tonyandkirsten.org

It’s been 9 days, and I haven’t told many people about this yet; it’s just finally starting to seem real. In the last couple of days, however, it’s started to sink in. I’ve asked for some time off work to go visit, and had to tell people why I’m going out of town. It’s real to me now.

Last week, Tuesday in fact, my dad had a minor stroke.

Aparently, he’s doing pretty well. The stroke happened in his sleep and it was on the right side of his brain. As a result, he’s lost some fine motor control on his left side and his speech is slurred. The last report is that he’s still in the hospital and will be for another week or so but that he is starting to make progress at regaining his lost abilities. Mom and Dad are both in good spirits, and this is very good.

Kirsten & I were already planning on making a trip to Iowa to see folks in Ames, but now we’re leaving another day earlier and are going first to Atlantic to see my parents. Please be praying for my parents and family.

-Tony

Today Erik is four weeks old! People seeing him for the first time often comment about how small he is — and compared to older babies, he is still pretty little.  But, he is growing fast and I am often amazed at how much heavier he feels each week.

We weighed Erik on a scale at home yesterday, and he is already about 11lbs, 1oz (give or take an ounce or so)! He started out at 8lbs, 7oz so that’s quite a gain in just a few weeks.  Madeline didn’t make it up to this weight until she was close to 2 months old (she weighed 11lbs, 7oz at her 2 month check up).

Not surprisingly, Erik is already growing out of some of his smaller clothes, like the tiny Gerber 0-3month onesies that supposedly go up to 12 lbs.  This small size of onesie has gotten even smaller since Madeline was a baby. (I’ve compared older ones and newer ones and they really have changed size a little bit!) Part of the fit issue with the clothes may be his long torso — while the 0-3 onesies are nearly outgrown in some cases, the 0-3 pants are just starting to fit correctly and up until this week he could still wear the “newborn” size of pants which supposedly only go up to 8lbs!

I’ve added new pictures to our photo gallery, so you can see for yourself how big he is getting: Erik (and the rest of us) — April 6th thru 22nd, 2007.

I also caught up on adding some pictures of Madeline from earlier this year: Madeline — February and March 2007.

I think I had ideas of things to blog about every day this past week — some days multiple topic ideas. It’s really too bad that I kept coming up with other things to do during the times I could have spent typing blog entries, because they would have been great posts about a family sushi-eating adventure (we learned that Madeline likes sushi too!), celebrating Easter, celebrating my birthday, getting out for my first “extended time” alone with God since Erik was born, attending Urban Refuge’s new family night for the first time, surviving my first trip to Target alone with both kids, the fun of spending a bunch of birthday money on a dozen items from my amazon.com wishlist, the amazing generosity of everyone who has been supplying us meals since Erik’s birth, the ongoing challenge of trying to keep Madeline from getting completely bored and driving me crazy while I am occupied with feeding and otherwise taking care of Erik, and all the ways Erik has been growing and changing during his third week of life.

Who knows — I may come back and revisit some of these topics…but at least now I feel like I’ve gotten them off my chest and I have a clean slate with which to start the new week. I hope you enjoyed that very condensed version of the highlights of my week.

(Also — I did post some new pictures in the photo gallery about a week ago, and I never mentioned that on the blog either. So, if you haven’t been looking at our pictures regularly, you might want to check out this album.)

Last night was a really long night. Or maybe a really short night, depending on how you look at it. Madeline went to bed around her usual time of 9pm, or maybe it was a few minutes later. Erik was asleep at that point, but soon woke up to eat. I was thinking to myself that I was happy his next feeding was going to be relatively early, so I could start my night of sleeping early as well.

It didn’t quite work out that way — While the feeding started around maybe 9:30 or so, he was taking lots of breaks to just stare at me or fall asleep briefly but wake up again a few minutes later…so it was taking a long time to accomplish the task of Erik getting full. The situation was aggravated by him peeing all over himself during a mid-feeding diaper change — prompting us to give him a much-needed quick bath. Around 11pm he and I were both finally going to sleep.

He was up again a little before 2am, and again wanted to take lots of breaks during eating. Around 2:45 am I started attempting to put him back to sleep, but it took until 3:30am before he really went back to sleep. He wasn’t screaming or anything like Madeline did at this age, but he was just having trouble falling asleep and needed some comfort and a few more quick “snacks” of milk before he could really drift off.

At this point I thought to myself that I could still get an okay night of sleep if he could just stay asleep for a 3 hours, which he often does after a nice long feeding. No such luck. He was awake again at 5:30am for the third slow feeding in a row, which is some kind of record for him. Normally he might have one “slow” or long feeding per night. To top it off, at 6:30 when he was done eating he decided to start his typical morning awake time a few hours early and looked bright-eyed and ready to start the day. Most mornings Tony probably would have taken over at this point, but he had left the house a little before 6am for his twice-monthly GCLI theology discussion group.

Madeline joined me in bed around 7:20am and was practically pushing me out of the bed by 7:30am. I was really wondering how I was going to survive the day considering how groggy I was at this point having gotten less than 5 hours of total sleep. Lucky for me, Tony came home between GCLI and work and made me a wonderful homemade latte.

While drinking large amounts of caffeine is not recommended for women who are breastfeeding, a little bit isn’t harmful, and I think is what has made today survivable! I expected to crash again after a few hours, but amazingly enough it’s almost 3:30 in the afternoon and I still feel great. Okay, so maybe some of God’s graciousness is involved too. Yesterday Madeline had one of her first real “meltdowns” where things all went wrong at once right while I was feeding Erik. We were both crying at the end of that one. But, no meltdowns today and Madeline is getting a little better at being patient while I feed Erik.

I was even ambitious enough today to head out with just me and the two kids. I absolutely had to at least get to the bank drive-thru to deposit a couple of checks into our account before the end of the business day, but I felt good enough to try taking a quick trip to the thrift store. That tested the patience of both me and Madeline (Erik slept through the whole thing), but it was good practice for harder things like going to the grocery store together.

Here’s hoping for shorter and better-timed feedings tonight!