...Like it's 1999

(Pre-script: For this post to have maximum impact, you will need to read it as the song,"100 years" by Five for Fighting plays. Go down to the playlist now, click on that song, then come back and commense reading. I'll wait...) (...still waiting...)

Remember 1999, when everyone was afraid of Y2K, and the impending possible computer crash? And then on December 31, 1999, the clock went from 11:59pm to 12:00am, and...nothing happened. Impending doom averted. PHEW. That could have been close.

What DID happen was that my 2 month old firstborn baby had contracted Infant Botulism and was about to be admitted to the hospital for 8 days, with all sorts of tubes and wires sticking out of her. Much prayer, a newly developed Imunoglobin, a couple months of physical therapy and nose tube feeding later, and she was a fully recovered big fat happy 4 month old. PHEW that WAS close.

And before you ask, no, I did not do anything crazy like feed her honey or traipse her through construction sights. She was fed only breast milk, and I held her all the time, not out of paranoia, but just because all I wanted to do was hold her. In fact, in the hospital when she was born, I didn't let anyone else hold her, even if they asked. My logic was that as she had been incubating inside of me for 9 months, my curiosity of her had grown 9 months worth, and now she was out, so I was going to be the one to hold her, thank you very much. It was similar to the story of the Little Red Hen, "You didn't help me grow the wheat, mill the wheat, mix the dough, bake the bread, so you will not help me eat the bread," only more like "You didn't help me feel the nausea, get fat all over, endure the labor, and then give birth, so you will not help me hold the baby...YET." (We'll never know how she caught it.)

9 years later, my firstborn is a 9 year old. I could never have predicted that. She is a 9 year old 4th grader who enjoys playing piano and ukulele, with 3 younger siblings. In another 9 years, I assume that she will be in college. But really, who knows? Maybe she'll be a hippy by then, tending to her dreadlocks and wearing long skirts as she treks across Europe with a backpack, a new resolve to vegetarianism, and her trusty ukulele for entertainment at night around the communal campfire. Maybe she'll be offended by the idea of institutionalized learning and say things like "The school of life and experience is all the education I need." That's fine; I just hope she doesn't inhale.

From everything I've observed or read in books, though, that tends to be more of a 2nd, 3rd, or 4th child trait; those free spirit notions are more what anyone BUT the high strung type A firstborn tend to espouse, since the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th borns are the wounded ones who received less undivided attention as infants. And whatnot. But we'll see in 9 years.

Happy 2009, peeps.

I am not predicting anything.

-XOXO,