tonyandkirsten.org

Madeline: Mom, are you done milking the baby yet?

Me: It’s called “nursing” or “breastfeeding” not “milking.”   And besides, don’t you think it’s more like Kai is milking me?

—-

Madeline: Daddy, did you play computer games when you were a kid?

Tony: Not really. There weren’t very many computer games when I was your age, and we didn’t have the internet at all.

Madeline: What did you DO?!?

—

Madeline: I like baby Kai a lot. I don’t think I would ever want to kill him.

Me: Um, Madeline, do you know what the word “kill” means?

Madeline: I guess it’s something bad, right? Like I wouldn’t ever want to do anything bad to him.

Me: Well, that’s putting it lightly! I really wouldn’t recommend talking at all about killing people.

—

Madeline: Guess what, we learned about two more babies in our class at church today

Me: Oh, what were their names?

Madeline: Jacob and See-Saw!

Me: [Side splitting laughter; Tony has to explain what's so funny about that]

Many people have been noting how similar Kai looks to how Erik looked as a baby, so I thought I would find some pictures where we could make a direct comparison.

Here’s Erik at 4 days old:

And here’s Kai wearing the same shirt, laying on the same couch, at 3 days old:

They definitely look very similar!  Though it is a little bit harder to tell in the pictures, Kai’s skin tone, hair and eye color are all darker than Erik’s are.  Erik’s skin tone is very fair like mine, while Kai (and Madeline) take more after Tony in that category.  Madeline was born with dark brown eyes, Erik’s were light blue from birth (and stayed blue!), and so far Kai has more of a dark gray-blue color to his eyes.  His seem to be more of a “baby” color that will change to something else as he gets older.  Perhaps his eyes will be hazel like mine?

Kai also seems very similar in temperament to what Erik was like as a baby.  Just like Erik, Kai seems very easy going and is a good eater and sleeper.  We haven’t had any problems with nursing, and as soon as my milk came in, he was sleeping about three hours at a time at night and easily going back to sleep between feedings (unlike Madeline, who liked to be awake and screaming between feedings in the middle of the night as a newborn).

Madeline and Erik seem to be adjusting pretty well to having Kai join our family.  We haven’t had any obvious jealousy issues thus far, though I can see that we will probably have some patience issues once Tony is back at work and there is only one grown-up here to help the kids.  I think it might take them some time to get used to the fact that there will be times during the day when it will be 10 or 15 minutes or more before I can get something for them or help them with something because I am feeding the baby.  Madeline obviously went through this once before when Erik was a baby, but since then she has gotten used to mommy almost always being available to her within a minute or two to respond to her requests.

Besides the logistical challenges of learning how to get out of the house and go places with three kids in tow, I think our biggest challenge once it is just the kids and I here will be finding a good schedule that work with a newborn, a toddler and a preschooler.  We had a pretty good schedule going for the first couple months of the fall, but then as I got further along in the pregnancy, the holidays hit, and so on…well, the schedule pretty much went out the window! For the six weeks or so before Kai was born, we were pretty much just trying to get through each day with a minimum of disaster and without me going completely crazy from exhaustion. That meant extra TV and computer time many days, and just more “entertainment” for the kids in general rather than purposeful use of time.

I’m sure we’ll still have some days like that in the weeks ahead, especially on days following nights when Kai does decide he needs to eat all night long (and every baby has those nights, even the “good sleepers”).   But overall I think a bit of structure will make our lives easier and more productive in the long run (though it might hurt a bit getting there!).  Tony is home with us for another week or so, until he starts his new job on Monday the 23rd.  Then the adventure of having three kids at home with me really begins!

Since Kai is currently a relatively unusual name, I thought it would be appropriate to blog about why we gave Kai his name.

The name Kai, as near as I can tell, has two primary origins. One seems to be roughly Indoeuropean, meaning either “Lord”, “Warrior”, “Keeper of Keys” or “Rejoice” as Caius / Gaius in Latin (Cai / Kai in Welsh and German and Kaj in Scandinavian) and Anglicized as Kay. The Arthurian legend depicts Cai (Sir Kay) as Arthur’s foster brother and one the first and most loyal of the Knights of the Round Table (also hot-headed). The other origin is Pacific, meaning “Ocean” in Japanese and Hawaiian.

All that said, we didn’t pick Kai because of any of the mentioned meanings of the name. Kai has an entirely different meaning to me.

Shortly after our first son was born, my dad unexpectedly passed away. Erik was about 3 1/2 months old. I had already been thinking about how my Dad raised me, the ways that we spent time together and what lessons he had taught me (both intentional and not) about what it was to be a man. After Dad passed my Mom, brother, sisters, in-laws, neices, nephews, aunts and friends spent copious time telling stories and remembering Dad. All this really brought his parenting (for which I am very grateful) into sharp focus for me. I decided that there was much of what and how Dad taught me that I wanted to repeat with my son.

I also began to think that if God were to give me another son, I wanted to preserve these thoughts by giving my son my Dad’s name. His name was Kay Russell Hill, a name that even in 1944 had quite a Boy-named-Sue feeling to it. Since Kai is a related name to Kay and only one letter off, I suggested the name to Kirsten after we found out she was having a boy. We tried it out for a while and quickly became settled on calling him Kai.

So while Kai is indeed nice masculine sounding male name, to me it is primarily a reminder of Dad, our relationship and the legacy that he left me to pass to my family.

We welcomed Kai Russell Hill to our family yesterday (February 6th) at 3:49pm.  He weighed 7lbs, 15 oz. at birth and is 20 inches long.

For those who are interested, here are all the details of his birth.    We arrived at the hospital at 8am on Friday, February 6th for a scheduled induction.  I was 41 weeks, 5 days along in the pregnancy — 12 days past my due date.  While anything under 42 weeks is still considered in the range of “normal,” induction is fairly commonly recommended at some point before a woman passes 42 weeks gestation.

The induction began around 8:45am with a pitocin drip.   The whole morning was pretty uneventful, other than a couple times when Kai’s heartbeat dipped down for 30-45 seconds or so before coming back up to normal.  Especially since I was 12 days past my due date, they were watching this very closely because it can be a sign that there is meconium in the amniotic fluid or that the baby isn’t responding well to the stress of labor. (Luckily, neither of which proved to be the case.)

I was having contractions all morning that were growing ever so slightly stronger and closer together, but the contractions were really not very painful.  While this was great in one sense, it also meant that the labor was not progressing very quickly.  Around 2:15 or 2:30, I was having contractions that were maybe 3 minutes apart, but I was also still only 3cm dilated and 80% effaced.

The midwife went ahead and broke my water at this point.  I was very nervous about this, because the act of the doctor breaking my water was very painful in my labor with Madeline.  It was a much better experience this time, and not painful at all.  I think the water breaking was just the cue my body was looking for, since things really started to move quickly at this point.

A little before the midwife checked my progress and broke my water, the nurse had asked me if I wanted to try a birth ball in order to be up and moving around, use different muscles, etc. (It’s basically a huge ball that is inflated enough to support a woman’s weight, but is soft enough to provide comfortable support when sitting on it).  I moved back to the birth ball after my water had been broken, and I was so thankful to have this option.  The contractions were getting more painful and closer together fairly quickly, but I was able to get some great body positions while on the birth ball that made the contractions as bearable as possible.

Some time later (maybe a little before 3:30pm?) the nurse and midwife suggested I move back to the bed, partly because they were having trouble continuing to get a good fix on the baby’s heartbeat, but also because (as Tony told me after it was all over) when they could get his heartbeat it was obviously getting lower.  Also, even though they started diluting the pitocin in order to try and space out the contractions just a little bit, my body kept accelerating the contractions on its own. So, I am sure it was clear to them that I was nearing the pushing phase of labor.

I took a few very strong contractions while moving from the birth ball to the bed.  Then, just about as soon as I was laying down on my left side in the bed (the position my midwife suggested), I started to feel the sensations associated with being ready to push! I was pretty surprised, since I figured I might be in for quite a bit longer time experiencing strong, painful contractions.  After a few small pushes, Kai was really ready to make his entrance, and I gave a few more strong, painful pushes to get him out.  Tony tells me the whole pushing phase lasted about 15 minutes,  and that I was mostly on my side when Kai was born.  I was surprised to have given birth in that position, but it seemed to have worked well and I pushed for (I think) about half the time I did in my labor with Erik.

I was so happy to have made it through the induced labor relatively quickly (at least realatively quickly once things really got started) and without needing any pain relief.  I had the epidural in my labor with Madeline, and it was actually not a bad experience (and made a long labor much more bearable), but having labored naturally with Erik I knew my body was capeable of it and I wanted to be able to do that again.

Kai has been a great baby so far — he is an eager eater and yet was nice enough to only wake up once for a true “middle of the night” feeding last night, thus allowing us to get a fairly good night’s sleep.

We’ll be here at Fairview Riverside hospital until sometime on Sunday, then we’ll be heading home to begin adjusting to life as a family of five!

The little guy inside me is being quite stubborn about wanting to come out and meet us in the big, bright world.  I never thought that I would be later with #3 than with #2, but that’s exactly what has happened.  I’m nine days overdue as of today, and I was only four days late with Erik.  The end is definitely in sight no matter what — I had a midwife appointment this morning and they will induce labor by sometime on Friday if my body can’t get things going by that time. I would be 42 weeks along on Sunday, and it’s rare for doctors or midwives to allow women to go past 42 weeks these days (and of course inductions aren’t scheduled for the weekend!).

If I make it to tomorrow morning without going into labor I’ll also be having an ultrasound tomorrow to check on the fluid levels around the baby and in general how the baby is doing.  I thought it was kind of funny that I will have the ultrasound less than 48 hours before either going into labor naturally or being induced regardless of the results…but I guess that information is important to them regardless of how things proceed from there.

I feel very fortunate to not be terribly physically uncomfortable despite the pregnancy lasting as long as it has.  Of course I have been having some contractions here and there, but in general I haven’t been feeling too awful.  The psychological stress of continually not being able to make plans is probably worse for me.  For the past two or three weeks, I have been nervous to leave the house alone with the kids for fear of going into labor while out and about (my labor was very fast with Erik, so I potentially might not have much warning between the time when I knew labor was really going and the time when the contractions would be so bad that I wouldn’t be able to drive!).   Madeline likes to plan ahead as much as I do, and every day she asks me not, “what are we going to do today?” but, “what are we going to do tomorrow?”!  It has been getting old to tell her every day, “I don’t know what we are doing tomorrow — it depends on how I’m feeling and if the baby comes or not.”

Until maybe the past couple of days, these last few weeks of pregnancy really did go by quite quickly.  I spent a fair amount of time in early January working on my editing for the Spring issue of the Faithwalkers devotional (formerly Daylights), and then once that was done I tackled a ton of projects to get ready for baby’s arrival — everything from reorganizing and sorting the kids’ toys to pre-washing and organizing the cloth diapers for the new baby to getting stocked up on groceries.  The projects were pretty much done by about a week ago, so the kids and I have enjoyed lots of time to play while we waited around to see when baby would show up.

Tony is home with us now starting this week, and will be home until at least February 16th.  We’re trying to make the best of waiting for baby and enjoying the time we have to spend as just the four of us.  When Tony returns to work sometime around the 16th, he will actually be heading to a different job.  He was offered a three month contract position at a company in St. Paul doing work that relates more to the scientific computing side of his skills and experiences than to his experience in the field of Chemical Engineering.   Assuming things go as planned, they would really like him to stay on as a permanent employee once the three months are up.  But even if something were to happen and they couldn’t hire him full time after the contract position is over, he would be no worse off than if he would have stayed at his job at the University of Minnesota, since that job would have ended in May anyway.

So look for baby news to be coming soon…we’ll be a family of five by sometime Friday at the latest!