“Build me a tent when you get home,” Becki said.

I decided this was something female and cryptic – something I should attempt to decode with great care and introspection. When I applied my woman decoder ring to the task, the resulting message was, “Dude, your wife is totally pregnant. Building a tent is, like, the weirdest, most random thing ever. Good luck, buddy.” But I did not know Becki was pregnant. I only suspected. Really, I only half-imagined it to be true. Surely, she was not really pregnant.

Keeping this in mind, when I got home I fashioned a makeshift tent in our living room, using two dining table chairs as supports for the blanket I draped over the top as a canopy.

“Build me a tent,” she had said. “Make it so I can watch TV from the tent,” she had added.

She was really roughing it now. I was tempted to build the tent in the yard, but I suspected my neighbors would phone the funny farm.

“Yes, our neighbor has set up a makeshift tent in his yard with chairs and blankets,” my neighbor Malcolm would say. “Please dispatch your most qualified personnel to the situation. I fear Chad will soon be wearing pots and pans on his feet and head, and sacrificing his cats to Puss ‘n’ Das Boots, the German cat god.” I know I can count on Malcolm and his lovely wife Joyce to phone the people with the straitjackets the day I forget to take my OCD meds. Or on the day my wife asks me to make her a tent.

Becki had never asked me to build her a tent before. Which is why I knew I had to build it. I felt like God Himself was asking me to build an altar of stone in my living room.

“Build it three cubits high and two hectares wide,” I imagined Him saying with a decidedly Old Testament timbre. “Build the altar out of granite and let not thine cats rest upon it for their ritual tongue washings.”

You get the picture.

So I built the tent.

“After you build the tent,” Becki had said, “can you gather together every blanket in the house for me? I’m cold.”

Keep in mind that Becki was broadcasting these requests from work over gmail chat. How in the world would she know she would be cold at home, hours after this transmission?

I gathered together every pillow and blanket I could find in the house and built her a suitable nest. It was a tent fit for a king, or a very pregnant queen.

When she got home, I made dinner for her and she hid under all those blankets and watched endless television in the comfort of her tent. She did not budge that night. She was snug as a bug in a tent on a rug.

The next night, she returned to her tent as if by instinct.

The next day, we found out we were pregnant.

I was not exactly surprised, but both of us were overjoyed. We celebrated with our friends Brandon and Joanna by eating dinner at the least authentic Mexican restaurant in town – On the Border. We had been given a Christmas gift certificate to the place, and we were hardly complaining. In fact, we were inhaling food, lining up chips and salsa on mirrors and snorting them like cokeheads.

I drank a margarita to celebrate. Becki celebrated by staring at my margarita and saying things like, “I can’t have one of those.”

Oh, how I have wanted to share these stories.

I have known about my wife’s pregnant state since Friday, January 28th. On the inside, I have been a child jumping up and down. On the outside, I have been an adult, rocking back and forth with an abundance of inner excitement.

But I suspected she was pregnant because of the day she asked me to build her a tent. Women who are not pregnant do not ask their husbands to build tents for them in the living room. Unless they happen to be insane.

There is another life inside my wife, and I saw it do flips on the screen during the sonogram yesterday at Lawrence Memorial Hospital. There is a fragile life inside of Becki, and it is four centimeters long right now. It is a living pickle with arms and legs. The doctor said it was crossing its legs yesterday – a trait that comes from me. She also said the baby had one arm over its face, as if it were resting in dramatic repose. ”Please don’t look at me, for I am shy!” the baby seemed to be saying. This is a Becki trait. Becki hides behind things all the time.

In fact, we only had to get a sonogram yesterday because, the day before, the doctor had listened for a heartbeat and failed to find one – apparently not uncommon for babies at 11 weeks. The baby was hiding from the microphone just like Becki would. Please don’t listen for my heartbeat! I am shy!

Only a matter of weeks before we found out we were pregnant, we kicked the cats out of our bedroom at night, as Becki’s allergies were causing her considerable trouble. For the first time, I was able to buy her flowers without fear of the cats eating them and promptly puking or expiring. So I bought her purple irises and sat them on the dresser in our bedroom. I brought new life into our bedroom the week we found out we were pregnant, not knowing there was new life growing in my wife’s womb.

We also watched a Bugs Bunny cartoon in which Bugs was delivered by a stork to family of gorillas. We did not see a bunny in the sonogram yesterday though. I saw only the aforementioned pickle. Becki saw a Peanuts cartoon character. Charlie Brown’s baby. I do have a big head, I guess.

I built the tent for my wife, and my Charlie Brown pickle baby, and our five cats visited her in that tent. It was like the Magi visiting Mary and Joseph in a nativity scene, but with less myrrh and more fur, and with a propensity for puking in all the wrong places at all the wrong times. It was a living nativity scene, and it was beautiful.