Scene: AJ�s bedroom, Friday night

AJ: What time was I born?

Harriet: 11:40 at night. You almost didn�t come on Bop�s birthday.

AJ: Was I really Bop�s favorite birthday present?

Harriet: Yes, you really were.

AJ: What time will I be five?

Harriet: Well, the exact time you�ll turn five will be while you�re sleeping tomorrow night. But the day you turn five starts at midnight while you�re sleeping tonight.

AJ: Can I just be five at midnight?

Harriet: Of course.

AJ: I�m going to sing a birthday song.

Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday to you!
I�m going to be five at midnight!
Happy birthday to you!

AJ woke up Saturday morning at five and came into our room wearing his birthday crown from his party at school yesterday. �Can I get up yet?� he asked in a stage whisper. We tried sending him back to bed a couple of times, but apparently it�s hard to sleep in a paper crown, so we eventually gave up and he crawled into bed between us so we could all watch Dora the Explorer together.

Five years ago at this time, I couldn�t decide whether I was anxious or not. The process of waiting for AJ was it�s own kind of pleasure, but the prospect of his imminent arrival was both exciting and a little scary. The night before he was born, I was sitting on the sofa watching Woman of the Year on PBS while my husband was making a pregnancy special salad � lettuce topped with pink grapefruit and cottage cheese. I had violent aversion to salad dressing throughout most of my pregnancy and towards the end this was pretty much the only thing I would eat. Suddenly I thought my pants were wet. I went to the bathroom. They were. I changed, thinking it was one of the many indignities of the last stages of pregnancy. I went back to watching the movie. A few minutes later, the same thing happened. I began to wonder what was going on. I had always thought that when the bag of waters broke you couldn�t miss it. My friend S. had told me that many times. I think a metaphor involving Niagara Falls was used. I called the doctor. He informed me that I was in labor. This was news to me. I just thought my back hurt. He told us to call him in the morning or when the contractions were five minutes apart, whichever came first.

I calmly took a shower and went to sleep. My husband packed and didn�t sleep at all. In the morning I still didn�t feel like I was in labor. We called the doctor. He told us to come in anyway.

So at 8 a.m. we were admitted with luggage and the Sunday paper and an assortment of mellow CDs (Kevin Mahogany, Freddie Cole, Mel Torme � I�m pretty sure the nurses thought we were 106) in tow. We spent the day hanging out in the room. Every now and then someone would come in and poke another needle in me. The gave me Pitocin. Life became one long contraction that never stopped. They gave me drugs. We went back to reading the paper.

By evening we were getting impatient. I�d finished the crossword puzzle and taken a nap. The next shift arrived. We turned on the TV. Nothing but the Oscars. But we soon discovered that by leaving the Oscars on in our room, we got extra nursing attention � they kept coming in to see what was going on. This was entertaining. We left the TV on. Shortly after they ended, AJ decided to make an appearance. The birth seemed to take a couple of minutes, but was in fact much longer. At 11:40, I was holding the tiniest little person, wrapped in a blanket like a burrito

I only know about the 11:40 because that�s what it says on AJ�s birth certificate. From the moment he was born, time was a fairly useless convention to us. Night was day, day was night. We followed his schedule completely. We all slept in short stretches around the clock, cycling in and out of sleep and wakefulness. And it was beautiful and we were not tired. It was a charmed time and any attempt to emerge from our carefully woven life felt like an assault of noise and dirt and brightness that we�d forgotten about.

Now that AJ is 5, our world is all about noise. And dirt. And brightness. And we also find ourselves obsessed once again with time � with how long it has been, with how much we�ve got left, with how fast it is slipping away from us. So once a year I always try to remember those weeks where we felt bathed in a golden light, oblivious of the mechanisms of the universe, completely introverted and enchanted.

[More raucous birthday stories to come after the houseguests leave. You'll laugh! You'll cry! There will be violence -- and science. Stay tuned.]

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