Honey It's Time
... but I had actually broken my little toe. I had finally gotten all of her overnight bags loaded into our old, beat up ford and was about to pull out of the driveway when I realized that I still needed her in the car as well. I rushed into the house and quickly escorted her back to the car. Upon arrival at the hospital, we noticed that there were several nurses waiting at the main entrance. One of them had wheel chair and seemed to be waiting for us to stop the car. I was limping so bad when I stepped out of the car that the nurse brought the wheelchair put me in it. “No, no, no!” I exclaimed. “Not me! It’s my wife! I’m having a baby! I mean, we’re having a baby! I mean, she’s having a baby,” I stuttered. I was so stressed that the nurse finally grabbed me by the shoulders and, in a claming voice, said, “Sir, please clam down. We do this everyday. Everything will be just fine.” I took a deep breath and finally managed to gain some control over myself. When we entered the room where my wife was going to be in, we noticed that it was freezing cold. The walls were painted in a pale yellow and comic strips were glued to the ceiling right above the bed. There was a smell of clean in the air and the floor seemed like it had just been waxed. “Not bad,” I thought to myself. There was a sit in window, which faced the ocean, and a rocking chair by the lavatory. The television was playing an infomercial on how to make million dollars in one hour, or some crazy trash like that. The room had a certain feel to it. It was as if it had been arranged and decorated especially for an expectant mother. When the doctor arrived, he introduced himself and then, in a coy fashion, asked, “Alright, now who’s the guilty party?” I was still in a bit of a craze repeating those same words that the nurse had said to me. “Everything will be just fine,” I muttered over and over. I remember wishing, at the same time, that it would all be over already. “Never mind, by the looks of you, I can pretty much decipher who the lucky one is,” said the doctor. The process seemed to take forever and the more I thought about it the slower the clock moved. My wife kept begging for food, but the doctor had said that she wasn’t supposed to eat while she was in these stages of labor. Repeatedly, I brought pitchers of ice chips to her and tried to convince her that they were potato chips instead. Several hours had gone by and still no baby. I called the doctor in to ask how everything was going. “Is the baby ready yet doctor?” I asked; as if the baby were some sort of pastry or dish. “It just needs to cook a little longer before we can take it out of the oven,” the doctor said laughingly. “It needs to cook?” I asked. “It’s been cooking for nine months, three days, sixteen hours and thirty-two and a half minutes.” The doctor just smiled and calmly walked out of the room. Finally, the contractions came on strong and doctor came in and told us that it was time to push. “Push?” I asked. “Not you, the mother,” said the doctor. “Ok, here we go babe...