Oogy_ The Dog Only a Family Could Love - Larry Levin [20]
Our visit to Golden Cradle lasted about an hour and a half, and at some point someone took a picture of me sitting on the couch with both boys on my lap. I look stunned. My eyes appear murky, unfocused, as though I had not slept in days. Perhaps I was beginning to crash from the adrenaline rush of the preceding several hours. I had never been jacked that high before, and I could not have had any idea what all of this would come to mean.
On the way over to Golden Cradle that morning, Jennifer and I, for the first time, had begun tossing around possible names. It was kind of like buying a house, involving lots of trial and error until we both could agree on something. We knew we both had to agree, because the results of the decision would be permanent. Very quickly we happily settled on Noah as the name of the firstborn. This was an easy choice because the boys had come two by two. Then, once we had agreed on Noah as the name for boy number one, we agreed that the second boy should also have a biblical first name. That second name proved more difficult to decide upon. Over the next several days, we tried out different names one after the other — Aaron, Adam, Ari, Benjamin, Caleb, David, Eli, Ezekiel, Gabriel, Gideon, Isaiah, Jonah — but we were unable to agree on a name for our second son. None of them seemed to fit with Levin. Until we agreed on a second name, the boys were “Baby One” and “Baby Two” by order of birth. Finally, we settled on Daniel for the younger boy. We could not recall a single Dan we had ever known who was not a stand-up guy. Dan’s middle name, Garrett (which for several of his early years he thought was “Carrot”), was for his maternal grandfather, Gershon. In Jewish tradition, one uses the initial of a deceased person and not the name. Noah was initially Noah Alexander, for no other reason than it sounded nice.
One of the ironies in all this is that the day we received the stork call from Golden Cradle, my dad had gone to the emergency room with severe stomach pains, which is why my parents had not been at home when we called to tell them that they were finally grandparents. These stomach pains proved to be the precursor of the cancer that killed him four months later. He did not get to enjoy our boys for long, but at least when he died he knew he was a grandfather. As the boys’ adoptions had not been finalized at the time of my father’s death, we changed Noah’s middle name to Harte, for Herbert, my dad’s first name.
In their infancy, we color-coded everything in order to distinguish what belonged to whom. All of Noah’s bottles had red dots appended to them. Dan’s bottles had blue dots. Noah had the red blanket and the red socks, Dan the blue. We never dressed them alike. We always made it a point to stress their individuality.
During the first six months, there might have been an hour out of every twenty-four, if we were lucky, in which both boys were asleep at the same time. As a result, Jennifer and I were constantly and completely exhausted. In fact, we were barely functioning. I would sleep from just after dinner until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., when Jennifer would awaken me and I would take over while she went to sleep until 7:00 or 8:00 a.m., when I would shower and dress and stumble to work. When I came home, I would fall asleep on the floor or wherever I happened to be when I could no longer stay awake, while whoever was in the house took no notice and walked around me as if I were simply another piece of furniture. The boys’ ability to sleep for extended periods gradually increased, but it was not until they were almost three years old that both of them slept through the night on a regular basis. Until then, whichever one of us could manage to get up and respond to whichever one of them was awake did so.
Jennifer’s parents came up from Maryland to help as often as they could, usually every other week. Before my dad died, he and my mom visited on three or four occasions,