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We had a lot to do and we got started right
away. I was taking a class in night school that semester
(Statistics), plus working out of the CMI Southfield office. Lyn
found a ‘high-risk’ OB/Gyn straight-away. He worked out of
the medical suite attached to Oakwood Hospital, so he would be
convenient. He was a native of Egypt, and possessed very little
warmth or personality. But he was extremely competent and confident
that our baby would come into this world with little fuss or worry.
He was a welcome addition to our project team.
Lyn joined the ‘stork club’ at TOPS, no longer concerned
with losing weight, only eating proper nutrition for the new baby.
Our friend from club, Laura, also turned up pregnant (with her third)
so the TOPS club went from zero to 2 "storks" within one
month's time. Lyn resigned as club leader and I took over for the two
month interim, setting up the procedure for the election and
transition to a new leader that April.
We bought a new car, and for the first time in our lives kept the old
one. We kept the Granada for Lyn to drive to her almost daily visits
to the doctor and purchased my favorite car of all time, the Pontiac
6000. We bought the Pontiac (used) with 9,000 miles on it and sold it
8 years later (used) with 120,000 miles on it. It was so reliable and
a delight to drive. It had power windows, a bench seat, cruise
control and a tape deck. It had 4 doors, room enough to drive the
client and myself to lunch while I worked as a consultant at CSI and
later Cullinet. We immediately installed a cellular phone and I was
never again out of touch as I drove around the city or on the 2 hr
drive to or from Grand Rapids.
Lyn started going to the doctor's office at
least once a week and I was home and could accompany her on one visit
where we did the ultrasound test. The process was done in the medical
offices attached to Oakwood hospital, and required that Lyn be
essentially afloat.  She
was required to drink several glasses of water while in the waiting
room and then not empty her bulging bladder (or she would have to do
it all again). She actually was swaying from side to side when we
were called into the exam room. Sure enough, with her belly coated in
a jelly like Vaseline and the operator probing left and right and
back and forth, we eventually located ‘the baby’. The
process is a little intimidating, since the TV viewscreen monitor is
initially positioned so that it can be seen only by the technician,
not the parents. This seemed obvious to me to be in case she found
something horrible that we were not to see (like a baby with two
heads or tail). Once she was satisfied that everything was OK (she
actually cooed at the screen), she turned the monitor around to let
us have a look at our little work in process.
It was our baby. You could clearly see the head and torso, the hands
and feet, eye sockets, jaw and ears. You could make out fingers but
not quite toes. The ultrasound image was white on black (like a
moving x-ray) and the baby's heartbeat showed as a gray then white
flicker and was racing at about 2 beats per second. As we watched in
awe, ‘the baby’ laid still, then reached his arms up and
stretched and yawned. He straightened out his legs and rolled over to
one side. Later he scooched back and rested. When Lyn got home, she
drew a hilarious cartoon of Jesse-bunny sitting in Lyn’s tummy,
watching TV and fluffing up her bladder to use as a throw pillow.
That cartoon was so funny because that is almost exactly what we had
seen that day and what she felt about every 30 or so minutes.
I had heard that an ultrasound was a good way to find out if your
baby was going to be a boy or a girl. A matter of fact, many couples
have long and heartwrenching discussions about whether or not they
want to know. Being both practical and curious about the technology,
I asked the operator what exactly she did to find out the baby’s
sex. I almost burst out laughing (and still smile today) when our
technician explained that they just waited for the baby to spin
around to the right angle and take a look. Oh. She then apologized to
us by saying, "sorry but the little bugger won’t open his
legs". So we pressed on toward delivery not knowing whether we
were waiting for our son or our daughter, and we would not know until
exactly 10 seconds after delivery.
  We
had one last chance to get the house updated. We had
wanted new carpet ‘throughout’ like we had in the house in
Denver. We loved chocolate brown, as you could spill anything into it
and it would not stain and Barney’s black fur was totally
invisible. We organized a ‘hell week’ on a spreadsheet on
the Kaypro, our first computer that we received from Ted. That
spreadsheet is still in a memory box somewhere. When statistics class
finished, we were to dismantle all furniture in the house and stuff
it all into the tiny kitchen. We would then rip up and haul out all
of the old carpeting. This was a savings for us as the crew would
charge us only for laying the new carpeting.
We would also redo the smaller bedroom, due to become the
"baby’s room". We removed the ratty ugly threadbare
green ‘carpet’ and pulled down the ugly green floral print
wallpaper. Lyn wanted bold primary colors for our child’s room,
so after all the suddenly exposed holes were patched, the room was
repainted a rich but soft yellow and blue curtains where hung on the windows.
During this time, we also were laying plywood sheet flooring in the
attics, to create extra storage space for the stuff laying out in the
upstairs bedroom / storage room. Very soon we would need the extra
space and having a baby around would limit our ability to set time
aside to get it done. This project evolved into a rich family story
when, as I walked backward on the attic joists hauling in a four by
eight foot plywood sheet with Lyn, I stepped off between the joists
and put my foot through the ceiling over the second bedroom. I hurt
my leg a little and twisted my back a little but I recovered in a
couple of days. The hole in the ceiling measured three feet by five
feet and the room below was a mess with sheetrock, sheetrock dust,
dirt and loose fill insulation everywhere. That little misstep took
two full days to clean up, and cost us a couple hundred dollars to
have repaired. The idiots that installed and patched the ceiling
plaster are another story but by then we had grown accustomed to the
notion that ‘you do not get Harvard MBA’s ....’
repairing ceiling plaster.
The hardest part of ‘hell week’ was draining and moving the
waterbed, everything else pretty much took care of itself. As I
recall, Lyn spent the night at her mothers, and the idiots that came
to install our lush new chocolate brown carpeting proved the adage
that ‘you do not get Harvard MBA’s...’ installing carpet.
During this time we attended pre-natal / Lamaze
class (it was a hoot). It is without a doubt the stupidest thing in
the world for two intelligent, extremely busy people to do during the
hectic and overloaded final weeks before having their first baby. We
covered all the concepts in the first 15 minutes of the first
session, but then had to attend an addition 10 or so 2 hour sessions
where people laid around on pillows and told each other (honest to
goodness) that labor pains would be the equivalent of squeezing your
wife’s wrist. It was months after delivery, when I was saying
once how those sessions had made no sense to me, that Lyn explained
that the ‘wrist squeezing’ exercise was meant to acclimate
us to the terrifying rip-roaring screaming-yelling cyclical pains
that Lyn lived through on the night and day of delivery. Oh.
Don’t even ask me about the ‘Daddy rap session’, where
we diapered a teddy bear and reminded each other that ‘women
have feelings, you know’. My schedule forced me to miss one or
two of these ridiculous sessions (while I was working in Grand
Rapids) and to show up late on an additional week. This scheduling
difficultly was quickly determined to represent the dangerous
‘lack of commitment’ on my part, and was immediately
accepted as reasonable proof to everybody (who would then pass on
this assessment to Lyn) that I was going to be a terrible, unhelpful,
and uncommitted father.
Lamaze class was led by a cute and perky brunette, named
‘Sharmin’ (pronounced ‘Charmin’). She was also
the lead nurse for Lyn’s high-risk OB/gyn and had made the
arrangements to get us enrolled. Sharmin's behavior was strange;
perky and friendly to us, yet mean and loatheful to Lyn's Egyptian
doctor. Lyn tells many stories about how all of the women at the
office (nurses, receptionist, etc) were rude or mean directly to him.
They would begrudgingly help him and then, after he left the room,
look at Lyn and roll their eyes. The whole strained office atmosphere
was pointless and quite bizarre.
Beside one or two ultrasounds, the main purpose of the three times a
week visit was to do a fetal monitor session. Lyn would be weighed
in, and her blood would be tested and all that stuff. Eventually, the
doctor would use a device that, as best I can describe it, was a very
expensive microphone which he would place against Lyn’s very
ample belly. He would fiddle with some dials, and a speaker would
squawk, then eventually the baby’s heartbeat could be heard.
Jesse always had a strong heartbeat, which comforted the doctor and
therefore us, too, even though we had no way to tell and no idea what
he was listening for. On the two occasions that I got to attend one
of these sessions, I remember first hearing the loud noises from some
poor mother-to-be in the next examination room. Then I got to live
through Lyn’s session. I cannot describe how I felt, as a
father, to hear the patter that was to be my child. I was fascinated,
and scared, and excited. But mostly scared by the
‘high-risk’ and everything associated with that. Lyn spent
many many sessions with the doctor.
With the ceiling fixed and new carpeting laid,
we purchased and assembled baby furniture.  Friends
and family pitched in to buy us a crib, a changing table, and lots
of odds and ends. With the theme of primary colors, Lyn purchased
several cans of spray paint for us. We put the furniture in the
backyard on the beautiful spring Saturday and painted the white
wicker changing table bright red, the little kid’s dresser
purple, and the fan-fold closet door bright orange. Lyn found two
wall hangings of plush primary color stitchings and they were hung on
the walls over the crib and changing table.
Lyn had, indeed, been having a ‘high-risk’ pregnancy. She
visited the doctor at least once a week and usually twice. She caught
her usual February cold that goes into bronchitis (so nice to live in
Florida these days), and could be given no prescription drugs due to
the pregnancy. Everyone is extremely cautious with pregnant women,
sometimes excessively cautious to the point of stupidity. But 1987
was a year where science could tell us what medications passed thru
the placenta and medical malpractice lawsuits were already in outer
orbit. So Lyn's annual bronchitis was treated without anti-biotics
and hung on painfully for weeks and weeks.
She had constant fluttering feelings in her abdomen, and the OB/Gyn
explained that those were mini-labor pains. Somewhere during this
time, while I was in Grand Rapids, one of her doctors visits was
escalated and Lyn was actually checked into the regular hospital for
monitoring. She had gone into some premature labor and we were
directly ordered for her to slow down and lay back or we would lose
the baby if we were not very very careful.
But the worse news was the ‘gestational diabetes’. While
not exactly common, it is not uncommon for women during their
pregnancy to become diabetic. If you are vulnerable to being diabetic
in later life, the pregnancy can often foreshadow the eventual and
cause diabetic symptoms to occur. Lyn blood sugar had registered as
diabetic and suddenly she needed daily insulin injections. This was
very very scary to me. I hate to even look at needles or injections.
Also, at that time I had no idea that it was Lyn's fate to become
insulin dependent anyway in under 10 years. Also, the injections
needed to be delivered directly into her abdomen, and I had already
seen with my own eyes that our little baby was lounging right there.
We had tickets to see the Broadway play
‘Cats’ that was on tour and playing in town. It was the
last time that we didn’t need a sitter or a third ticket for
many years to come. We double dated with the two women from TOPS that
were our age and had become our friends. These two women (Kris and
Marie), also put on a surprise baby shower for us. Actually, it was a
cute and clever idea. Since both Lyn and Laura were pregnant, they
schemed to have a combined party for both. As they explained to me,
they would tell each Lyn and Laura that the party was for the other.
This would explain the whispers and the secret plans and keep the
secret without suspicion. It was hilarious when the plan worked. Lyn
and Laura actually helped out (bringing a dish, etc) thinking the
‘surprise’ party was for the other. Lyn (and Laura) were
both starting to look VERY pregnant, and I was certainly a mass of
confusion, worry, and excitement. To set the appropriate tone, I
started a pool on the baby’s birth date with everybody at TOPS
and many friends from work. The original intent was to sell chances
at a dollar each and do a 50/50 split for the baby but it seemed too
weird for the 1980’s. Instead we just called it a contest and
everybody had good fun picking a date which I logged on our big wall
calendar in the office. It was a good learning experience to listen
to the questions that the wise old mothers asked to make their pick
and it was quite a transition as the days progressed and the early
guesses passed by.
My philosophy was to have all our baby furniture be cheap and simple,
then repainted in primary colors. It seemed smart to me, by design,
to save money for important things, and provide Jesse with fun colors
that were very functional.  Grandma
Boros was aghast that we would have ‘cheap junk’ for our
baby. Lyn caved on the crib, and I spent one Sunday afternoon
assembling the kit of the solid wood spindled crib. We were very
pregnant at the time and it was one of the last projects before
D-Day. Since it was a gift to us, I conceded the point that other
people could spend their money (on our child) any way they wished.
Eventually, we also were given a wood high chair (so much for
banishing ‘form over function' from my baby's life). However,
Lyn and I came to appreciate it’s easy wipe-up nature (something
that we learned was very practical around a new baby) and that the
tray latches were made of soft plastic with a tab on the front of the
tray that could be pushed to remove it with one hand. This means you
can remove the high chair tray with one hand while standing and
holding the baby in your other arm. Hard to believe that my parents
would have to set the baby down (on the floor?) then use two hands to
remove a tray. Then clear the little bugger's hands and snap shut two
very sharp spring loaded metal clips. Its hard to believe, but I
remember that monstrosity from MY childhood. My child (and my wife)
would definitely have a nicer time of it.
For Mother’s day, I bought Lyn a dishwasher
from Sears. I tried in vain to take instead the one that mom and dad
had sitting unused in their kitchen for a dozen years.  They
bought their dishwasher when I was a kid and we had used it every
day back then. But now it served only as an expensive microwave cart
and a storage case for (of all things) recipe boxes. I hated to spend
money to buy a new dishwasher when that money could have instead
bought mom a combination microwave cart / rolling file cabinet, but
there was no way to avoid it. So I purchased a new dishwasher for Lyn
and set it in the kitchen. Long after mom’s death (10 years into
the future) her dishwasher still sat there, unused and full of recipe
boxes, in my parent’s kitchen.
Installing the dishwasher was to be my last home project and it was
suddenly a big one. Our kitchen cabinets were not the modern modular
standard sized kind, but were pieced together from scrap pine board
ends when the house was built at the end of World War II. I measured
and measured and finally concluded that my ‘drop in’
dishwasher would end up requiring a lot of tricky handiwork to
install. The installation project was put on hold and that dishwasher
was sitting, still in its box, when we left for the hospital to have
the baby.
As the days elapsed, more and more guesses for
the baby's delivery date passed by and Lyn, now huge, still showed no
signs of delivery. CSI had been recently purchased by Cullinet and
there were to be two big company shindigs celebrating the acquisition
and the first few months of combined business. With Lyn due any
minute, I would be unable to attend these boondoggles in Cleveland
and Chicago. Functions like these are designed to be fun times of
‘team building’ with good food, lots of drinking, and
catered entertainment. Cullinet did not last but another year or two,
but boy they new how to throw a party! Of course, I was stuck at
home, tethered to Lyn's swollen ankle, and my morale was sinking more
and more every day. The worst was when everybody else returned to the
office with autographed pictures of themselves with Bobby Orr (a
Cullinet board member) and signed pucks and sticks and I still had no
door prizes and no baby to show for it. They had their souvenirs and
I had stayed at home and Lyn had still showed no signs of delivery
whatsoever. Even my guess date had passed, and I had guessed fairly
late by standard calculations. Three quarters of the guesses had
passed by and I was still not a father.
After work on Tuesday, I was getting so very bummed. With no time
left for us to do any more preparing, and feeling handcuffed to Lyn
and the house, I could really do nothing but wait. I was so bummed
that I suggested we go out and have ourselves a nice dinner, since we
had a day or two to kill and we would be very busy very soon. We
picked the Chuck Muer’s fish place at the Fairlane mall
(TGIFridays hadn’t been built yet) and I was still dressed in my
suit and tie from work. We had a lovely dinner and I relaxed and had
my favorite drink at that time, a vodka sour. Later in the evening I
had another vodka sour, then a third one after dinner was finished. I
could feel the lightness as a weeks-old cloud of moody depression
lifted from me and I found that I could finally just relax and accept
the inconvenient unknown of waiting for the baby to arrive.
I remember that night vividly, being very inebriated, laying down on
the waterbed with Lyn and feeling very relaxed and very much in love.
I fell asleep immediately and, for the first time in several weeks,
passed directly into a deep restful sleep. |
