Birthday Boys

Twenty years ago, I began the day in a drug-induced haze, which eventually cleared enough for me to have a lengthy discussion with the doctor who had replaced mine for awhile (How is it that doctors can go home to sleep, but laboring women have to stick with the program?) about a nonprogressing labor that was about to turn into a c-section.  By early afternoon I would be sitting on an operating table arguing with an anesthesiologist about a botched epidural (Ha! Little did I know that a botched spinal was about to follow).  Not much that I had planned actually took place during that labor, but I did have the extraordinary, amazing, absolutely transcendent experience of watching in a small mirror above my head as two tiny bodies were lifted from mine.   

I don't remember much of the next hour, but the babies spent it in a warmer next to me and the pictures show the personalities that have been apparent since their first seconds of life: one dozing contentedly in utter oblivion to the lights and action surrounding him, the other wide-eyed and apparently completely panicked by his emergence into this world.  In a few years, the first would be marching confidently into the Atlantic Ocean, while his brother would be racing back and forth on the beach screaming, "Mom!  He's going to drown!  He's going to drown!"  

I'm imagining them in Prague today.  One is sipping a cup of coffee, relaxed and oblivious to the fact that they need to get to the station for their overnight train to Amsterdam.  The other is tense and alert, trying to hurry things along.  And back here at home, missing them, we find that we don't have three teenagers anymore.  

Happy Birthdays, guys!

 

Walked: 3 miles.