Daddy’s Day Out

Clancy gave me a wonderful gift today: A day off.

This was made more awesome by the fact that it’s not like she really gets much in the way of days off. What she does get, however, is time away from the baby. More time than she would like, of course, but she is very sympathetic to the alone and away time that I am not getting. So one of her goals over the four-day Memorial Day weekend was that she would get all of her notes done and would be able to look after the baby while I could make a trip to Redstone.

Since we’ll be moving soon, the number of days I will get to spend in Redstone are limited. I can come up here with the baby, of course, but it hinders my ability to soak that fascinating town in. When I’m with the baby, the baby is of course central to my attention.

It’s funny how this can mean so much to me while, prior to the baby’s arrival, days like this were free. Abundant. Over-abundant, really.

I suppose it’s one of those things that you only appreciate it in scarcity.

When I get home, Lain will be asleep. So I’ll likely miss out on seeing her excited face upon my return. At least, I assume that her face would be excited. I see it sometimes in the morning, if I’ve gone on the couch in the living room as Clancy takes the morning shift (feeding, mostly). The’s not ordinarily excited to see me because I’m pretty much always around. When Clancy gets home, though, she blows up in excitement. Some of that is the fact that she’s the milktruck, but I think a lot of that is the appreciation that comes with scarcity.

I haven’t been a father for long enough for it to not blow my mind that, whenever I do leave, that I have a daughter when I get home. My daughter. We’ve waited quite some time for this. We’ve tried to keep expectations to a minimum, since there was reason to believe that pregnancy might be more difficult to attain than it turned out to be.

The other day, an acquaintance mentioned having had a child before the two that I knew about. The child died of a heart abnormality within a couple weeks. It struck a chord because of a trip to Umatilla we had to take when a test on Lain’s heart turned something up. That was the first (and to date, only) threat of losing Lain that we’ve had. But I remember it well enough that, though I immensely enjoyed my day out, I am nonetheless glad they get to be so rare.