Late January 1998

I was looking at my datebook from 1998 again, and wow, the memories and the things you forget about...

Jan. 21st of that year, my grandmother's house was torn down by the town -- razed to the ground. We knew it was coming -- they had moved into an apartment years before and decided it wasn't worth paying the taxes on the property anymore -- but we still used to go over there & sit on the screened in side porch shaded by Virginia creeper. It was hard to believe that the place where both my grandmother & mother grew up and where I spent all my childhood summers & most of my Christmases was gone. I still have many dreams where I am back in that house.

Jan. 22nd, I went to my family dr for my annual Pap. I had recently been to the dentist & taken amoxicillin, because I have a very mild heart murmur. Don't know if that did the trick, but a few days later they called to tell me I had a yeast infection! Off to the drugstore to get Monistat. This was the cycle before I got pregnant, & while I vividly remember the period I had a few weeks earlier, I had totally forgotten about this little detail. Was THAT, in some strange way, the factor that made the difference in my getting pregnant a few weeks later??

The following week (the first week of February), I got my first-ever cold sore!! Dh has had them for years (so has my mother), so I suppose it was inevitable I would eventually get one myself. It was a doozy -- absolutely humungous -- a sure sign that my hormones were running amok. (And of course, a coworker I had spoken with many times on the telephone from London, England, happened to be visiting our Toronto offices & decided to stop by & say hello. I can never think of her or hear her name without thinking of that huge cold sore on my lip.) Was THAT what made the difference??

Friday, Jan. 23rd, was a bombshell of a day. Canada has five large banks -- I work for one of them in the corporate communications area (I would prefer not to say which one). That day, two of them, the Royal Bank and Bank of Montreal, announced plans to merge. A few months later, two of the other banks, CIBC and Toronto-Dominion, not wanting to be left behind while their already-gigantic rivals got even bigger, announced that they too wanted to merge. Both proposals required the consent of the Minister of Finance to proceed -- and this was ultimately NOT granted later that year. Needless to say, however, it created a huge flurry of activity for the PR & other communications people working at those banks -- not to mention a ton of STRESS, which coloured almost the entire year of 1998 for me -- not just the additional workload, but wondering whether I was going to have a job at the end of it all. I can remember the day the CIBC-TD proposal was announced, sitting at my desk, pregnant, typing furiously & feeling stressed, & looking at my pregnant belly thinking, "Oh baby, this is NOT good for you." :( Was this what made the difference in the eventual outcome of my pregnancy? I'm sure it certainly didn't help...

Saturday night, Jan. 23, we went for dinner at dh's cousin's house to mark his uncle's 75th birthday. This past week (talking present-day now), we were at a first birthday party, and this uncle's daughter mentioned, "My dad would have been 85 years old this week." He passed away just shy of his 80th birthday. He specifically requested no party, just dinner with his own immediate family, and dh & his brother (his sister's sons -- they were the oldest brother & sister among their siblings). There were five small children among us, and they opened all the presents and kept us all entertained.

The following week, our next-door neighbours moved out, and a few days later, the new neighbours moved in -- a (then) childless couple. We weren't sorry to see the old neighbours go. They had four (!) children in a small three-bedroom house. They were the type of neighbours who were always asking when we were going to have kids & pointing to their own four & saying, "Wouldn't you just love to have one of these?" Ugh.

Friday the 30th, BIL got the snip (I can't believe I actually marked that in my datebook!). They were done with their family after two -- & after almost 13 years of marriage & 2.5 years of ttc, we hadn't even managed one yet.

Sunday, Feb. 1st, we went to see "Good Will Hunting" at the movies. Our lives were about to change forever, although we didn't yet know it.