Kira & Tree House

Today is a special day. Twenty six years ago on this day at roughly 2:26 in the afternoon my first child was born. I was just beginning my fourth year in college at the University of Alberta. Lisa was actually admitted the day before and the plan was to induce her the following morning. She was two weeks overdue and she was constantly having those "Bracksten Hicks" contractions (or whatever it is they call them) so they gave her some sleeping pills to help her sleep. She was in a room with three other people and one of her room mates was having triplets. Boy was she one huge woman, not fat, she looked like she was going to pop. I went home alone and it was pretty tough but I was very excited about the following day. In the middle of the night (around 2:00 AM) I got a call from Lisa, she was in labor. It was very difficult for her to stay alert since she had the sleeping pills but Kira was finally coming. The contractions went on for a very long time and Lisa was almost comatose. She was also talking deleriously. I remember they gave her some nitrous oxide to help take the edge off the pain because it was too late to give her a shot. Lisa grabbed the mask out of the nurses hands and shoved it on her face and took a long deep breath. The doctor calmly mentioned to the nurse that perhaps she should take that away from her. When Kira came it was such a wonderful feeling. I thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world. I still do. One minute I was dead tired and could hardly keep my eyes open and the next minute I was floating above the ground. On my way back to my car I had to walk through these underground walkways in the basement of the Royal Alexandria hospital and I just floated, I was so happy I thought I would burst. I spent every spare minute at the hospital and I showed everyone who came which one was my daughter. She was the one with the long sexy legs. She still is. She was long too, 22 1/4 inches. The picture is of Kira's second birthday. The picture of Lisa and Kira is just before Brandon was born in the spring of 1984. So today we celebrate my daughters birthday and she is 1,500 miles away. I guess I can just be grateful that we have telephones. I love you Kira.

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Before my shed burned and killed half of our tree I decided to help my boys build a tree house. I always wanted a tree house when I was a kid so it didn't take much to convince me to build one. Brandon and Ben had just received new tool boxes for Christmas so they were ready to proceed. I never liked the idea of getting them toy tools, I figured we might as well get them real tools so they could learn to use them. The tree wasn't a very large tree so the tree house was only about ten feet in the air. One day we were out there working on it and Brandon was up in the tree house and I was down on the ground. I don't remember exactly what Brandon was doing but he dropped his hammer and it landed on my head. Thank goodness that 1) the hammer was a relatively small hammer and 2) my head was only a few feet below the tree house. Even still, it hurt like the dickens and maybe worse was it scared me to death. I guess that was nothing to how Brandon felt. According to him it was one of those out of body experiences where everything goes in slow motion. He could see the hammer falling and he thought sure I was going to die. This picture shows several of the things I've talked about. To the right is the old white shed and in front of it is the infamous burning barrel. Left of the shed is the big tree that we built a tree house in. In the foreground is the garden that briefly had a skating rink on it.