We had great plans for the long weekend. Two of my wife's best friends are expecting babies this spring, and we were all set to pack the family into a minivan and drive to Westport for a Pre-Baby Summit. My wife, the medical hobbyist, would grill them on all things reproductive while the husbands, unwilling to hang around for frank discussions about discharge, would take the kids to dig trenches on the beach. The weather had been balmy all week, perfect conditions for little boys to ferret for sand-booty.
Until the wall of cold blew into town and knocked out their power, effectively killing the day.
Parents are conditioned
to the basic truth that any plan has about a 60% chance of fruition.
But this cancellation was a real blow, because we had spent Saturday morning
gleaning six bags of babyphernalia to offload on the newbie moms, and Saturday afternoon staring into a half-empty closet, rapturous over the myriad storage possibilities.
Sadly, they were not to be. We were on the table, prepped and ready for a massive detritus-ectomy, and the surgeon dropped dead in his scrubs.
Plan B was an important zen exercise: the Steelers-Colts game. I've been a Steeler fan since kindergarten, so seeing them jump out to a huge lead over the best team in football piqued my interest. Then came the fourth quarter, which was one of the most heart-rendingly ridiculous 15 minutes of football played in recent memory, full of momentum swings and terrible officiating that would normally have sent me into barbaric yawps of incredulity (and others into cardiac events). But while my brain boiled on the inside I was the picture of outer calm, because TwoBert spent the whole quarter asleep on my chest.
You know those dudes who use mind over matter to walk on hot coals or sleep on a bed of nails? Wussie-boys.
