A New Path

This may be it. Our last weekend as expecting parents. We had our final doctor appointment on Friday afternoon. During that time, the doctor told us he thought the pregnancy would go past the due date, but he was very careful to accentuate that was only his thought and that in a pregnancy anything can happen. He advised me not to go anywhere more than an hour away from the hospital without Alecia and told a story about a couple he knew that nearly split because the husband was planning on taking a business trip to the other side of the country while his wife was at the same stage Alecia is now. Needless to say, there is no way I am leaving the state and probably not even South Snohomish County without Alecia there with me. So while technically, with the due date set at this Thursday, February 14, it may not be our last weekend as soon-to-be parents, there is a strong possibility that it will be.

                Yesterday, we walked the Green Lake trail, a very nice three-mile circuit perfect for a little exercise as well as people and dog watching, in Seattle with our friends Keri and Tracy. We started by the Green Lake Pitch and Putt on the south side of the lake. There was a 5K race just wrapping up as we arrived. We watched some of the runners—many of them costumed—finishing up and milling around and we started walking clockwise around the lake past the rowing stadium toward the Seattle Canoe and Kayak Club.

                It was in early June 2012 that Alecia broke the news to me. I was tired and had gone to bed. My eyelids were heavy and I was just about ready to let the day go when I heard Alecia coming up our creaky stairs. “I have a surprise for you!” she said, and my exhausted brain thought it had picked up a hint of sarcasm in her voice. “Great,” I replied, “where’d the cat puke this time?” But instead of Clorox, she showed me the positive pregnancy test. Although I was still tired, I didn’t sleep much that night and the next day I felt I was teaching on a cloud. I was going to be a dad!

                When walking the Green Lake trail there are all the usual and expected people and sights, but there’s so much unexpected, too. There will be a lot of people of all shapes and sizes and there will be almost as many dogs. There will be a dodgy-looking guy holding a sign that says he offers “Free Spanish Lessons” and although he may have some linguistic genius that would allow me to learn an entire new language in a matter of minutes, his outward appearance shouts “STAY AWAY” in a universal language without words. But there is also always something new and interesting from a group of twenty-somethings wearing Snuggies and riding golf clubs like Quidditch brooms while participating in a scavenger hunt to a toddler racing down the path dragging a full-sized suitcase with his mother in hot pursuit.

                Such were our feelings with this pregnancy. We knew the basic stages and what we’d find there and we knew what the end result would be, but what were we going to find on the path?

                A few weeks after Alecia’s announcement that the cat hadn’t barfed, we took a trip to Alaska to visit my parents and share our exciting news. We were at a city park in Anchorage and had wrapped two of my favorite books as a toddler, Goodnight Moon and Cars and Trucks and Things that Go and had written inscriptions that would leave no doubt as to the news we had to share. We took a video of the event and it’s one of the happiest I’ve ever seen and can still make me tear up. Their reactions were priceless.

                Alecia was a trooper during that first trimester. Riding a float plane into Katmai National Park to see grizzly bears in a natural environment that felt very Jurassic Park-like (in the best of ways), searching for a new house that would be more conducive to raising a family, and taking a surprisingly grueling hike to reach Lake Twenty-Two off of the Mountain Loop Highway among many other things, all the while battling terrible nausea.              

                During those first few months, we met our doctor, bought all the important books, and downloaded an iPhone app that filled us in on what to expect during each new week of the pregnancy. We listened and read and watched videos so we would know exactly what point on the trail the “Free Spanish Lessons” were being offered.

                We continued on the shore of Green Lake past the Bathhouse Theatre, past the wading pond that is filled with happy, squealing children during the summer months, past people of every shape, size, and ethnicity including several other pregnant women making their way around the lake in the opposite direction.

                The second trimester of the pregnancy found us renovating our old house (with extraordinary help from my brother, Brian, and friends Tim and Ann) and moving into our new one, a cute little three-bedroom within a half-mile of the elementary, middle, and high school our son will be attending. It has parks nearby and a green belt beyond the backyard at the end of a nearly silent col-de-sac. We started another school year with new fifth grade classes filled with fifth graders who can hardly wait for our little one to be born. We also had the ultrasound that revealed our baby’s gender. We found out and immediately called my parents so they would be the first to know. Alecia’s dad, Kim, found out by opening up a gift we had bought for him at a Chevron station on the way home. The gift? A hot dog. We were going to have a boy!

                About two-thirds of the way around Green Lake there is a Starbucks. We decided to stop for a snack and to warm up after being out in the cool-dampness that is Seattle’s winters. Inside was a friendly atmosphere with people laughing and chatting and there was a smiling young couple with an adorable one-year-old baby boy.

                It was during the third trimester when all the questions started. Is he here yet? Where’s that baby? Is she nesting? Are you ready? How’s she feeling? Ready for your life to change? Has she dropped? Has she lost her mucous plug? There is also incredibly touching generosity from friends, family, and co-workers. After Alecia’s baby shower it took two carloads to get the gifts to our house. We had them all spread out in what will inevitably be our playroom. They were organized into groups such as toys, clothes, utility items. Colorful and cheerful and humbling we could feel the love of our wonderful family and friends as we looked at all the thoughtful gifts imagining the people most important to us at the store picking the perfect present for our new son. A preview, I am sure, of the intense and immensely powerful love we will feel for who will soon be our most precious person in the world.

                We left Starbucks warmer and continued and as with any circuit trail we ended up back where we had started the journey. The Pitch and Putt, near the stadium, the finish line of the 5K race that had now been cleared, all the debris piled neatly in plastic bags. But our other journey will not leave us back where we started. We will finish it and start on an entirely new path where Alecia and I have made a new beautiful little person who from within that tiny package will redefine importance, fear, admiration, triumph, setback, exhaustion, frustration, but most importantly love. I am overjoyed at the thought of our next walk around Green Lake from behind a stroller as we introduce the precious little love of our lives, our son, to the world.