How I Became Your Father Pt. 1

Photo by Rocky Friz on Unsplash

This is the story of my son’s birth. It is a long story so I will write it in multiple parts. This article is a bit different as my main target audience is my son. He’s just shy of five months old so he won’t be able to read it for a while, but I want to go ahead and share it with a wider audience in the meantime.

As you might be able to tell, the title is an homage to ‘How I Met Your Mother.’ I just hope it doesn’t take nine years to tell this story.

As you may know, you were born at West Virginia University Children’s Hospital on June 23, 2023. The only problem with being born there is that we, of course, live in Philadelphia.

In order to understand how this happened we are going to need to go back a couple of weeks.

It was June 9. Your mom and I were meeting up with your grandparents in Lancaster, PA as has become our yearly tradition. We enjoy going to Sight and Sound, visiting the local shops, and of course eating.

When we got to the hotel, nan and grandad where already there. Dad unloaded the car and then he and mommy went to your grandparent’s room. After greeting them, they told us there was something that we needed to talk about. Your great-grandfather (‘PawPaw B’) was not feeling well and had to go to the emergency room earlier that morning.

The doctors weren’t sure what was going on but were going to run tests and try to figure it out. Nan and granddad decided that they would go ahead and stay in Lancaster for the weekend. In spite of being worried about him all weekend, we continued to have a good time together.

The weekend would not be completely smooth sailing, however. PawPaw B’s wife, Lola, would also need to be rushed to the emergency room.

After running tests, the doctors determined that PawPaw B had a heart attack. With him being 92, there was quite a bit of concern, but he was stable.

Your mom and I wanted to go to West Virginia to visit him, but with the pregnancy and your mom’s job it was going to take a bit of planning in order to make it work.

The next weekend we were planning on going to Baltimore for a wedding of one of your mom’s old co-workers. We made the decision that since we were already traveling to Baltimore that we would leave from the wedding and go to West Virginia to see PawPaw B.

We never could imagine that once we left Philadelphia, we would not be back for over a month.

Stay tuned for Part 2…