:: Introducing . . . ::

We still have two fun children left (the other two being stodgy grown-ups with children and responsibilities of their own), so last week, we took the Fun Ones to Disneyland.  We have been waiting to go to Disneyland for the whole two years our M was in Argentina, and everybody else was supposed to go with us, too.  And we’d have taken the others very happily – yes, even the stodgy ones.  Except they all decided to have babies instead.

I cannot tell you how insane the last three weeks (??? years????) have been.

One of the new babies considerately came at the end of June.  But the other one kept hanging around and hanging around, growing bigger and rosier by the minute – a baby about five years in the making.  At least, desired for that long.

The trip to LA, as I have said, had been planned for a couple of years.  For this October.  But then Chaz had to go and get a job at a costume company (where they actually add about one hundred employees during the month of October to handle their load).  So that month was out of the question.  The first week of November was our next choice.  But it seems that Pixar likes to visit BYU that week, and we couldn’t miss that.  So we chose the second week of November, which – it turns out – was the exact week our second baby had chosen for its ETA.

So going to Disneyland turned out to be a race.  A race between a mouse and a baby.  And happily for us, the mouse won.  (I will roll film at six—which means i’m saving some pictures for later).  On Friday night, we got home, breathless, laughed out, pigged out, worn out.  The puppies and house were still alive and in place (thank you, Luke), the horses were sassy and fat (thank you beloved Rachel), and the kids helped us haul in the bags and baggage and coolers and sacks and loose coats and shoes and whatever before they dispersed to their own abodes.  There was still no sign of the promised baby.

Which meant that, at this point, I came hard up against the distance-mother’s dilemma: when do you finally buy a ticket and fly to the side of your watermelon sized daughter’s side, once the due date has been breached?  Do you go now and risk having to come home before a two-week late baby finally puts in an appearance?  Or do you wait for a sign and drive straight to the airport, only too late?  Whatever you do, you end up buying an airplane ticket (another twelve hour drive didn’t appeal, somehow) at the last possible minute, which means for the top possible dollar. (Oh, the specials I had seen roll by in the last many weeks.)

So I made my reservations, flying blind – for Monday morning (that’s tomorrow if you are reading this today).  They were kind of awkward reservations at very bad times for being picked up, because everything was, per force, still up in the air:  if the baby still hadn’t come,  if someone had to be induced, if the little soul decided to drop in at just the hour my plane landed—if, if, if . . .

I told my father about all of this and he just chuckled.  “Yes,” he said in a sort of faraway voice.  “I remember your mother going through this so many times – ”

Saturday, I packed for Santa Fe.  And then started trying to catch up the stuff I would have done at home over the next week: did the laundry and half unpacked,  found the Christmas lights and tested them and wrapped some things for Ginna and ran some errands and thought long and heavily about the Thanksgiving feast and the great cleaning before the feast and what day we’d have to celebrate – working around the allied families. And when it was five thirty, my phone began ringing downstairs.  Gin’s ring. Buried in the pocket of my pasture coat.

Guy got it.  I heard his voice as I ran down the hall.  “They’re going!” he yelled.  They were on their way to the hospital – going very fast.  So we started jumping around and bumping into walls and after another hour finally settled down to watch a movie.  When – there was a twinkly text-ish sound.  Again from my phone (I had to figure out what it was because I don’t text).  And on the screen it said: “This is IT.”  A flurry of emails immediately shot out of my computer into the world – to my dad and sister and brother, and dear friends: “THIS IS ITTTTT!!!”  And I made a short, enigmatic status update: WOOO HOOOOO!!!!

Within another forty minutes, another text:  “It’s a BOY!!!”  Which was a surprise (I coulda sworn we had another girl coming). And a great deal more jumping around and hollering and a whole new flurry of messages passing back and forth.  One of them was the fresh-off-the-press family stats page from my sister, the new Sandy-boy appended.

Which brings me to the promised introduction:

ANNOUNCING to those I hold dear:

The SANDY-boy: nine pounds and two ounces at his very first appearance, and twenty-one inches long.  And his beautiful mother and brother.  His father, whose medical creds got him into the maternity ward, but luckily were not put to the maternity test in the back seat of the car, was behind the camera.

You know, if Kris had just had the baby instead, there’d be a lot more pictures by now.  Darn it.