Mother’s Day

Gina and I were trying for a year and a half when I thought she might be pregnant.

“I don’t want to get your hopes up,” I told her. And then I did anyway. I said what she took for a light period may actually have been a fetus implanting. I’d been doing my research earlier that day. I was getting my hopes up, too.

She didn’t want to take a pregnancy test until the next morning since they’re more accurate then. I got up, went about my routine, and tried not to think about it. I was getting out of the shower when Gina came in and said,

“We’re having a baby!”

“Baby baby?” I gave Gina a hug, and we kissed and laughed and cried. “Baby baby!” We held each other and rocked in a joyous circle. All the doubts and the few false alarms and the tests that I went through. All forgotten in this beautiful moment. A miracle.

A miracle.

Gina showed me the proof, a plus on her test. Then she made me buy another one. I was convinced, but she went and had a blood test for good measure. But first we called our families and I told everyone at work. There was no way I was going to be able to keep the news all to myself.

That was June 24, 2008. One of the best days of my life.

Happy Mother’s Day to my beautiful wife.

Just look at our little guy.

Down the hatch

The first time Gina bought me dinner did not go well. We went to Outback Steakhouse, our favorite restaurant, and I had the usual sirloin special, which promptly got stuck in my throat. I’d had a couple isolated incidents of gagging on food before, but this was worse than any of those. I ducked into the restroom. I’ll spare you what happened there. Suffice it to say it was not pleasant.

I returned to the table and tried my best to finish the rest of the meal. It was a special occasion that I didn’t want to spoil. But a few hunks of meat later I was back in the men’s room.

It was hard to play off two emergency trips within the span of ten minutes, so I told Gina what happened. We left Outback with my steak half eaten. A few blocks away I had to pull over. I was feeling worse than ever. I opened my door and in what I thought was quite a considerate moment, said “I don’t want to gross you out, babe, but BLARGHHHHHH.”

At which point I grossed Gina out.

That was five years ago, and I ended up getting a throat scope that revealed I had acid reflux. The reason it felt like I was getting food stuck in my throat was because I literally was. My throat was scarred so badly that it had to be blown up with a balloon in what I called a throatoplasty. Afterwards I was put on medication to reduce the acid in my stomach. The thought was if acid splashed up my throat, at least it would be diluted.

In the five years since I was feeling better and started to slack on my meds. Then sure enough we had steak recently and the old feeling returned.

So yesterday it was time for another endoscopy. Having had one before, I wasn’t as nervous as the first time around. For one thing, I didn’t opt to watch the “informational” video, which back then was still from the 80’s and showed a throat scope the size of a gutter. I laid on the gurney freaking out, thinking “how’s that going down my throat?” only to be wheeled in the surgical room to see the actual scopes were much thinner.

For anyone who’s facing an endoscope, I’d recommend the procedure. My throat wasn’t sore either time, and though I was conscious for both procedures I don’t remember a thing. They administer an IV of “joy juice,” which has amnesiatic properties. You’re aware what’s happening every moment but forget it the next second. They could have taken my wallet and car keys for all I knew or cared.

The verdict this time was that I had a mild blockage in my throat. I guess it’s time to behave myself.

But I’m not giving up my steak.

The night I was trapped at Nana’s

Our friends the Roots have a party every year the weekend before Christmas. The first year we went, Gina and I were dating. She was living with her mom. The drive to Nana’s is half an hour of barren rural roads, with two stoplights to spice things up. It’s not a snowplow priority. And the flakes were already coming down as I went to pick Gina up.

Once you’re five minutes out of Gina’s hometown, everything’s dark at night. There’s no streetlights and little traffic. The snow was drifting already. We were starting down the long country stretch when three deer leapt out in front of us. They were all in a row and they looked like ghosts as they appeared out of the snow. I didn’t have time to think, but somehow we didn’t hit any of them. Gina and I are convinced it was our guardian angel at work.

Once we stopped hyperventilating we continued onto the party, where we both got to sit on Santa’s lap. We should have asked him for a ride home. We came back to my house, but seeing the weather we decided to head back early.

By then the snow was a blizzard and the back roads were impassable. I turned around shortly after the point where I couldn’t see a thing.

“You’re going to have to spend the night tonight,” I said. Gina wasn’t for it. Apparently her mother comes from the school of thought where it’s more appropriate for a woman to succumb to frostbite than to spend the night at her boyfriend’s. So after some debate we were back on the road, this time on an alternate route.

The other way to Nana’s takes you down two well-traveled roads but involves a lot of backtracking. It took three hours to get there from the time we started from home. This was one of the weekends Nana had six people over to sleep: Gina’s brother Jim and five of the kids. Gina’s sister Sue and nephew Chris were also sleeping over, so between all of the company there was no room in the inn. So Gina volunteered to sleep on the floor and let me have her bed.

I knew that her nieces, Angie and Amy, always crawled into bed with Gina in the middle of the night. As Gina tucked me into her bed while everyone else was asleep, I envisioned a nightmare scenario: Amy and Angie would come to snuggle thinking that I was their aunt, and when they realized it was me they would wake up the whole house. I was more afraid of two six-year-old girls than I was of the blizzard outside.

Gina did her best to calm my nerves, than went to sleep in the living room. I lay in bed and tried my best. Then the snoring began. It was Jim, and the only relief I got was when the furnace kicked in. It was just loud enough to drown him out. I tried falling asleep to the blower. I managed a nap and got up around 6:00, determined to head home. Quiet as a mouse, I crept through the hallway and into the living room. Gina was asleep on the floor. And standing in her nightgown was Nana.

“I see we had another guest last night,” she said without batting an eye. I told her of our epic adventure and that it was time to go home, then kissed Gina’s forehead after figuring out which silhouette was hers.

By then the plows had found their way to the lowly back roads to Nana’s. I made my way home and crawled into bed in peaceful solitude.

Gina still laughs when she thinks of me with her sheets up to my neck, gripping the edges as tightly as I held the steering wheel.

A shout-out to Mrs. Miller

Today’s National Blog Month topic is, who was your biggest influence growing up, and why? I’m going to forgo talking about my awesome parents, my natural #1 choice, to give props to Mrs. Miller.

Mrs. Miller was the only teacher I had whose reputation preceded her. It was the summer of 1982, and my best friend James and I were huddled in his bedroom discussing our homeroom assignments. Instead of being excited that I would finally be an eighth grader, I was fidgeting as James regaled me with tales of the new teacher in town.

“She only wears black, and she never smiles. They call her the Dragon Lady.”

It took some doing to be the most feared teacher in a faculty loaded with nuns, but Mrs. Miller had accomplished the task entirely sight unseen. And her first day did not disappoint. She was prim and proper, with glasses to match, and scared the whole class straight. What set the tone best? Probably when she said, “and don’t bleed on my carpet.”

It wasn’t until later that we appreciated the genius of what Mrs. Miller had done. By breathing fire, the Dragon Lady established she had teeth, while giving herself the latitude to gradually reveal she was . . . nice.

Mrs. Miller was smart enough to realize we were young and impressionable, and that canned lesson plans were not the best way to reach a 14 year old. So she taught us how to outline by helping us plot a bank robbery. She earned the respect of the rabble rousers she dubbed The Infamous Five. She admonished us to live by her catchphrase, “you must rise above.”

I learned more grammar from Mrs. Miller than in eight years of high school and college. And she taught me as much about character as she did about nouns and verbs. She also served as an unfortunate lesson in disillusionment.

You’d think Mrs. Miller would have been recognized with a Teacher of the Year award. Instead, she left St. Mary’s a few years after I did. I’m guessing she was a bit too much of a noncomformist for them. Whatever the circumstances, it was a hard lesson for me. I thought excellence was rewarded. And that the powers that be weren’t morons.

If I was still a student and Mrs. Miller was being forced out, I would have stood up on my desk for her, like those kids defending their shafted teacher in Dead Poet’s Society.

After all, Mrs. Miller always said “you have to rise above.”

How to choose a pediatrician

A month before Ryan was born, Gina and I thought it was a good idea to find a pediatrician. The baby books offered all kinds of advice for choosing the right one, but we preferred the scientific method. We looked at the candidates’ pictures. 

“She doesn’t look too friendly,” Gina said on the phone as we scrolled through the providers’ mugs. I’d found a website with head shots of all of the doctors in our network.

“She looks like a mean nun,” I said. “I don’t want to get lectured.”

“And what is she wearing?” Gina said, scoffing at a doctor who lost our business with her questionable taste in scarves.

“What about her?” 

“She looks nice, but her smile’s kind of fake. Like she could snap or something.”

We were burning through our choices fast.

“What about two down from the last one?” I said.

“That’s a way more natural smile.”

“All right,” I said. “We have a winner. Let’s give her a call.”

The week before the baby was born, we interviewed our selection (yes, our criteria went beyond whether we thought our doctor photographed well.) And after over a dozen visits, we’re happy with our choice.

So not only is a picture worth a thousand words, it makes for a good referral.

Rookie mistake

The beauty of thinking about having more kids is that you’re reasonably confident you might know what you’re doing with the second one. No more calling the pediatrician at 3 a.m. when they spit up their milk. Or having your wife wonder how she’ll know when her water breaks (you’ll know.) Or, I don’t know, broiling your bundled-up baby to get a booger out.

The later happened this past winter, when Ryan was no more than a month. His breathing was raspy from some crusty mucous that Gina and I spied up his nose. The bulb syringe couldn’t get it, but I recalled something I’d read.

“Where are you going?” Gina said.

“To the bathroom.”

“With the baby?”

“I’m going to run the shower to try to loosen his mucous up.”

Proud of my parental knowledge, I sequestered the boys in the bathroom. I shut the door with the shower running. The room promptly steamed up. Ryan did not seem to be getting relief. If anything, he was sluggish. Perhaps it was the wool pajamas that daddy left him in.

“It didn’t work,” I told Gina, returning with our beet-red baby. Gina came to a new appreciation of how a good idea goes bad.

“You left him in that?”

I looked down at the baby and made the connection.

“Uh…”

Like I said, live and learn. That’s the kind of mistake I won’t make if we have another kid. Clearly, the proper approach calls for the vacuum’s crevice tool.

My baby brother

Me and Andy after I shaved my far more handsome head

Five years ago, my younger brother Andy said he had testicular cancer that had spread to his lungs and abdomen. We were in my sister Suzie’s dorm room, just the Moose brothers and Sue, and I never expected to hear that news on an otherwise ordinary day. Andy was at peace with it, almost supernaturally so, but Joe, Sue and I had no idea this was coming.

Nothing’s as much of a punch in the gut as hearing the word cancer. Even though Suzie was a survivor, so we knew Andy could fight it, it was still frighteningly arbitrary that my baby brother was sick. He didn’t do anything more to “deserve” it than Suzie did when she was two, and all the rest of us could do was pray and offer our support.

It often pours when it rains, and Andy was having a run of bad luck. Around the same time he was diagnosed, he found mold in his upstairs bedroom. The entire second floor of his home had to be gutted. Luckily, our brother-in-law Mike is a construction foreman, and he graciously took a few days off to supervise the project. He, Joe and I managed to refinish the upstairs in the course of a week, replacing crossbeams and all of the moldy insulation and drywall. Andy slept in his kitchen for the duration of the second floor’s repair.

I decided to show my support for Andy by shaving my head. I figured he could use some solidarity once chemo took its toll. Andy, never one to miss an opportunity to talk trash, thanked me by taking a picture of himself with a sign by his newly bald head. The sign had arrows pointed to every bump and scar on his misshapen noggin, with a clearly deluded explanation of how each one got there. “Matt made me hang on the banister until it came off the wall,” one said. “Matt threw my Cubs hat out of the tree house and made me jump after it.” When I claimed such instances only pointed out Andy’s reckless stupidity, he fell back on his timeless defense: “You were older and should have known better.”

I have to say there was never a time when I thought he wouldn’t make it. (Ironically, he was almost done in by one of his medications. Andy had such a severe allergic reaction his chest and throat closed up.) I was spared the daily realities that Brandi and the kids lived through, his fainting spells in the bathroom and the ravages of chemotherapy. But call it a feeling or call it faith, I knew Andy would be okay. Maybe it’s from all the times I saw just what a thick skull he has.

It’s Andy’s birthday this weekend. He’s completely cancer-free. In the meantime, our friend Mark has been diagnosed with bone cancer. I think back to the time when Andy was sick, and how sad and scary that felt, and I wish Mark and his wife Diane will share Andy’s faith and health.

Happy birthday, baby brother.

Now about those bumps on your head . . .

Our first Fourth

Gina and I had just started dating before our first Fourth of July. Now that I wasn’t single I was suddenly popular, and we had two parties to go to (thankfully in the same subdivision.) The first was at our friend’s whose backyard was right off a lake, and Gina and I staked out a bench that gave us a beautiful view. We only left our hideaway to take a paddle boat ride, and even though there was a good crowd there we felt like we were in our own world.

We rounded out the day at our friends Aaron and Holly’s. Their subdivision launched fireworks near a clubhouse on the lake, and they had friends who had a condo that was right across the water. All of us piled into a few vehicles and headed for the show, and Gina and I rode in the back of a pickup with some of the other guests. It was dusk and Gina looked beautiful, her hair blowing in the wind, and when we got to the condo we set up in the backyard. This was the first time I got to see what a Pied Piper Gina is with kids, as they were all chasing her around trying to wrestle her for her glow sticks. I just sat and watched and smiled before I went to her rescue.

We had only been dating a few weeks, but things were getting serious. That first Fourth of July holds special memories for both of us. When I think of how she looked in the back of that pickup, sitting across from me, there’s only one word that describes what I felt:

Fireworks.

Sibling rivalry

In late `07, I got a call from my baby brother Andy. He was sounding squirrelly, so I asked him what was going on. There was a slight pause on the other line. Then he told me Brandi was pregnant.

This was quite the feat as Andy wasn’t supposed to have more kids. In 2004 he was diagnosed with testicular cancer, which, by the time they caught it, had spread to his lungs and abdomen. Between having the original tumor removed and going through chemotherapy, Andy was told that . . . well, his swimmers had gotten out of the pool. 

This was fine with Andy and Brandi, as they already had four girls. But now when their youngest, the twins, were nine, God sent a surprise their way. Andy and Brandi were thrilled, of course, albeit a little stunned. They may have wanted to ask their doctor for a second opinion.

Gina and I had been trying to conceive for a year at the time. I can’t remember exactly what Gina said when I told her the news, but the analogy was Andy had half the troops, so what was wrong with my men?

I knew she was teasing, but holy cow.

Talk about competition.

Lil’ Star

In honor of a new month, I thought I’d start a new feature. Friday Flashbacks will let me fill in details from Gina’s pregnancy, and tell some of my favorite anecdotes before I forget them all. So, today I thought I’d start with the story behind Lil’ Star.

When Gina and I were both at the newspaper, our employer decided to finally institute annual reviews. They were based on a 5-star system, with three being “fully performing,” four “exceeding expectations,” and five “above and beyond.” Our managers were encouraged not to give out any fours and fives, yet during my appraisal I was lavished with not one, but three 4-stars. I came home ready to brag to Gina, who was also reviewed that day.

Gina got two 5-star ratings on top of a handful of lowly 4’s. I felt like the guy with three aces who’d been beaten by a Royal Flush.

Gina rode that episode for the next several months. I decided to christen her “Five Star” to take some wind out of her sails.

“I won Artist of the Year,” Gina would say.

“Yeah whatever, Five Star.”

When Gina was expecting Ryan but before we learned he was a boy, we wanted to come up with something to call him besides “the baby.” We toyed with the ubiquitous “Peanut” until I had an inspiration.

“If you’re Five Star, the baby’s Lil’ Star!”

And that’s how it came to be.

Now the question is if our Lil Star’s going to part of a constellation.