Yeah. He didn’t.
Oh, he was in our room all right. He just didn’t sleep.
The current theory: When he was on the bili-blanket, he was in the living room all night *with the lights on*. All the lights stay off in our room at night. The dark is different, so he doesn’t sleep.
At any rate, tired and frustrated parents today.
David has officially been cleared of having to wear the biliblanket as of late this morning. We didn’t even have to get a heel stick at the pediatrician’s office like we thought we would. Now we’ll be able to have him in our room at night so I won’t have to wake up completely and go into a separate room to feed him. Yay!
It’s amazing the difference that a single change can make. Valerie had spent a considerable amount of time researching the kind of attendant that she wanted during delivery and had settled on a midwife team whose offices were about a half hour away, and who would only deliver at the hospital in downtown Charlotte, about an hour’s drive away. But it was relatively late in the process when it came to our attention that, after David had been born, the attendant who would dismiss him from the hospital would not be the same attendant who dismissed my wife. Midwives and obstetricians don’t check babies – only mommies. So, whereas we had spent some months finding just the right midwife, we had to settle on a pediatrician in a matter of weeks. And here’s the rub: the primary thing we needed a pediatrician to do is to okay the removal of our baby from the hospital. Well baby visits and immunizations aside, the pediatrician’s immediate job was to be on site at the appropriate time. We had several strong recommendations for pediatricians within minutes of our apartment, one of whom was even covered by our insurance. But since they were all located directly adjacent to the hospital that was also 2 minutes from our apartment, not a single one of them would be available to dismiss our baby from the hospital in downtown Charlotte.
So we got a recommendation from our midwife for a pediatrician whose main offices were in the same building as hers and signed up for an interview. Now, I had not been present when Valerie was interviewing the other pediatricians, but I managed to make this one, and I had all kinds of alarm signals going off during the meeting. The woman was jovial and grandmotherly and seemed very very competent, but also struck me several times as having that trait you hear about so frequently in doctors: the God complex, that overwhelming sense that they are the doctor and you are not; they know what’s best in all things medical, and you do not. It’s all very well for you to go and do your own research and have your own opinions, but they’ve been doing this sort of thing for years with literally thousands of patients, so they really know what’s best in your situation. And perhaps they do. But it’s not a very comforting notion when faced with our own particular needs in our own particular situation. My child is a patient of course, but I am also a customer. However, the doctor we interviewed was competent and grandmotherly, and most appealing of all was that this office had a lactation consultant on site. The lactation consultant was very important to Valerie, and no other doctor’s office had had one. And ultimately, we had little initial choice – we needed a doctor who could check out our baby from the hospital. But we decided to stick with the half hour drive, at least until Valerie and David had settled down with nursing.
Looking back, something was wrong from the get-go. Continue reading “Change of Pediatrician”
I’m tired of you, pretty baby, being tied up on a string.
Oh get up, little baby, off that light machine.
Please change your color, baby: Go back to white from yellow gold.
‘Cause till you pale up, baby, you’re awfully hard to hold.
Little David Ebenezer is six days old today. Tomorrow will make a week. And for three of those days, so far, our son has been tied to a light bulb. He has jaundice, an affliction he shares with apparently half of all newborns. Jaundice is officially defined simply as unnaturally sallow skin, which today makes me envious of all Asian, Pacific Islander, Indian and African babies, who by the dictionary can’t get jaundice. Continue reading “Jaundice”
(Please forgive me for posting about Latin Grammar when I have a new baby at home. The following was actually urgently necessary to write for work before I could continue my week of disemployment while doting on my new-met son.)
I have come to the conclusion that one of the most important goals for an upper school class in a classical language is to defeat the dread monster Gibberish, whom I picture as something like the awful Dynne from The Phantom Tollbooth. 
Gibberish is what happens when a person knows all the basic parts of English grammar – subjects, verbs, direct objects, prepositional phrases – but it hasn’t occurred to him that these individual parts are particularly important. One subject is as good as any other, and if we switch the subject with the object of a preposition, what difference does it really make? Of course, it makes a great deal of difference. Without careful attention, the sentence “He himself was hurrying to them, and had sent the knights before him” becomes transformed into “Himself to them horsemen he was hurrying to send before him.” The sentence is utter nonsense, and no one knows exactly how it happened. Continue reading “Against Gibberish”
David Ebenezer
Born: February 16, 2008
At: 9:53am
Weight: 8 lbs. 9 oz.
Length: 21 1/4 in.
Today’s thought to ponder is very short and came from last week’s sermon. I really needed to be reminded of this particular thought:
To complain about out circumstances is to really complain against God. A sovereign God does not owe us an explaination; God is not more interested in being understood than worshipped and trusted in every circumstance. We have to learn to trust even if we don’t understand.
I had a couple of thoughts for y’all to ponder that came from a couple of sermons over the past couple of weeks. So today’s installment is from Jan 13th.
Jeff Bridges has a definition of ungodliness that caught my attention. He stated that ungodliness is living one’s everyday life with little or no thought of God. So based on that definition, our pastor asked us to rate how ungodly we are on a scale of 1-10 stating that everyone is on the spectrum because none of us have “made it.” Most of us aren’t even in the high good numbers because we really don’t tend to regard God daily like we should.
Next we were asked a series of seven questions to ponder:
1. What’s the effect of listening to God’s word on my life? (listening and reading is not enough; we have to put things into practice)
2. How do I make decisions in difficult circumstances? (who or what do I regard first?)
3. How often am I anxious or fearful? (anxiety and fear are temporary athesism; its a reflection on not regarding God or his soverienty)
4. Am I partially or selectively obedient? (Do we define areas of importance for our obedience?)
5. How often am I self sufficient instead of being consciously dependent on God?
6. Am I very aware of what others think of me instead of God? (Whose favor do I seek? Who would I rather be honored by?)
7. Am I letting the Spirit live through me or am I mostly going it alone with only the outward appearance of change?
Well, I made it to 39 weeks and have been having prodromal labor contractions since Sunday. I went to my prenatal yesterday and found out that I was 3cm, 50% effaced and the baby was in a -2 position (translation: nicely lodged in my pelvis). And, yes, the baby is still head down. The CNM said that she doesn’t think I’ll make it another week and would not be surprised if we had this little wiggler by the end of the weekend. So we are apparently almost to the top of the rollercoaster; how exciting.
KB has officially given me permission to fiddle with the website (bwahahah…um I mean…) so bear with me as I navigate PHP and mess around a bit.
neumatikos 