One year ago today I embarked on this wonderful journey called parenthood.  June 16th, 2009 was a bad day.  I know that’s not what most first-time dads say about their son’s birthday but it was.  To tell the story, I need to bring you back to June 14th, 2009.  Jenn was home excited preparing for her friend Susan’s baby shower which was scheduled for the next morning.  All day she’d prepared small bags of chocolate covered cashews as part of the thank you gift for visitors.  We returned from a brief shopping trip to discover a very upset young lab who’d decided she’d try to eat all of these bagged cashews…bags and all. 

In the end, we discovered that she’d eaten 13 of them in all.  I called the vet who suggested we keep an eye on her and we’d have to monitor her for at least 24 hours or until we could find all of the bags in her “droppings.”  Yeah,not fun.  That night we decided we’d meet some friends for dinner, if just for an hour, so we could take a breather.  We knew that there were precious weeks to enjoy our freedom before our little man would enter the world. 

Little did we know that would be a lot sooner.  Jenn woke up in the middle of the night with terrible stomach cramps and we rushed her to the hospital.  It turned out that was the right thing to do.  Jenn had preeclampsia with an added does of HELLP syndrome.  Hellp, otherwise known as hemolysis elevated liver enzymes and low platelet count, is nasty.  I’m not a doctor (or a nurse, or even an EMT- in fact I can’t even put a bandaid on properly) but everyone told us that she needed to deliver fast in order to save hers and Ryan’s life.  That was scary.  At this point my parents had taken Maddie so that I didn’t have to go back and forth from the hospital checking for bags of cashews in piles of “droppings.”  Thanks guys!

So, it was a rough day. 

Today was a huge relief though and Jenn and I can now look back at June 16th, 2009 with more warmth and joy.  A few more days like today convinces me that bad days fly by but the good ones stick around.