Month: March 2015

Have Preemie, Will Not Travel

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Oh, the places we’ve been since London was born.

From January 30, 2014 to May 19, 2014 I left Denver once, for a quick trip north to Fort Collins. I was there for six hours. Since London was born I have spent three days outside of the state, not too far away, in Green River, WY. It took me two minutes to draw on a map where I have been in the last 14 months.

Having a baby will naturally limit your geographical existence. Having a 26-weeker will completely shut your travel down. From what I have heard about other parents who had a very early baby, we have been ambitious in our reach across this relatively small map. I have heard of parents who will not take their baby outside the house but for walks. These parents have decided that taking their preemie to the grocery store, the shopping mall, or to Target, puts their preemie at too great a risk of getting seriously sick and going right back to the hospital. My family did not make it out of the NICU without receiving such advice, from a nurse nonetheless. We were blown away by the severity of such restrictions and quickly conferred with other nurses that we did not have to stay under house arrest with our preemie until flu season was over.

We have followed certain recommendations such as, do not fly anywhere with your baby until flu season ends. Locking baby inside an incredibly small area for two hours with 140 other strangers sounded like a really bad idea to us as well. Not flying anywhere for such a long time (our last flight was in mid-December 2013) has been incredibly weird and challenging, but also much better than having a very sick daughter back in the hospital.

The feeling has been similar to putting travel and adventure on probation for over a year. Localized adventure has still been possible and we have taken advantage of that with trips to Wyoming, Breckenridge (twice), Steamboat Springs, and Estes Park. If it wasn’t for weddings, I am not sure we would have made all those trips, but thank God for weddings because these short getaways have quenched at least a little bit of our thirst for travel.

Flu season is almost over. Besides the obvious, this means as a family we are free to move about the country. And again, weddings will be the catalyst of much of that travel, but instead of weekends in the Colorado mountains we will get a weekend in southern California and Nashville, with some excursions in between. The destinations are exciting. The process of getting there, i.e. flying with London and bringing all the baby stuff along with us, does not excite. However, if London’s behavior as a baby can be a predictor for how she’ll be on a flight, I can say she probably won’t put up much of a fight. It’s her 40 lb. car seat that will.

10 Signs You’re A Stay-At-Home Dad

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1. When you’re hanging out with other couples who have kids you start identifying with what the moms in the group are talking about. You’ve chimed in before and then you’ve immediately felt sort of awkward. Just keep doing it, because sometimes, mom really doesn’t know what is best. Dad does.

2. You’re intimately aware of just how much Netflix’s selection of streaming movies sucks. Knowing this, you’ve delved into several binges on documentaries available on Netflix. When you’ve exhausted the current outstanding selection of these films you once again are disappointed to find that the popular selections on Netflix consist of the remake of Robocop, Homefront, Redemption, and every other Jason Statham movie in which he plays a hardscrabble character who has run up against some guys who threaten his life leading to Statham coming out of quasi-retirement to blow shit up and kill people. Thank God for HBO.

3. You’ve caught yourself looking at a stay-at-home mom. No, no, no, not in that way. You were just staring at her because you were thinking how hard it would be to carry a kid around and all the kid stuff with arms like that.

4. Your to-read pile of books and magazines looks like you’re in grad school again. That is, you have bookcases full of to-read books and your nightstand to-read selection has grown off of the nightstand and is now growing in all directions on the floor and up opposing walls like kudzu. (This particular sign is in no way exclusive to SAHDs.)

5. You’ve watched the entirety of HBO’s The Wire while playing on the floor with your baby, while changing diapers, while washing Dr. Brown’s bottles, while feeding baby, while dressing her, and while reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

6. You’ve taken your baby for a walk through the park, a rather large park, and you’ve been the only dad in site. It’s just you and your baby and a hundred other moms with their charges.

7. Once or twice you’ve noticed a dad looking at you. You look back and the dad quickly turns away. He was looking out of curiosity and amazement because of the ease with which you’re doing everything, well not quite everything, baby-related that only the mom in his young family does.

8. Conversation with other dads is always going to be a little different for you. The odds are they are not SAHDs themselves, but make an effort. You’ll soon find something to talk about. Dads who aren’t SAHDs still get a chance to watch the shows or movies you’ve recently seen. You just watch them at totally different times and with different distractions.

9. You relish opportunities not afforded to you in a typical job: you don’t shave for months, you wear a t-shirt and pants every day, you drink a beer with lunch in your office (aka house), you drink another one when the afternoon is getting really long, you don’t have to worry about what day of the week it is, and maybe somedays you just neglect showering…not because you forgot to, because you can.

10. You can carry a ridiculous amount of goods while holding your baby. Example: When you get home from a Costco trip you grab baby first and hold her with left arm, sling diaper bag over right shoulder, carry two gallons of milk with arm that is holding baby, carry 48 rolls of toilet paper with right arm, and with the limited real estate available pinch a bag of avocados in between a couple of fingers (doesn’t matter which hand).

12 Classics: Brave New World

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I would not quite believe Suzanne Collins if she said she took no inspiration from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World for her Hunger Games series of books. Some of the elements in the books are too close to one another for it to be a coincidence.

Moving on.

I read a classic book looking for that one element that explains why said book is classified as a classic. Sometimes it is the quality of the writing, or the twisted, complex plot that you never thought someone could come up with. There are too many elements of a classic book to write about them all, but I will mention one more, sometimes it is a particular passage, which resonates more strongly than any other portion of the book. For me, this was the element in Brave New World that made it a classic.

The passage I am speaking of takes place near the end of the book, when the Savage is speaking with Mustapha Mond. The Savage is challenging Mond on the decision to “civilize” a society in the way that Mond and other directors have. Mond attempts to justify why he and other directors/controllers are correct. Both men frequently reference Othello to support their arguments, although Othello benefits the Savage’s points more appropriately.

The Savage speaks of the “feelies” the “civilized,” modern equivalent of a book or movie, i.e. mass entertainment. He says, “Othello’s good, Othello’s better than those feelies.”

“Of course it is,” the Controller agreed. “But that’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.”

Mond later mentions science as being in the same category as high art:

“Yes,” Mustapha Mond was saying, “that’s another item in the cost of stability. It isn’t only art that’s incompatible with happiness; it’s also science. Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.”

What a prescient passage. Keeping science under lock and key has become a huge task for climate change deniers, oil companies, and pleasant men like Senator Jim Inhofe who brought a snowball into Congress to support his argument that global warming is a hoax. Mind you, it was February…in Washington D.C.

The Savage and Mond argue back and forth for quite a few pages. The Savage closes with a point about the inconveniences in life, the inconveniences Mond and others have tried so hard to eliminate.

“But I like the inconveniences.”

“We don’t,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.”

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” There was a long silence.

“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. “You’re welcome,” he said.

This discussion is why Brave New World is, at least for me, a classic. Inconveniences are certainly not all pleasant, but they are the price we pay for freedom. They make for a fuller, richer life; a life, which thanks to inconveniences, produces high art. I like high art.

The Troubling Loss of the Car Seat

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Fully functioning baby in the now retired car seat.

I felt the familiar bite of envy today when I saw a dad walking into a bookstore carrying his baby in a car seat. Oh, those were the days. Yes, they were.

But wait, you might say. Aren’t you excited for your baby to grow up? To walk? To be freer? Of course I am. She is crawling right now, but all she wants to do is stand at the coffee table and cruise around. In a little more time she will be walking with me, but right now we are in a cumbersome interregnum between the too-big-for-the-car-seat size and the not-yet-walking stage.

Benefits of the car seat era include easily carrying baby during any errand, including, but certainly not limited to, a stroll through the bookstore, a coffee run, and going to pick up a book at the library. Also, easily transferring baby from house to car, to inside bookstore, back inside car, back to house, and up to room if baby has fallen asleep in car seat. All this used to be done with one convenient baby bucket (receptacle or repository I like much better, but it just sounded weird, “baby repository”).

But now upon arrival anywhere we must transfer baby from big, new, giant booster-type seat for extra-tall babies to the stroller, also great for extra-tall daddies.

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Fully functioning much bigger baby in the new, custom-built-for-huge-people, booster seat.

The other option, and this is a big ask, is to carry her sans stroller. Since she’s 25 lbs and 31 inches, one better hope the errand does not take longer than expected if you spring for this non-stroller option, especially if you have already lifted weights that day.

This might be the first of many posts in which I sort of (or jokingly) mourn losing the conveniences of the infant, but also recognize the perks of getting older and growing bigger, like her booster seat (which is one indestructible gadget) and her current obsession with pulling to stand. These are great things.

But the other point of this post is that I cannot shake the memory of the days when I could carry London around in her car seat, sometimes with just a few fingers wrapped around the handle and the other two fingers carrying a six-pack. The ease. The comfort. The convenience. Oh my.

 

 

Generous Ventricles

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The hardest day to get through was Wednesday, the day after we got the news that London would need an MRI and a neurosurgery consult. Though we knew that the challenges of having a preemie were not over, we did not expect to encounter an obstacle quite as scary as this. But, with some prayer and time we reacquainted ourselves with the frame of mind necessary to get through the NICU days. That frame of mind is a place where you never forget that you’re not in control. The NICU does not allow for you to believe you are in control of anything. It is like you have been dropped into a boxing ring and all you can do is roll with the punches, no telling how awfully painful the next one is going to be, nor from where it will be coming. We got pretty good at that last winter and by Thursday I think we both felt better in a way. I even made a joke about it. After Kate asked me what I had decided to give up for Lent I said, “Hope.”

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London at 9 months.

We waited until the following Tuesday for the MRI. We were told it was a rapid MRI, a brain shunt series, which would take about five minutes and London would not have to be sedated for it. The consult would follow right afterward so there would be instant results.

At Children’s we were taken to an MRI waiting room. There were no small gowns for London to wear so she wore pants half a foot longer than her legs and a top that looked like a Snuggie. Kate and I chose to be in the room for the MRI so we had to get rid of all metal we had on. Zippers were okay. After a few minutes we were ushered down a very long hallway into the MRI room, where the door was lined with a metal detector, ready to catch any metal on or in our bodies that we forgot to mention in the screening process.

This MRI room was out of a Sci-Fi movie. It would have looked right at home in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The walls were of white gloss and the lighting made the room glow an interesting mix of blue and white. London was placed on the MRI bed, which had a blue pad on it that the nurses kept calling a “blue snuggly.” They warned us that once London was on the bed, they would fold up the sides, buckle them together, and suck all the air out of the snuggly to vacuum pack London. They added, kids don’t like this very much and they start to squirm and cry.

We folded up the sides of the snuggly, snapped the four buckles up from London’s feet to her upper chest. Her head was braced with many cushions, but first earplugs were added to protect her from the noises of the MRI. And then a nice lady sucked all the air out of the blue snuggly. By all measures London seemed to enjoy the whole experience. She did not make a peep and was even smiley. The bed slid into the MRI and the scanning began. London could look toward her feet and see us standing there waving and smiling back. She made two noises of distress, but quickly calmed down when she saw us. Five minutes later, she was done, and free from the blue snuggly.

We then had to go upstairs and check in for the neurosurgery consult. Within ten minutes we were sitting with a very nice lady who did not cut to the chase right away, but by the way she spoke and by the words she chose, I had a good feeling. She gave us a complete rundown on hydrocephalus and brain shunts. We looked at images of London’s head. In one image we got to see all of her teeth, although she only has three that have broken through. The rest of them were floating at various heights above and below the mouth. We went over the symptoms of hydrocephalus. There was a lot of talk about the size of my head. This was not news, but to prove the point the lady measured my head to confirm. 63cm. She said anything above 59cm is huge. And hey, it turns out Kate’s head is sort of big too.

London, we were told, has generous ventricles, but shows no signs of hydrocephalus. Of course, we should still monitor her head size and maybe at age 2 another MRI. Apparently, the MRI images told the doctors that there was nothing to be “excited” about, an interesting choice of words. If there was an issue, excitement would not be the feeling I would have. I found myself excited because there was not an issue.

We spent a very long time talking about London’s head and why it looks like London has adjusted nicely to her generous ventricles. As soon as we were out, Kate returned to work and I called my parents who, I know, were anxiously waiting for news and probably not expecting to have waited this long.

I returned home with London, relieved to an extent I cannot describe. I spent a lot of that afternoon and evening looking at London even more than usual, admiring her strength and attitude, and imagining the day I would tell London about the first year of her life. What would I tell her about a day like today? And what about the days far scarier and more exhausting than this one? I don’t know, but I know she will love the ending.