This is a recount of our birth experience because it will be totally, absolutely useful and universally applicable to other couples. The first thing you’re going to need is for it to rain dead fish… actually, let me back up a bit.
Early in the morning, we had gone into the hospital and they had applied a gel to soften the cervix. Several hours later, at home, not much was happening.
We decided to take the dog for a walk. She briefly went out of sight and came back with white chunks on her that smelled absolutely putrid. In the past few days, she had found a deer leg, deer jaw and some general pieces of deer, but this smelled far worse than that. Although a little further up our driveway there lives a skunk, we weren’t close to that at all.
Instead, she had found a dead fish and absolutely covered herself in it from head to toe, bouncing around like the happiest dog in the world, pouncing, the way you see foxes jump around. Our cat is known to leave dead mice for the dog, but if the dead fish was its doing, I think we’ll have to take away its fishing rod.
Being about to be left to her own devices for what could be several days (with some checking by family members), the dog was going to have to stay inside — precisely where she could get that amazing smell on the bed, on the couch and pretty much everywhere else she’s not supposed to go but does in our absence anyways (because she misses us so much right?). She would have to be washed, which is a two person job.
We got her in the bathtub and, with the doors closed to the bathroom and her slipping and sliding around on the tub floor, we had only treats to stave off her fear of the mean and possessed shower head. It smelled like we were in a partially decaying fish cannery. By the end of it, Sarah was having proper contractions. We headed back to the hospital, but not before the dog shook herself out in the hallway.
After 15 minutes down our driveway, we came to the end, which was, of course, blocked by the longest trailer either of us had ever seen (our exit is really wide and, we had previously believed, impossible to block with a single motor vehicle). On the side, in big letters, the trailer said “Exceeding Expectations.”
After you get that to move, it’s all relatively straightforward. When you get to the hospital, simply ask for some pain medications so you can have a nap despite your wife being excessively loud and distracting.
We thought that as a first-time calver, we would have to wait for a snowstorm for Sarah to give birth, but evidently, we needed it to rain fish.
