Angela and the King Man

We had a choice of assignments in my OAC year of highschool (yes, I'm old enough to have gone to highschool when they still offered a fifth year).  You could either read two novels and compare them in an essay or you could spend your spare each day for a month being a teaching assistant in a grade nine or grade ten class.  I thought teaching a math class would be a piece of cake.  I was good at math.  Plus selfishly I thought it couldn't hurt to put down some experience tutoring math on my university applications into engineering.

That semester there were no grade nine or ten math classes during my spare.  Instead I got a grade eleven general math class.  In a portable.  At least with grade niners you were guaranteed to be a few years older and therefore could command some degree of respect (one could hope).  But grade eleven general math?  Half of the students were the same age as me if not older.  And oh, a girl who I had been friends with in primary school happened to be in that class. We had fallen out of touch in highschool and now suddenly I was her TA, in a math class that was two years below her grade.  It was awkward.  She never asked me for help.  The teacher always looked worn down and defeated.  I didn't really blame her.  Something was wrong with the school system if I needed to teach kids who were learning to drive how to add and subtract.

On my first day I was asked to take attendance and learn the students' names.  I came upon a stereotypical nerdy Chinese boy in glasses surrounded by a bunch of punks with greasy slicked-back hair.  I asked his name and he stared at me blankly.  The punks started chuckling. I asked for his name again but still he just stared.  Didn't know the language?  More laughter.  One of the punks put his hand on the boy's shoulder and said to me "This is the King Man," (snickering).  "He's my friend, the King Man," and gave me a joker's smile.  I ignored him and asked the boy a third time with more force, irritated that his silence was drawing attention.  "I told you, he's the King Man!" and now several of these punks burst into laughter. 

"He is NOT the King Man," I barked and then heard the teacher calling me over, wondering what the problem was.  I explained that I was trying without success to get one of the students' names for the attendance.  "Oh, that's Dennis Ho," she said.  "But you won't find that on the attendance because his real name is King Man Ho."  

Another day I was asked to tutor a student who had been failing.  I was reviewing multiplication with her when I realized she couldn't subtract.  More specifically, she couldn't subtract anything from zero.  Her answer was always zero.  Now negative numbers is a pretty abstract concept. You can't show it with objects.  You can't say "Here are five pencils and I take seven away and look, we're left with minus-two pencils!"  At first she wouldn't believe the answers weren't zero.  She thought I was trying to fool her and wanted to punch my face in.  She could have very well beaten my skinny ass.  The only way I got through to her was using a calculator and then pretended not to notice her embarrassment.  After that she was more open to learning from me.

In the beginning I tutored students and did the marking.  Eventually the teacher had me designing the tests myself.  Problem was, the students were made aware of it which made for a lot of peer pressure to "go easy".  Then during the actual tests the teacher would leave the classroom to go for a washroom or coffee break.  Since we were in a portable it always took a while for her to get to the main building and back.  Or perhaps she was just in her car trying to pull it together.  It put me in a tough position monitoring students who would talk or cheat once the coast was clear.  Not to mention the chaos that ensued when one time, during a quiz, the punks started a pencil-whipping fight the second the teacher left.  Like with old school wooden pencils you need to sharpen.  Full force whipping, as if you were trying to dart a wild animal.  Some kids ducked under desks.  I thought I was going to lose an eye.  

The most interesting character in that class was a skinny tough kid named Robert who had a gold tooth.  It was engraved "R" for Robert.  I can't make this stuff up. One gleaming gold tooth front and centre of his smug grin.  He used to call me Angela.  The first time he did it he was yelling for me from across the room to come over.  I hadn't looked up since it's not my name.  Finally it dawned on me that there wasn't any student named Angela in the class and looked up to see he was gesturing at me. I corrected him a few times but it never made a difference.  He always said "Yo Angela," and that was that.

By the end of the month I was pretty relieved to be finished my assignment.  The experience hadn't been particularly inspiring or rewarding.  The King Man still didn't speak and Robert still called me "Angela".  The girl who couldn't handle negative numbers was still making mistakes but no longer wanted to punch me in the face.  Instead she started coming to me a lot when she had questions and I thought hey, that's a start.

Magic Belly Buttons

In the past six months my older son has asked me on several occasions from where on my body his baby brother came out.  Usually this question would come up at the dinner table.  My husband and I have always been comfortable using the proper names for body parts to normalize the conversation and so our son is quite familiar with the word penis.  We occasionally need to remind him that it is a "bathroom word" and not necessarily something we need to discuss over dinner.  He was also taught the word vagina but it comes up much less frequently in our conversations.  I think one of the few times I can recall him saying the word was immediately after he learned it and then asked to see mine (the answer was no).  Sometimes it's a struggle to maintain my composure and pretend that these innocent questions don't also make for really awkward conversation.

My husband and I never did discuss how we would talk to our son about birth though.  So when he asked me for the first time where the baby had come out, I panicked and made a joke saying the baby magically passed through my belly button.  Then I swiftly changed topics.  I could tell that my son didn't really believe me, and that was fine because I didn't actually want him to think babies are born from belly buttons.  I was just buying some time.  But then the question was posed to me another two or three times weeks later and each time I just said it was from my belly button.  

Last week while my son and I were building a pirate ship Ninja Turtle fortress using LEGO and a whole lot of imagination I decided it was time to have the conversation.  I didn't want my previous avoidance of the topic to create a huge mystery in my son's head, or suggest to him that I wouldn't be someone he could always come to with his curiosity.  So the conversation went something like this:

Me:  "So remember how you asked Mummy about where the baby came out from?"

Son: "Yah?" [searching through a pile of LEGO]

Me: "Well boys and girls have different body parts, right?"

Son: [nod without looking up from his LEGO]

Me:  "What is the name for a boy's private part?"

Son: "Penis."  [big grin, still not looking up]

Me: "And what is it for a girl?"

Son: [Shrug, grins awkwardly] "I don't remember."

Me: "Vagina, remember?"

Son: "Hee hee, buh-gi-na" [he chuckles, turning it into a joke]

Me: "No, how do you say it properly?"

Son: "Vagina."

Me: "Ok, well that's where the baby came out.  Not from my belly button.  That was just a joke..."

Son: [Interrupting, eyes wide open] "Babies come out of your penis?!?!" [forefinger and thumb about an inch apart, hovering over pants]

I imagined my son picturing a marble-sized baby coming out of my penis and thought, well that went about as well as I had hoped.  

Packing List

In North America we seem to have an endless supply of toys, equipment, gizmos, and gadgets for babies.  Never was this fact made more clear to me than in 2015 when I attended the ABC Kids Expo in Las Vegas as a vendor.  This show is advertised as "The World of Juvenile Products - All In One Place" and draws more than 1500 booths all focused on the world of baby.  Walking through aisle after aisle of vendors was frankly overwhelming and you realize how much of the market is filled with products that are aimed at solving a problem that perhaps doesn't actually exist just to create the demand.  

For the past four years our own basement has been storage to much of the baby gear used by my eldest son when he was under a year old.  Ironically it feels like humans take up the most space when they are smallest; there was a crib, travel crib, exersaucer, car seat, stroller, two bouncy chairs, foam play mats, portable high chairs, and multiple ride-on toys.  When my son turned ten months old we had our first family vacation to London, England for my cousin's wedding.  While making a list of "necessities" for my son including gear for travel and mealtime I wondered how in the world we could pack everything onto the plane.  Do we bring a car seat or rent one after we arrive?  Do we take the stroller or just use the carrier everywhere we go?  Do we use the travel crib or just share the bed?  Where will he nap if we don't bring the travel crib?  Annoyed, I started complaining to my mom about what a hassle it would be to travel with a baby.

Then, without an ounce of sarcasm, my mom nodded and shared how she had also found it a challenge to pack for my brother as a baby when they left Vietnam back in 1979.  "We could only bring two bags," she remembered, and went on to describe some items she packed away for their journey - not headed for vacation but instead an escape on a junk ship that would ultimately take 36 days to reach the refugee camps in Hong Kong.  My brother was less than a year old. 

So that jolted me back to reality and put my troubles into perspective.   I grew up hearing the stories of my parents leaving Vietnam so I can absolutely recognize how trivial my problems are by comparison.  The fact that I could even forget for a moment what they would have gone through shows how blessed and easy my life has been.

I think back occasionally to this conversation I had with my mom.  It makes me chuckle (and feel ashamed) at how absurd my complaints about whether or not to pack a stroller would have sounded followed by my mom's completely offhand recount of leaving her life behind.  Could I pack up my life into two bags?  I've over-packed for almost every trip I've ever taken.

Lesson to be learned here is that you can get by on so much less than you think, and when necessary you can get by on even less.  Almost everything is a luxury.  

Overnight flight to London

Slightly too big for the on-board bassinet but it worked

Taking a tour of the Tower of London

1979 - My parents and brother on a flight to Canada after eight months in refugee camps

Meet Dextre the Robot

Recently on the Moth podcast I listened to On Approach to Pluto by Cathy Olkin, a scientist who worked on NASA's New Horizon's mission to Pluto.  It brought back some memories of my own flight support experiences when I was still working as an engineer for MDA, the company that built the Canadarm.  My job there for the first five or so years was focused on systems integration and testing of the Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator (SPDM), or Dextre, which was supposed to be more media-friendly.  Note that no one called it Dextre.  

The SPDM is a two-armed robot equipped with various tools to perform repairs on the International Space Station and can be operated while attached to the end of the Canadarm.  Below you can see it at the tip of the Canadarm on the newest Canadian five dollar bill.  No, it didn't make it onto the twenty but it's still pretty awesome.  A cool and little known fact:  Many of us at MDA who worked on the SPDM were allowed (informally?) to sign our names onto the hardware just prior to it being shipped down to Florida for launch.  You can't see the signatures as they are covered by the white thermal blankets but it's a pretty neat thought to know there is something out in space with my signature on it.

Five dollar bill showing the SPDM on the tip of the Canadarm

The SPDM launched on March 11, 2008 on STS-123 and a handful of us from MDA supported the assembly and commissioning of the robot on that mission.  I was used to doing flight support for the Canadarm from the Canadian Space Agency from Montreal but it was my first time supporting operations from the Johnson Space Centre in Houston.  At that point I had yet to see a shuttle launch and the Space Shuttle program was coming to an end in 2011.  Four of us from MDA were being sent down to Houston to support the mission - one to cover each shift, and our chief engineer was a floater to be on whichever shift had the most action on a given day.  We pleaded with our managers to let us fly to Florida first to watch the shuttle launch before heading down to Houston but we were denied permission.  Launches were frequently delayed due to weather and they couldn't have us hanging around Florida when we needed to be answering last minute questions about the mission back at home.  In the end STS-123 did in fact launch as planned without delay (fist shaking at our managers) and we flew down to Houston to begin what was ultimately a successful and very eventful mission to assemble the SPDM and perform all initial checkouts.

Below is an email I dug up which I wrote from my hotel room to family and friends towards the end of that mission.  I got a kick out of reading it again today almost a full decade later.

************  Monday, March 17, 2008  ********************************************

Hey guys,

Just thought I'd share some excitement with you.  I'm more than half way through the SPDM 1J/A launch mission where I'm doing flight support from the Mission Evaluation Room (MER) in Houston.  If you've been paying attention to the news at all you'll know that we've been having loads of problems launching and installing and powering our robot SPDM (that I've tested since I started working at MDA).  

Yesterday I pulled a 15 hour shift trying to analyze data for multiple brake failures we experienced.  It got to the point where everyone involved in the mission was calling on the phones and voice loops at once wanting an explanation. I have a headset but wasn't the person who talked on the voice loops, however I supported our chief engineer from the neighbouring console. Then the Flight Director, Dana Weigal, requested a meeting with MDA Engineering (that's us!) because she needed to be convinced there wasn't a problem before she would allow the ops to continue. This doesn't normally happen because there's another level of engineering at NASA that separates us from the Flight Director but our chief engineer and I are supposedly the "experts" for this brake test on this specific robot.  

We were told we had only 40 min to put together a short presentation...and then our chief engineer and I got called into the Flight Control Room! It was SO COOL...but my hands were a bit shaky and I hadn't eaten or slept in hours.  People doing flight support from Houston and Montreal said they saw me on NASA television talking to the Flight Director.  I'm going to see if someone can get that part of the video for me since they record everything.  

After that we stayed for meeting after meeting after meeting, went back to the hotel to sleep for 4 hours and had to come back for 6 hours of more meetings to convince the Station and Shuttle managers that we were good to go and there was no impact to the mission.

Check out the email below, from the manager of the SPDM program at the Canadian Space Agency.  Pay attention to the last sentence :D This was sent out to a wide distribution in Houston, Montreal and back at Brampton.  That experience was well worth the lack of sleep over the mission so far.  I should be coming back to Toronto around Good Friday.

Danielle

*********************************************************************

I then attached an email of congratulations from Dan Rey, the SPDM program manager, who had mentioned the chief engineer and me by name for our "amazing work done in short order to avoid any impacts to the mission timeline."  

A few things I still remember from that mission:

1.  When it was time for the chief engineer and I to present to  the flight director (recall, this doesn't usually happen as the Flight ROBO typically is the middle-man between engineering and the FD) I assumed we were being led into a small meeting room and was floored when we stepped into the Flight Control Room where (obviously) the FD would be. Flash to Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks - we later toured the actual control room for that mission.

2.  While meeting with the flight director our chief engineer did most of the talking with minimal support from me.  However we happened to be standing in the path of one of the NASA cameras in a way which only had the flight director and myself in view (I later heard from colleagues who saw me on screen).  It looked like I had had a private meeting with the FD!  They never were able to pull the footage for me to see unfortunately.

3.  We had a great time riding rollercoasters at the nearby amusement park on our days off.

Eyes a little bloodshot from too many hours analyzing data

Numerous calls to troubleshoot failures during post-assembly testing

Vising the Flight Control Room again on our last day (Flight ROBO didn't look amused)

Riding rollercoasters between shifts

Stick 'Em Up!

For my first pregnancy my husband and I attended prenatal classes and learned about all sorts of things that never ended up being put to practice during actual labour.  I do remember the teacher emphasizing that women didn't usually have their water break like in the movies - that in many cases women had to have their waters broken during labour or that even if it did break on its own it would usually be a trickle or small leak as opposed to a gush.  That put my mind at ease.  

Turned out however that my water did break on its own (two weeks early, might I add) and it did gush like in the movies and baby was born eleven hours later.  Fortunately my water broke in the middle of the night when I was in the privacy of my own home and not earlier that afternoon when I was taking the crowded Dufferin bus.  They would have had to burn my seat.  I recall distinctly being woken up at 3am in a panic and calling out to Mike "Either my water just broke or I peed myself in bed!"

Fast forward to my second pregnancy when I was paranoid about my water breaking once baby had dropped at the 36-week mark.  I started sitting on seat covers in the car while driving, or towels on the sofa while lounging.  Late into my third trimester during my nesting phase I felt an urgency to reupholster all of our dining chairs (go figure).  Once they were finished you can bet I wasn't going to chance an accident on the new fabric.  

However this second time around I went into labour at 40 weeks without my water breaking which really threw me.  I didn't know if my mild contractions were actually a sign of labour or not.  I've heard that doctors/midwives will often break the waters during labour as a way to speed up the process.  This was not necessary in my case because (as I wrote in my previous post Labour of Love) baby was delivered only two hours after arriving in hospital.  In fact, my water didn't break at all until baby was already entering our world.

My husband described our newborn baby as looking like a bank robber when he was delivered.  It's probably safe to say this isn't the image a mother has in her head of what her newborn will look like.  His head and shoulders were encased in the amniotic sac which my midwife only broke open when the baby was half-way out.  The membrane ended up clinging to his face like a mask which was then easily removed after birth.  I have since read about how rare this situation is, to have a baby born "with a caul".   Apparently it is more common for babies to be born "en caul", which is when the baby is still entirely encased in the amniotic sac after birth.  That isn't intuitive to me as it seems like an even rarer occurrence to have the entire sac still in tact after birth.  The reason is that premature (and hence smaller) babies account for many of the "en caul" births.  According to Wikipedia babies born either with a caul or en caul account for fewer than 1 in 80,000 births.  So it seems our little chub-chub is special in even more ways than I could have expected.

I found it so amusing to read about the superstitions surrounding caul births due to their rarity.  In some cases people born with cauls were thought to have second sight, the ability to see what will happen in the future or what is happening in another place.  The History section of Wikipedia is also a fun read so I thought I'd include it below:

***************************************

In medieval times the appearance of a caul on a newborn baby was seen as a sign of good luck.  It was considered an omen that the child was destined for greatness. 

Gathering the caul onto paper was considered an important tradition of childbirth: the midwife would rub a sheet of paper across the baby's head and face, pressing the material of the caul onto the paper. The caul would then be presented to the mother, to be kept as an heirloom. Some Early Modern European traditions linked caul birth to the ability to defend fertility and the harvest against the forces of evil, particularly witches and sorcerers.

Folklore developed suggesting that possession of a baby's caul would give its bearer good luck and protect that person from death by drowning. Cauls were therefore highly prized by sailors. Medieval women often sold these cauls to sailors for large sums of money; a caul was regarded as a valuable talisman.

Not all cultural beliefs about cauls are positive. In Romanian folklore, babies born with a caul are said to become vampires upon death.

**************************************

I noticed that that last point was missing its citation so clearly it can't be true ;)

Labour of Love

I'm exhausted from this week of solo-parenting.  The boys have been asleep in [my] bed for over an hour and Mike is taking the red-eye back from California.  The house is quiet. It's a good time to start writing again.

Three months ago, also on a Thursday, I started to feel regular but mild contractions.  I was 39wks 6days pregnant and baby's head had been fixed in position since week 36.  It was such a challenge to walk during my final two weeks of pregnancy that I couldn't believe the baby hadn't arrived already.  I had made it just past 38 weeks the first time around. Finally I felt regular contractions starting around dinner time, occuring every 5-7 min and lasting about thirty seconds.  

They were mild though and not getting any stronger over time.  After about two hours of these contractions I told Mike we should take our son to his parents' house for the night, just in case.  Mike didn't seem to take the suggestion too seriously at first, not very convinced I might actually be going into labour.  Well neither was I at that point but I didn't want to worry about what to do with our son in the middle of the night if the baby did decide to come.  Besides, a false alarm wouldn't be the end of the world.  After another ten minutes I said more urgently "I really think we should take him over now."  It was around 8:30pm, our son's bedtime, and I was starting to get annoyed that we hadn't left yet.  I watched Mike take out his work laptop from his bag and set it on the dining table.  "What are you doing?" I asked irritated.  He was setting his out-of-office reply.

A little over an hour later we had returned home after dropping off our son.  We had been prepared to go straight to the hospital from my in-laws' but the contractions hadn't progressed at all and were still mild after over three hours.  We flipped on Netflix for a bit and then decided to go to bed.  I called my midwife to let her know about the contractions but told her we were headed to sleep.  She had expected me to say we were headed to the hospital and was thrown off (our son had been born relatively quickly and everyone was expecting an even faster labour this time around).  I was disappointed and a little frustrated that perhaps this could very well be a false alarm and theoretically I'd have to wait up to another two weeks before baby would arrive.

Surprisingly I managed to fall asleep and it wasn't until 2:30am that my contractions woke me up.  The pain as moderate at this point and so I timed them for the next hour.  Since they were only 3-5 min apart we called the midwife who told us to head straight for St. Michael's Hospital. She would meet us there.  This was really going to happen!We listened to an episode of the Reply All podcast on the way down.  Upon entering the hospital we were met with security guards at the desk who need to remotely unlock the doors to the rest of the hospital during the wee hours of the night.  To keep the drunks and crazies out, I believe.  St. Mike's is after all located in the heart of downtown.  My mind was clearly distracted when I had spoken with the midwife earlier because I somehow thought we were supposed to wait for her in the waiting room at the main entrance rather than up in the Labour and Delivery ward.  She lives right by our house and I was convinced we would have beat her to the hospital and would see her when she arrived.

The hospital is connected to a Second Cup near the main entrance and we proceeded to watch what looked like a dispute between a drunken woman and a homeless man who kept darting back and forth between the cafe and waiting area.  I couldn't quite tell whether they were a couple or not but they seemed to know each other.  At one point the man tried to leave the hospital through the revolving door but the woman jammed it so he couldn't, all the while shouting that he had stolen her wallet or purse.  The security guards were not amused.  My guess is they have to deal with situations like this on a daily basis.  I was trying to focus on my breathing and not on the crazy couple thirty feet away.

After ten or fifteen minutes we decided to head up to the Labour and Delivery ward, if nothing else but to get away from this scene.  It wasn't really the Zen atmosphere I was hoping for.  Aside from the dispute downstairs the hospital was near silent at this time of night.  Our midwife had indeed arrived already and had set up the delivery room for us, wondering why we were taking so long.  I walked by several nurses at the station in front of our room but after that, for the next two hours, the only people I saw were Mike and our midwife.  The next two hours became an experience like nothing I expected and something I want to remember forever.

It was a very different experience from my first labour where I was put for a few hours in a bed in triage until a delivery room opened up; where I had a sensor strapped to my belly to monitor contractions and a fetal heartbeat; where I wasn't given an epidural until I was fully dilated and even that took two tries and a consult with a second anaesthesiologist because the epidural wouldn't take.  They ended up giving me the C-section dose which, to everyone's surprise, wore off after an hour which is when I decided to push.  This time around there was no drama, no monitors, no epidural.  It honestly could have taken place in my own home but there was no way either Mike or I would have agreed to that.  

I entered active labour 45 min after arriving and for the next hour it was practically silent in the room.  I had my eyes squeezed tight for much of that time and concentrated so deeply on breathing that I could barely think of anything else.  To my surprise the midwife barely spoke, only occasionally saying something encouraging in an almost whisper and dabbing my sweaty forehead just once.  It was my first time with a midwife and I had expected her to provide more coaching or almost be like a personal cheerleader.  That didn't end up being the case.  However looking back, the silence was just fine as cheerleading probably would have angered me.  The silence was definitely better than the faint yawning I heard from Mike beside me on a stool while my eyes were shut tight and I was experiencing the worst pain of my life.  Three times, that happened.  Three yawns.  I counted.

I knew if I started to cry as I did in my first labour then I would just unravel and lose control.  So when I felt the tears starting to come, when the pain seemed unbearable, I clenched my teeth and forced myself to stop holding my breath.  In and out, in and out. Just breathe.  Everything was progressing so quickly.  It only lasted an hour (mercifully) but I was told the pain was probably more intense as a result, similar to when women are induced.  I didn't have time to think or ask about an epidural - I doubt there would have been time to get one anyway.  It was traumatic, no doubt.  I admit without shame that I panicked more than once about how I'd make it through this pain that was beyond anything I had ever felt.  During this pregnancy I had read much of Childbirth Without Fear by Grantly Dick-Read (by the way, not the most fortunately name and also, why did they choose such a frightening photo of a baby for the front cover??).  I disagree that it was simply my fear that brought on such intense pain. I'm quite sure it was my being torn apart that brought on such intense pain.

When it was time to push I was terrified, truly terrified.  The pain was shocking and I could hardly bring myself to cause more pain by pushing.  I imagine it's like preparing to jump out of a plane, where you have to psych yourself up for it.  I heard my midwife tell me a second time and after one or two pushes I distinctly recall a violent convulsing of my abdomen. I don't know if it was my muscles simply taking over to push the baby out, or if it was the feeling of my placenta separating from my body.  I just remember violent convulsions followed by horrible pain followed by relief and tears.  I think I was in shock when they placed the baby on my chest.  I just clutched him breathless and looked over at Mike whose eyes were filled with tears.

But now that I've survived labour without an epidural I feel grateful to have had that experience.  Just once.  Never again.  Just once.  Honestly though, I felt so much more connected to what was happening this time around.  It was such a different experience with a midwife, with no interventions, with no masking of the pain, with no hospital stay sharing a room with another family with a newborn.

Without the epidural I felt everything that came after;  The delivery of the placenta, the delivery of what felt like fist-sized blood clots.  I could feel the umbilical cord warm and wet draped across my inner thigh.  I could feel the four injections before they stitched me up.  It was all so visceral and those moments remained vivid in my mind for the weeks following the birth.

Our midwife told us she would show us the placenta once she finished up some paperwork regarding the birth.  Mike and I looked at each other.  "Why do we want to see the placenta?" I wondered, and Mike asked aloud.  "Because it's so cool, your baby lived in here," was her reply.  And she was right, it was cool after we got over the ick factor of it being a huge slimy organ that had just come from inside of my body.  She showed us the hole where the baby exited from, the attachment of the umbilical cord, the calcifications that were starting to form on the placental wall indicating it was time for baby to be born.  I was amazed when she showed me how much of the placenta had been attached to the wall of my uterus, explaining I had a wound of the same size now which is why I would bleed for several weeks postpartum while everything healed.  It was equal parts nauseating and fascinating.

Our beautiful, healthy baby was born at 6:14am, less than two hours after arriving at the hospital.  With no complications we were discharged three hours later.  We had watched the sun rise with our new baby and it was time now to drive home with him.  It felt surreal.  Everyone else had dropped off their kids at school and were on their way to work, going about their day as usual.  We were taking a new person home with us, a person we had waited such a long time to meet. Longer than the nine months I had carried him in my belly.  And even though we weren't new parents the feeling was no less magical.

On The Bathroom Floor

My husband told this story at our wedding and it's one that many friends have heard before.  It always gets a laugh, although at the time you can bet I didn't find it quite so amusing.  It was 2006 and we were backpacking around Europe - London, Gibraltar, Madrid, Cordoba, Chamonix, Milan.  We ran into a few glitches on the trip, the first being that the airline misplaced my luggage (one large, bright yellow backpack) on the first leg of the trip.  Mike and I put our backpacks one after another on the luggage conveyor belt; his flew with us to London and somehow mine stayed back in Toronto.  Fortunately for me we were spending three days in London with my family and I was able to borrow a few items from my younger cousin until the luggage could arrive two days later.  From then on we rearranged our bags so that each backpack contained half of each of our belongings.  There were many other flights and train rides still to come.

The other glitch, which is the story my husband told at our wedding, occurred in Gibraltar.  We were staying mainly in hostels whenever we weren't visiting family and there was really only one hostel to choose from at the time in Gibraltar.  Emile Hostel was only 1.5 km from the airport so we walked there once the plane landed (literally, we walked across the tarmac of the runway after deplaning).  It was a mediocre hostel, mostly empty from what we could see.  The front desk was in its own little one-storey house and after check-in we were taken into the next single-level building where guestrooms were located.  We entered through a glass door and then the host used his key to open a tiny door high up in the middle of the hallway.  Behind it were room keys, supposedly for all the guest rooms in the hostel.   He used a pole to take down the key to our room, handed it to us, and left the building.
  

I was surprised to find Gibraltar so deserted in the evening.  Shops closed early, streets were empty after 5pm, and there wasn't much of a night life.   After a quick dinner at a nearby pub we headed back to the hostel, again not running into anyone in the halls.  Our tiny bare room was furnished simply with two single beds and a side table.  We decided to push the two single beds together into the middle of the room for a more cozy feel.  Not that we would have use for the beds that night, as it turned out. 

The room was self-locking so we decided to take turns washing up in the communal bathroom down the hall.  I went first to brush my teeth.  Before finishing up Mike rounded the corner with his toiletries kit, ready for his turn.  "Did you bring the key?" I asked.  No, he did not.  And so began the most interesting evening of our Europe trip.

We headed to front desk in the next building over.  By now the lights were off and the house looked empty.  We knocked and rang the doorbell, circled the house, knocked some more.   It was past office hours so expectations were low that anyone was around.  At the very least the glass door to enter our hostel was not self-locking and we were able to return inside.  Next thought was to try and obtain another key from that little door in the hallway.  However the little door was well off the ground above head level and we had no means of getting it open.  We thought about prying open our room door (there was already a disconcerting gap between the door and the frame near the knob as if it had been done before) but we didn't have access to a knife or credit card.  Finally I thought we had a real chance when I remembered Mike's lock-picking skills.  A while back he had ordered a lock-picking set (interesting hobby, I'll admit) and practiced on a locking doorknob he had purchased from Home Depot.  Mike had even practiced on the front door to my parents' house, which likely raised some questions when they first found him doing so.

I returned to the bathroom and hunted around. When I found a bobby pin near one of the sinks I thought it was fate.  I honestly thought that within ten minutes Mike would be able to MacGyver the door we'd be lying in bed laughing about what had just happened.  Thirty minutes later we were still on our hands and knees outside our locked door, jiggling and twisting the bobby pin without success.

Eventually we came to terms with the fact that we wouldn't be spending the night in the hostel room.  However I felt exposed and unsafe in the hallway with large windows and an unlocking glass door to the dark outdoors.  I imagined us falling asleep in the hall and waking up to local thugs towering over us.

The only locking room we had access to was the communal shower.  It was a small tiled room, not much larger than a typical house bathroom, but with two shower heads and a little raised edge on the floor to prevent water from flooding out into the hall.  Who designed this?  Now I'm used to communal showers at public swimming pool but there isn't a chance in hell I'd shower in a locking room with another stranger.  

I'm sure I never thought I'd do what I did next either but desperate times, you know.  Turns out that this somewhat creepy tiled room would become our bedroom for the night; the grungy tiled floor, our bed.  I couldn't bare the thought of lying directly on the grimy floor so we removed the shower curtain and lay it down first.  I can't remember now whether we had put the outer face of the curtain up and honestly try not to think too much about it anymore.

After lying down for a while on the cold, hard floor, tired and frustrated from the evening, we heard the slow shuffling of feet from what sounded like a very, very old man.  I was surprised to know anyone else was in the entire hostel at all as we hadn't heard a sound from any other room after arriving.  The footsteps shuffled closer and the phlegmy hacking coughs were growing louder. We decided to remain silent behind the shower room door which he would have to pass on his way to the bathroom stalls so as not to startle him in the middle of the night.  Finally the absurdity of it all hit me as I lay shivering on the sure-to-be moldy shower curtain atop a dirty tiled floor, listening to an octogenarian hacking out his lung and grunting as he tried to pass a bowel movement just steps away from our door.  It was just too much and I started to shake uncontrollably with laughter (the silent kind that only happens with a really good belly-aching laugh).  I must have snapped. 

When the laughter was under control and the man had finally returned to his room we tried to get some shut eye.  It was impossible to fall asleep under such conditions though, and I was freezing cold with just a T-shirt and thin pyjama bottoms on.  I was lying down while Mike sat against the wall warming my feet with his stomach and hands.  Eventually I joined him sitting up (tiles are hard on the spine) and there we passed the remaining hours of the night, listening to cats meowing outside the tiny window, waiting for the sun to rise.  

In the morning we dragged our tired, aching bodies back to the front desk and briefly explained our predicament.  I could tell from the smirk on the man's face he found it more than a little amusing.  With no questions asked he lead us back to our room and opened the door.  The next thing I knew I was back in the cursed shower room with a clean towel and change of clothes to take what would be one of the best hot showers I've had in my life.   

Visiting the Barbary Apes of Gibraltar after a night spent sleeping in the shower