Just came back from checking out the girl at the pediatrician. Turns out that she's 9 lb. 4 oz., having gained nearly two pounds in about three weeks.
(It took our much earlier son at least three months, if not more, to reach the 9 lb. mark.)
Big, healthy girl.
Thursday, May 26, 2005
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
"Sister Baby"
Bright today, the sun high early and pushing itself everywhere. My son has also been getting up early these past few days, even before 6 a.m. Usually this gives us more time outside to adore the Scoops and Dump Trucks that are clearing the ground a few blocks away for another luxury high-rise. The precious parks that skirt our building here in lower Manhattan are already quite crowded these days, even during the week, so we mutter curses under our breath when we walk by these spots that could each bring another thousand residents or so to the neighborhood. And then we wonder whether we could afford a place there.
It's been a week since "the girls" came home, and at first my son didn't take things at all well. This is understandable, as one might well imagine finding another dedicated target of love in the house distressing for someone used to being the Center Of All Things. He's never been an aggressive child, so his frustration at her arrival and her staying didn't bubble up in headbutts or hits. Instead, everything conspired against him inside the house. Go outside and the sun and sandbox make him forget about the change; take him home and he crumples on the floor at the least resistance to his plans. And he's been sick with some sort of respiratory thing that clogs him up, which itself made for difficult sleeping and its nasty friend General Crankiness. The combination of factors turned out to be quite a cocktail, and he proved again and again why non-violent protest can be an effective means of getting what you want. For about a week he simply refused to eat any meals inside the house. Period. Put him in his chair at the table and he explodes into sobs and slurry strings of "Out please!" Pack the same food away to nibble at out on a walk and it's gone in no time.
Where, we wondered, did our lovely son go?
But then, like a fever breaking, he came back to us after about a week, reminding us why we appreciate him as we do. After a particularly bad dinner and an epic Daddy v. Son Bath and Diaper struggle, he came out of his bedroom a new--or rather old and familiar--boy. He asked for his dinner and ate every last bit of quesadilla--cheering "TEE-ah" (for tortilla) in fact, between bites. And before laying him down to sleep in his Big Bed we said goodnight to various things in his room, as we always do. At the very end I took him into our bedroom and stood above our daughter's bassinet. "Goodnight, sister baby," I said. "Goodnight, Sister Baby," he echoed softly through a smile.
From that point on, he's been fascinated by her. If you want him up on your lap, just hold the girl, and he'll make his way over. He gives her sweet pats, points out Baby's Hair, Baby's Mouth, Baby's Ear, etc. He's pure energy next to her, moving closer then away, pointing then holding back his own hands. Just over a week old, she's basically still a tight bundle of need. The difference between them now is staggering, both in size of body and self. We can't wait to see her at his age now, and to see them both come to know each other as we know they will.
So things are working out.
Oh yeah, and we bought him a little doll stroller as a gift from his sister, and he can't get enough of it. Whatever works. Right?
More later perhaps.
It's been a week since "the girls" came home, and at first my son didn't take things at all well. This is understandable, as one might well imagine finding another dedicated target of love in the house distressing for someone used to being the Center Of All Things. He's never been an aggressive child, so his frustration at her arrival and her staying didn't bubble up in headbutts or hits. Instead, everything conspired against him inside the house. Go outside and the sun and sandbox make him forget about the change; take him home and he crumples on the floor at the least resistance to his plans. And he's been sick with some sort of respiratory thing that clogs him up, which itself made for difficult sleeping and its nasty friend General Crankiness. The combination of factors turned out to be quite a cocktail, and he proved again and again why non-violent protest can be an effective means of getting what you want. For about a week he simply refused to eat any meals inside the house. Period. Put him in his chair at the table and he explodes into sobs and slurry strings of "Out please!" Pack the same food away to nibble at out on a walk and it's gone in no time.
Where, we wondered, did our lovely son go?
But then, like a fever breaking, he came back to us after about a week, reminding us why we appreciate him as we do. After a particularly bad dinner and an epic Daddy v. Son Bath and Diaper struggle, he came out of his bedroom a new--or rather old and familiar--boy. He asked for his dinner and ate every last bit of quesadilla--cheering "TEE-ah" (for tortilla) in fact, between bites. And before laying him down to sleep in his Big Bed we said goodnight to various things in his room, as we always do. At the very end I took him into our bedroom and stood above our daughter's bassinet. "Goodnight, sister baby," I said. "Goodnight, Sister Baby," he echoed softly through a smile.
From that point on, he's been fascinated by her. If you want him up on your lap, just hold the girl, and he'll make his way over. He gives her sweet pats, points out Baby's Hair, Baby's Mouth, Baby's Ear, etc. He's pure energy next to her, moving closer then away, pointing then holding back his own hands. Just over a week old, she's basically still a tight bundle of need. The difference between them now is staggering, both in size of body and self. We can't wait to see her at his age now, and to see them both come to know each other as we know they will.
So things are working out.
Oh yeah, and we bought him a little doll stroller as a gift from his sister, and he can't get enough of it. Whatever works. Right?
More later perhaps.
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
What We Can Remember Now That We've Started to Forget
"The Girls" are now home, as of Sunday morning, for good--in every sense of that last word.
The past few days are already fraying around the edges in my memory, so I want to get it out and down before nature completes the job. So bear with me.
Last Thursday night around 7 p.m., after we'd finished dinner (I can't quite remember even now what we ate--see?), my wife's water broke. She had been feeling, well, different for the past few days, like a small hand had reached through her stomach and was gripping her lower back. Which means that we weren't that surprised, really. And since her water broke with our son, is was clear what was happening. This time I wasn't on a plane from Memphis, and we were much more calm overall. We even had a bag packed, like in the movies. We called our babysitter, and she came right away, practically shoving us out the door to the hospital.
It was a beautiful night, the huddle of buildings in lower Manhattan "unutterly crisp" in the twilight, as cummings put it somewhere. We wound our way around the east part of the island on the FDR drive up to the hospital, passing under the bridges dressed in pearls for the night. Traffic was light, so we weren't worried that we'd someday be telling the story of our daughter arriving in the back of a taxi. (And besides, what to tip for that?) We walked in the front doors of the hospital, and when the guard stopped us to ask for ID, my wife pointed at her belly, and he stepped aside. It was late enough that the usually busy halls were rather empty, almost as many mops as people going up and down the marble.
Up on the 7th floor, we checked my wife in and were pointed to Triage Room 4, which was a profound change from the last visits--the first of many. We knew from last time that once the water breaks, we would be meeting the girl rather soon. And since my wife was nearly 36 weeks along, the doctors wouldn't work to keep the little girl in and may in fact induce if nature proved too lazy. The nurse strapped on the familiar monitors and the concise room filled up with the blips tracking her quick heart. We waited. Eventually, a resident came in to check the position of the baby, among other things, and things looked good. A newer nurse, all Texas cheerleader like, arrived to find a vein for my wife's IV. After taping down her line, she wheeled around to me to ask "Would you like one too? I don't want you to feel left out." Funny.
We were moved over to Birthing Room 3, one of the smaller ones but with a nice view. The nurse there, the one who would be with us until the end, could have been, well, more nurse-like. (Throughout the night she questioned my wife's tolerance for pain. Knowing my wife as I do, her questions were certainly unfounded and not at all entertaining to either of us.) Rumors soon began about the doctor who would deliver our daughter, mainly concerning how to say his name. He's French Canadian, and the various accents of those who passed through to check blood pressure, temperature, etc., all finished off his name with their own peculiar flourishes. He himself came in later with his own pleasant lilt in his speech, which helped him seem just a little foreign in the right way and immensely competent. We made introductions and forced jokes.
Her labor progressed all by itself, and no drugs were prescribed beyond penicillin and just plain water. Everyone went away; and we were left to wait. A couple of hours slunk by, and my wife's contractions became more assertive, pulling her face tight every 4-6 minutes. We're skipping lots of downtime here, but eventually my wife decided not to be a hero and asked for an epidural. The two anesthesiologists arrived and ushered me out of the room. Turns out that men are required to leave during this process because in general they don't tend to react all that well to the insertion of a rather large needle into their wifes' spine--reactions that (we were told) usually constitute threats to the doctors or fainting dead away. I probably wouldn't have done either, but I was grateful for the excuse in any event.
I came back from the hallway outside and an overpriced bag of pretzels to find the epidural guys finishing up. In perhaps the most bizarre stretch of the evening, we talked for several minutes with them about one of their passions, namely a website called www.privateislandsonline.com (billed as "The world's largest online directory of private islands for sale or rent"). He proved scarily knowledgeable about where one could buy entire islands, from $20,000 plops of sand in the Philippines to multimillion dollar places off more popular resorts. So there's that. Satisfied with my wife's numbness, they left us alone to rest as much as we could.
I'll skip ahead again, bypassing the fitful attempts at sleep and the nervous chatter about muscling two kids. And so the resident came in around 4 a.m. to check my wife's progress, and she was nearly ready. "You're an excellent patient," was her diagnosis. She called the doctor, and he came in looking a little rumpled. He had been napping when the resident called him, but he sharpened up quickly (and the confession was cute, we thought). The baby was indeed on her way.
I expected more doctors and nurses to flood in, but only one, a staff pediatrician, started to shuffle things around in the adjoining room housing the newborn warmer and the isolette. With our son, I can remember at least five to six folks standing ready. No Code Blue expected this time around apparently. In what seemed like a Why Don't We Try This? kind of approach, my wife was encouraged to push as her contractions came on. So she did that, me counting to ten like in the movies and on TV, reminding her to breathe. (ASIDE: Lamaze is basically a rip-off; any kind of distraction will do just as well.) For the weak-stomached, I'll pass over the particulars to the most striking difference to our first birth experience. She came out rather easily all in all, wet and slick and flailing. The doctor lifted her in a towel and settled her in my wife's arms for just a moment. No crowds, no tubes. The pediatrician took her to clean her up, and a strong, sharp cry burst out of her. We didn't hear our son cry for about two months. They weighed her. We had placed our bets--I said 5 lb. something, my wife, feeling reckless, guessed in the 6-lb. range. She came in at 7 lb. 1.5 oz., a true heavyweight for a 35-weeker. And her APGAR scores were 9 and 9. (We were told that the pediatricians at the hospital "just don't give tens.")
I got to hold her in delivery for a bit before they took her to the nursery. She felt like nearly nothing, a piece of light that would float up if I let go. I didn't. We looked out the window together for the first time at the great city into which she was just pushed. I could only imagine her thoughts, her body beginning to bloom just like the city itself on any Friday morning. She met the sight with a cry, and it was all I could do not to join her.
Our girl had arrived.
Good night.
The past few days are already fraying around the edges in my memory, so I want to get it out and down before nature completes the job. So bear with me.
Last Thursday night around 7 p.m., after we'd finished dinner (I can't quite remember even now what we ate--see?), my wife's water broke. She had been feeling, well, different for the past few days, like a small hand had reached through her stomach and was gripping her lower back. Which means that we weren't that surprised, really. And since her water broke with our son, is was clear what was happening. This time I wasn't on a plane from Memphis, and we were much more calm overall. We even had a bag packed, like in the movies. We called our babysitter, and she came right away, practically shoving us out the door to the hospital.
It was a beautiful night, the huddle of buildings in lower Manhattan "unutterly crisp" in the twilight, as cummings put it somewhere. We wound our way around the east part of the island on the FDR drive up to the hospital, passing under the bridges dressed in pearls for the night. Traffic was light, so we weren't worried that we'd someday be telling the story of our daughter arriving in the back of a taxi. (And besides, what to tip for that?) We walked in the front doors of the hospital, and when the guard stopped us to ask for ID, my wife pointed at her belly, and he stepped aside. It was late enough that the usually busy halls were rather empty, almost as many mops as people going up and down the marble.
Up on the 7th floor, we checked my wife in and were pointed to Triage Room 4, which was a profound change from the last visits--the first of many. We knew from last time that once the water breaks, we would be meeting the girl rather soon. And since my wife was nearly 36 weeks along, the doctors wouldn't work to keep the little girl in and may in fact induce if nature proved too lazy. The nurse strapped on the familiar monitors and the concise room filled up with the blips tracking her quick heart. We waited. Eventually, a resident came in to check the position of the baby, among other things, and things looked good. A newer nurse, all Texas cheerleader like, arrived to find a vein for my wife's IV. After taping down her line, she wheeled around to me to ask "Would you like one too? I don't want you to feel left out." Funny.
We were moved over to Birthing Room 3, one of the smaller ones but with a nice view. The nurse there, the one who would be with us until the end, could have been, well, more nurse-like. (Throughout the night she questioned my wife's tolerance for pain. Knowing my wife as I do, her questions were certainly unfounded and not at all entertaining to either of us.) Rumors soon began about the doctor who would deliver our daughter, mainly concerning how to say his name. He's French Canadian, and the various accents of those who passed through to check blood pressure, temperature, etc., all finished off his name with their own peculiar flourishes. He himself came in later with his own pleasant lilt in his speech, which helped him seem just a little foreign in the right way and immensely competent. We made introductions and forced jokes.
Her labor progressed all by itself, and no drugs were prescribed beyond penicillin and just plain water. Everyone went away; and we were left to wait. A couple of hours slunk by, and my wife's contractions became more assertive, pulling her face tight every 4-6 minutes. We're skipping lots of downtime here, but eventually my wife decided not to be a hero and asked for an epidural. The two anesthesiologists arrived and ushered me out of the room. Turns out that men are required to leave during this process because in general they don't tend to react all that well to the insertion of a rather large needle into their wifes' spine--reactions that (we were told) usually constitute threats to the doctors or fainting dead away. I probably wouldn't have done either, but I was grateful for the excuse in any event.
I came back from the hallway outside and an overpriced bag of pretzels to find the epidural guys finishing up. In perhaps the most bizarre stretch of the evening, we talked for several minutes with them about one of their passions, namely a website called www.privateislandsonline.com (billed as "The world's largest online directory of private islands for sale or rent"). He proved scarily knowledgeable about where one could buy entire islands, from $20,000 plops of sand in the Philippines to multimillion dollar places off more popular resorts. So there's that. Satisfied with my wife's numbness, they left us alone to rest as much as we could.
I'll skip ahead again, bypassing the fitful attempts at sleep and the nervous chatter about muscling two kids. And so the resident came in around 4 a.m. to check my wife's progress, and she was nearly ready. "You're an excellent patient," was her diagnosis. She called the doctor, and he came in looking a little rumpled. He had been napping when the resident called him, but he sharpened up quickly (and the confession was cute, we thought). The baby was indeed on her way.
I expected more doctors and nurses to flood in, but only one, a staff pediatrician, started to shuffle things around in the adjoining room housing the newborn warmer and the isolette. With our son, I can remember at least five to six folks standing ready. No Code Blue expected this time around apparently. In what seemed like a Why Don't We Try This? kind of approach, my wife was encouraged to push as her contractions came on. So she did that, me counting to ten like in the movies and on TV, reminding her to breathe. (ASIDE: Lamaze is basically a rip-off; any kind of distraction will do just as well.) For the weak-stomached, I'll pass over the particulars to the most striking difference to our first birth experience. She came out rather easily all in all, wet and slick and flailing. The doctor lifted her in a towel and settled her in my wife's arms for just a moment. No crowds, no tubes. The pediatrician took her to clean her up, and a strong, sharp cry burst out of her. We didn't hear our son cry for about two months. They weighed her. We had placed our bets--I said 5 lb. something, my wife, feeling reckless, guessed in the 6-lb. range. She came in at 7 lb. 1.5 oz., a true heavyweight for a 35-weeker. And her APGAR scores were 9 and 9. (We were told that the pediatricians at the hospital "just don't give tens.")
I got to hold her in delivery for a bit before they took her to the nursery. She felt like nearly nothing, a piece of light that would float up if I let go. I didn't. We looked out the window together for the first time at the great city into which she was just pushed. I could only imagine her thoughts, her body beginning to bloom just like the city itself on any Friday morning. She met the sight with a cry, and it was all I could do not to join her.
Our girl had arrived.
Good night.
Friday, April 22, 2005
Nearly 36 weeks
April 22, 2005, 4:37 a.m. Beautiful and big.
(And so that's how it's all supposed to go.)
(And so that's how it's all supposed to go.)
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Bed Arrest: End of Week 2
Today is exactly two weeks since my wife went into the hospital and then onto bed arrest, and the holding pattern continues. Still largely within the bed's clutches, she keeps herself busy to keep the time from getting the best of her. The girl seems to be behaving herself, thankfully, reminding us all that she's close through frequent kicks and bouts of hiccups. Soon, we believe, we'll get to see each other face to face, perhaps even without the plastic of the isolette between us.
Grandma is gone, and my son has noticed. Just last night he looked at the bed where she slept, looked back to us and said, "Grandma's green blanket." And still dripping from the bath, he discovered that his voice booms back to him when he talks into his stacking cups--perfect, then, for uttering "Grandma go." Indeed she has; she will be missed by us all.
The isolette--or as preemie-parent friends of ours call it, The Easy Bake Oven--is where I first had my idea of parenthood turned inside out--or rather outside in. Looking at our 3.5 lb. son in only a diaper and shortened goggles, lying under the bili lights (battling a tenacious case of jaundice), I couldn't help but think about a troubled future. And the nurse practitioner didn't help either. When we were finally allowed to visit our son in the NICU, she debriefed us on his situation. We were told that he didn't breathe on his own initially and that they had intubated him. (He was still on oxygen at this point.) We knew that preemies often experience bleeding in the brain, and that, starving for oxygen early, he could suffer significant long-term mental deficiencies. Little was known when we first huddled around him; he wasn't yet a full day old, and they hadn't conducted an ultrasound or MRI on his brain. The nurse practitioner tried to comfort us, I suppose--I'm trying to say something nice here--by pointing out, "Not all kids go to college."
What to do with that?
And but back to outside in: From talking with parents of non-preemies, they say that their children came out all fat with possibilities. Accordingly, the worries were all external--sticks and stones, missed deadlines for Ivy League schools, rabid dogs, balls chased out onto freeways, the usual stuff. A parent's job, then, is to clear as big a swath through the sharp-edged world as possible so that his child can be free to turn himself into whatever he chooses. For parents of preemies, it's all the standard worries plus something more insidious. We've been told, time and time again, that our son might have been changed in some way, perhaps large, perhaps small, by his coming early. As a full-termer, he'd have his pick of colleges (no doubt), but since 8 weeks early he might very well find lower grades a struggle. And college is a long way off, of course, which means that everything becomes a sign of everything and nothing. A delay in walking suddenly means that he has no future as an athlete, a little lag in sorting shapes correctly and we find ourselves fighting back fears that ideas will always be too big for his small hands. In other words, we've been reminded that lurking inside him somewhere, too remote for anyone to spot or to reach, could be premature limits. The children's books then turn into cruel jokes: He threatens to become the little engine that couldn't--and can't. And parents just can't protect their children from what's so deep inside them, what makes them; it's like chasing something lodged in your own muscles.
So we love and try not to think too much. He's made it easy.
It's nearly 80 degrees, the sunlight drips off everything, making the park grass pop and the river a table of glass. When he wakes from his nap, my son will want to scoop sand, and I will hold his hand across the street and down into the Pretty Playground near our building so that he can go to work. But before putting him down amongst the dumptrucks and the rainbow of miniature shovels, I'll hold him just a little longer and tighter than usual. For despite all the gloomy studies dug up on the Internet and the doctors and the books, nearly two years in his orbit have convinced me that the whole world is his to have.
More later perhaps.
Grandma is gone, and my son has noticed. Just last night he looked at the bed where she slept, looked back to us and said, "Grandma's green blanket." And still dripping from the bath, he discovered that his voice booms back to him when he talks into his stacking cups--perfect, then, for uttering "Grandma go." Indeed she has; she will be missed by us all.
The isolette--or as preemie-parent friends of ours call it, The Easy Bake Oven--is where I first had my idea of parenthood turned inside out--or rather outside in. Looking at our 3.5 lb. son in only a diaper and shortened goggles, lying under the bili lights (battling a tenacious case of jaundice), I couldn't help but think about a troubled future. And the nurse practitioner didn't help either. When we were finally allowed to visit our son in the NICU, she debriefed us on his situation. We were told that he didn't breathe on his own initially and that they had intubated him. (He was still on oxygen at this point.) We knew that preemies often experience bleeding in the brain, and that, starving for oxygen early, he could suffer significant long-term mental deficiencies. Little was known when we first huddled around him; he wasn't yet a full day old, and they hadn't conducted an ultrasound or MRI on his brain. The nurse practitioner tried to comfort us, I suppose--I'm trying to say something nice here--by pointing out, "Not all kids go to college."
What to do with that?
And but back to outside in: From talking with parents of non-preemies, they say that their children came out all fat with possibilities. Accordingly, the worries were all external--sticks and stones, missed deadlines for Ivy League schools, rabid dogs, balls chased out onto freeways, the usual stuff. A parent's job, then, is to clear as big a swath through the sharp-edged world as possible so that his child can be free to turn himself into whatever he chooses. For parents of preemies, it's all the standard worries plus something more insidious. We've been told, time and time again, that our son might have been changed in some way, perhaps large, perhaps small, by his coming early. As a full-termer, he'd have his pick of colleges (no doubt), but since 8 weeks early he might very well find lower grades a struggle. And college is a long way off, of course, which means that everything becomes a sign of everything and nothing. A delay in walking suddenly means that he has no future as an athlete, a little lag in sorting shapes correctly and we find ourselves fighting back fears that ideas will always be too big for his small hands. In other words, we've been reminded that lurking inside him somewhere, too remote for anyone to spot or to reach, could be premature limits. The children's books then turn into cruel jokes: He threatens to become the little engine that couldn't--and can't. And parents just can't protect their children from what's so deep inside them, what makes them; it's like chasing something lodged in your own muscles.
So we love and try not to think too much. He's made it easy.
It's nearly 80 degrees, the sunlight drips off everything, making the park grass pop and the river a table of glass. When he wakes from his nap, my son will want to scoop sand, and I will hold his hand across the street and down into the Pretty Playground near our building so that he can go to work. But before putting him down amongst the dumptrucks and the rainbow of miniature shovels, I'll hold him just a little longer and tighter than usual. For despite all the gloomy studies dug up on the Internet and the doctors and the books, nearly two years in his orbit have convinced me that the whole world is his to have.
More later perhaps.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)