Today is Henry’s birthday; he’s nine. He woke up this morning with a hacking cough, of course, because his allergies are bad and he’s run down from playing baseball and swimming and jumping on Will’s trampoline and staying up late and being a boy.

June 2000

Henry wears his watch all the time; he only takes it off to shower and swim and play sports. This morning, on the way to camp, I said, “Henry, watch the time today. At exactly 11:17 you’ll be 9 years old.” It’s amazing to me that I can still remember that, after all this time, especially considering how crazy Henry’s birth was. My water broke at 34 weeks, completely unexpectedly; we rushed to the hospital and they shot me full of Brethine, to stop the contractions that I couldn’t feel. I had two rounds of steroid shots, in my hip, to beef up the baby’s lungs, and spent a day and a half in a hospital bed, strapped to a fetal monitor and a contraction monitor. The first night, we didn’t realize that we could turn the volume on the fetal monitor down; we spent the entire night listening to Henry’s heart beating.

Henry was born on a Saturday morning. My parents were on their way from Tucson; they called that morning from the airport and Wade said everything was fine and I would probably have the baby the next day. When they got to Oklahoma City, they called again and Wade told them they had a grandson.

Henry was the tiniest baby I had ever seen; he weighed 4 lbs 15 oz and had a teeny, scrunchy face. He didn’t cry at all in the delivery room, he just frowned and screwed his eyes shut like we were disturbing him. I held him for maybe fifteen seconds before the NICU team whisked him away. He was on a ventilator for two days, and in the NICU for ten. We called it the Baby Spa; Henry was easily the biggest, healthiest infant there. In the end, they held on to him for a few extra days because he was having a hard time maintaining an appropriate body temperature. Now, we go in to kiss him goodnight and he is sweating in his sleep.

Henry was born with the cord wrapped twice around his neck, although I didn’t know about that for days. Wade let it slip much later, when he was joking that he could have delivered Henry himself (he had been reading up in the Worst Case Scenario Handbook about how to deliver a baby, “just in case,” he liked to tell people). My doctor never flinched; she just reached down and put her finger under the cord and unlooped it and that was that.

As I was telling the boys all of these things in the car this morning, I was struck for the first time in a long time with the memory of how entirely terrifying Henry’s birth was, how many things could have — and nearly did — go wrong. At the time, though, we were surrounded by people who were calm and collected and who assured us that they didn’t see any reason to worry. Even when the NICU doctor came to talk us through all the things that could possibly happen to Henry (a tear in his lung caused by the ventilator, a specific form of blindness resulting from being premature, an infection from the feeding tube) we still felt like it would all be okay.

Now that he’s nine, now that he’s healthy and thriving and talking nonstop about Star Wars and Batman and Newton’s Third Law of Physics, I can stop and look back and think about all the close calls we had in that first week, with that tiny tiny baby. And it still gives me pause.

This morning, though, the boys weren’t interested in the story of Henry’s arrival, even though it was fraught with danger and adventure; they wanted to hear a different story. “Tell me about that time Nana forgot to clean out the drawer,” Henry said, already laughing.

The story is this: When Henry was probably a year old, I took him to visit my parents. My mother said, “I’ve cleaned out that bottom drawer for him to play in. ” So we plunked Henry on her kitchen floor and opened the drawer for him. He pulled out some plastic containers and a wooden spoon, and then he found an extension cord and started to chew on it. “Hmm,” my mother said, and took the cord away.

And then Henry pulled a serrated bread knife out of the drawer and my mother said, “Maybe I didn’t do such a good job of cleaning that out after all.”

The boys think that is the funniest story ever, in the whole history of stories about Henry. And really, they’re not wrong.