Brother Love

This blurry picture was taken when Hannah was less than 24 hours old... that's her big brother Mikey there, giving her a big smooch. Sometimes pictures are so terrible they're almost unpresentable, but so wonderful that you can't hit the "delete" button. :)

When we found out we were going to have a baby, Mikey was very excited. Heck, after several miscarriages (we had maybe three or four extremely early-term miscarriages between Mikey and Hannah) we were all pretty charged up when it became clear that this one was going to make it all the way to delivery! Many months ago we asked Mikey whether he wanted a sister or brother, and in typical Mikey fashion, at first without really thinking about it, he gave the "perfect" answer: "It doesn't matter to me, as long as the baby is healthy." Weeks later, that had mysteriously changed to "a brother!" which was not a problem until we found out through ultrasound that we were indeed going to have a sister. Ultrasound pictures are never 100% conclusive, but Hannah was nice enough to give us a viewpoint that made us probably 97-98% positive that it was a girl. Mikey refused to be convinced, and I'm pretty sure he started praying that the baby was a boy. We did explain to him that the baby was already what it was going to be and we can't change that by praying any more than we could pray a baby girl that has already been born into being a boy, but that didn't seem to have any effect at first.

Eventually, though, Mikey came around, and he became very excited about having a baby sister. Now that Hannah is finally here, our biggest problem is getting Mikey to give her room to breathe! He's always giving her a smooch, or holding her hand, or touching her little tootsies. I've had to resort to saying "Mikey, are you touching the grownup who is holding Hannah? Then you are TOO CLOSE!" and he backs off a little.

But I think we prefer the little inconvenience of Mikey being underfoot because he wants to be around Hannah, to the big inconvenience if he hated and resented her. I think the two of them are likely to be very close throughout their lives, which is awesome. :)

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...

Cathy and I haven't been getting very regular sleep lately. This is of course not unexpected when there's a new baby in the house, but that doesn't make it easier. Last night we had one of those typical nights which consists of alternating sounds of adult snoring (about one hour) and baby cries (about five minutes), punctuated by about twenty or thirty minutes of a bleary-eyed grown-up holding a baby in one arm and a bottle with the other hand. One particular time, she was crying and crying and I knew she had just been changed and eaten, and the Gloworm just wasn't doing the trick (not even in MUSIC mode!) so I wound up getting up and rocking her to sleep in the glide rocker. Cathy's been so pooped that she slept through that entire episode. I hope all the wee-hour fussing isn't waking up Mikey... I'd hate for this to affect his schoolwork when school starts back up in a week or two. If we're really lucky, maybe Hannah will be sleeping through the night by that time (knock wood, and perform many other good luck gestures).

Merry Birthmas from the Joneses!

And a Christmas new year!

More drama at the Jones house

Saturday night, six days after we had Hannah, Cathy and I went to bed about midnight after having a terrific time entertaining friends much of the afternoon and evening. Cathy, who up to that time had been perfectly fine, suddenly became very hot and stated shaking. I prayed for her and she stopped shaking, but she still was awfully warm... her temperature was about 102° and didn't go down. Our doctor had mentioned to us that there is a small risk of meningitis with an epidural, so I popped on Wikipedia and looked it up. Sure enough, a fever is one of the classic three symptoms (the others being a headache and a stiff neck). I gave her some of the strong ibuprofen that the doctor had prescribed for the back pain she had been having since the birth, hoping that would bring the fever down. When it did not (in fact, the fever went up to 103° at one point) I called the on-call doctor. She asked me a number of questions, and then recommended that we go in to the emergency room for some testing. She didn't think that there was any reason to panic, but to be safe she recommended tests. She even told me that it was OK to wait until morning for the kid's night's rest sake, so we toughed it out for the night and waited for morning. In the morning we called my mom and dad and they came over to take care of Mikey and Hannah, and Cathy and I went off to the ER at SouthCrest.

Being in the ER is never a "short story," but to try and make it shorter, we found out that it was likely nothing. Although Cathy actually did have some neck pain and a mild headache, her symptoms were not severe (even the temperature had gone down under 100° within a few hours). The doctor offered to do a spinal tap (apparently that is the only way to positively diagnose meningitis) or to release us and we would wait and see if it got worse, with the understanding that if the symptoms got worse, we would immediately come back to the ER and get that spinal tap. We elected to follow the "wait and see" approach, hoping that maybe Cathy just needed some rest overnight. They gave us a scrip for some antibiotics and we headed home to see our baby! My mom and dad offered to let us stay over for the night so we could rest; Mom even said she would do the every-two-hours feedings for us so we could sleep uninterrupted. We sure took them up on that one! So outside of getting up a few times to run the breast pump, Cathy got a good night's sleep and I did too. The symptoms diminished and today (Christmas Eve) she is pretty much back to her regular self. Praise the Lord! :)

For the record... we asked the ER doctor, and he told us that in order to cause any kind of permanent damage, your fever has to go up into the 107° range or so. So it was definitely something to keep track of, but she wasn't really in danger of drain bramage or anything at that level. (whew!)

So it's Christmas Eve! I want to wish both of my readers a wonderful Christmas, a terrific new year, many blessings, and happy holidays. :) And hey... if you haven't been watching the listings from my "Christian" blog (my "journal" on Christdot), don't miss my Christmassy blog post from a few days ago. (There are a few more here and here if you like that one.) Despite what may be your first impressions, they are definitely not anti-Christmas, or really anti-anything. What I do hope is that maybe one of them will get someone thinking about Christmas in a different way. It's easy to get in a "it's Christmas again, same song as last year, different verse" mode, but I think there are a lot of things that deserve a second look. If you disagree with me on any point, feel free to post a comment here or on Christdot.

We're home!

December 16, 2007. At 7am we arrived at the hospital, ready to induce labor on our baby. Cathy had been diagnosed with gestational diabetes (high blood sugar during pregnancy; it generally goes away after delivery) and that is known to cause the baby to grow bigger inside the mother than usual, and if you let the baby go to full term and it's too big, the labor will be hard or you might even wind up delivering via C-section. It was basically the same scenario when we had Mikey seven and a half years ago... big baby, decided to induce, even the 7am appointment at the hospital. The outcome was pretty different, although both times we wound up with beautiful babies!

So around 9:15am we had been admitted and started a pitocin IV. Pitocin is a hormone that can be used to encourage the woman's body to begin to have contractions. Some friends showed up to keep us company, but the contractions did not show up... until 11am when everybody left the room to let Cathy go to sleep. As soon as everybody was outside, the contractions started up and we were off to the races!

Well... ALMOST. Turns out that pitocin-induced contractions are good, but they're not quite the same as "real" contractions that are initiated by your actual body. But they are still painful, and by about 12:15 Cathy was ready for some Stadol. (Actually, she wanted her epidural, but the nurse advised against it, and it turns out that it was for a good reason... but I'm getting ahead of myself.) By about 1:30 the Stadol had worn off by Cathy decided to tough it out until 2, when the nurse gave her another dose. So by the 2-hour rule, that would have worn off by 4 at the latest, but Cathy wouldn't take another dose... she wanted to wait for the epidural! (The Stadol made her a little loopy and she didn't like it.)

The nurse recommended that she work with a labor ball and do some walking laps of her room, so we did that and by about 6 she had gone into "real" labor. That's why it's a good thing we didn't do the epidural earlier... she wouldn't have been able to walk (an epidural basically kills all feeling from the waist down). So at about 6 she took the epidural. During good active labor you can expect to dilate at a rate of about 1cm per hour. At 6 she was at 5cm, at 7 she was at 6cm, and at 8 she was at 7cm, but then by 9 she took a leap and had become fully dilated (10cm), so they called Dr. Ross to come on down to deliver the baby.

And at 9:36pm, Hannah was born! Cathy only had to push through about maybe 6-7 contractions, maybe 10-15 minutes of pushing total, which is an unusually easy time considering that Hannah was 9 pounds, 2 ounces (which is pretty big at birth!) and Mikey had been smaller but took so long that Cathy ran out of steam and had had to agree to vacuum extraction. This time there was no vacuum and no running out of steam. Hannah came right on out and everything was awesome!

At least it was right at first. Shortly after I cut the cord and they put Hannah on the little examination cart, they discovered that she had sucked a little fluid into her lungs and needed to be watched overnight. Cathy got to hold her for just a minute or two and the doctor explained the situation, and they whisked her off to a special part of the nursery area that they call the "Special Care Nursery". They wanted to keep an eye on Hannah overnight and make sure she was breathing properly. So Hannah was whisked and I whisked with her, and the 8-10 family and friends outside the birth room only got the quickest glimpse of her on the way out. It broke my heart... Mikey was so excited, he wanted to go to Special Care Nursery too and look at her. They wouldn't let him, but he did get to see through a window, and one of the nurses took a snapshot of her for him to take home for the night. Hannah stuck her tongue out in the picture. Take THAT, big brother!!

So they put her head under a little oxygen hood for the night. They moved us to our recovery room, and we got them to put a camera over her bassinet for us so we could watch her on the TV in our room. A little after midnight we went to sleep. At 4 they woke us to take Cathy's vital signs, and I noticed that the oxygen hood had been removed from her head... a good sign, I assumed. At 6am we woke up again to the sound of static on the TV speakers... our camera feed was gone! I assumed that this was also a good sign; they don't do the cameras in the regular nursery, only Special Care. We called the nursery to get the four one one, and turns out they were giving her a bath, but the nurse reassured me that we would likely get her in our room in the morning, and that's what we got!

We had lots of family members and friends to see us on Sunday and Monday... we loved every minute of it! It sure tuckered us out, though, and we were a little glad that we didn't have any visitors on Tuesday. Tuesday afternoon about 3 or 4 they checked us out, and by late afternoon we were home!

So, we've had a number of nearly sleepless nights since Hannah's birth. Cathy has stressed a little bit about breast feeding... our first night in the hospital with her we had one marathon feeding session that must have lasted at least two hours, maybe more. Tonight it's nearly 1am and I'm staying up because Hannah has developed Hyperbilirubinemia (also called jaundice) and she has to be kept under a special blue light all of the time except when she is eating or getting changed until the jaundice clears up (the light helps the body break down the excess bilirubin; the build-up is fairly common in newborns and is nutrition-related). In about ten minutes I'm going to change Hannah's diaper and feed her, put her back under the light (which looks like a baby tanning bed) and maybe doze off in the living room where she is... at 3 Cathy will get up and do the same while I go to bed for a little while. So we're going to take turns with this thing and if the tech who delivered the light bed is right, we may only have to do this for less than 24 hours.

What a blessing she is. I don't care if I have to stay up all night for the rest of my life; I'm so happy and thankful to God that my family has increased from 3 of us to 4!

(If you want to see Hannah's baby pictures, you can find them in the Web Nursery under Tulsa's SouthCrest hospital for Dec. 16, 2007. If you don't know the password, email me and I'll let you know.)

New Baby Tomorrow

Seven and a half years after we had our first child, and tomorrow we are inducing to have the second one. We're inducing this time too, so we won't have the omigosh my water broke on the floor in Wal-Mart we have to get to the hospital NOW!!! thing going on. And it does give us the opportunity to get a night's sleep first... as if anyone could SLEEP knowing you're having a BABY the next day! :)

We went to the Christmas production at our church tonight, and it was very nice. Of course, if we hadn't been scheduled to induce at 7am on Sunday morning on the same Sunday as our production...! Thank you so much Dr. Ross! hehe we would have sung in the choir tonight. We could have done it tonight for the Saturday performance but not the Sunday ones so we decided to bow out this year. We just went for moral support. We were glad we did! Cathy cried any time anyone said Jesus was a "baby" or Joseph was the "father" or Mary was the "mother"... it was almost Pavlovian. :)

Ice Storm Redux

Well, we were able to go home yesterday evening... I slept in my own bed! My parents, on the other hand, were either less lucky or more lucky... a friend of theirs grabbed a room for them when it came open in the otherwise-full hotel where she works, so instead of sleeping in their cold house, they got to sleep at Holiday In Express. My wife's dad still has power, but his driveway is blocked by debris... you can get in and out on foot, but not in cars. Some of the tree branches that were down in his yard were not actually broken, and when the ice melted off they sprang back up, so some of what we thought we were going to have to clear out is actually back where it belongs. :) His car and pickup have some branches on them, but because they were coated with maybe a half-inch of ice when the branches fell we hope there's no damage.

Much of Tulsa is still without power, but my impression after driving through town last night is that now at least the no-power sections are the exception and the we-have-power sections are the rule (Tuesday night that was not the case). Even my church has power back; it came on late yesterday afternoon (they had already canceled Wednesday night service, though, and they did not reinstate).

My 7-year-old's school has been canceled all week. Tonight was supposed to be their Christmas program... D'OH! Our church program has missed out on two important rehearsals so far, too... D'OH!! We're not in it because of our upcoming labor induction (the morning of the production!) but we still hope they are able to do an excellent job.

Supposed to snow Friday and Saturday, but hopefully it won't cause another mess like the one this week.

Oklahoma Ice Storm - December 2007

Wow.

OK, so Sunday we went to church as usual, came home as usual, did all our regular Sunday stuff as usual. Watched Dallas beat Detroit at home in a surprisingly close game. Went to bed as usual... then at 4am woke up NOT as usual. The power was out, so I got up and called the power company. Apparently the power was out for a lot of people... there was some ice during the night. It was cold, so I went and got our 7-year-old and took him to our bed so he wouldn't get cold and we toughed it out until morning.

In the morning we started calling around for someone with electric so we could get into a warm place. My mom and dad had no power... she was planning to run her oven all day and keep the house warm that way (ultimately that worked for her). Cathy's brother with the big house in Broken Arrow was out of power too. Finally we called Cathy's dad who lives by the fair grounds... and his power was on, so we bundled up and went to his house.

There was no ice on the street... the ground temperature was comparatively warm, so the streets were OK. Except for the occasional tree limb. And WHEW, about those tree limbs! But I'll get to that in a minute. Cathy's dad's power was on when we got there, but an hour or two later... BAM! no power. We had plenty of flashlights, though, and some battery- and oil-powered lanterns, and he lit the burners on his gas stove to keep the place warm, so our main enemy was plain old boredom. A few hours later the power came back on, but not the cable TV... fortunately we had lots of DVDs to help keep my little boy occupied (it ALMOST worked!) and except for a few flickers and one 20-minute blackout, the power hasn't gone back off. Later we learned that we are about two blocks from the main staging area that the power company is sending the emergency trucks out from, which probably explains why we had power when everyone else outside of our immediate area was still dark.

As of yesterday afternoon, my house in East Tulsa was still without power. According to the Tulsa World this morning, 220,000 homes in the Tulsa area are still dark... I understand that the ice took out the power of half a million homes across the state. Oklahoma has been declared a federal disaster area, with $5 million in aid to go to local governments to help with debris removal. All those tree limbs! It's incredible the size of some of the tree limbs (and whole trees) that were taken down by this ice. My father-in-law has part of his magnolia tree on his roof now, although luckily it doesn't appear to have done any damage. Yesterday the power company estimated for my wife that our power would be on today, so let's hope.

The power is also out at my church... if you click that link and get nothing it's because their Web server is still down. :) I don't think the power ever went down where I work downtown. I didn't come in to work Monday or Tuesday (my boss said not to) but I expect to be business as usual from here on out.

UPDATE: a friend of ours wrote a pretty cool blog post about the ice storm a few weeks after the fact.

24-hour Christmas Music

I am a HUGE fan of Christmas music! To date I have about 874 tracks of Christmas music available to me... it's kind of tough to get an exact count because of things like CDs that have all of the songs in karaoke versions at the end, or compilations that have duplicates of songs from other CDs (the Chipmunks, Burl and Bing are particularly bad in this regard), or tracks that are actually mostly or entirely spoken. But that's the number of tracks in my MediaMonkey, anyway. Out of all of those, most of which are off of CDs, I eliminate about 100 from regular rotation for various reasons (like, for example, the ONE song on the CD that I can't STAND!), but that's still enough to keep me happy pretty much all of the time. It's plenty enough to fill up my GoGear. But what about when I'm MP3-playerless? What about when I'm in the car? Or around the house? Or when my GoGear's battery is dead? Do I go straight to the CDs? No, silly! I go to one of the radio stations in Tulsa that's playing 24-hour Christmas music: Mix 96 or KBEZ! (They both have live streams if you're somewhere that doesn't have 24-hour Christmas music.)

'Course, if you love Internet radio, there are lots of options... like AccuHolidays and Yahoo's Happy Holidays Stations. And if you can somehow manage to get tired of the 46(!) different holiday music stations on those two sites, I suppose you could always Google for some more.

Some things just don't go well together

Today while walking home from the bus stop I heard two sounds that should not ever be heard together: the roar of a truck that needs a quieter muffler, and the sound of a car alarm. There are only a few things wrong with this:

• a noisy muffler roaring in a residential area
• a car alarm set so sensitive that someone's noisy muffler can set it off
• the owner of the car alarm letting it run for several minutes before turning it off... what's the use? I could have stolen your stereo myself, and I don't know anything about stealing stereos.

Noise pollution at its finest...

Red Sky In The Morning...

This morning as I was waiting for the bus I looked to the East-Southeast and saw a striking sunrise happening. There was a stretch of clouds, like choppy water frozen in place, that went on for probably several miles, and the clouds at the end were exactly where the sun was coming up. It was almost blood-red at that point, with a lighter-colored shaft coming straight up from where the sun was below the horizon. I'm not sure why that one shaft going straight up was lighter than the rest of the cloud, and not radiating out in all directions like your garden-variety first grade drawing of the Sun would indicate, but anyway... it was beautiful.

I got a seat in the sideways seats in the back of the bus so I could watch the sunrise all the way down 21st Street (my bus to downtown heads directly West so I could look out the side windows and see it). The sunrise turned orange, then lighter and lighter, and by the time I got to an area where my view was mostly blocked, the show was mostly over anyway.

Or so I thought!

When we got into the downtown area there were a couple of places where I could see that part of the sky again, and the sun was directly behind a dark cloud. The edges of the cloud were almost blindingly bright (OK, maybe literally blinding... I realize it's the sun we're talking about here!) and it was just beautiful. Now I know where that old saying about the cloud with the silver lining came from!

Welcome to my new blog, by the way. You'll notice on the edge of the blog page that I've already been blogging on Last.fm and Christdot, so feel free to visit those sites and read some other thoughts while I'm cogitating on what else to post here! And I apologizing for not having any pictures of the beautiful sunrise to post... I tried to be as vivid in my description as possible so maybe you can see it in your mind's eye. Maybe someone will buy me a digital camera for Christmas!