Uphill Battle

A great many men and women have come before us and experienced challenges in their lives. Our furry cave-loving ancestors had issues with staying warm, warding off predatory animals, keeping their teeth clean, and more or less just surviving long enough to bear children. Less than a thousand years ago the human race was faced with a plague with a funny name (bubonic, also known as Black Death) and more recently we've seen things like genecide, floods, economic issues, planes hitting birds, or the internet not being available in a time of need. All of these issues have taught us lessons that we can use to approach problems we face in our everyday lives. Today my wife and I face a new problem. One way to look at it is that we need to reverse the way we've been counting. Another way to look at it is that we need to reset our expectations. Regardless of how you look at it, the disappointment can be likened to that of a small child counting down the days until Christmas. Remember when you were a kid and December rolled around. Maybe it was a candy calendar that counted down, or a bunch of paper rings signifying the remaining days until Christmas. Can you imagine if you'd been counting down the days until Christmas, set out the Christmas cookies and milk, dreamed of sugar plums and then woke up on Christmas morning to find out that it had been postponed for up to two weeks. Suddenly that nice little angel you'd been for all of December probably wouldn't be so nice anymore. Anyway, this is the situation that I find myself in today. For months, 9 of them to be exact, we have been counting days, 270, 269, 268..... 200, 100, 50, 10, 5, 4, 3,2,1... and now we reach 0. And what do we get? Nothing, not even a token contraction to let us know the baby is coming soon. Instead we get to start counting the number of days again. Tomorrow will be 1, Thursday 2. I feel bad for my wife. What a terrible thing to go through. But alas, humanity still survives today. Cave dwellers kept on dwelling, the peons of the dark ages fell, but regrouped, the economy will undoubtedly recover in the future, Taco Bell will return, and the birds may have brought down the plane, but the will of humanity to survive always pulls through. We will prevail. We will not falter. We will have this baby. Have no fear, Claire will declare in one beautiful scream that she has arrived on this planet. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day soon and with that notion firmly planted in our brains, let us rejoice, let us smile at the prospects of no sleep and dirty diapers, we will survive!