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"Never apologize for the good stuff." —my personal motto
The Thursday Essay is bogged down in Very Serious Stuff in 2026, and I'm certain we both need a break. This is a good year so far — knock on wood, cross fingers, throw salt over your shoulder, etc. — and I hope you're having as much fun with it as I am.
With that in mind, let's switch gears, and let me get a little personal by sharing a Genuinely Totally True VodkaPundit Tale™ that I hope you'll enjoy.
When it comes to personal stories, my two favorite genres are the Perfectly Planned Engagement and the First-Born Delivery. Or Second- or Third-born, for that matter. An amusing delivery is always good, even for families up in Eight Is Quite Enough Already Thank You* territory.
(*Not the actual name of the show, but it would have been if it'd been a BBC production.)
I just so happen to have a delightful and impressive, if I say so myself, Perfectly Planned Engagement story, but I'll save that one for Melissa and my 25th anniversary, coming up fast in 2027. But our eldest turned 20 a few weeks ago, and Melissa and I can't stop sharing our First-Born Delivery tale — and if you'll indulge me for just a few more minutes, I'll share it with you.
No names or other details have been changed to protect the innocent, because who would I fool with the whole innocent act? But I won't bother you with any of the gory details, which started with nothing more than a bottle of wine and some well-laid plans. There, I've said too much already, haven't I?
We'd been trying to catch for months without luck, and "trying" isn't the best word for such a pleasant activity, but you know what I mean. When Melissa said she was going to see her ob-gyn about fertility medication, I told her, and I quote, "One pill is all it will take. You just need a kick-start."
This was in February. She came home with the prescription a few days later, and I reminded her that if she got pregnant on her next cycle, we'd have a Christmas baby, which does tend to complicate the holidays. Melissa did not care because when a girl is ready, she's ready. And no number of "Are you sure we want a Christmas baby?" gently phrased warnings will make her pause and wait another month.
Yep, one little kick-start was all she needed, and Dr. Cassidy announced her fit and healthy, with a baby due on Dec. 26. "See, not a Christmas baby!" is exactly what she didn't say. What Melissa did say was, "We'll have to take all the Christmas down before the birthday party."
Imagine cleaning the gutters the day after Christmas, except that they're made of glitter and tinsel, and all the pine needles need to be carefully put back in boxes.
We've been doing basically that for 20 years now, almost (but only almost) without complaint.
Before we really get into this, let me say that there are two kinds of parents-to-be. The first kind is a little more traditional and wants to keep the baby's sex a mystery until the big day. The second kind wants to know ASAP.
I'm the first kind, Melissa is the second kind — mostly because she's such a plan-a-holic that she needed the extra time to get the nursery just right for a boy or a girl. What this means is that I magically transmogrified into the second kind, because if you think I was going to let Melissa lord it over me with "I know something you don't know!" for weeks until she decorated the nursery, think again.
Anyway, I hoped for a daughter. I'm the only son of an only son, and my dad's father just had a brother who never had children. You have to go back to my Great Aunt Mary's birth in 1896 to find a woman in my family actually born a Green. I thought it would be nice to break that chain.
So there I was with Melissa at Dr. Cassidy's office during Month Four (Five?) for the ultrasound that might reveal the baby's sex and me nodding along that I really did want to know. "Make it a girl," I silently thought. And when Dr. Cassidy pointed to various parts of our baby on the ultrasound, and said, "Butt-cheek, butt-cheek, not a butt-cheek. It's a boy," I found myself practically shouting, "YES, IT'S A BOY!" while doing the most modest victory dance I could think of.
Turns out I did want a boy, after all. So did Melissa. Best thing, really — I would have doted on a girl too much, and she and Melissa would have been at loggerheads. A girl could have ended our marriage, and Melissa says that's probably true.
That part told, let's back up a bit.
The first six weeks went without incident. But we had a long-planned wedding to attend in Britain, and the landing at Heathrow in 90-plus-degree weather (really!) and a 90-minute wait at customs caused Melissa's morning sickness to kick in. We stayed in London for two weeks, and she saw a lot more of the hotel room (and the bathroom in particular) than she would have liked.
Then she discovered a food she could eat in London: The pizza at Luna Rossa in Notting Hill. She thought she might be onto something when she noticed the staff all spoke Italian as their first language, and if Melissa was eating for two, I got to drink for two, thanks to the short walk back to the hotel in Kensington.
The things our husbands do to help during a pregnancy, right? We're basically heroes.
And Another Thing: Luna Rossa is still there. Try it next time you're in the neighborhood, and tell them the crazy pregnant lady who kept eating entire pizzas sent you. They might just remember.
Actually, I did feel like a hero during Month Seven, which, as any mom can tell you, is when things start to get really, really, very seriously difficult for moms-to-be. Or as Melissa put it at the time — and frequently in the 20 years since — "Seven months pregnant is 40 months pregnant."
Can I get an "Amen!" from the female half of the choir?
Anyway, 40 months in is when the Krispy Kreme craving hit, probably because Melissa needed dessert after eating an entire spiral-cut honey-baked ham in three days. She was actually picking at it in the car on the way home from the honey-baked ham place. I stayed away from it after the first time getting my hand slapped.
Our eldest to this day refuses to eat ham. He must have gotten his fill umbilically.
Anyway, it was a lovely autumn Sunday afternoon when Melissa sent me out for Krispy Kreme, a pleasant 15-minute drive down to the Citadel Mall...
...and it was closed. Not like, "Closed early," but abandoned and boarded up.
This was 2005. There were no smartphones. I had this awful little Nokia flip phone that I almost never used and kept charged even less often. It may or may not have been charged, but it certainly wasn't in the car with me.
So I did what any husband invested in "discretion is the better part of valor" when it comes to showing up empty-handed when his 40-Months-Pregnant wife expects Krispy Kreme, and I drove more than an hour up to Denver to the only other location anywhere on the Front Range, and came home with a couple dozen.
Three dozen, actually — I wasn't getting my hand slapped over Krispy Kreme.
That was about it for major events during the pregnancy, which means it's time to get to the big day.
And Another Thing: About halfway into her pregnancy, Melissa suddenly forgot when to use "implied" and when to use "inferred," and always got it wrong. After the baby was born, both words snapped back into place in her brain. Pregnancy is weird.
Eventually. Maybe. Approximately forever days late.
There's something you need to understand about my lovely bride. When you tell her a particular thing will happen on a particular date, she expects it to happen. Insists, really.
So December 26 came and went, and my wife — now 118 Months Pregnant — still had a baby on the inside instead of on the outside where he belonged. December 27 came... and she'd had just enough of this not-having-a-baby-on-time s***.
We tried all the usual remedies, some more fun than others, before Melissa decided on a hot bath and a large dose of castor oil to be taken internally — it's one of those old wives' tales with more than a little data backing it up.
So I went to the corner store for castor oil while she drew a bath, and as it turns out, it's much easier to read about other desperate pregnant women drinking castor oil than to actually drink it yourself. My idea was to blend it into a glass of pulpy OJ to try and disguise the texture and taste as best I could, and let me tell you, castor oil DOES NOT MIX AT ALL into orange juice. It's the kind of concoction that you inadvertently hold away from your body as you carry it.
Melissa somehow gulped some of it down in the tub, and late as it was by then, I went to bed with her go-bag next to the door where it had been for days.
When I woke up at around 2 a.m. or so, it was to the sound of Melissa in the shower. She'd set up a folding chair in there and was sitting on it backwards, letting the water pound her sore back. Half asleep, I asked how she was doing.
"I keep having these stomach aches."
Waking up a lot faster than I usually do, I asked with as much diplomacy as I could muster after three hours of bad sleep and no coffee brewing, "Um... how far apart are your 'aches'?"
That's when she got it. She wasn't suffering aches or cramps. Those were contractions, and "They're just a few minutes apart." But, hey, first pregnancy.
"Get your clothes on, we're going."
We made the 10-minute drive down North Academy in the dead of night in under eight minutes, with Melissa's feet propped up on the dash — mostly for comfort, but partly in case the baby didn't wait for the hospital — and me blowing through any red lights. I mean, I slowed down enough to make sure there were no cars coming, but only enough.
I had to half-carry her into the maternity entrance of Penrose Hospital. Which, true story, they closed not too long after our son was born. I tell him it's because they knew they'd never top that.
Melissa made a face and a sound that got those nurses moving. I swear to you, they moved so quickly that the wheelchair seemed to materialize under her, and if there had been any traffic lights down the hospital hallway, we would have blown right through them.
Had we been just two or three minutes later, the fill-in ob-gyn told us — Cassidy was out for some reason — Melissa would have been too far along for an epidural. In which case, I think she would have just held the baby in until they agreed to give her literally all the drugs. Demerol? Heroin? Whatever.
Whatever it is they put in those epidurals took hold quickly, and everything went smoothly once Melissa could relax a little. Smoothly and quickly. There was pushing and pain and squeezing my finger and all the rest, but once our late baby decided it was time to enter the world, he wasn't going to take his time. A nurse had to haul the doc out of the shower he thought he had time to take, and ended up delivering the baby with his hair still wet.
We'd been at the hospital for less than 90 minutes when Preston was born, almost exactly 20 years ago.
Just don't ask Melissa how many months that works out to.
Last Thursday: So How's That Russo-Ukraine Oil War Going?
