two months and two days old...

Our teeny bean is now officially a newborn. His due date was the 17th, so his adjusted age (3 days!) is finally no longer a negative number. Even though he chooses not to sleep at convenient times (like at night, for instance), we still like him a lot. Here are some reasons you'd probably like him a lot too...

• his bright, hell-I'm-just-happy-to-be-here, post-nap eyes
• the new additions of pudge and dimples on his hands
• the way his tiny hands flutter around ours like little birds when we hold him close to feed him
• his dead-on impersonation of baby pig sounds
• how he often reaches out to stroke my belly with his fingertips while we're sleeping, as if to make sure I'm still there next to him
• his new sigh... "tchoo!" it reminds me of a tiny cartoon mouse.
• the drunken old monk smile. perhaps not yet intentional, but still charming.

I wish this picture showed his long eyelashes. They'd melt your heart.

Thinking about getting hungry... there's a song about this. Ask Leif.

Baby bums and feet are a great argument for why it's a good idea to have children.

This is Barnslut, the IKEA ostridge who poses with Soren each Sunday so we can see how much bigger he's gotten (Soren, that is. Not Barnslut). His Christian name (well, true IKEA name, at least) is Barnslick Struts, but that's much harder to say 8 times fast, don't you think?

Anyway, he's Soren's favorite.

Sleepy bean.

Admittedly, they don't do many video-worthy things at this age. But, this is Soren waking up from his nap.

Our Sea of Reeds

Two miracles in one day:

1. Our favorite Ethiopian restaurant actually reopened, and
2. Soren did pretty well in his first dining out experience.

We are both losing a little bit of steam. Lisa is really missing actual adult conversation and being outside of the house, and i am missing feeling actually well rested and creative. I think that we both feel a little less than interesting-- something happens with the repetition of changing a diaper and heating up breast milk.

Our biggest challenge so far is probably doing all this without any significant help. Our families are pretty far away, and we can't seem to work out the timing with friends and coworkers who volunteer to help. So we end up passing the baby to each other kind of a lot. I'm definitely putting faith in an idea other than a nuclear family (oh, sorry Mr. President-- i mean "nucular"). Right now, the idea of having a live-in aunt, or a cousin Charles, or being on a hippie commune definitely has its draws. I could even agree with our almost-first female president, and say that I could see how this would take a whole village.

What i keep reading, though, is that no matter how difficult things seem, they are always do-able. Everything in life seems to be too difficult at one point or another, and if you stop and think it out and plan it out, it just won' t happen. But my hero Roots Manuva would say, Chin high, head up we step right to it/ The choice is there ain't no choice but to pursue it. Basically, you walk straight into the fire, and then marvel as it all seems to work out. My brother Ben commented on the story of Moses parting the Red Sea so that the children of Israel could walk through. According to him, many scholars translate "Red Sea" to be "Sea of Reeds." Maybe we can't part the crashing seas of parenthood, but i bet we can part some reeds.

Our baby vampire. Only awakens from 10pm to 2am every day.

I have to say that drinking wine never made so much sense. You go, Jesus.

********************

I don't know if people know this, but we have a career of electrical engineer/computer programmer picked out for our son, so that he doesn't suffer a similar fate of a working artist/musician. However, he's already picked a career as a philosophy professor, as I'm sure you can see in these photos.

Getting Better All the Time

When we stop and think about things, we have this new creature who sleeps, eats, and poops (probably in that order; the last two could be switched, depending on the day).

Things are, all in all, relatively simple right now. I can't help but feel duped sometimes when i see parents with three teenagers who have clothes that don't fit, use sentences that don't make sense, and have hair that obscures their breathing canals. This is going to happen to our sweet little eight pound baby?!

Anyway, here are more pictures. Soren is feeling much better today, and i got him all to myself for a good chunk of the day. He's a great napper.

Screamers

Good news and bad news.

Good news: Soren is home. No more wires.

Bad news: He has an awful case of reflux, so whenever he eats, he makes this horrible grimace, tries to throw it up, and looks awful. Then he tries to eat more because he's still hungry. When he used to get hungry, he'd cry a little and scrunch his face up. Now, he goes from zero to scream in one second. No warm up. He's just out of the bull pen full out screaming, in a pitch we've never heard. If Lisa hadn't been there the whole time, I'd suspect that the nurses did something awful to him.

He is on antibiotics and will be having more tests done next week. He's also going to the pediatrician today.

This all makes me much more sympathetic to those parents (like Joel and Jenni, and Daniel and Christi) who have unusual pregnancies or kids with different needs. Johanna and Rosella were born at 10 days or something ridiculously early. Daniel's second son has a form of autism and about 30 food allergies (I think).

I'm now gearing up to start making lists of everything that Soren will be allergic to. I'm imagining raising Bill Murray in What About Bob?

But, poor guy. The most infuriating and most helpless feeling is watching this little guy in total pain, without any means of communicating how to help him. Lisa and i were so frustrated-- we nearly started hitting each other with chairs, WWF style.

We were looking forward to a nice low key summer, but this is a whole new thing. We're pretty much under house arrest, in order to keep our boy safe until he gets a bit older and stronger. So we'll be watching LOTS of Netflix, cooking a bunch, trying white wines, and wondering what it feels like to sleep more than 2 hours at a time.

Thanks for all the posts and phone calls. They go a long way- - we can totally use the support.

The E.R.

We took our boy into the ER last night.

He's had a slight fever which has grown slighter, but last night he was dropping off, looking lethargic, barely eating. We took him in at the insistence of our pediatrician, who said that fevers are the only real indicators in newborns that something is wrong.

He had a fever of 100.6, which dropped to 100. The hospital staff saw enough cause to want to give him a spinal tap to test for bacteria, which could allude to menangitis. That in an adult is not too big of a deal, but to an infant, it could be really caustic.

Our poor little guy had more blood drawn. Watching nurses look for veins in a baby who is technically minus two weeks old is really heartbreaking, no matter how gentle or empathetic the medical staff is. And he cried like we have never heard they put a catheter into him. Nothing makes you wince like a newborn squealing in pain. He was on this hospital bed that was giant. Just this baby, lying helpless and tiny.

So, after being home for a week, he will be back in the hospital for a bit. We don't know exactly how long. But when they hooked him back up to the heart, pulse, and blood oxygen monitors again... it really broke our hearts. It was a deja vu that we really didn't care to revisit.

The irony is that Soren is much more graceful, empathetic, patient, and forgiving than either of us are towards this whole situation. He has a heart of gold.

Home

Last Monday, we got to pick our little bear up from the hospital. It felt like a pretty monumental occasion just seeing him without a feeding tube, heart monitor, and blood oxygen monitor, let alone getting to take him out of his little plastic bed! I wanted to take one more picture of the NICU so that people could see where we've spent hours each day of the last five weeks of our lives. We got to take a look around and notice all the tiny babies, hooked up to tubes, contained in units, monitored and still. Our baby suddenly looked like a giant, at 7 and a half pounds!

We were thinking of all the things Soren would be seeing for the first time (although, really, he probably just sees blurs and things that make him tired). He had many fans on his way home, and he was quite the wonderful trooper. He looked T-I-N-Y in his baby carrier (which has a special insert to fit him in-- it makes him look like Batman encased in this giant suit), and at 7 lbs 4 oz, he was still smaller than most newborns. We have to remind ourselves that he is still minus 3 weeks old. That's such a weird idea!


(just look how little he is compared to my shoe!

He's about the size of a football!)








Lisa rode in the back with him and i was the safest driver in the world.
We just felt giddy driving with our new person in the back, over the same boring main road, past the same over-trafficked McDonalds. There was something significant about taking him up the stairs for the first time, and of course, we had to take a picture of him in his new home!

Lisa is proudly displaying her new actual, for-real, fresh newborn baby, still minus two weeks.

We've since been adjusting to having an addition person living in our home... but that's another post altogether.