The Number Field

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Torrential rain was not what we wanted to see in the forecast for a weekend when we had visitors and plans. We were lucky--the rain was intense but passed quickly, and we were able to carry out all our planned activities. The peak of the storm did happen while I was driving one set of grandparents from the airport to our house, but it didn't bother us too much and they were impressed by the greenness of our environment, since they had flown in from the arid northwest.

We always enjoy spending time with grandparents, but we see the others more frequently, so it was especially nice to spend time with Grandpa Tony and Grandma Renee. They wanted to experience the sights, sounds, and flavor of the area while they were here, so we spent some time as their tour guides.

Our plans included a trip to D.C. on Saturday morning, where we spent an hour looking for parking because of all the events. We drove by the Solar Decathlon and skipped the National Book Fair, but did wander into the the Worldwide Day of Play . Our guests wanted to see the White House, and it wasn't too far away, but somehow we ended up with a very hungry baby while we were still way too far away from the car where we could feed him. Elena did her best on the forced march back to the car, while the rest of us took turns carrying Roman for as long as we could manage to listen to his crying at close range.

We thought it might be nice to have burgers and fries for lunch, but the Five Guys location we went to was no longer in service, and after the morning's disastrous driving I was in no mood to drive the city streets in search of another, especially when we were right next to a freeway entrance. We headed home, but the grandparents were ready for more--they headed out to Annapolis for more sightseeing and crabcakes. Elena had fallen asleep in the car and woke up when we got home, which caused an immediate meltdown because we had promised her a trip to a restaurant with french fries. After unloading Jenny and Roman, she and I made a special trip to Chick-fil-A.

After that we didn't have time to rest before the arrival of another set of relatives: Grandma Nancy and Grandpa Kevin, along with uncles Shaun (recently back from serving a mission in Guatemala) and Mark. The men and I went to unload the last of the Barbies from their house, then start the charcoal for our cookout, while Jenny and her mom finished getting all the food ready. When the coals were hot, everyone showed up as if on cue, including my parents and Leisa and Sam, the final guests for our weekend event. As with Elena's blessing weekend, I felt especially manly running the grill at this special celebration of our child's birth.

Sunday morning was Roman's baby naming and blessing, the event that brought everyone together on this particular weekend. In our church all worthy men are ordained to the priesthood, and as a result I was the one who performed the ordinance with my relatives and close friends joining me. We stood in a circle and held Roman in our arms while I spoke words of guidance and direction. Roman was quiet for the first part, but started crying before I went on too long, so I tried not to torture him and the whole congregation too much. Of course he won't remember this event, so Jenny and I sat down that evening to record some of the things that I had said.

After church we tried to take pictures of the whole group. At the outset, Grandpa Tony reminded me that this was the hardest part of any family get-together, and by the time we were done I was in complete agreement with him. Elena was having too much fun playing with her cousins to be still for even a minute of pictures. The playing continued after everyone came back to our house to eat and spend time together. The children's exuberance was enough to get our angry drunk downstairs neighbor to come up and yell at me incoherently, as he's done once or twice before. Following those tense moments the kids were more understanding of our requests for them not to run and jump on our main floor--not because we were scared, but because we wanted to be considerate. The rest of our afternoon was pleasant, and all too soon we said our goodbyes to cousins and grandparents.

Grandpa Tony and Grandma Renee had most of another day left. Jenny took them to one more city--Baltimore this time--where they had our favorite pizza for lunch. Then I joined them at a museum for one last activity before Elena and I dropped them off at the airport. With that our eventful weekend finally came to a close, but we're sure to remember it for a long time.

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Roman enjoys tummy time, at least more than Elena did at this age. He's almost always willing to give it a try for a few minutes, and once or twice it helped to calm him down when he was fussing. He does quite well lifting up his head, which is a key metric for tummy time performance that shows up on most lists of infant milestones. Not long ago he was enjoying some tummy time, looking all around, when all of a sudden he pushed his legs in just the right way and rolled over onto his back like it was nothing. It was only a one-off performance, but we didn't expect him to do it at all for another two or three months.

I wasn't able to attend the one-month well baby checkup, but everything went well. Elena behaved very well, and created some beautiful art for me to examine when I came home from work. Roman is gaining weight at a good rate, his bilirubin levels (for jaundice) are dropping quickly, and he handled his shots like a champ. His schedule is stabilizing to the point where we can start to think about having a schedule. All in all, it seems like we're getting things under control. I can't take any of the credit--this is all Jenny and Roman's doing, with a lot of help from Elena.

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When Jenny and I were dating, one of my favorite things was to send her pictures of sunrises and sunsets that I took while rowing or coaching. It was fitting that I was on the water to meet the sunrise this morning, when for just a moment the sun hit the clouds from beneath and bathed the river and everything around with preternatural pink hues. It was the first of many birthday opportunities to connect and reconnect with my favorite things from the present and past.

I called home while driving back from coaching and Elena was already anxious for me to be quick so that I could open presents. She had already tipped me off about one of them; it was the first one she wanted me to open: a new bike jersey. I hope I get to wear it several times before winter comes. I also got an under-seat bike bag, where I can keep my repair supplies and cell phone when I ride. As we enjoyed a breakfast of wheat pancakes and bacon I opened other presents, including new clothes and two DVDs. The DVDs brought back childhood memories: Donald in Mathmagic Land and Duck Tales: The Movie . It was only a few days ago that I was telling Elena about the Disney cartoons of my childhood, although I had been thinking of Chip and Dale, as we had just seen a chipmunk.

After hitting the yard sales we met some of my family at a pizza place for lunch, where my mom had put together a bucket filled with things that were my favorites at one time or another. Included were Skittles, pistachios, candy corns, a rubber ducky, and chocolate syrup to put in my milk. I do remember that a bag of Skittles was my item of choice on the rare occasions when I would buy from the vending machines in high school. I didn't immediately remember liking chocolate milk so well, but as I reflect on that I think it was because I assumed that my preference for it was the norm; doesn't everyone prefer the chocolate kind to regular milk?

We tried to remember what my birthday dinner of choice was, but couldn't pin it down. There's a good chance that it was either pizza or lasagna. I do remember that my mother had a recipe for 'chocolate disappearing cake,' which I requested several times. The name is meant to suggest that it's so good that the speed with which people eat it makes it disappear. I don't know if it was better than any other chocolate cake, but it seemed that way to me. My mother brought cupcakes to lunch; Elena did her best to make one disappear, as did we all.

After lunch we all took simultaneous naps, which is a rare occurrence recently. I assumed one of my favorite napping postures: lying in the front room with the TV on and tuned to a sporting event. Even better, the Texas Longhorns were playing and winning when I woke up. Roman and I watched the game while Jenny was in the kitchen working on dinner and decorating the cake and Elena bounced back and forth between the two rooms.

Jenny's lasagna was especially extravagant because it had sausage and hamburger. There's still plenty left, so anyone who wants to come over to share leftovers is more than welcome. Unless we get help taking care of it, we'll enjoy it over the next several days. The same is true for the beautiful and delicious cake. Even though Elena would probably like to give it a go all by herself, we would appreciate assistance in eating the rest of it. Many thanks to all who contributed to my happy birthday, especially Jenny!

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Because of Labor day and scheduling difficulties, Roman's two week well baby appointment didn't happen until three weeks. His weight is doing well: he's gaining at a good rate and at the time of the appointment had returned to his birth weight. Despite suffering from his first cold, which he must have caught from Elena, he didn't have a fever and his chest sounded good. The hardest part of the appointment was when they had to take some blood for tests. It took a long time because his heels didn't want to give up their precious blood, and the nurse needed to draw more than usual so they could run an extra jaundice test; his eyes are still a little bit yellow. Yesterday the pediatrician's office called him back in because the samples weren't clean enough and they needed to stick him again. Jenny took him alone this time and said that it didn't take any less time and he cried just as much.

Roman's the only one who's had a recent checkup at the doctor's office, but the rest of us are monitoring our vital signs and statistics in other ways. At Elena's most recent speech therapy appointment, the pathologist ran her through a word battery. Basically, she asked Elena to say a sequence of words that contained a broad range of sounds. Elena did a great job--I've noticed her improving diction but it's good to have an expert's confirmation.

I got a gut check yesterday when I tried to do a double workout for the first time in a long time. Tuesdays are my rowing day--in the morning I coach for a college and in the evening for a group of masters rowers. I've been coaching the college rowers from my single and yesterday was no different. Even though they're mostly novices, we covered a good distance. In the evening I expected to coach from a launch, but it wouldn't start. Instead, I hopped into an empty seat in one of the boats. It gave me a different perspective on the team and the things that I as a coach ask them to do. One thing I know: today I can feel all those strokes, but luckily I'm not too sore.

Jenny's following some external statistics, and discovering that the most amazing thing about the internet is in tracking the number of people viewing your own content. She has always been amused by my fascination with this blog's page views, but now she understands because she loves watching the progress of the stuff on eBay. She can see the numbers of views, the number 'watchers' an item has, and perhaps most importantly the bidding information. It's almost addictive. Luckily, those statistics are also strong!

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When I was a child, I loved the book A Big Ball of String . In the first half the protagonist collects bits and pieces of string anywhere he finds them, then ties them end to end and wraps it all up into the titular object. It doesn't appear that he's doing this for any purpose, other than that he loves string and believes that possessing large quantities of it opens up unspecified new possibilities. In the second half of the book, the boy gets a cold and is supposed to stay in bed. However, his imagination is as active as ever--he begins to use the ball of string to rig up elaborate mechanisms to do anything that he might want to do while he's in bed. (It's unclear how much time he spends out of bed setting everything up.) Towards the end of the story, he has what must be hundreds of different strings attached to himself and everything else within his reach, and the world obeys him with a simple tug of the right one. I don't recall how the story ends; perhaps it all comes crashing down and he plots version 2.0. Maybe he wraps the string back up into a big ball after he gets better, but anticipates the next opportunity to deploy his web. At the very least I don't think it ends in unrecoverable disaster; I remember thinking that I wanted to do that whenever I read the book. My balls of string were never large enough, and I was not creative enough, to do anything spectacular with them.

I took a week off of work when Roman was born. Things were busy around here, but in the few moments when Jenny, Elena, and Roman were all asleep (and maybe at other times too), I had the chance to play around with my new toy--a new (to me) desktop computer. I'm still figuring out how to use it in conjunction with all the other computers and screens in the house. Putting it all together makes me feel like a boy with a big ball of string--remote control apps and web interfaces make it seem like I can do anything at all, from changing the TV channel with my iPod to running a math program on one computer and accessing it with another.

My most recent accomplishment along these lines has to do with photography. Jenny and I are selling things on eBay, and want to have good images of our products. I connected my camera and laptop so I could control the camera from the computer and have the images saved directly to the hard drive. I open them over the network and edit on my more powerful new computer before saving them to Jenny's computer; they never even touch a flash drive. The complicated setup allows for a very quick workflow--even though Jenny laughs at my complicated arrangements, I think she's impressed by how fast I get things done.

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Everybody loves to hold a baby, especially when he's not crying. True champions can quiet him down when he's upset, or handle him and his big sister at once. Those people usually go by another name: grandparent.

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Before some moments from Roman's birth story become exaggerated while others wither on the fields of memory, I want to capture the story as I know it now.

The doctor scheduled Jenny for induction at exactly 41 weeks, and that had a calming effect on us. Instead of hoping that every passing day would be the one, we had a deadline and focused on making final preparations. When the day finally came, with Elena safe at her grandparents' house, we ate a hearty breakfast and headed off to the hospital, checking in a few minutes before our scheduled 8:00 am arrival time. A staff member showed us to our room and shortly afterwards we met our nurses. There were two of them because one was in training and still needed a mentor to help her follow the proper procedures. Confidentiality laws prohibited them from telling us much about what was going on outside our room, but we did learn that it was shaping up to be a busy day in the maternity ward.

After Jenny answered lots of questions for the hospital's paperwork, the nurse finally hooked her up to an IV drip and the labor-inducing drug Pitocin, so that we could get the show on the road. Twenty minutes later, the mentor nurse came in and noticed that the Pitocin was not hooked to the main IV line, so she attached it and things got started for real. The trainee nurse was so chatty that it became at times awkward, which was amplified by the fact that she was clearly completing her tasks more slowly and with less precision than a trained nurse would.

Our doctor came in to discuss our plans and expectations. She said that all the signs pointed to Roman not being as large as Elena so conditions were favorable for a trial of labor. Along with that, she explained the risks of shoulder dystocia and reminded us that she would have no qualms about whisking Jenny into the operating room if she deemed it necessary. After a quick check of the progress, she headed out to her other patients--according to the nurses, she was the busiest doctor in the ward.

By the time we reached mid-morning the stretches of time when we were on our own grew longer and longer. Jenny was managing the pain well, we watched some cable TV, and I slowly worked my way through my snacks and lunch. The trainee nurse seemed amused at my regular snacking, but her mentor commended me for taking measures to keep my strength up so I wouldn't faint later. One inconvenience of being induced is that it requires constant monitoring. Even though she would have liked to spend some time walking or just standing, she could only do so for short stretches without causing a nurse or technician to hurry in and check on things.

Morning turned into afternoon as Jenny's contractions became more regular and intense. By mid-afternoon, we started to indicate that she would like to have an epidural, but it wasn't until some time later that her doctor could check that the labor had progressed enough to allow for the epidural. After that was taken care of, the anesthesiologist started his work. Jenny needed to assume a sitting position for the procedure to take place, but the pain of contractions made that quite hard. I continued to hold her hand during contractions, as I had throughout, but later on I was asked to leave the room or at least sit in the corning. I soon understood why; the sight of a bloody-handed doctor coupled with the idea of needles being stuck directly into Jenny's spinal column was enough to make me queasy and scared.

We told the anesthesiologist about the problems with the procedure during Jenny's labor with Elena. He explained that there's sometimes a false loss of resistance, making it seem like the line is in place when it isn't. I think that it helped to tell him about the previous experience, because he said that he felt the loss of resistance but kept going until he was sure that everything was in the proper place. I have only the vaguest idea of what he was actually doing, so if any doctor reads this and it doesn't make sense, the fault is entirely mine. The doctor had a warm bedside manner, which has not always been our experience with anesthesiologists.

With the epidural working well, Jenny was able to relax and even fell asleep for a while. I got some dinner at the in-hospital Subway and made some phone calls to report progress. Our doctor came back for another exam and broke Jenny's water. The nursing shift changed, and we met our very competent night nurse. The epidural stopped working, but only in one small region; however, the increased Pitocin dosage meant that the pain exceeded its previous levels, even though it was isolated to that one spot. I again loaned Jenny my hand to squeeze with every contraction. It took some time for us to convince the nurse that Jenny's pain had returned, but when the anesthesiologist finally came back in he was happy to give her an extra dose of medicine to calm things down--he was surprised that Jenny had gone on so long after it got bad again.

After the epidural was working again, we enjoyed another hour or two of rest. Jenny and I both slept at least a little bit while her body worked on the baby and night fell. At about 11:15 Jenny was starting to feel pressure, and when the nurse took a look it was clear that Roman was ready--his hair was already visible. The doctor hurried in, Jenny started pushing, and less than fifteen minutes later we had a baby; Jenny pushed like a champ. It isn't very often that a nine and a half pound newborn will be described as tiny, but in this circumstance it made sense. The doctor seemed quite happy with how Roman came out: easily, and with a minimum of maneuvering. There were only three or four medical personnel in the room--at the peak of Elena's delivery we must have had ten people helping out. Before I knew what was happening, Roman was lying on Jenny's stomach and the doctor handed me scissors so I could cut the umbilical cord.

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