Halfway down the Danube

Home again, home again

Actually, I've been back for a few days.

Didn't feel like blogging, because (1) after a week away, my desk was really full, and (2) it's been just beautiful here... lovely early autumn weather, sunny breezy days and cool clear nights. So I've been taking advantage of my family's absence to take some long walks around Bucharest. About which more anon.

Family, yes: mother and child are well. Baby Jacob was about two weeks early, and had a little difficulty breathing at first. So he spent his first night in the ICU. This was a little worrisome, but we'd been through this before -- David was the same -- and he was out the next day. Since then, he's been just fine. Eating... well, a lot. Vigorously.

I was there for the birth. German hospitals are very civilized about this sort of thing; for a modest extra fee, the father can share the mother's hospital room. Nice. And then I was standing by Claude's head, talking to her, when the doctors took Jacob out. He didn't have a lot to say, but his expression spoke volumes.

Alan and David are staying with the beloved grandparents, Oma and Opa. It's nice weather in Germany too, so they spend a lot of time in the back yard, in Oma's garden, and in the playground across the street. This weekend Oma mowed the back yard, and Alan got to ride on the tractor with her. (It's a rather big yard.) On the tractor. With Oma. I'm half surprised he didn't faint from sheer delight.

What else... oh yes, the pirate ship.

See, Claude and I promised Alan a pirate ship when the new baby arrived. The idea here was to have him looking forward to the baby instead of, say, being worried about a little competitor. As it turned out, this seems (cross fingers) to have been unnecessary; Alan seems to like his new baby brother just fine. But anyway, the promise was made.

(One odd short-term effect was that, for a while, the concepts "baby" and "pirate ship" seemed to be totally cross-wired in Alan's head. As in, we might pass a baby on the street, and he'd turn to me and start talking about pirates. He seemed to get over it, but who knows? It may be an interesting problem for some lucky therapist one day.)

So anyway, we bought the Playmobile pirate ship. It came in a big box. I brought it to the hospital and stashed it under the bed.

When Alan and David arrived, they spent the first five or ten minutes kissing and holding Jacob. But then that palled a little. "Okay, new baby brother, right." So I pulled out the box. That got their interest, all right. I opened it, and...

...stupid me: I hadn't opened it before. So only then did I discover that the stinking pirate ship was "some assembly required". Like, three hundred tiny, tiny little parts worth of assembly required.

Long, long after the boys had gone home, I was sitting on the floor of the hospital room, staring first at the instruction booklet and then at the dozens of pieces of colored plastic strewn around me.

After a while, a nurse came in. I smiled at her sheepishly. She stared, then launched into a short speech in rapid-fire German, much too fast for me to follow. Claudia answered, and it went back and forth for a few moments. Then the nurse shook her head and left.

"Um... what did she say?"

"She said the one to really watch out for is the Knight's Castle. That one has like five hundred parts. She says her husband was up half the night putting it together for Christmas."

So. I guess now I'm in the club.

Posted by douglas at October 9, 2005 10:37 PM