Cradle - final product

Over the last few months, we have been writing about the progress of our cradle. Our aim was to get it completely done by April 1. While it was mostly done by then, it still had to be varnished. Jim applied the last coat of polyurethane to it two days before Annie was born! :) Here are photos of the final product (with Annie in it):


It is in our bedroom right now, as all the books and experts say that it's best to have the baby sleep in the room with you for the first few months. You'll see that she fits perfectly in it.

Jim is now learning how to do dovetail joints, and he's practicing by remaking our kitchen drawers. It's a good project, because anything he builds, even with serious mistakes in them, will be better than the drawers we have now. He did a great job remaking our kitchen utensil drawer.

Home!

Annie is home!
(She slept all the way home).

I love... I don't love... Part Deux

I Love (In no particular order)

The smell of rotting wood in a wet forest
My wife and child
The view of an approaching thunderstorm
My family
The smell of sawdust
People who want to make the world a better place
The first snow
People who think about what they are, why they are, and what they want to be
The smell of rain
People who enjoy life
New York City in the fall (Bryant Park when it snows!)
Listening to the Damnation of Faust
Thinking about why people do what they do
Hamlet (A Rat! A Rat!...)
The eternal wilderness of upstate New York
Community Opera
The feel of heavy bond paper in book
Old Homes
Being Squared
Driving in new places
Organized confusion
This ad (and this one too)
Being here

I Don't Love
Country Music (I can't even bring myself to appreciate it! Sorry)
Euphemisms
Prairie Home Companion; Prairie Style Architecture
Pretentious Poetry ('coming over the Starnbergersee' my arse!)
People who don't think
Government stimulus
Swamps

User's Manual

Please, when you design a product, write a manual which gives you a bag of screws and then asks you to pick the M-1-8-15mm screw. Good god, what on earth is the 1-8 and what does the 15mm stand for? As an engineer I did not actually find this confusing. But please, I suspect we are not all engineers.

A better solution? Manufacture the screws with a drop of colored paint on the head, and make the manual read "Put the screw with the red top in the red hole, put the screw with the green top in the green hole." Is that really that hard to do?

If you can't paint the top, how about describing things like this:
This product is manufactured with three different sized screws. Please open the bag and divide them into small, medium, and large. Now... take one small screw and put it in the hole labeled 'S' ." Can't we just do that?

Homecoming

We got the phone call this morning - Annie is scheduled to be discharged tomorrow! Yesterday after we went home from the hospital, she decided to pull out her feeding tube. Because she has been feeding so well, they decided not to reinsert it, and she's been feeding quite well since then. Perhaps in the end, it's the baby who decides when it's time to come home!

This morning, I called in to find out when she was feeding, and was told that they've been feeding her when she was awake, instead of on a set schedule. Then Mom and I went out to run a few errands, and when we got home again, there was a message that Annie was going to be discharged tomorrow, and that we should bring her car seat into the hospital so that they could test her out in it.

So today we went through a bunch of discharge requirements. They had to check Annie in the car seat by letting her sit in it for an hour with all of her probes on to make sure she could handle it and could hold her head up well enough in it. Here's a photo of Jim and the nurse putting her in the chair. She had just had her bottle and was sound asleep, so at first, she wasn't so happy about being disturbed.
But she did just fine - she slept through that. We also had to watch a video on infant CPR and choking, meet with a dietitian, and purchase some vitamin drops that Annie will have to take every day. The hospital made us an appointment with our pediatrician for Wednesday, and I assume we'll get a lot more advice then.

We left the hospital around 5 and went out to dinner - the "last supper," so to speak. :) We went to Kagawa and I had vegetarian sushi. Then we got back home and Jim put together a little chair/bouncer, whose instructions were written by someone who lacked an appropriate command of the English language. Not unexpectedly, Zeus is now sleeping in said chair.

We also picked out a few options for Annie's "going away" outfit. :) The contenders include a blue onesie that says "Miss Marvelous"; a green, long-sleeved onesie that says "Peas On Earth But Not on my Plate"; and an off-white onesie with matching blanket that says "Peaceful" in pink. We're not sure if she's going to fit in any of them because she's so little! It's supposed to be 90 degrees tomorrow, so she'll probably be comfortable in a onesie and a blanket.

Needless to say, it's all quite exciting. And scary too. Tomorrow will be quite a day.

I love... I don't love...

I love:
The smell of baby
Forsythias and magnolias in bloom
The smell of lemon blossoms in my house
Warm weather in April
Dozing with a baby on my chest
Moms
Sunny Saturday mornings with endless possibilities
Boston, the Charles River, the city at night, the city during the day, and the care at its hospitals

I don't love:
Waiting for Annika to come home
Books that are trying to give advice but just make me doubt myself
The "baby blues"
Being far apart from family
Employment uncertainty
Uncertainty in general

Patriots' Day and Marathon Monday

It's Patriots' Day here in Boston, also known as Marathon Monday, and it's a state holiday. Patriots' Day commemorates the battles of Lexington and Concord and there are always reenactments of those battles in Lexington and Concord. When I first lived in Boston, I went to part of the Lexington reenactment. We mostly just saw people dressed up like Minutemen, marching along the road. I think we might've seen a small skirmish with some red coats too.

The Boston Marathon is always on Patriots' Day. It starts in mid-morning in Hopkinton, MA (west of Boston) and usually around noon, the first of the runners are at the finish line. The marathon is a big thing in Boston. They shut down a lot of major streets and there are always huge crowds at the finish line. I've stood at the finish line several times - it is really moving to see people make it to the finish line, some running, some limping and crawling. You are allowed to run if you fit into either of these categories: 1) You have qualified for the marathon by running one or two other marathons with a specific time; or 2) You are running for a charity. My friend Jen ran the marathon once. She ran for a family friend who had died of cancer, and raised money for one of the cancer organizations. I think it's especially moving to see the people running for charities make it to the finish line, because many of them aren't even runners. They're just trying to challenge themselves and do a good deed in the process.

For me, Patriots' Day marks the beginning of real spring. The trees and flowers are in bloom, and it's usually much warmer and spring-like than the "official" first day of spring (March 21). Only a few weeks until I can plant my garden.

Annie remains in the hospital and will probably be there for at least a week longer. She is still on oxygen, still in the isolette and last night they had to put a feeding tube in because she's not eating enough to gain weight. She's actually losing weight. She is very good hands at the hospital, although I desperately want to bring her home. At this point, because taking her out of her bed and holding her expends energy, we have been discouraged from holding her very much. We can hold her around meal times, which happen every three hours. This is pretty hard - I really could sit there all day and hold her.

My mom is visiting from Buffalo and arrived on Saturday night, staying til Wednesday morning. It's good to have her here because I really need the extra support right now. Jim went to work today and my mom and I are going to go to the hospital to do Annie's 11:00 feeding.

I guess this starts the first full week of my maternity leave. It's weird. I called into work last week to make sure the transition was going smoothly. I miss my bosses and my clients and the work itself. I had a lot of projects that I was trying to plow through before the baby came, and now they have to finish them for me. It's hard to let go, especially for a control freak like me. I guess the transition isn't just happening at work - I'm going through it too.