Archive for 2007

I’m going to start pointing everybody to this space for updates, especially the non-update updates, which is what this is: baby still isn’t here. Karina has continued to have contractions all day but they’re still not consistent. The birthing ball seems to be working wonders–she gets a contraction five seconds after she sits on it. We’re also going for walks and trying other ideas to help jumpstart active labor.

There is some irony that Karina is finally ready for Baby to come out and now he’s the one who isn’t cooperating. I’m convinced that, up until now, she’s kept her legs tightly crossed and was busy summoning all of her willpower to keep him locked away until she was ready for him. Baby was a prisoner in her womb. I’m sure of it!

Monday she started getting contractions at around 9 AM. They were stronger than the ones she had all last week, more consistent, and the pain from them went from her back through to the rest of her body. The contractions lasted all day and into the night. It was okay though because she was finally ready.

We went to the doctor’s office at 1 PM but there were no doctors. They were all off delivering babies. There were no nurse practitioners. They were all off delivering babies. In fact, there was nobody to do an exam. The nurses hooked Karina up to a fetal monitor and recorded the contractions and baby’s heartrate then sent us home. We were to report back a few hours later. Then again today.

After all those trips back and forth, the verdict is in: the prisoner will not be parolled. Karina hasn’t progressed at all since our appointment last Thursday.

Neither of us have slept much the last two days. We’re both tired and a little frustrated, but we know we’re going to be a lot more tired once baby arrives. Hopefully we’ll get some sleep tonight. The excitement and worry both wore off a bit with the news that today was not going to be the day.

This weekend I’m misssing my favorite event: SXSWi. I start looking forward to the next one the day the current one ends and I usually have more fun during those four or five days than I do when Karina and I go on vacation.

But I’m missing it for a very good reason: Karina is due any day now and it turns out there are a (very) few things that are more important than south-by.

To all of our friends who are in town: we both want to say ‘hi’. Even though we probably won’t see any of you, we will think of all of you with envy for the next four days. Enjoy south-by and send us the cliff notes! (If you have my cell or email, drop me a line — I am hoping to make it downtown for an hour or two tomorrow if we’re not in the hospital.)

James sent this to me this afternoon and I liked it so much I wanted to pass it along.

“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured hat greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.

When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new hatched sin, will not think that they invented it.

Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; not two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blow-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only when do the frustrations fall away. In this
a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand.”

I’m not a big believer in religion but sometimes I do feel tested. We’re now eight weeks away from our estimated due date. Last week my laptop–the one I do all my work on–died. It died once before and I’m not sure if I’m going to try to get it fixed this time around. The rub is that I can’t afford to replace it and I can’t afford to be without it.

My car has been on its last leg for a long time now. We’ve only been using it when we absolutely had to, which we absolutely had to on Friday night when my wife was driving home from work in the freezing rain and her car broke down. Turns out the transmission is shot on hers, which is not great news two weeks after we fixed the A/C, power steering, and a CV joint.

We ended up putting a large sum on the credit card to repair my Hyundai Accent (somehow that car always gets a reprieve). The list of things done to it was a page long. I had been avoiding those repairs in the hopes that we could trade it in for a new car at some point, but I had to bite the bullet. We live 25 miles from Austin and we have to have at least one working car.

Saturday was spent going back and forth with the repair shop. I spent several hours there but I managed to get both cars to them, get both diagnosed, and worked out what work was going to be done to them. Getting the one with the broken transmission home today was the real challenge (that’s not going to be fixed anytime soon). At five miles an hour it takes a very long time to drive the ten miles from the repair shop to my house. I did it though and I have no idea what to do with the car now that I have it home. Maybe CraigsList.

Things have been tight for a while, but this is the first time they’ve been scary.

To the six people who read this: sorry I haven’t posted in a long time. There never seems to be enough time these days.