Key Lime: delicious dessert fruit or human being? Image via Wikipedia

Terri has been puking, a fact she is for some reason reluctant to write about.  Some days she pukes less.  Some days she pukes more.  Some days she doesn’t puke at all.

She’s not so hot on the puking.  I don’t really blame her.

We’re about to start Week 12, and according to our bizarrely inappropriate (and honestly, at times almost lewd) iPad app, we’re between fig and key lime on the “Baby-Size-As-Compared-to-Fruit” chart.  This may be neither here nor there, but I’ll be honest: I can’t think of how you’d combine key limes and figs together into a palatable dessert.

(Though a quick Google search turns up a delightful-sounding recipe for Key Lime Rosemary Jelly and Spiced Chocolate Mission Fig Scones.)

Later this week, we have the First Trimester ultrasound, after which we’ll probably tell people about the whole baby thing and then actually get visitors to this blog.  In the mean time, today was a chance to tour the hospital and see where we’ll end up having the kid.

It all starts innocuously enough: a brief talk about policies and visiting hours and security procedures and even the promise of high-quality hospital food. Then they start the group out on a tour of the Parker BirthPlace, and your clinical but professional and reassuring talk transitions into warm, glowing pictures of happy babies and families on the wall and you think: I don’t know why, but I can do this!

But just when you’re thinking, “this seems wholly disengaged from the actual process of having a child, but in a good way” you get to the part of the tour where they show you the birthing suite.  And even this isn’t particularly weird or strange — it’s just a nice room with a TV, after all — until your nurse/tour group leader starts demonstrating the high-tech and magical functions of the bed.

And as she’s demonstrating how the bed can change into this position for this type of birth and this position for more comfort while you’re pushing, it suddenly and unavoidably hits you: you are six months away from being really concerned with how a bed can be positioned for different types of births and how comfortable it can make somebody while they’re pushing.

Oh, and holy crap, that’s my wife.

Terri is just starting to show, in about as minimally a way as is possible.  Until today, it was easy to be disengaged from the mechanics of the whole thing.  Before today, it was a thing that would happen.  Like Canada Day.  But in this terrible metaphor, I’m now one with the Canadians — a Canadian citizen.  I can’t escape the reality of Canada Day.  Canada Day will happen to me.  And that’s more than a little weird.

As we left the hospital, Terri owned up.

“All of this has to happen to me,” she said.  “And I think we picked the wrong person for this to happen to.”

Which is dumb, of course.  I’ve never known anyone who dealt with adversity or hardship or even pain with as much grace as Terri does.  I can’t think of a better partner, a stronger person or a more loving wife, and I can say without a single doubt that she’ll make an excellent mother.

“Don’t be stupid,” I said.  “You’re awesome.”

We are actually having a baby.  I have seen a fuzzy, bean-shaped thing on a TV screen.  I have gone to the hospital and seen the fancy bed. And this next week, we’ll make it official by telling friends and extended family.

But in this last moment of quiet and relative secrecy, and despite how mind-boggling and otherworldly this has seemed at times, really there’s only excitement.

Well, that and total, gripping fear.  I don’t even know what Canadians do on Canada Day.