The day before my life changed forever

This is the anniversary of my me-day, when I had finally given up on Jack ever coming of his own accord, and conceded that they would just have to cut him out of me, so I might as well enjoy the last week or so of freedom I thought I had, by getting a pedicure and buying a new book and reading it at a tea shop and going to dinner and a movie with my husband. It was a pretty great day. And Jack must've thought so, too, because the next morning he decided to check out what all the fuss was about in this World Outside the Womb.

I would love to reflect and reminisce about the past year, but it's been kind of a brutal couple of days. Jack is celebrating his first birthday by contracting the worst case of stomach flu I have ever seen. That's probably not true, but it seems a hundred times worse than anything else you've experienced when it's your own little baby who's throwing up. And it's my fault. Well, really, it's Ki's fault, or Sam's fault for sending an infectious Ki to me on Monday with the claim that he seemed mostly all recovered, but she did warn me and I could've put up more of a fight for her to keep him home. But instead I let him come over and breathe all over my baby with his germy breath. Somehow Danny has also gotten sick but I have managed to avoid it. Not that I want to be losing my lunch out of both ends, so to speak, but it does compound my guilt to see everyone I love suffering while I sit here unaffected.

Here are my poor babies.

Danny puts on a happy face, but he is even more miserable than Jack. Poor babies! What a crummy birthday for Jack. I was all excited to make him a cake tomorrow and now he won't even be able to eat it. (I tried to feed him the BRAT diet tonight, bananas, rice, applesauce, skipping the toast, and really regretted that when it wound up all over the floor, crib, dresser, and freshly bathed babe an hour later.) My mommy group was going to have a little party for him this afternoon. Danny and I were going to go to Dopo tonight after he was asleep, the fancy restaurant we went to last year on our last evening of pre-parenthood, and I was looking forward to making that a kind of tradition, to remember what life was like before this little person entered your life so that you can properly celebrate them the next day. But that is maybe the best lesson of parenthood right there, you can't ever expect that things will go according to plan. As I noted not too far into this whole endeavor, "the plan is to have no plan."

On the bright side, I saved myself the agony of deciding whether to take the day off work for his birthday.  I have a lot of work to do, and have been missing a lot of work days lately for trips and various other reasons. But, I thought to myself, in a year or five years or fifty years, am I going to remember what work so desperately needed to be done on that particular day that it couldn't wait a day so I could spend my baby's first birthday with him instead of handing him off to someone else? But then again, I thought to myself another thought, is it really so important to celebrate on the actual day, especially since Jack certainly isn't going to know the difference? But then again again, I thought, I will. It was going on and on like this in my head, a little maddening, as you may surmise, and I still hadn't made up my mind. But now I don't need to, because I don't really have a choice. He needs his mommy tomorrow and that is that.

Happy T-minus one day to birthday, Jack. I hope you make a miraculous recovery overnight. That would be a very good birthday present.