.

One of the things that was obvious from the get-go was that this was going to be 40weeks + of … something. In saner moments I’ve wondered whether we really had enough left to go through the process. The waiting can be excrutiating, the potential for loss a pall over the days as they pass, the possibility of a 10 + week convalescence for bon in the same place where Finn’s short life was lived and where she spent 9 weeks with Oscar’s pregnancy. And she smiled, and we shrugged our shoulders and decided that it was worth it.

But nobody told me there’d be days like these

Two days actually. It all started yesterday, with dropping bon off at the hospital. She was going to be in for 2-3 days, and the O-man and I were going to get our chance to try out 2 full days chillin’ with each other. We could be doing it for ten this summer… so practice is nice. We’ve been staying at my sister’s place while she’s in Florida and it pretty much has everything that you could ever want to entertain a two year old. Plus, plus I say, that’s not all, oh no, plus we are in Halifax, which has much better shopping than our quaint little home town.

but then oscar got sick

For those of you familiar with bon’s literary jaunts here on the crib, you’ll realize that when the O-man gets sick, there’s about a 50/50 chance that it will necessitate a trip to emergency. But, no problem there, the emergency is in the same hospital that bon’s is staying in, no biggie. We muddle our way through the morning, the O and I, with only a seemingly short visit from

the home alarm installation team

They came by about 10:30am, we chatted, and they figured they’d be done by about 12:30pm… no promises the very effective man says, but we’ll do our best. So, they start out by doing all the installations in the room that O will be sleeping in and we head off to the grocery store.

which was a howling disaster of snot filled chaos

but we managed to get ourselves together and back to the home range in time for lunch… this is rarely a problem for O, and, true to type, he gobbles down the goodies i managed to grab while fending off the little coughing dervish. We head upstairs, he yowls a bit for mommy, for daddy, for the neighbours… but it’s with that tone that says he’s really not pleased with the whole jigger, but that he’s fine. and he drifted into a cough filled, semi-peaceful sleep

until they started testing the alarm bell

It seemed that due to some unforseen challenges they weren’t going to get done before about 2pm, thirty minutes after the alarm bell sounded and twenty nine minutes after the O explained in no uncertain terms that he was done his nap. All counted 45min - not enough for O. So we head to the hospital to bring bonnie her stuff… I had no one to send in the short term (lots of fine folks in halifax, but most of them work and the phone numbers and contact info for bon’s blogger friends are all in HER head, which i had no access to) So I arrived there and quaranteened the O man for an hour it took them to figure out where bonnie was going to be. We moved into her room to be, found she wasn’t there, got her phone hooked up, stuff unpacked, requisite chocolate and room warming present purchased and O entertained (barely) for another hour in our little room

and then they moved her

Pack everything back up, head up one floor and find bonnie… we had a pretty nice time actually, as I’d brought the computer and a video (thanks for the suggestion dad) and O watched richard scarey’s best abc ever while bon and I talk about how she’s feeling (crampy but good)… we had supper, and we went home… and home, well, we made it through. I try not to watch the clock on nights like that, but i watched the clock all the way to bedtime.

and oscar was up most of the night (not to mention the toast fiasco, apparently toasted spelt bread tastes like melba toast)

So we ‘woke’ up this morning and the little bugger is hitting the high point of his illness - and he’s really being a trooper about it, but he is ill and 2 - and tried to pull together some semblance of a morning… and I discover that I’m not really feeling well. Just kinda lethargic, which i pass off as a lack of reasonable food, sleep and stress. So we skim by the hospital, hand off some more food to bon to supplement the cinamen and sugar on white bread that she apparently doesn’t think qualifies as a nutritious breakfast (I ask you, who puts that on a menu). And we head home

to the sound of chainsaws ‘trimming’ trees in the park behind the house 

Amazingly, Oscar gets to sleep. And stays asleep. And I sit down with a banana and a beer… no joke, i figure enough food to count (it’s two fruit!) and enough of a sedative to get me to sleep. Or, potentially, to give me some kind of vicious food reaction. (not susceptable) So I crawl up onto the couch, manage to make to ill-runs to the bathroom before O wakes up…

and well… the day continued. There’s a part about almost fainting in the Subway, and curling up with Oscar while he patted my head, my father having heart fibrulations which meant they couldn’t come and a family member put into paliative care.

But that’s not what I broke into the blog talk about. 

Today, I got my parent badge. Barely able to stand, sore all over, I managed to feed and ‘entertain’ my child. It puts me into a long line, through thousands of years and millions of similar moments, of parents getting it done, of being tired, sick, starving… and finding enough in themselves to do what was necessary.

It wasn’t near the worst day of my life, but it was the day where i caught my own eye in the mirror the most. (minus, of course, my teens) I found myself looking into myself, muttering encouragement, finding clever solutions to getting O to stay in a room with a couch. I know there will be many more of these on the horizon,

but today, i know a little more about courage. watching O try to comfort me while he was sick, seeing bonnie in the bed desperate to find a way to make the day easier, and, inside me, something more fulfilling then the thousands of hockey/soccer/rugby games that I thought had tested my endurance.

I lurk, and find encouragement in all your voices, and am finding not just Oscar who is already wrapped into my life, but the ‘act’ of parenthood, swiftly becoming something that is very important to me.