Bumps in the Night
Last Saturday, the wife and I stayed in and watched the
NASCAR race,
which took place in Bristol, Tennessee.
Bristol, for the NASCAR
impaired, is a tiny track – about 1/2 mile in length – where they
crowd a field of 43 cars into a bowl and tell them to go.
If you don’t get the sport of NASCAR racing, Bristol is the place
to start. No room to run and lots of guys looking to do so.
Paint is traded in every turn, where bumping and grinding is not the
exception, but the norm. Cars spin, tempers flare, and more than one
driver gives another the one finger salute. The highlight of this
race was the fact that my favorite driver,
Jeff Gordon,
gave the leader a tap in the back with two laps to go, pushed him out of
the way, and finished up front for the
first time in a while.
But that was nothing compared to the bump that awaited me. See, the
quickening
has begun. It started just a couple of weeks ago, with the wife uttering
oohs and ahhs occasionally, spreading her eyes wide at the activity inside.
There was a time where she wasn’t quite sure if the movement she felt was
gas or child, but, as the weeks passed, the thumps and wallops inside her have
become more pronounced and more frequent.
The sad side of this, from the father’s perspective, is that I don’t get
to share in it. Whenever she feels any movement, the wife is quick
to grab my hand, place it upon her tummy, and anxiously await a signal from
me that I do, in fact, feel it.
“Nope.”
Saturday that all changed. Laying down on the bed after the race, my wife
revealed her belly to me and placed my hand on it. We’ve been doing this
for a while and she had reported a recent spat of activity.
Lo and behold the child gave quite a bump to the center of her baby carrier.
I got to experience a kind of quickening of my own. Contact was made and
won’t soon be forgotten.
Jenn made the cute observation that the child was giving me a high five after
the race (if so, babe, we now know who his or her favorite driver is). Whatever
it was, I was just glad to be there. This baby thing becomes more real
every day.
