The Day the Rabbit Died

Dan thought, when we got married, that he wanted six children. I thought he was crazy, because three, maybe four was perfectly fine, but six? No way. One day, about a year and a half or so into our marriage, we caught a portion of an Oprah episode about "older" parents. People who waited until they were 35+ to have kids. You know the ones -- they have white furniture, take great vacations, are always dressed impeccably, wondering what all the fuss in the world is about and everything goes to hell when they have a baby, when suddenly they are calling the crisis intervention line at least twice a week, threatening to jump off the garage roof because the baby won't poop in the potty. Well, it was at this point that Dan decided that he didn't want to be an "older" parent. He wanted to have his six kids whilst he was still young enough to play ball with him.

He was twenty six years old.

And so it was that we embarked about this journey of parenthood. I asked Dan at one point, "when I find out that I'm pregnant, how do you want me to tell you?" "Oh," he said, "just hang some little baby thing on the front door of the apartment, and then I'll know." And when the big day came, I stopped by the lab on the way home from work and had some blood drawn. They called me when I was walking in the door at home and told me that it was positive. Yep, the seedling of Utter Chaos had been planted. I promptly went right back out the door, went to the store and bought one of those "I heart Daddy" bibs, and hung it on the front door.

Half and hour later, in came Dan, who said "what the heck is this thing doing on the door? I was grinning when I said "I have no idea. What is it?" "Looks like a baby bib." "Yep." "What's it doing on the door?" ::sigh::

What we seemed to have here was a failure to communicate.

When he finally was told the big news, it became a rather rapidfire conversation -- all one-sided, all questions, and no waiting for answers: "how do you know? what test did they do? how accurate is it? How trustworthy is the guy who did it? How long has he been working there?" and on and on and on. Ending with "can I call my mom," which he proceeded to do, almost before the words were out of his mouth.

A few days later, we were enjoying laying in bed a little past normal, when Dan rolled over and looked at me. He patted my belly and said "yeah, gonna father me five children." My immediate response was, "who you gonna do that with" to which his response was "my wife." "Haven't met her yet, huh?" He just laughed, sure that he would eventually win the battle. He was still pretty sure about those five kids, right up to when the first one was born. But that's another story.