Les Bonnes Choses

My apologies to those out there who don't know me well enough to know that I'm the sort of person who would make a geek reference in the middle of a birth announcement. James Tiberius (as in James T. Kirk from the original Star Trek series) is definitely a well-crafted name, but our first-born, Jude, already has a lifetime of "Hey Jude" references ahead of him. I can't imagine it would be any easier for someone to grow up with a name that's an obvious reference to a womanizing starship captain. He seems to be a pretty good-looking boy, and I could imagine a desperate girl might make the mistake of painting herself green to try to win his affections.

We didn't know ahead of time if we were having a boy or girl, whose name would have been Sasha Claire (I also liked the name Portia, but I was already responsible for the middle name). We eventually decided on the name Asher, and arriving at this decision was a difficult process because it took 8 brain-racking months to come up with the first boy's name, Jude, that met my stringent social-engineering-based criteria was a challenge. Deciding on a middle name for Asher was a little less difficult, on account of the fact that they are generally used only when the child is in big cucks, though this was not without it's difficulties either. Rebecca first proposed the name Jackson. On it's own, it's not a bad name, but when combined with Asher, well, I couldn't say Asher Jackson without instead calling him Action Jackson and then giggling. In the end, Rebecca thought it wouldn't be appropriate if I laughed at the mention of my son's name, so we went with Benjamin - a name shared by a good, selfless friend of mine.



So here's where I give a few shoutouts. Props to our midwife, Natalie Hicken, who was great company the whole day. Props also go to my dad for answering the phone at 6am and coming to get Jude that morning, and to Heather and X for coming down from Toronto for the weekend and willing the baby to be born (Heather is that stubborn).

On the other hand, slops go to Rogers home phone service, which spontaneously cut out in the middle of our emergency call to the midwives to tell them that we were in labour. We were fortunate to have a cell phone, but I was plenty irate with the loss of service in the middle of an emergency call. They were, after all, the ones that required us to replace our phone-line service with their stupid, unreliable cable phone.

I finish off with the observation that childbirth isn't called labour for nothing. It's a lot of hard work, which is why it isn't called vacation instead. I'm not sure why nature took that route; I'm sure it would be nice to have pleasant tickling contractions and have the baby come out with something that felt like a backrub. I don't know who to talk to about that. I'm always inventing things, you see, and I think I've got a real moneymaker of an idea going.