Baby Jack!

Nine Long Months - December

December 1999

December 24, 1999: Last night James visited us with Buffy the Vampire Slayer video tapes and Christmas Presents. One of them was a Millennium Countdown Clock which I promptly reprogrammed to countdown to February 26, 2000, the day Jack Affleck is expected to arrive. Nine weeks and change are all that remains. Of course, that could be seven weeks and change or eleven weeks and change. That's part of the fun of all of this: the not knowing exactly when.

We had our final ultra-sounds this week. I can see we are already becoming parents. We were mesmerized by the clear views of his face we saw (he has Ann's nose and chin, near as we can tell) but even more wonderful were the views of a perfect little heart (all four chambers present and pumping blood), a femur of the correct length, no cleft palate, a proper sized brain. He is perfectly healthy and exactly on schedule.

In a way, I envy Ann. She feels him all day long. At the end of work (she now is doing Human Resources contract work at my company) we'll drive home and she will report to me how active he's been all day (almost always constantly active and moving around). She can tell me everything about his habits. Now that we know he is already head-down, she can tell me how many times he punched her bladder and forced her to run quickly to the bathroom down the hall. Or maybe how he kicked her diaphragm and knocked the wind out of her. She has a direct connection to him. All I can really experience is an hour or two each day where I can feel him kick or watch her stomach move while he rolls around. I can put my ear to her and hear his heartbeat. But that's really about it. I do not experience him so intimately as she does.

So, I read to him every day. And he is learning my voice. Whenever I read to him he becomes very active, kicking, rolling, moving about. It's as if he is terribly excited to hear my voice. So, he gets children's books. He's had "Where the Sidewalk Ends" and "Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?" and "In the Night Kitchen" and "The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig" (a brilliant twist on the old classic) and Pooh. And he also gets real books. Last week I completed reading "A Wrinkle in Time" to him (which almost made me want to change his name-to-be to Charles Wallace Affleck) and began Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone this morning. (Yes, he's getting the original British edition of the book and not the "edited for Americans" version.)

We also told him all about Santa Claus too. "His suit is red. That's pretty much the only color you can see right now but it's a brighter red." And talked about how much fun his grandfather is going to have with him. "As soon as he can walk you know he's going to be showing him how to hold a golf club." And how much we already love him. He's still a mysterious creature hidden away giving us only hints and the occasional elbow sticking right out of Ann's belly but we already know him and as we tell him every day, "We can't wait to meet you!"

63 Days, 14 Hours, 58 Minutes, 23 Seconds

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