Happy Birthday!

At this time, 13 years ago, I was heading into the Labor and Delivery Unit at Freeman Hospital. Kyle was freakishly late in making his grand entrance.

Some things never change, huh?

It was a bazillion degrees outside. Then it rained, torrentially. There were tornadoes. I saw a funnel cloud from my very nice hospital room view.

There were other, painful, nasty things, too. I won’t share that with you. Unless you are a mother who is looking to swap labor horror stories, you’re not going to want to read it anyways. Then there were the sleep deprived days and the post-partum psychotic dreams and the clothes that would never fit again. You really don’t want to hear about any of that either.

Tomorrow night will mark the anniversary of the first good chunk of time I got to spend with that kid alone. I sat in my hospital bed with K on my lap, waiting for that overwhelming mother/child bond-love thing to happen. It was quiet. It felt like it were just he and I alone on the entire planet.

That bond-love thing didn’t happen immediately. Everyone said it was supposed to happen at first sight. Liars.

He stared at me, I stared at him. Finally, I gave up and stuck my tongue out at him.

He stuck his back out at me.

I thought it was a fluke, so I did it again.

So did he. And again.

That’s when I knew that he was smarter than me, and I was screwed.

Happy Birthday to the only first son of mine!

P.S. I know he won’t read this. I wish he would, but he saw that I posted about his recent participant observation research into pop culture, and he is now ignoring the fact that I blog. So I can feel free to say, “I love you! I love you! I love you!”