It was a dark and stormy night. Nine months had passed in a blur and yet, somehow, at the same time they crept by like a snail on Quaaludes. Impossibly fast – the baby can’t come now! And also . . . the longest nine months of my life. How was this possible? Do babies warp the space time continuum?

We learned our baby was coming (see last issue), we watched as Linda’s body changed, we decided on names: Henry for a boy, Maggie for a girl. And then came the day we saw our baby on ultrasound.We decided not to let the technician reveal the gender to us because we wanted to be surprised our resolve was strong, resolute, only wavering briefly when the technician muttered “There it is!” in a mocking tone. She wasn’t mocking us really, for all I know the only joy in an ultrasound technician’s job is revealing the gender to proud parents and here we were cruelly denying her that honor. But I bit my lip and didn’t think about it. See, Linda and I vowed not to think about it too much. To us it was “baby” and that was enough. We were resolute. We didn’t want to know. Nope. Not at all.

I spent months wondering if “it” was a vagina or a penis. It drove me crazy.

Family members like to predict the gender of your unborn child. It’s like a game everyone can play and the odds are pretty good you’ll be right.

“It’s a girl,” said Linda’s mother confidently. “A boy,” said a friend of mine. Elderly patients made predictions based on the size of her belly, where she carried the baby, and even the size of her butt. I think some of her friends did something with a needle and thread over her belly at the baby shower ﾖ what the heck goes on at baby showers? Is it true that men go now? I wasn’t invited and frankly, I didn’t want to go. I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody called in a Voodoo Priest at the shower and consulted chicken entrails. Anyway, the needle or the Voodoo Priest, predicted a boy.

“It will be a boy” Linda’s Uncle also predicted. Her uncle has an impressive success rate at this and everyone in Linda’s family decided to remind me that he had successfully predicted the sex of 5 children so far. That is pretty impressive, but it doesn’t mean he’s psychic. I mean, he has a 50% chance of being right, each time. But then again, flipping a coin “Heads” five times in a row isn’t exactly easy. Linda’s family placed an inordinate amount of faith in Uncle Kreskin and I was a little even convinced just a little, that I was having a son.

Despite the words of the family soothsayer, needle, butt-size, and possible Voodoo Priest, Linda and I prudently decided to decorate and buy basic baby clothes in neutral colors. We’re not the pink headband or blue outfit type anyway. My mom even came up and helped Linda prepare the baby’s room.

They painted the room blue and my mom drew Winnie the Pooh characters on the walls, and clouds on the ceiling. We went with the classic original illustrations rather than the more cutesy-poo (cutesy-the-pooh?) Disney versions.

I was hard at work writing reviews, making money, and I even took on a second book project. That second book was, fittingly, Toy Commander. A thoroughly average DreamCast game that cast a little boy, Andy in a pitched bedroom battle against his favorite Teddy Bear. An all out toy war. Fun stuff and they even let me dedicate the book to my unborn child:

“I can’t wait to game with you . . .” I wrote. This is probably the earliest sign that GamerDad was indeed coming.

I responded to Linda’s frequent bouts of nausea like the good husband I can be at times (rather than the lazy husband I am most of the time). I dealt with and enabled her bizarre cravings (it was Frosted Mini-Wheats at all hours of the night and day) but I didn’t partake in the Mini-Wheat action myself. Maybe I should have, because I gained almost as much weight as she did over the course of those nine months ﾖ and I didn’t have a baby growing inside me. I soon found I could outpace her in when we went for walks. (For the first time in our marriage she just couldn’t keep up!) And we’d sometimes fantasize about what it would be like making those treks with a stroller.

Everyone responds to imminent baby stress differently. The phenomenon is often called “feathering the nest” or something similar to that, but it could also be called “Wacky Parent Syndrome.” I suffered from it from the moment I first learned we had a baby on the way, Linda got it bad at about month 6. She cleaned, prepared the house, researched her pregnancy, read articles and books, talked to friends, and kept herself in shape and kept a strict eye on her nutrition ﾖ and on the Mini-Wheats. I wrote a second and third Strategy Guide, reviewed scores of games, wrote columns and articles, and basically worked harder than I’ve ever worked in my life. I got by on little sleep and worked well into the night. I remember Linda coming downstairs to go to the bathroom at midnight and three AM, every night. She got a kiss each time. I was a madman and I’ll probably never come close to making that much money again. I know this was some sort of hormonal/parental/provider instinct because it got worse the closer we got to the baby’s due-date. The month the baby came, I did more work than any other month in my life. In fact, I was working on a review the day she arrived.

That was a tough week. Linda went into a form of false labor on Monday and she was very uncomfortable. We moved her downstairs to the guest room next to my office and I kept on working. Unfortunately, we didn’t get much sleep all that week. Then the day, finally, came.

Linda came out of the guest room just as I was finishing the first draft of a game review. A cheap little nothing called Codename: Eagle by the company that would one day later become famous for Battlefield 1942.

Linda said: “It’s time.” I saved the review, zipped the screens, and sent it in to the editor with an explanation that they’d have to do a bit more editing and proofing on this one than usual because I was about to become a father. Then we gathered or stuff and went to meet our baby.

It was a dark and stormy night and I drove much too fast, but we made it. The baby arrived at 8:45AM. Linda was amazing, the midwives were extremely helpful and they gave me good marks for defending and helping Linda throughout that long night. They called me her “dula,” which is a woman that apparently a mother can hire to act as an intermediary in the birthing process. The dula answers questions and takes instruction so the mother can devote her time to panting, moaning, and screaming.
I was glad we didn’t find out the gender, all that waiting paid off, because I will always value the moment when they held up my daughter and I got to say: “It’s a girl! Linda, we have a daughter!”

It was a dark and stormy night, but now it was morning. It was 9am and still nasty outside and my daughter came out healthy and feisty. She cried a lot, seemingly because she was warning us about her future personality: spunky, willful, and proud. But a gentle “shush” from daddy would quiet her down instantly. I’d shush, and my little girl would stop crying and look up at me with her wide perfectly blue eyes and I saw the sun come out in our little Hospital room.

Her name is Maggie. She’s my “Sunshine Girl.”

Tags: Misc