Wednesday, June 25, 2014

The Nachos are out of the oven

This week I became an aunt.

Aunt Jade.

Of course, I knew it was eventually going to happen. It's not like babies just spring out of the ground, fully formed, overnight. But little Blaine did decide to come five weeks early, so I have to say I wasn't quite prepared. I didn't wake up that morning thinking "Today I might become an aunt." I woke up thinking "Argh, why is it morning already? I wasn't done sleeping."

I guess I can't complain, having aunt-hood sprung on me in such an abrupt manner. Easier to handle than becoming parent a month ahead of schedule. After all, when Lance texted Dad less than 24 hours before Jasinda went into labor that "this prenatal class is so long Jasinda will have the baby before it's over," he thought he was being hilariously hyperbolic.  (Dad responded "Breathe," to which Lance responded "Hee hoo hee hoo.")

Even my parents thought they would have a few weeks of transition between the day they became empty nesters and the day they became grandparents, but life decided it should just rip that bandaid off all in one week. Actually, they're thrilled about the whole grandparent thing. They embraced the role fully by sitting in the old person section of the chapel at church on Sunday.

Now that the baby is born, we can stop calling him "the baby" and start calling him Blaine, since his parents decided not to announce his name before he was born. Logan took matters into his own hands early on, however, and emailed Lance that he should name the baby Nacho. Much to Lance's dismay, the nickname stuck, and all of us referred to Blaine as "little Nacho" for the past five months or so. A couple of weeks ago he told Logan just because everyone else was calling the baby Nacho didn't mean it was going to happen, to which Logan replied in his weekly email home from his mission, "As for your comment about your future son's name... I'm pretty sure it's so brilliant it's Nacho choice anymore."

We were all taking bets on what type of name the new baby would have. If Lance and Jasinda had named the baby something with a weird spelling Cole was planning to email them back (this was when we thought Cole would be on his mission already) and say "Hey guys, when you were writing the email you accidentally spelled his name wrong."

One time when we were on a long road trip we decided we had to pick the names of our future children right then and there (we had gotten bored with the classic "Next person we pass is your wife") using only words that we saw as we were driving. It was more doable than you think. Lots of car names, like Mercedes, are passable people names, and a lot of cities were named after people to begin with. I do seem to remember someone ended up with a son named Truck though. As for me, if I name my future daughter Meridian you'll know why.

Sunday night, at about 1 a.m., Lance was finally able to run home and grab his laptop and we got to Skype with the newest member of the family. We mostly just marveled at how much hair Blaine has. Seriously. The kid is going to need a haircut in about three weeks. But it's totally adorable. Like everything about him. Isn't it amazing how the human brain is wired to look at newborns and think they're pretty much the cutest thing ever, even when, objectively speaking, they come out of the womb looking like a boiled monkey?

I can't wait to go see him, but for the next few weeks I'll have to be content with baby Blaine being added to the never-ending stream of baby photos on my Facebook newsfeed (yes, most of you reading this are contributors, and yes, I do have a secret list in my head ranking all of your children by cuteness level and yes, I will lie and tell you yours is the cutest if you ask me).

Aunt Jade out.









2 comments:

  1. Congratulations Aunt Jade!!!


    But seriously--Henry is the cutest, isn't he?

    ReplyDelete