My story . . . Part 2 of several

About a month passed, and I was feeling no different.

In late October, 2000, we were painting a couple of rooms in the house in preparation for our move to England the following Spring. You can picture the scene: drop cloths all over the carpets, empty paint cans strewn about, painter’s tape around the baseboards.

I am pretty sure it was late on a Sunday afternoon. Barb was at home finishing up some painting, and I was out with Chad. When I got home, Barbara came up to me, handed me a home pregnancy test stick, and asked me that strange question, “Does that look like a line to you?” Now, realize that at this point I had given up all hope that we would get pregnant again. So when Barb asked me the question, I had no emotional response. There was no breath of anticipation; no butterflies started jumping in my stomach. But when I took a look, my immediate thought was, “Holy crap, it sure does look like a line!”

So Barb went off to see the doctor that week, and he confirmed that she was pregnant. You can imagine the exhilaration we felt over the next days and weeks. We had been trying to have another baby for about four years, and now it was finally going to happen! It was hard to believe. At some point in the initial euphoria, it dawned on us that we had just sold almost all of our baby stuff at the yard sale. But under the circumstances we didn’t care. We could buy new stuff for the new baby.

Barbara’s due date was early July of 2001. But we were supposed to move to England in April or May of 2001. So, I thought that one of the first things I ought to do is inform the Navy of this situation to make sure there were no problems. As it turns out, there was a problem. My detailer (senior Navy officer in charge of tour assignments) informed me that Navy policy is that a service member may not execute an overseas move when his dependent (wife) is in the third trimester of a pregnancy. To make a long story short, because of the timing of our pregnancy, my orders to England were cancelled, and I was reassigned to a three year job in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

It’s odd, but I remember that when I heard that I was not going to go on this much longed-for tour in Europe, I was not disappointed. Instead, I felt a rush of relief. I didn’t care that I was not going to live in England. What I really wanted was to have another baby, and that’s what was going to happen. So we would stay put in the Norfolk-Virginia Beach area for a few more years.

During those early, exciting days of Barb’s pregnancy, Chad told us something that we thought was funny. He was eight years old at the time. He said, “I want the baby to be born on my birthday.” Barb and I laughed out loud. It was a cute sentiment. But we explained to Chad that this was just not going to happen. His birthday is on May 16th. The baby was not due until early July, about eight weeks later. We tried to make him understand that it could actually be unhealthy and even dangerous for a baby to be born so early.

Throughout the pregnancy, though, Chad would occasionally mention to us that he was praying that the baby would be born on his birthday.