Three weeks and growing

Tomorrow is Morgan's Three week birthday and he is getting bigger everyday. Today he seems a little different when he looks at Steve and I. It feels like his sight is getting better and he is recognizing us more and more. When I fed him today he just stared at me wide eyed and really seemed like he was looking and taking it in rather than trying to get his eyes to adjust like before. Steve commented that his eyes are also getting bluer each day and the gray is disappearing. We are both convinced he will be a blue eyed blond hair little boy which is super cute. I need to get some baby pics of Steve to post because the ones I have seen are of him as a toddler and Morgan looks just like him almost clone like. It is adorable.

I have this incredible nagging feeling of trying to capture and remember what each day is like with him while he is this small it is sad how fast it goes. It's only been three weeks but each day just seems to slip by us. The gas is still an issue yet we are getting better and better at making him as comfortable as we can so the fussiness is just minimal squirming and the really hard part so far has been getting him to go to sleep. Yet when he is out he sleeps incredibly well and nothing wakes him up even me screaming for Steve or the dogs alarm barking fits. I guess we are lucky I think we trained him in the womb for our noisy house. Oh and the swing my sister-in-law Tracie bought is amazing he actually really likes it now so that is one more helpful tool we have to utilize. Steve took some video of him in the swing and doing some other silly baby stuff we will post later.


This morning Steve fell asleep cuddling Morgan trying to get him to go back to sleep after a feeding and I woke up and caught this image on my camera of the two snuggling.

Moving pictures

While Melissa and I spent our first two hours with Morgan in the recovery room of the hospital I shot a few short seconds of video on my cell phone.

If Melissa looks a bit haggared it's because she was litterally 10 minutes out of surgery when I shot this. This is the first time that she ever held Morgan. She doesn't even remember it.

The price of gas

Gas has emerged as our major obstacle in keeping Morgan happy. I have no frame of reference on if he's more gassy than the average infant, but he is certainly gassy. We've tried all kinds of various methods to alleviate the discomfort with some success. It's hard to know what to do since the most effective method changes from day to day. Some of the more effective methods (such as rubbing his back) actually seem to piss him off now. I'm not sure when issues with gas are supposed to go away, but I can't wait for this particular phase to come to an end.

Fun with baby burping



One of the oddest things about this whole experience is how we've ended up living in this sort of limbo state where the differentiation between night and day is a rather arbitrary and unimportant distinction. We live in 3 - 4 hour increments and it's highly disorienting. It's amazingly hard to keep track of what day it is under these circumstances. I can't help but wonder what it's going to be like once outside scheduling comes back into the picture. Hopefully Morgan will be sleeping at longer increments by the time I head back to work.

In other news a slow trickle of people have been stopping by which is just about the right speed for us. The kindness of our friends and family, providing food and assistance has been wonderful.

A caveat on the pictures (including the ones above), they aren't what Melissa would like them to be for a laundry list of reasons. In this case the need to get more pictures of Morgan up online wins out over Melissa's need to only post the most perfect pictures.

All the boys


Morgan Shows off his Bottle Face


Morgan and Grandma Col


Mom n' Baby

Taking a stand

There are very few things about which Morgan has formed strong opinions in his 12 days of life, but he is not without convictions. For example, Morgan is VERY pro-milk. He unequivocally supports milk in all the forms that he thus far has encountered it and pushes hard for a very milk based agenda. On the other side of the coin Morgan is strongly anti-bath, as is evidenced by these pictures that followed from his first bath at home:




Even at 12 days old he has a nice strong glare. ;)

In other news, our worries regarding him having trouble gaining weight were clearly unfounded. We were concerned because he lost a bunch (more than normal) at first then wasn't gaining it back as well as we would have hoped. We were clearly concerned for no good reason, because he weighed in at 8lbs 1oz on 8/16 and 9lbs today. For those of you playing the home game that's 15 oz in 5 days. Now we're worried that we feed him too much. There's just no winning at this. His doctor said not to worry, so we're not going to worry about it but we are going to keep an eye on it.

Morwyn has taken a keen interest in Morgan's well being. During his bath Morgan was screaming and raising a ruckus, for the whole time Morwyn stood at the door with her ears back and the most concerned look on her face whining and crying. Everytime we come home she checks on him first, giving him a quick sniff and, if we aren't fast enough to warn her away, a tiny lick. Her interest has gotten her into a bit of trouble, this morning we caught her half in his bassinet licking and sniffing him all over. Morgan didn't seem to care but given the fact that his immune system isn't up to snuff yet we're being careful to keep the licks away for the first little bit. Still, our lil mama dog's concern for the new addition to our family is super cute.

If A than B, if B then C, not A therefore not C

We're starting to settle in now, although last night we both had a bit of a breakdown in our confidence. So far my biggest frustration in being a parent is that there are reems of information available. Hundreds of websites, books, doctors, nurses, other parents, all providing contradictory information. In the middle of that malestrom of data there is a tiny little person, who has his own ideas about how this all needs to work out. He hasn't shown any interest thus far in sticking to the books, but then again he is our son so I guess that is to be expected.

Before we left the hospital last week we talked to more doctors and nurses than I can count and we still ended up in the hosptial 24 hours later. We thought we had a handle on this, and that with the help of our doctors and some books we could muddle our way through. Still on even the most simple of questions, for example 'How much should we be feeding him', we've recieved no fewer than 4 different answers. We're paying attention to what Morgan is telling us now more than anything, but next time we talk to our pediatriction I'm going to make it clear that we are quite frustrated by the inability of our various healthcare providers to provide consistent answers on even the most basic questions.

In less frustrated news things are going smoother today, and we seem to be finding a decent rythm to life at home. So long as Morgan has gained weight when we see the lactation nurse again on Wednesday I'll be feeling pretty good about things. Morgan's umbilical stump fell off yesterday, so he's sporting a belly button for the first time. He remains cute as a button and I've given him his first nickname, 'Noodle' which is short for 'Noodle Neck'. The break in the heat has been a god send, Morgan has actually had the chance to see the rest of the house!

Back to work... lots of Math to do before the end of the quarter.

One Thousand Words

It's been just a bit more than 24 hours since we finally got back from the hospital. Morgan recieved a clean bill of health, the dehydration has passed and he has gained back some of the weight that he lost although he is still below his birth weight. That's normal, and we're hoping that he'll be back up where he belongs for his next checkup. We were going to have some visitors yesterday, but given how crazy the last week has been and that we just recently made it back home it just didn't feel right. We need some time to decompress, to adjust to caring for Morgan at home, and to really just learn to be a family. Once we've had a few more days to settle, then we can take visitors outside of immediate family.

I learned an interesting thing about infants while we were in the hosptial, specifically that sugar water has the exact same effect on their brains that morphine has on the brains of adults. I saw it in action while they were pulling spinal fluid and inserting the catheter, crazy stuff.

It’s damn good to be home again. Melissa especially is feeling much better since she never left the hospital room, not once the whole time that Morgan was there. I got short breaks, heading home to let out the dogs and to get food. She commented that it was like being in prison, and honestly I can’t disagree. Here are some pictures from Morgan’s latest hospital stay, we’ll post some more happy pics and some video soon! :)

Boomerang baby

I was hoping that this post would be about Morgan's first trip home, and it is in part about that, but I'm writing this from the Pediatric wing of the same hospital where he was born so it's about more than that. First, the good news. Yesterday we brought Morgan home for the first time and that turned out to be a rather stressful event. First off, Morgan didn't take to the car AT ALL. So he raised a huge fuss all the way home, only calming down when Melissa got into the back of the car with him. When we did get home we had to deal with three dogs who had been couped up in the house, by themselves, for four days. The result was that we were dealing with Melissa in pain, a fussy baby, and three dogs in full bore insane freak out mode. Eventually we managed to get reasonably settled in, but it was a bit of a battle to do it.

Morgan's fussiness continued through the day, there were short respites when we could get him to calm down and sleep but overall he was pretty much angry at the world. Before we finally managed to get him to calm down and sleep he spent about three hours screaming at the top of his lungs, so upset we couldn't get him to take a pacifier or hold still in a swaddle. At the hospital they had indicated that the problem was that he was gassy so we tried our best to treat that without much success. Otherwise all the indicators were that everything was fine, he was dirtying the proper number of diapers and he was feeding every 2-3 hours.

This morning he continued to be highly fussy, so when we called to set up his well baby check I asked if we could either talk to a nurse or get in ASAP to get help with the fussiness. They set us up with an appointment that day in the afternoon. As a part of the preparations I went to change Morgan's diaper. Upon removing the diaper I found what appeared to be blood in his urine. Seeing this was panic inducing to say the least. At that point Melissa took his temperature and got 99.8 the first time and 100.4 the second. We threw ourselves together and rushed to the pediatrician.

The pediatrician started out by assuring us that his diaper was not actually filled with blood, but that the red spotting we were seeing was Uria (urine crystals) that sometimes form in small babies. The fever however, was confirmed at 101 and that puts us where we are now, in the pediatrics ward of Providence's center for Women and Children. Exactly two floors and half the building away from where we were just yesterday.

Our pediatrician, and the pediatrician that saw Morgan here don't seem to be overly concerned about his situation. It appears that the problem is most likely dehydration, caused by the fact that Melissa just isn't producing enough milk to keep him hydrated at this point. Still, anytime that a baby as young as Morgan runs a fever it's standard procedure to admit them to the hospital in order to screen for any potential infections. The chance that he actually has an infection is very small, but it's not a risk we or our doctors are willing to take.

I wasn't here for the placing of the IV line. Apparently it took two nurses to hold Morgan down to place it. He might be sick, but he's strong for a 4 day old baby. It breaks my heart to see the IV coming out of his little hand, I have to keep reminding myself that it's a necessary evil. I stoked his hair and gave him the occasional drop of sugar water while they took spinal fluid and placed his (short lived) catheter. Everything has been shipped off to the lab and we'll know tomorrow if we have anything to worry about or not. In the meantime it's IV fluids and antibiotics.

It's hard not to feel guilty about this, Melissa particularly is having issues with that. The fact that the problem is most likely that she wasn't producing enough milk eats at her. We did everything right to ensure that he was getting enough to eat, but apparently somehow it didn't work out. We counted his diapers, we talked with 5 different doctors during the time at the hospital before we brought him home, along with probably 10 different nurses and a lactation nurse and they all indicated to us that he was getting plenty to eat. Still, here we are and a couple bottles of formula and some IV fluids later and Morgan is a completely different baby. Calm, curious and not overly fussy. It's a very good sign.

During his short stint home Melissa actually managed to get some snaps of Morgan, which are clearly of much higher quality than any that I took in the hospital.









**UPDATE** The spinal fluid tests are back, along with preliminary testing on the blood an urine. Everything is clean. Menengitis, the biggest concern, is not a factor. The fever has already subsided. We will still be here for the next 48 hours while we wait for cultures to come back clean, but it's a big relief.

Tabula Rasa

Morgan Kemp Wax, born happy and healthy at 5:59 PM 8/9/08. He's was born by C-Section, which wasn't our preferred method but the end result was the desired one. He's been checked and monitored for the past day now and everything is peachy keen. He's been breastfeeding and while that has proved to be a bit of a challenge he's getting enough food so that is good.

He's a very even tempered baby, and while he's not fond of being out of the swaddle or getting his temperature taken otherwise he's been calm and happy. We didn't get much sleep last night, but I'm hoping that we'll do a bit better tonight.

Here are some pictures. It's hard for Melissa to be willing to publish these, perfectionist that she is. Still, these are good enough to provide some idea of what the newest member of our family looks like!

D Day, H Hour

The time has come, we are currently located in Providence's Women and Children's Pavilion. The induction happens tomorrow, for now medication has been administered to prepare the ground for the main event. Melissa is terrified, and I certainly don't blame her. We knew this was coming, but being here is another thing entirely. For me there is still a certain lack of reality to this whole situation. I can understand where I am and what we are doing here, but the full implication of that hasn't sunk in. I don't feel nervous, but I think that's more of a function of my role here than anything else. My role is to be the calm counterpoint to Melissa's fear. The more she expresses nervousness and apprehension the more those emotions drain, leaving me empty but calm.

The room is cozy compared with other hospital rooms I've been in, but it's hardly what I would call a comfortable place to spend the night. We have WiFi, that's all I really need to feel comfy. Our poor dogs are going to be mostly on their own for the next few days, depending on how long this takes. I ran home and let them out and we've made arrangements for someone to be there every 8 hours or so but it's not our preferred arrangement by a long shot.

I brought my Fathers watch, a gold plated wind up pocket watch. I got it out of the box of keepsakes I keep it in recently because we lacked any other time piece with a second hand for timing contractions. It's an anachronism here, where digital electronic sensors record the slightest movement or spasm with perfect electronic accuracy. Still there is something reassuring about the relentless tick of the second hand, like a heartbeat driving night to day and night again.

"Cowboy Dan's a major player in the cowboy scene, he goes to the reservation drinks and gets mean. He goes to the desert fires his rifle at the sky and says, 'God if I have to die you will have to die.'" -Modest Mouse, Cowboy Dan

Puppies of Doom Beach Vacation 2007

In preparation for the baby Steve started transferring all our videos from tape to the computer with a new fancy gadget he bought today. We now will have something interesting to video tape other than the dogs.

So, last year we went to the ocean for a week in between Spring and Summer Quarter and we stayed in our favorite cabin on Roosevelt Beach and this is some footage of the puppy antics while we were there....The first clip is of Necrobutcher who waded out in ankle deep water to a tire but once he got up on the tire he forgot how he got there and decided he was stuck. We only got the last 30 seconds of his predicament on tape but he had been on that tire crying for at least 5-10 minutes before making the jump. I think the second clip is self explanatory :)

Delays and Frustrations

So, 15 minutes into using the Blogger interface and I'm thinking that everyone who uses this site needs to take a collection and send Google some money so they can hire a User Interface team. This is the least intuitive social networking site I've ever worked with. It's social networking without the convenient networking aspects. No wonder Blogger is 5th or 6th most popular behind MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Friendster, and just about any other social networking site out there...:P

But yeah... here's our blog. More substantive and less frustrated posts will come later.