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April 12, 2006

One Heck Of A Weekend

This past weekend was quite a weekend...

...for starters, I had a very awesomely spring-in-the-suburbs weekend. On Saturday, I researched using corn gluten meal as a natural pre-emergent herbicide (to combat a plague of dandelions that ravaged my suburban lawn-care soul all last year). I think I just love the terms. "Pre-emergent herbicide." You can't front on that. Said corn gluten meal brought us out to the local(ish) Agway...which was a satisfying place...lots of pickup trucks pulled up to the loading dock, a heavy smell of seeds, feeds, and weed killers, and a way-too-friendly atmosphere (including people paying for things that were in their trunks in an "I wouldn't lie to you about the price, ma'am" kind of way).

On Sunday, I spent the morning dethatching my back yard, and lugging barrels of winter's detritus to a communal dumping ground (where I managed to catch a long, amazing glance of what I assumed to be a pileated woodpecker)...I uncovered all of last year's plantings (which were all struggling little buds), and I applied said corn gluten meal (which looks a lot like mustard-flavored Nerds candies).

Then, on Monday (not the weekend, I know), Kat and I were hit with some amazingly good news: long story short, probably almost a month ago, we went into for our gender-revealing ultrasound (it's a boy!) where we were met with a blow...a "soft marker" (ie: vague impression) raised a slight risk that our son may have downs' syndrome. So, we were floored...we had about 10 minutes of being excited to see our son, to now...an unknown amount of time with unimaginably unaswerable questions. We opted to undergo amniosentisis (which in and of itself was a miserably difficult decision as the risk of miscarriage after amnio was much higher than the purported risk of our son having downs' after spotting the "soft markers), it was successful...and after about 2 weeks of hearing and knowing nothing...we found out everything is fine.

I kind of feel like i'd like those two weeks back...but i'm more just...happy everything is fine. I feel like a father:

"Do you know how worried your mother and I were? You're grounded."

Clampants | April 12, 2006 06:14 PM