....and weighed six pounds, nine ounces, then he'd look a lot like Jackson David Puckett :)

                  


Jacks did NOT want to be born, as it turns out, so he swelled his head up to the size of a volleyball to keep from being pushed out. And Angela has the pelvic girdle of an Ethiopian, so there were many hours of "irresistible force meeting an immovable object", so eventually the doc decided to go in and get him.

(I'd like to state, here and now, that - although it has always been the lot of the male to go outside the cave and fight the saber-toothed tiger, or go to war and fight the Nazis, or go down with the ship so that the women and children can get into the lifeboats - I am very, very grateful to be a man, and not a woman. That other stuff is INFINITELY preferable to being the center of attention in a Labor & Delivery room. The fact that I've never had to actually FIGHT saber-toothed Nazis or get out of the lifeboat only adds to my extreme gratitude for my Y chromosome).

Anyway, all of this push me - pull you stuff resulted in Jacks' head being pushed into an orofice much too small to accodomate it, such that - if his head DOESN'T reshape itself - I expect him to wind up as an Art History major in a Liberal Arts college, wearing a turtleneck and smelling like the Arcosanti. But the doc assures us that there are no such concerns - that his head will go back to its designed proportions.

I got to go into the nursery with Dave, briefly, in order to touch and smell little Jacks. It's pretty amazing, to do this as a grandfather - one has much more awareness of just how big an event a birth is, when one has been through it before, and when one is not suddenly assuming the mantle of responsibility that goes along with it. I see that my eldest son, at the age of 29, will suddenly have to go ahead and finish growing up in all of those ways that simply cannot happen until one is responsible for somebody else's life.

I'm also able to think long-range - at some point, Ethel and I will be taking Jacks skiing, and climbing, and sailing; he'll be calling us Mawmaw and Pawpaw, and running into our house yelling. At about the same time that Silas moves out and makes our house quiet, he'll be showing up to raise the decibel level.

I reckon that'll be all right :)