Rainy Pete Goes On Tour

Sorry I'm late, did I miss anything?

It was a busy day in the Rainy household. The impending arrival of the Rainy baby had us running around before it even arrives. Darn kid's making trouble already.......I'm so proud!

We had yet another regular visit today with Dr. Rick after which we had to begin the housing shuffle. Those of you who have had kids know about this one. It involves the moving around of one's residence and possessions in order to create an acceptable space in which to house the newcomer. It's like Happy and Blue's houseguest lament, only on a much more permanent scale. We rearranged dressers and other goodies to dig out our first child's room and are in the process of trying to figure out how to fit everything into the baby's room. It's like playing Tetris, only you can't rotate the pieces on end to make them fit better, much harder.

We accomplished as much as we could and then it was off to the hospital for the grand tour. Our hospital has a rather intellient policy of pre-registering your birth so they can ask all the question that they need answered to take good care of you. Only by doing it ahead of time, you can avoid having to think while you are in the midst of labour chaos. This happens by ensuring Moms get what they really want as if asked what kind of room they want during labour they are likely to yell something like

"I don't care if I'm in a garden shed, just get this thing out of me!"

So we're checking out the tour and they've kitted all the rooms out with some fancy new toys for Mum and Dad and the docs. The beds are vastly improved, which is good news for Moms, and they have added chairs that are now slumbering Dad compatible. For the techno-geek among us (Oh wait that's me) they have a freaky lamp in the ceiling that goes wherever a remote controlled stick goes. They won't let me play with the wand. They even have some pretty fancy whirlpool tubs to make Moms as comfy as possible while they are being gripped by contractions, although how they work without sides on them is a mystery to me. Something I got a laugh out of is that with every piece of equipment they mentioned, they also mentioned the price. I don't know if they were trying to sell some, or if they were trying to impress us. I actually go the distinct impression they were telling us to be careful around the new stuff, like a little kid would;

"That's Mommy's new phone. We aren't allowed to play with it, it's very expensive"

As the tour nears a close they herd us all into a room and let the poor pregnant women, most of which are pretty much due anytime soon and have walked the length of the building, sit down for a while. They go over the last bits of information that they legally give to protect themselves and show you some of the written resources available to you. As the session, designed to calm the worried parents and expectant folks down, the nurse decides to ease the minds of the pregnant women by telling them the record birth for their hospital was 14 pounds and that labour was something like 2 and a half hours long!

Now correct me if I'm wrong here, but why would anyone want to prolong labour with that monstrous a child trying to escape the womb. I would think that this was done out of a sense of self preservation. Good job nurse, the lady sitting across from me would have had her eyes fall on the floor next to her jaws if she didn't look so tired from lugging a baby around inside her for the full term. I think she was due something like an hour or two after the tour.

We decided that all thatmade for a pretty lazy day so I spent the rest of the night preparing for the impeding day of creation by unleashing my fairly effective destructive side. Does anyone know anything about plumbing? How about electrickery?