Yesterday, June 21st, had been circled on the Cool Fam Calendar for weeks. Cool Mum was scheduled to go in for a C-section to have our new boy. We were having our baby on the 21st!

Cool Baby (now 3) was born 9 days late. There was no waiting game this time. It was refreshing to have some control over the situation. The funny thing was that we missed our June 21 appointment. The really funny thing is that it’s because the new boy was born over a week before. So much for control.

It was supposed to be our last normal weekend – as normal as we could be with CM’s torpedo belly preventing her from walking outside of a 3-block radius of our apartment. On Saturday the 12th, she would do brunch with her friends while I watched CB all day. On Sunday, we’d relax and go to church.

Well, I don’t know what CM munched at brunch, but when she got home, she felt like she was having contractions. The body goes through “practice contractions” leading up to birth, so I told CM that her uterus was just in rehearsal mode. We were having our baby on the 21st.

CB had worn me out, so I was feeling sluggish, literally laying around the apartment. CM alerted me that the contractions were getting closer together and that we should go to the hospital.

Hospital?! I protested; it was a waste of time. They would just send us back. I had good plans for the weekend. There was too much to do at work this week. We were having our baby on the 21st!

Despite my airtight logic (and because of the advice of CM’s doctor), we went to the hospital. We got there and an army of doctors and nurses attended to CM. She was the only patient in the whole labor & delivery ward. Of course, that just meant more people to tell us to go back home due to false alarm, as it was not yet the 21st.

After various tests, a nurse strolled in and declared, “It looks like you’re having a baby.” And I thought Yes, we are eventually having a baby, but then my brain caught up and realized that the smiling nurse had said “today” at the end of her news. I was not ready to have a baby “today.” I was not ready to have a baby until Google Calendar sent me an email reminder for our C-section appointment on the 21st .

But despite my lack of emotional readiness, there I was an hour and a half later, holding a freshly-wiped, squinty-eyed brand new boy up for CM to see as she laid on the operating table.

The latest in the legendary line of Cool Babies was born on Saturday, June 12 at 7:47 pm. He weighed 7 lbs, 4 oz. And he was 9 days early. The 21st would have been nice, but we just got 9 bonus days to love on the little guy. That’s cool with me. (And yes, he has a name, but that’s a post all its own.)

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3. Cool Baby cares for a cool baby of his own
4. Cool Baby is the shark. Cool Newbie is the killer whale.
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