The Greatest Adventure of My Life
My whole life has been a great adventure for the last nine months. Everyday I live new experiences and emotions. The reason being is that my beautiful wife has been carrying our first babe for nine months now, and he could be born at any time now. It’s hard to describe this experience because of the wide range of emotions I have been through. From being surprise when we first learned about the new addition to our family, to being scared and nervous once the news sunk in to being excited and happy when I first heard his heart beat and his moving inside my wife’s belly, to being anxious in these last few weeks. It has been the longest and most gratifying nine months of my life, and because it takes place over a long period of time and involves many different experiences and emotions, please allow me to write about the highlights of this great adventure.
Let us begin from the beginning. One cold February evening, my wife calls me a work and asks me to go have dinner at home (I work second shift), and I knew right away that she was up to something (she only cooks when either she wants something). I was already expecting her classic question “how much do you love me?” and I already knew my reply: “what do you want to ask me?” That is a very dangerous question because she usually has a to-do list for me (she is a to-do list maniac). However, I knew that it had to be something bigger than a to-do list in order for her to cook dinner on a weeknight. So I come home not knowing what she was up to. I kept trying to remember if I had done something that made her mad because I have heard about wives that will cook with all kinds of unusual ingredients, such as dog food, and feed it to their husbands when they have been bad. So I come home, and she as happy as she can be, which made me even more suspicious. She had made the table as if we were expecting Prince Williams and Princess Kate for dinner. I grew even more suspicious and I had to exchange plates with her just in case she was trying to punish me for some reason. That’s when she sowed me the pregnancy test with the two lines showing that it came back positive. I wish she had waited until I did not have any food in my mouth because I almost choked. Millions of thousands of thoughts rushed through my head, but one that stood out was that we had to do a second test to confirm it. We decided to wait until the next day and try it again the first thing in the morning. So we did and it again came back positive. These two lines changed our lives forever.
After the first moment of excitement and celebration, we schedule our first doctor visit for an ultrasound and the official confirmation that a divine gift has been placed in our lives. It is very hard to describe what I felt the first time I saw his little heart beating on the computer monitor. I was trying to focus on the happiness of the moment, but the ultrasound technician kept talking about her own experience and how it was hard to raise a child with autism (her youngest daughter is autistic). I did not know if I should listen to her and show my sympathy or if I should ignore her because that was our (my wife’s and mine) moment. I kept looking at my wife and she had a smile that almost could not fit on her face. She was so beautiful and she was glowing. Her eyes were shinning in a way that I will never forget. But I still could hear the technician going on and on and on…
So it was official that we were expecting a babe. I could not help to come home and do some research about pregnancy and find out what to expect when you are expecting. One of the first things I learned was that, at that time, Alex (that’s our son’s name) was only the size of a blue berry. So we started calling him blue berry. I must confess that, even though it was official, I still did not feel it as being real, that it was really happening. I am not sure why, but I believe that it is natural for people to be in denial when they experience something new and of such magnitude.
So months go by and blue berry is now big enough so I can feel him moving inside my wife’s belly. It was a magical moment the first time I felt him kicking, pushing and moving around. From that moment on I was hooked. Every night I rush home so I can lie next to my wife and feel him doing his own thing. I feel like I am missing out when I am not around them. I believe that these are precious moments, and they will not last forever. So I try to be with them as much as I can, and this is distracting me and keeping me from working on my responsibilities. I have not been paying my bills on time and definitely not keeping up with my school assignments.
I am sure that every parent out there understands what I am going through. These magical moments of being a parent to be are part of a great adventure that not only has changed my life forever, but also it has changed my perspective of life. I now realize more than ever how fast life goes by, and I don’t want to miss any single second of it. Only if I could add twelve hours to my days and three days to my weeks I would be able to give my family all the attention I can, work full time and still turn in my school assignments on time. But this is not the case, and I have to deal with it. So I continue trying the best to make the best of this adventurous journey called life.
