Today is the day. There was one year where all four of my kids were teenagers. Adolescence is officially over here.

Twenty years ago, both my daughters needed surgery, and both the doctors involved wanted to schedule it for the day of or the day after my due date. Um, this doesn’t work. Picture a small child under anesthesia at the outclinic surgery center, the mom going into labor, and the dad stuck, torn between the two, not being able to just leave his child, but his wife needing to go to the hospital–especially since my labor time had been halved each successive pregnancy and this was my fifth pregnancy, the fourth to survive to fullterm.

What do you do?

So I did what I do. I prayed hard. God, You know, and I have not a clue.

I woke up in the middle of that night from a vivid dream of having just had the baby and looking at the clock. I knew in that moment what day John was going to be born and what time. He was not going to come on his due date and get to be a Feb 29th baby after all.

I called the girls’ doctors and was able to move one surgery up a week, the one that just couldn’t wait; the other, I moved back. I told them I was having the baby on the 7th (nobody asked; let them assume a planned C-section or inducement if they wanted, had they asked me I’d have told them straight out why I was saying that.)

And then at 1:05 pm on March 6th I started labor. Hey! According to past history, this one was supposed to last less than an hour! Okay, whatever. There was a concert at church that evening, and I went. Someone asked me how I was doing, and I cheerfully chirped, “I’m three minutes apart.”

“What are you DOING here!?” they demanded.

I sat down, the music began, the labor stopped, I enjoyed the concert, I stood up at the end, and boom, I was in labor again. I guess John wanted to take some time off and listen to that piano too before he really got to work.

He arrived forty-seven minutes after midnight, exactly on time and exactly as I’d dreamed it. The biopsy on his two-year-old sister’s cells had come back precancerous but they’d caught it in time and she was okay; her doctor told me he was glad we hadn’t waited.

And I’m glad John waited until we could get her squared away. But then, he’s always been a considerate and very kind child.

Happy birthday, big guy. And if any of my readers are in Texarkana, Texas at the moment, (he’ll probably spend some time in Louisiana and Mississippi later) and you see some of those Mormon missionaries go by in their dark suits and white shirts on their bikes, wave hi to Elder Hyde for me and tell him his momma loves him.