Funny Letters and Mad Science

Dear Oliver,

I’m sorry for the delay in writing; your mother and I have been pretty busy lately. We’ve been organizing the house for your eventual arrival, and we’re getting ready for a whole bunch of baby showers in your honor.

We also signed up for a couple of parenting classes. One of them is a day-long class, and I’m assuming that it will be like a parenting version of basic training. But instead of drill sergeants ordering us to do this many pushups or peel so many potatoes, the drill sergeants will be actual infants and they will not be quiet until they get a good burping and you give them their nooky-nook.

I also expect that instead of running and push-ups for physical training, there will be fathers practicing wind-sprints to get ice cream for their screaming wives, and we’ll practice pulling up Pull-Ups and diapers on mannequins of small children. Like in basic training, there will also probably be exposure to chemical weapons, but instead of being exposed to actual chemical weapons, they will probably make us change a really, really smelly baby raised entirely on breast milk from a mother who eats only cabbage-filled bean tacos and washes it down with pickle juice. (OK, that actually wouldn’t cause gas in the baby—just the mom, but still, you get my point.) And of course, there will no doubt be lots of practice marching around, but instead of the “You will love your rifle! You will care for your rifle!” you might hear in the U.S. Army, we will march our sample-babies to the crib, to the floor for tummy time, and so on.

If it’s like any of the marching I’ve seen on TV, we’ll no doubt be marching and singing. In fact, I’m already preparing for this—and for your arrival—I’m already trying out songs to sing to you when you get here. One of my current favorites is “Ollie, Ollie, Ollie, get your adverbs here.”

About the singing: You can blame your Grandpa Ortler for this. He is always walking around singing songs he makes up on the spot. (And he wonders why I ended up liking writing and poetry.)  For instance, just the other day, he and I were talking about one of the rovers that has been cruising around on Mars, and I mentioned that it has survived for years and driven over 15 miles. He said, “That’s a long way to go without talking to anyone. I bet it’s humming as it’s driving along.” Now every time I think of it, I think of a Mars rover driving along and doing a little dance, probably holding some sort of umbrella drink.

Anyway, you should know that your mother looks absolutely adorable. Because her center of gravity has shifted, she carries her weight differently. When you combine that with her now-noticeable belly, she looks something like an adorable umpire. And when she’s on the couch and attempts to get up, there’s a moment in her ascent where she’s essentially in a half-crouch, as if she’s standing behind a catcher. And sometimes, her attempts to get up aren’t entirely successful, so she’ll hover in that position for a second, and it’ll look like she’s calling a game and can’t decide on what her call should be (continue getting up, or return to the couch). Usually, this results in a return to the couch and a request that I go get whatever she needed.

Of course, I don’t have much of a problem fetching her whatever she needs, especially since I’ve been reading about the biological processes at work. It’s like a construction site in there. Her hips are moving, her organs are shifting around, and all the while, you’re whirring about, like some sort of adorable dynamo. Most of the time at the ultrasounds, I expect to see orange cones all over the place and all of her organs in reflective vests and wearing hard-hats. (I wouldn’t quite know what to make of a “Men at Work” sign, though.)

While my organs haven’t moved much, a lot has changed for me too. I mean, everyone says how much a child changes your life, but they never tell you how. I never realized how often I lived in the present tense. I’d decide to go to a movie or I’d go camping on a whim. If anything, I planned things out one weekend in advance, or a few weeks at most.

When you have a kid, that kind of planning will no longer do. Suddenly, everything switches to the future tense—where you want them to grow up, what schools to look into, all that. Your mother and I have had more conversations about the next four or five years in the last few months than we had in the years we’d been together. Until you, everything else in the future had been hypothetical and tentative, like a report of a spate of beautiful weather on the horizon, but when we saw you on the 3D ultrasound, you were concrete, imminent.

It’s a good change—and one that we are ready for—but there’s no real preparing for it, I can tell you that. One day, it just sets in. For me, I looked at your mom’s belly and I said, “Yep, I think it’s about time we finish that bedroom.”

Take care,

Pops