Why did I think I would be able to make 30 posts in 30 days with a new baby in the house? Everything was fine right up until Friday, when we brought Ty home.

With Mary laid up because of her incision from the c-section, it falls to me to perform most of the domestic tasks around the house. And help take care of the baby.

It’s wonderful — don’t get me wrong — but I am tired, and just as I manage to catch a few moments to relax, something else needs doing.

Welcome to fatherhood.

There will be more later… but I’m not sure how soon ‘later’ will be.

Mother Nature celebrated Ty’s birth by dumping quite a bit of snow on top of Bangor.

It started late Wednesday evening and continued through Thursday morning. The road conditions were so bad at one point that as I was out shoveling the sidewalk, I saw one of the city’s plow trucks go sliding sideways across our street and get mired in the snowbank along our driveway.

They had to get a heavier piece of equipment, chain it up to the plow, and haul it out (no simple task — the heavy-duty tractor plow was having trouble getting traction as well).

It warmed up a little bit during the afternoon — enough so that the streets didn’t stay snowy. Once clear, they were just wet. Still, it was a strange bit of weather after the days a couple of weeks back where the temperature would climb up into the 50s.

Something else to make this a memorable week.

Long day today (time at the hospital, followed by work), so it’s just going to be a quick post, adding some more pictures of Ty and the delivery from yesterday.

Mary and I before the surgery

Cutting the cord

The first ‘official’ picture of the new arrival

Mommy, me, and baby makes three

Titania Lynn Harrison

April 3, 2007 @ 2:14pm
5 pounds, 15 ounces

Both mom and baby are doing well. If you’ll excuse me, I need to head over to the hospital to spend more time with them both before I work this evening.

(PS — I would have posted this last night, but our internet connection was down.)

So here’s a baby update.

A little over a month ago, at the ultrasound back in February, everything was right on target — estimated weight was about 4 pounds, 1 ounce. At the following ultrasound (about a week and a half ago) there was a concern. Estimated weight was only at 4 pounds, 11 ounces — half a pound (or more) behind the desired/typical target weight range.

This, in addition to the concerns with Mary’s gestational diabetes, back problems, and possible complications due to her medications, prompted the doctor to schedule a C-section for April 3rd.

That’s tomorrow.

At about 11:30am, we arrive at the hospital for pre-surgery prep, and at 1:30 Mary goes under the knife. It’s spinal anesthetic, so she’ll be conscious, and I’ll be there as well. A cut a few inches long, and out will come the newest addition to the family. Putting Mary’s insides back in order will take longer than the delivery.

The past week has been filled with the repetitious questions, “Are you ready?” “Are you excited?” “Are you nervous?” And, to be honest, I’ve been getting a little tired of them.

But now, with the delivery less than 24 hours away… I am starting to get those flutters of nerves in my stomach. It’s a lot like the anticipation I would feel before opening night of a show — keyed up, restless…

I’m not nervous about the delivery — we have a good doctor, and she does this sort of thing fairly regularly. I’m nervous about the next twenty years… this is a big event, and while I have friends and family who will no doubt offer support, advice, and so forth… there’s ultimately no real way to prepare for this.

You can take all the classes you want, read all the books on the shelf, but it’s likely to go out the window the first time you hold your child in your arms.

So… we will see what tomorrow brings. Until next time!

This post is going to be short, but it will introduce the idea I hope to run with this month.

Back on March 12, Wil Wheaton made a post to his blog about 30 blog posts in 30 days — kind of a NaNoWriMo for bloggers (but without the massive organization).

Since I have been rather lax in updating this blog recently, I thought I would make an effort to make daily updates in April. There’s a lot going on this month, and I would like to try and document as much of it as possible.

So… stay tuned to this space as the experiment goes forward. It’s sure to be interesting.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to work (which is decidedly uninteresting).

Student punished for spaghetti beliefs

I confess, I haven’t been very good about updating this thing lately. However, my wife informed me last night that I needed to post something, because what kind of post was that back on the fifteenth? I mean, really? “Just beware”? Sheesh…

So, here’s a bit of a story. This weekend was wet and nasty. We started with some snow on Friday night, which changed over the next several hours into sleet, freezing rain and — eventually — straight-up rain. Friday night was the mid-month Vampire LARP up at UMO, and while I was planning on attending it at first, the weather was just awful, and I decided to stay home. I have no idea what happened (if anything).

(Which reminds me… I haven’t done an episode of The More Things Change in a while. I made one post recently, but much like this blog, that one has fallen into the Pit of Can’t Be Bothered Right Now.)

Saturday was a continuation of Friday, weather-wise. The precipitation stopped around mid-afternoon. The schedule for the evening included Mage LARP on campus (which got canceled). I got out of work at 6:30pm, and came home to find that the front walk was… well… flooded.

See, the snow that fell overnight was not washed away by the subsequent rain — it just sucked it up like some kind of spongy, amorphous, slime-mold creature spawned by a Gary Gygax fever-dream. You know how snow, due to the inherent crystalline structure of ice, and its airy consistency, is less dense than water? The stuff on the sidewalk in front of our house was solid water — not ice, but water in solid form. “Snow” (if you will) that was as dense as water. Take snow, replace all the air with water… that’s what we had.

The melting runoff from further uphill (we are just on the downhill side of the curve of our street), which flowed so nicely from the cleanly-shoveled sidewalks and driveways of our uphill neighbors, came to a gurgling halt on our front walk, which had been dammed by this damned (see what I did there — clever, right?) mutant snow.

You would step on this stuff, testing its solidity… and it would lure you in… tempt you with false resilience. You shift a bit more weight onto your foot, start to bring your other foot off the ground…

And the faux-snow-beast would swallow your lead foot with a mocking schplash (that is, snowy crunch mixed with watery splash — more the latter than the former), filling your footwear of choice (in my case — foolishly — sneakers) with its icy saliva.

This would be followed by a burst of profanity, and a desperate search for some honest-to-God solid ground to put the other foot on so you don’t end up with two sodden feet.

After negotiating the treacherous ground of the sidewalk (mainly by avoiding it entirely, picking my way across the icy drift of the front yard), I get inside the house, change my socks, put my boots on, and go out to open a channel to allow the uphill floodwaters to pass by our home unimpeded… and clear out the end of the driveway, which the city plows had so thoughtfully blocked with even more of this solid water.

It was an hour of wet, annoying, back-breaking work.

So that was my weekend. Hope yours was just as enjoyable.

It is late, and I need sleep. I will update more later.

That’s all.

Just beware.

I have some more news, but I’m going to crash early tonight. Updates later this weekend.

Hello all. I’m typing this entry with semi-numb fingers… we ran out of heating oil some time in the early morning hours, and the new delivery hasn’t come yet. The temp in the house is down to about 60 F (about 15 C for those of you who use a civilized temperature scale).

That’s all for now. Send warm thoughts.