The Kid Delivers His Kid (Baby!)

My oldest son is very upset this week. When his first child was born he was robbed of the opportunity to "cut the cord" due to some silly "complication", health of the mother, problems with the delivery. Doctors, what do they know anyway. Tuesday morning when his daughter was born he missed out on cutting that cord too. I think his actual words were, "dang, I didn't get to cut her cord either". What a complainer. You'd think that he wasn't allowed into the delivery room at the hospital to participate.

Truth is he wasn't allowed in the delivery room. Okay, she didn't deliver in the delivery room but she did made it to the hospital. The reason he didn't cut the cord this time is a tale as old as time itself.

He was busy delivering his own baby in the car, in the parking lot, at the hospital, just after midnight.

Show off.

It happened like this (and this is a second hand report).

Son comes home from school, 10pm. (He's an apprentice electrician and is going to police academy to become a reserve sheriff in Spokane (SpoCan, not SpoCain), Washington. They're going to induce the delivery on Monday the 23rd, baby due March 4th. This baby is a kick boxer it turns out and is working out early for the Ultimate Fight Championship. His sweetie pie is feeling weird, not right, but she is a human punching bag right now.

12 midnight. After a bath Sweetie calls for mommy to come watch child #1. Doctor says come to the hospital. You know, runs up the doctors bills if you do that. Mommy comes because that's what mommy's do.

Sometime between midnight and I'm guessing 1:30, yea, AM!, they are driving to the hospital and she starts having contractions a minute and half apart. This is the part where my son decides that traffic laws are for sissy's because he breaks most of them when he puts his foot down on the pedal. She worries she's going to have baby and there is widespread panic... at least in their car. Me and the wife, she's in her kerchief and I'm in my cap, we just settled down for.... forget it. Sleeping like old people do. Besides, we're 400 miles away.

Somewhere during this blatant disregard for the traffic laws they hear running water. Since there isn't a sink in the car it must be coming from the pregnant one in the story. More gas is applied to the injectors. More panic too.

He skillfully drives up to the emergency room entrance, don's his SuperDad cape and rushes to the door to assist his wife into the hospital. He yells at the security guard to get help there's a baby coming and other stuff that I forgot.

Adrenalin is not flowing, it's pumping at high pressure, but still he gently opens the door for his sweetie and suggests that maybe she should remove.... how can I say this delicately.... her, her, her. Underwear. Just in case, which they do.

Now this is the part where everything gets crazy. Supposedly it happens something like this; wife screams "I'm having a baby", has a major contraction, and then, and then....

MY SON LOOKS DOWN JUST IN TIME TO SEE A BABY SHOOT OUT OF THE PLACE BABY'S SHOOT OUT OF AND DOES A QUICK JOHNNY BENCH (Hall of Fame Catcher) AND GRABS SAID SHOOTING BABY REAL FAST AND PULLS HER TO HIS CHEST!!!! NOT SEEING HER BREATHE HE TURNS HER OVER, CLEARS THE AIRWAY, PATS HER BACK AND GETS HER CRYING!!!!

And then the nurses showed up, and security. Mother and baby doing fine. Dad, well he's SuperDad, his little piece of Kryptonite just jumped into his arms. Mom, well we just love our Jessica. We hope the baby looks like her.

Welcome to the world Heidi Jean Haynes. 6 pounds, 15 ounces. 20 inches long with lots of hair. Pictures to follow.

I wonder if his insurance is going to get billed for the delivery.

24

Besides breathing and eating, you know, basically existing, there is only one other significant event that has taken up any significant portion of my 50 years of existence on this rotating orb we call Earth.

Marriage, and the joys and pains that go with it.

Saturday, February 14th, my Honey Buns, my Lucy, and I will celebrate 24 years together. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I never knew what happiness was until I got married… and now it’s too late.

Okay, when I say that she gives me the look. But she gives ME the look! And I think she’s beginning to realize that I’m in it for the long run. I believe that we have a chance of going all the way and that’s saying something. In our families divorce has been the light at the end of the tunnel.

First marriage for me, second for her, but she’s sweet and says that I’m the one that counts. She divorced the first guy because of a sleeping disorder... he was always sleeping with someone else. She brought two great kids to the party and I don’t think of them as stepkids, just my kids. Two more, the clones, joined us in the first 3 years. Later, 7 grandkids, the 8th is due this March.

The memories…. Here are some in no particular order.

· Driving to Disneyland, the two of us, June 1986, Seattle to Anaheim, 1982 Ford Escort, no a/c. San Joquin Valley. Spraying each other with spray bottles to battle the heat.

· Honolulu, Hawaii, November 2005, climbing Diamond Head together. I nearly die on this climb because I’m out of shape, looking forward to the stairs at the top. I think I did die doing those stairs.

· May 1987, hanging a stuffed rabbit from the chandeler at our apartment in Tualitin, Oregon, our visual message to friends Matthew & Kerry Peterson, that number 4 child was on the way. (The rabbitt had died.)

· November 1986, Everett, Washington, me the big strong guy and my petite little wife, carrying couches and mattresses together in the pouring rain when we moved into our new rental because the local congregation of our church knew we weren’t going to stay long and didn’t want to help a transient family.

· June 1993, Disneyland again, this time in a rented Chevy Astro, all four kids. Might have been the best family vacation ever for us. Down and up the West Coast.

· Westport, Washington, the in-laws own a one bedroom cabin there. Besides being the honeymoon suite (or as a friend calls it “the stabbin’ cabin”), it has been the Spring Vacation Getaway for the family, numerous summer visits, the place where the crab is cheap and plenty. We all do the Walton’s goodnight thing when we stay there.

· Date unknown, the family home evening where we learned to spit grapes across the room at the house on 14th Street. Almost invited Guiness Book of World Records.

· September 27, 1987, the Seattle Temple for the LDS Church. We got rid of the “til death do ye part” and replaced it with “for time and all eternity”. Three kids sealed, the fourth was 5 months away.

· March 1991, Disney World for four days, the weekend cruise to the Bahamas. Oh yeah, it was sooooo worth it. No kids.

· February 14, 1986 – Our first anniversary, new baby and burnt brocolli.

· February 13, 1994 to July 1, 1994 – Temporary assignment for me in Denver, home every other weekend. She had the kids, the daughter turning 13, three boys in baseball. It was hell, for her. But it did everything for my career.

· November 1986, I was demoted in a job. Came home to tell her, ex-husband there to see the kids. Not a great memory but it sticks in my mind because it’s was so great that someone that day still believed in me, and she always has.

· March 2008, Lucy has major surgery, supposed to take only an hour, at hour two I wondering, hour three I’m spending the insurance money mentally, hour four I’m a basket case.

· Everytime we’re intimate, well… she doesn’t laugh at me naked. Surely she gets points for that, and “stop calling me Shirley”.

· Name Calling – We have them for everything, My Ricky to her Lucy, Shirley, as in "Surely you don’t mean that. Stop calling me Shirley." Buns, Honey Buns, and when she’s mad, HOT CROSS BUNS. And let’s not forget our old standbys, “Dream Killer!” “Hope Smasher!”

There’s more about us, some personal, some general. We’ve had our disagreements, our make ups, challenges financially, with the kids, with each other. But over the years we’ve been a team. We finish sentences for each other, we start them, we still get frustrated at each other, but we’re together 24 years later.

A young man once taught me (just before he got divorced from some wacko), the grass isn’t greener on the other side, it’s greener where you water it. Well Buns, Lucy, Honey Buns, Shirley, let’s turn on the sprinkler and get the grass greener for another 24 years.

Gotta Love That Kisser!!! Ricky & Lucy at "24"

My (Misplaced) Fear of Flying

WARNING! WARNING! If you are here to read about death row inmates eating their eyes and grown men having sex with horses you have come to the wrong place. I’ve reformed, I’ve seen the light, I’m a new man.

Let’s talk phobias!

I thought about being a pilot when I was younger, it’s a profession full of chance takers, guts and in some cases glory. The problem is that I have a fear of flying, or so I thought. When I watched the news stories last week regarding the “miracle” of US Airways Flight 1589 in New York I had a paradigm shift with regards to my phobia. And now that I’ve made this transition I’m ready to come clean. I don’t have a fear of flying… I have a fear of crashing. I also have a fear of dying but I’ve always thought that the fear of crashing was the prerequisite to the fear of dying.

Everyone still with me?

Let’s face it, there is something exhilarating about flying through the air, regardless, I might add, of whether you’re in plane or it’s just you in free flight. What stops us some of us from pursuing a life of flight is not the flight; it’s the potential of the crash. And I’m an expert witness for the defense in this case.

In my lifetime I have flown on commercial jets and puddle jumpers nearly 100 times. I have taken off 4 times in small planes, landed in only one of them. I have allowed someone to tie big rubber bands around my legs and ankles and then purposely jumped from 170 feet in the air with only a swimming pool to break my fall or, at some might believe, contain my remains. I have jumped from trees, high diving boards, the occasional window, deck, and roof. In all of these experiences the thrill is in the flight, the fear is in the options for the landing.

Let me share some experiences. Three times I’ve been skydiving. The question always comes up, “why would you want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane?” Trust me, the planes you jump out of are so crap that you want to get out. Each time I jumped from 2,400 feet in the air hooked to a static line. That means that I while I’m falling out of the plane and have completely forgot everything that they taught me in skydiving school, that there is a line to automatically pull the ripcord for my parachute. They are also nice enough to provide a spare chute in case things go wrong. The third option is death or a landing so hard that you become your family’s favorite vegetable. This school was so thorough that they informed you how long you could expect to float down if your parachute deployed properly, 3 minutes, and how long the flight would be if your chute failed to deploy. About 17 seconds. And with skydiving the question isn’t about whether you’re going to get on the ground again, it’s how far into the ground. I don’t know how far you have to fall before people on the ground can hear you screaming for your mommy if your chute fails to open.

Bungee Jumping is nothing like skydiving. Bungee jumping is “totally radical dude”! There are many places that you can bungee jump; off the side of a bridge, some take an elevator to the top of a crane, others hang their digits on the edge of a cliff. Then some guy who doesn’t have an engineering degree wraps your legs and ankles with bungees, a bigger version of the ones that you use to anchor the tarp over your tent; basically a big rubber band. The problem with bungee jumping is that you can visualize how far you’re going to drop because you’ve got visual verification, with skydiving you can’t comprehend the height. Let’s see, 2,400 feet is about half a mile, so it’s two times around the track but from the air. With bungee jumping you know where you are going to land or in some cases, splatter. The thrill is the flight, the fear is the landing. Here’s the other surprise; jumping from a height of 170 feet with a big rubber band attached to your legs means that you are at some point going to stretch the rubber band to its extremes. Now if you’ve every stretched a rubber band you know that they like to bounce back to their original shape. What goes down must come back up. You can see your house from up there, and again, and again, and again.

So far I’m pretty confident with skydiving and bungee jumping. I’m really okay with airplanes; each time I takeoff and land safely my confidence increases. I don’t have the same confidence in the future of solo flight where you are the flight vehicle. All of those documentaries showing humans with jet packs, or wings and rudders attached to their bodies trying to fly and then crashing have not convinced me that personal flight is the future. Besides, if God had intended that we fly solo he would have given us a rudder on the backside instead of a butt crack.

Can I Get An AMEN!

Brothers and Sisters, the subject of our sermon today is food. We’ll be taking our lesson from “The Book of Daniel, Chapter 68, The Lost Chapters.”

Starting with verse 6: “Let the doors of the buffet be opened unto you that you may feast upon the salads, the meats and the fish, and end with a nice piece of chocolate cake, with ice cream. And in consuming them you shall be filled to uncomfortability and your pants shall be tight and your proximity to the bathroom shall be close. But you will be contented.”

Can I get an Amen! Amen! Say it again. Amen!

Fact; Women are into quality and men are into quantity, which is why women love restaurants and men love buffets.

The same rules apply with regards to sex, women want quality, men, well we just want it. Quantity.

But this is really about food so I’ll try to stay focused.

The secret to a long life, according to those who live long, is that food is not their priority. Sounds to me like someone has their priorities mixed up. I want to eat my way to at least 100 years old. Women tend to not focus on food and that may be the explanation as to why women live longer than men, but what’s the fun of living long if you can’t enjoy it and nothing says enjoy like buffet!

Last week I had occasion to be in a town on the Olympic Peninsula for business and decided to pop into a buffet for a “light” lunch, meaning that at lunch they don’t carve roast beef and ham. A group of four young men in white shirts, ties, and name tags were prayerfully pondering whether the buffet was a prudent use of their money. Now I’m not Bill Gates when it comes to money but I have needed some blessings for my family so I convinced them that the “spirit of the buffet” had prompted me to pay for their meal. Why else would they have pulled into the parking lot at the same time if it wasn’t meant to be?

“And they came two by two to the table; and they did eat of foods, both fried and baked, whipped and steamed, and they saw that it was good. They partook of fowl of the ground, fishes of the sea, and they popped those little shrimp all breaded and deep fried and dipped in cocktail sauce into their mouths. So great was their joy that they returned again and again to feast upon the bounties provided by the toothless guy who spoke no English.”

“And they washed it down with endless glasses of pop and milk and they all proclaimed that it was good.”

In modern terms, those boys could eat. I was so proud of them I nearly cried.

I did feel bad though. Just after we sat down together another four missionaries arrived, surveyed the situation, and then announced that they weren’t going to spend that kind of money on a meal. Bless those young men that were already eating for they did not announce that they were eating on my dime. Besides, 8 missionaries in one place is a zone conference in my book and I didn’t see a Mission President. They wandered off in search of a dollar menu somewhere. Hey, sometimes the spirit moves you. It moved me to not pay for four more.

I know that I don’t make the rules, but whoever, no matter what the circumstances were, invented the buffet should get a free pass into heaven. If I believed in sainthood I’d saint him. If I could name a town or a road after him I would. I’d declare a Buffet Holiday. There would be no fasting on this day. Forget sacrifice and service, the rallying cry should be “Buffets! It’s what’s for Dinner… and lunch!”

And his place in heaven should be on the right hand… of the guy who invented bacon.