What (or more accurately, who) is Daigoro?
Daigoro was the name of the fictional character Kozure Okami's son, who accompanied him in his epic adventures across Feudal Japan. I've chosen to use Daigoro as a pseudonym for my son - it's an obvious choice given my choice of nickname.
This Daigoro, my Daigoro, entered into this world in the early hours of the first week of April, 2005. My wife (who as yet lacks a pseudonym and will thus go nameless for the time being) had convinced me of the benefits of a home birth, and we had planned together for the event. Being a first time father, I was nervous, of course, but I was also well prepared by the patient and well-informed coaching of my wife, who has quite a bit of knowledge in childbirth from her medical-related education.
While she had been experiencing symptoms of early labour since that morning, she was convinced that she had some time yet to wait even as I arrived home from work around 6:30 that evening. We had taken a short course in so-called "self-hypnosis", a method of inducing a trance-like state which assisted in reducing both the perception of pain and making time seem to go by more quickly when feeling discomfort. It's actually a none-too-complex method, but it requires practice and preparation.
I suggested that she should being the early steps of going into a light state of self-hypnosis so that once labour began in earnest, she'd be prepared, but she declined, thinking she had plenty of time yet. She even went so far as to start doing laundry. By 9:30, though, she realized that perhaps this was proceeding a little faster than she expected and we paged the midwives. I believe they arrived sometime around 10:30, but my recollection of events is somewhat skewed.
Things proceeded quickly after that. The midwives were wonderful and my wife was brave (albeit understandably unreasonable at times) and my son was delivered without drugs (the term "natural childbirth" always seems a little snobbish to me) shortly before 3 AM. I am proud to say that I had enough of my wits about me to be in a position to "catch" the baby - as he emerged, he was cradled in my hands first.
Perhaps in some future post, I'll try to better capture the details of the birth, but it was first and foremost a whirlwind experience. I can barely remember details - helping my wife, comforting her, trying to play host to our midwives - it all seemed to happen so fast. One thing I will always remember, however, is the moment of pure joy as I held my son for the first time and wrapped him in blankets to give to his mother.
As it happened, we had been expecting a girl. During a routine ultrasound, my wife overheard the technician describing "girl parts" in medical lingo that my wife could understand. So, as the baby emerged and I saw that it was a boy, I was both happy for the health of a new child, but also surprised that it would be a son and not a daughter.
I suppose it is somewhat of a throwback in today's society to want a son as your first born, but I would be dishonest to say I wasn't hoping for one. Patrilinear primogeniture is a sexist concept, but it dies hard in the male mind.
Despite it being a relatively fast labour, it understandably left my wife quite drained. We bustled about for a little while, made a few phone calls and after thanking the midwives, we tumbled into bed. Thus ended Daigoro's first night on earth.
Since I'm starting this blog belatedly about 21.5 months into Daigoro's development, I'll have to bounce back and forth between current accounts of him and what happened in the past. I hope you will forgive me any temporal confusion this may create.
Daigoro today is a healthy and vigorous young toddler, with a wry, scrunched up smile and a ready laugh. His eyes, sometimes describes as "snapping black" are indeed so dark brown as to be nearly black. He has a mop of wavy light brown hair when it hasn't been cut short (as his mother prefers) and is pretty average-sized for a child his age. He is long-bodied and short limbed, like both his parents, and though not quite stocky, he is certainly solidly built. His current speed settings seem to be "running" and "running faster" but if he interested in something, he will sit down to contemplate it quite thoroughly.
While generally quite happy and pleasant, he also has a meditative and contemplative nature at times, looking very serious when he beetles his lightly toned eyebrows and simply gazes about curiously.
His passions are currently trucks, cars and trains, a trait which I imagine he shares with 80% or more of North American boys. His first word was "shoe", learned because he so enjoys going outside; putting on his shoes meant going there. His current vocabulary is thus (rendered here in no particular order other than the ones that spring first to mind, and by no means comprehensive):
shoe, car, mommy, mom, momma, dada, daddy, kitty, bib, cookie, no, down, up (sometimes up and down get reversed), outside, door, open, hockey, stick, broken, doggie, gi-chan (Japanese familiar term for "grandfather"), truck, plane, train, come, please, thank-you, welcome, juice, water, key, pooh, bama (banana), cracker, cookie, yes (also "yup" and "yeah"), ow, bath, wet, ball, go, one-two-three (said mostly by rote when "counting" something, not always actually related to the number being counted and often restarted), pizza (well, "pida", but close enough), bread, toast, jam, cereal, apple (applies to all round, reddish or red-orange fruits), orange, sock, fish(y), cow, horse, pig, chicken, bird, play, dance, snow, cold, hot, baby, treat(s), tree, wheee, okay, tee (TV), pooh (as in the bear, not the body function), light, diaper, corn, book, jacket, pants, shirt, mitten(s), bike + various names of family members and fellow homecare children.There are a number of other words he seems to understand without necessarily being able to repeat them to us - our instruction to be "gentle" for example. Taking a moment to write down these words, it's interesting to note what he's learned and what he hasn't learned by this point.
In some cases ("thank you", "please"), I'm quite happy he's learned the words. In others ("pooh", "tee"), I'm not quite as proud.
No one said this path would be easy.
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