Connor, not so much. He wasn’t eating as well as he should’ve been yesterday. Today, he hit all his minimums. It would be nice if he would exceed them, but at least he’s improving. When we went back for the ten o’clock feeding, his feeding tube had been removed, which was an immense relief. Now he’s just got the IV port and his monitor leads; he’s got his whole face all to himself. Shannon’s milk has started to come in, which is a big relief. There’s not much yet, but it’s clearly on its way.

I’m fine with him staying in the hospital today; if we take him home and then have to bring him back, he starts over at zero, undergoing all the tests again, probably resulting in at least a weeks’ stay. I don’t want him until he’s good and ready.

I just hope he’s good and ready tomorrow.

Oh yeah, and tomorrow (Friday; today, actually) is Shannon and my fifth anniversary. We were planning to go to Palio and then go furniture shopping for a nice coffee table to replace the modular plastic shelving we’re currently using (it’s the wood anniversary, apparently). Whatever happens, I have a feeling we’ll have other plans.

No new pictures, just a quick status update. Connor is doing really well. He came off the Cannula (the little tubes in his nose) this morning, and weaning off of antibiotics so the IV may come out soon. The feeding tube is still in, but they’re not using it; it’s just for emergencies. At this point, he only needs to get the whole eating thing down, and he’ll be ready to come home. It may be as early as tomorrow (Thursday) morning, though he’s not eating quite as much as they’d like, so it may be a tad later.

Shannon and I went to the room last night at around 10:30 to have some family time, our first no-pressure just-the-three-of-us session we’d been able to have (not that we haven’t loved and needed everybody being there, but it was nice to have some “just us” time). Shannon wanted to do some Kangaroo Care, which is when the baby is laid skin-to-skin on the parent. So they lay him down, and put blankets over the two of them, and they both slept for almost two hours.

Most of today is pretty fuzzy for me: I’d planned to go home and get some sleep as soon as Shannon’s mom came back (she and Kelly slept at the house last night, I was on hospital duty), but there was always one more thing to take care of, so I didn’t get home until around 2:30. So between 6:00 this morning and 2:30 this afternoon, I was just trying to keep my eyes open, all while feeding him, doing my first diaper change, getting the swaddling tutorial, and so forth (like I said, it’s fuzzy). I’m about to go back in for the night.

It’s probably pretty fuzzy for him, too. His first 24 hours, he was really active, awake almost every time I saw him. Today, we can’t keep him awake to eat; he tends to fall back asleep mid-suckle. I know how he feels. I think he’s relieved to have the Cannula out (he hated that thing), and just exhausted from his first day.

Shannon’s been discharged from the hospital, but will continue to be there overnight in one of their nesting rooms, so we don’t have to shuttle her back and forth to feed and take care of Connor.  They’re starting the long process of learning to breast-feed together, which is kind of tricky since she doesn’t have any milk.  But he’s starting to figure out how to latch on and he’s starting to give a few good suckles, so progress is being made.  She’s feeling pretty uncomfortable, but otherwise doing fine.

But overall he’s doing really well. With luck, he’ll be coming home sometime tomorrow.

Here are the promised pictures, for I am Dad, the Camera Dork. I’ve put them all on our Flickr page, here.  Special thanks to those dorkettes who helped by taking some of these: Tonua, and Shannon’s boss whose name I can’t remember off the top of my head.

And, because I will not rest until he’s truly and completely mortified in his teenage years, here’s a movie.

Baby came. Connor Loughlin Nitchie. Monday, 7/16/07, 19:58. 5 lbs, 8ish oz. I’d planned a fancy poety post about the labor and the birth, about how he wasn’t there and then he was and how it’s as simple and profound as that, but the theme of today seems to be that what you plan and what happens don’t always get along. True: he wasn’t there, and then he was, but then he wasn’t breathing. Or rather, as the pediatrician put it, he was breathing, but “not consistently.” As you might expect, something like that turns the supposed beauty of childbirth into the most terrifying pocket of time imaginable, and I’d rather not talk about it, because it was awful, and besides:

He’s fine. He’s in the NICU on a ventilator, and everything else about him seems perfect. He’s on an IV for antibiotics (he spent 17 hours in a ruptured sack, which introduces major possibilities for infection), and they said before I left the hospital at 1:30 A.M. that they may be able to wean him off of the ventilator by later this (Tuesday) morning, and get him out of the NICU in a few days.

Shannon’s doing well, though a bit fuzzy. The labor, though long (as Mike noted, the water broke at 2:30 a.m., and he didn’t come until nearly 8 p.m.), wasn’t one of those horror story births you hear about (epidurals are wonderful). When it came time to push, we went through maybe 12-15 rounds, and then out he came. Shannon rocked it. And now she’s a bit fuzzy, and hopefully sleeping.

Me? I snuck home for a few hours of sleep (currently on Hour 25 of consciousness after around 2 hours’ sleep), and am finally starting to come down off the adrenaline high. I left the camera at the hospital, so I don’t have any pictures, but they’ll be along eventually. But trust me: he’s beautiful.

Bed now. More later.

Chris’s brother Mike here with a quick update.

Shannon and Chris left for the hospital this morning (7/16/07) at about 3 AM. As of about 3 PM Shannon had her epidural and was 7-8 centimeters dialated. The baby is considered “full term” in less than a week, so it is technically coming pre-mature. However, the doctor estimated it’s weight at six pounds and Shannon’s labor is progressing normally. They’re both in great spirits, but really tired.

I’ll omit any other details for the new Mom and Dad to fill you in on once they’re able (I can’t write nearly as creatively as Chris), but I’ll post with pictures (if I can figure out how) when I can.

If you enjoy my writing here, you should know I’m just doing my best James Lileks impression. He’s a newspaper columnist in Minneapolis who, on his personal website, often writes about raising his daughter in such a way that you can’t help but laugh and go, “dyawww,” at the same time. He’s just written a review of a video called, “Photographing Kids,” which you might enjoy. It starts off thusly:

When they’re born, they just look like beets. When they’re very small, they look squished, or like strangely over-inflated gnomes. Everyone always says they’re cute. Half the people are lying, and the other half are women. By the time they look like something you’d take home, let alone photograph, they’re two, and by then you’d best have taken lots of pictures. But how?

The rest is here.

Last weekend was Shannon’s baby shower, and the house was filled with women. It was just me and Gandalf the cat versus seven: Shannon, her mom and sister, Chloe the cat, our friends Maya and Tonua, and our soon-to-be sister-in-law Michelle. Fortunately for Gandy and me, they’re all pretty cool ladies, so we didn’t mind.

Not wanting to sully a feminine ritual with my dirty, dirty boyness, I made myself scarce for most of the actual shower part. I got back just in time to put the stuff together.

And what a pile of stuff it is. A bassinet, car seat, a stroller, a diaper bag, a pack-and-play (pack my butt, the thing weighs a ton), several swing-type-things, a toy set, a bunch of diapers, clothes, little bitty socks, and who knows what else. The packaging alone is going to be an adventure to dispose of. I imagine there’ll be a big sigh of relief when the cardboard shows up at the recycling center: oh, so that’s where it all went.  While we were putting it all together, I had flashes of Christmas future, I think, and I’m starting to acquire the sense of foreboding all fathers have for those three little words: some assembly required.

Still, even the assembly was fun.  It was a wonderful, busy weekend, and a good time was had by all.

Just a quick note about this blog: a few times, our friends and family have asked if it’s OK to show this blog to people outside our “inner circle.”  The answer is: of course!  One of the fun things about blogging is that it’s out there, on the internet, visible to Google, and people you’ve never heard of and will never meet are reading what you’re writing, and all without getting a publisher or an editor or any of that other twentieth-century publishing apparatus (of course, you don’t get paid, either, but I’m not in this for the money).

So yeah, if you know somebody who might get a kick out of this humble little corner of the interweb, feel free to pass it along.

“Okay, so I had this dream? Where I had to write an essay? And all I had to write on were the backs of bookmarks. And all I had to write with was a piece of chicken covered in barbecue sauce.”

These were the words with which my beautiful wife woke me this morning. Pregnancy is so weird.

Ned, a lesser celestial, is seated at a laptop at center stage. Enter the Achangel Gabriel, the Voice of God, stage left.

Gabriel: Hi, Ned.

Ned: Hey Gabe!

Gabriel: How’s that human reproduction project going?

Ned: Fantastic! I’m just putting the finishing touches on it now!

Gabriel: This isn’t going to turn out like the last project you ran, is it?

Ned: Hey, look, I know it didn’t go over so well, but you watch. I think the Australian mammals will fit in to the larger scheme of things better than you think.

Gabriel: (deadpan) Uh-huh.

Ned: I’m particularly proud of the duck billed platypus.

Gabriel: (deadpan) Of course you are.

Ned: It’s a beaver and a duck!

Gabriel: If we could get back to the humans…

Ned: What? Oh, right. Well, it starts out with sex…

Gabriel: That thing we had the presentation on last week?

Ned: Right.

Gabriel: Nice.

Ned: Yeah, I thought you’d like that. Then the sperm finds the egg in the ampulla of the fallopian tube, and then you’ve got a zygote.

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