Now that the infant sub­ject is mobile, I’ve been able to engage it in the sec­ond round of my Infant Exper­i­men­ta­tion Project. I was assisted in these exper­i­ments by the infant’s mater­nal unit.

WARNING

You are likely to find the fol­low­ing record­ings quite boring.

Time Trial Mark 1

Sum­mary

In which I attempt to gain empir­i­cal data regard­ing the subject’s aes­thetic pref­er­ences and gauge its innate toy value cost/benefit ratio analy­sis abil­ity. A slight infant mal­func­tion at the end of the video stopped this exper­i­ment prematurely.

Data

Results

Sub­ject shows inabil­ity to rec­og­nize that it is being exper­i­mented upon. Subject’s aes­thetic devel­op­ment extends only to taste and tex­ture. Sub­ject has a tummy ache.

Time Trial Mark 2

Sum­mary

Another iter­a­tion of the exper­i­ment, this time using food as the moti­va­tor, rather than toys. Sub­ject given trail of food to fol­low with lit­tle to no dis­trac­tion and pater­nal encour­age­ment. An eas­ier ver­sion of the pre­vi­ous experiment.

Data

Results

Sub­ject is not quite as smart as a dog.

Agility Drill

Sum­mary

This exper­i­ment charts the subject’s poise, bal­ance, agility and fast-twitch mus­cle capa­bil­ity using a state-of-the-art spring-loaded restraint that was cus­tomized from a sex swing that shrank in the wash. Remem­ber to only pur­chase items made from pre-shrunk cotton.

Data

Results

Sub­ject con­tin­ues to exhibit no knowl­edge that it is being exper­i­mented on. Sub­ject also shows no signs of poise, bal­ance, agility or fast-twitch mus­cle capa­bil­ity. Sub­ject does, how­ever, appear to be hav­ing a good time.

Abra­ham had to be restrained by the police today for the first [and hope­fully last] time in his life. A cop helped me buckle him into the shop­ping cart at the grocery.

Eat­ing is some­times a fraught affair.

Abra­ham and Deb­bie were impromptu shang­haied into appear­ing in the Novem­ber 2004 Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion Cuya­hoga County Board of Elec­tions Vote by Mail video a cou­ple of weeks back. Now that it has made its way onto the air­waves and YouTube, he’s offi­cially famous.

Deb­bie looks pretty good too. ROWR.

With all of the stuff I’ve been up to lately, doing a bit of writ­ing has fallen by the way­side. Work on the house is still incom­plete, but has slowed down because what remains isn’t crit­i­cal quite yet. Once all of the paint­ing is com­plete, and I’ve man­aged to get all of the doors rehung, there will be pictures.

I’ve gone to see The Dark Knight, which was the first time since Abra­ham graced us with his pres­ence that Deb­bie and I man­aged to get out alone. I went to the zoo, where the boy and I became an exhibit to all of the women around when Deb­bie went to the restroom. I went to Whiskey Island on Fri­day after­noon for a pic­nic, took a walk by myself to get some alone time with nature, watched swal­low bug-catching, a swallow-heckling ori­ole, and played with a ground­hog for a lit­tle while.

Last Mon­day my office was one of the three County offices raided by the FBI and IRS-CID as a part of their inves­ti­ga­tion into cor­rup­tion by County offi­cials. Appar­ently they came over the inter­com and told folks to go to the can­teen [which is what every­where else is called a lunch room]. The design room keeps the over­head speaker turned off because we’d rather not lis­ten to the best in soft rock from the 80s, 90s and now, so I didn’t hear the announce­ment. I hap­pened to be both on my com­puter and on the phone, both no-nos, when the FBI knocked on the door. I’d already man­aged to tell Deb­bie every­thing she needed to know to get the scan­ner at home work­ing though, so it was no big deal.

I went to the can­teen, where every­one else was, and filled out a sheet that asked for basic infor­ma­tion and job duties, and then got to take the rest of the day off.

When my mom rolled up here for the 4th of July, we planted a tree for Abra­ham. I had a tree planted for me when I was born as well. I even wrote about it for Young Authors, so you can read that here. Although that pic­ture is from a month ago, Abra­ham is already much big­ger, I’d say near 12 pounds. He’s started smil­ing and chuck­ling a lit­tle, and I can actu­ally sort of play with him now. The only rough part is that when I’m at work he’s in his best mood, so when I come home I get to inter­act with him for the part of the day when he’s at his worst. It gets frus­trat­ing at times.

I got sea­son tick­ets to the Notre Dame foot­ball games this year, blessed be my mono­gram. I don’t know that I’ll be able to get to more than one of them, however.

The weather has been won­der­ful, and today looks as if it will con­tinue that pat­tern. Din­ner is a daily choice between eat­ing on the porch or watch­ing some old school Mup­pet Show episodes. I recently dis­cov­ered that I can get Mr. Wiz­ard on DVD as well. Abraham’s going to talk to folks at school about these crazy shows that aren’t on TV any­more and no-one is going to know what he’s talk­ing about except his teachers.

I haven’t been to a rock and roll show in for­ever. It hurts.

Watch­ing Abra­ham is a never-ending source of fun. At first he had no voli­tion, at all, but here we are three weeks later and he’s already fig­ured out that he has the abil­ity to con­trol his own body. He’s not very good at it, but I can already see some def­i­nite human behav­ior emerg­ing. He’s a good boy.

In the evening he’s usu­ally over­stim­u­lated from all the new things he’s learned dur­ing the day, so while he feeds he fusses might­ily. Some­times he gets full and doesn’t really know what is going on and becomes incon­solable by Debbie.

I’m an expert, how­ever, at both wak­ing and get­ting the boy to sleep. Here’s a demon­stra­tion of the former:

The lat­ter basi­cally con­sists of me lay­ing him across my body and let­ting him hear my heart­beat and look at my face until he’s out like the fat kid in dodge­ball. Takes no more than 10 min­utes, every time.

I’ve been read­ing him Robert Bly’s The Night Abra­ham Called to the Stars and The Sil­mar­il­lion.

The other day I referred to him as Lord Squirmocu­lous, and treated him as if he were a com­mand­ing alien from an alien inva­sion force; dis­guised as a baby, of course. This has been quite fun, and we’ve been run­ning with it. Say­ing: “Lord Squirmocu­lous com­mands x!” and “Your forces are leav­ing Squirmoc­ula now, sir!” and “If you don’t lis­ten to Lord Squirmocu­lous, he’ll unleash the Squirmo­culizer!” Poor lit­tle guy, he has no idea. Heh.

Rou­tine

Abra­ham is one week old and I’ve still not man­aged to get rid of him. I took him to Petco the other day to see if any­one wanted to adopt him. That didn’t work, so I went to Home Depot to try and return him there. Home Depot will take just about any­thing back but they wouldn’t take the kid.

We’ve been told that rou­tine is the most impor­tant thing for a new­born, so we’ve been try­ing to estab­lish one. Abraham’s in utero rou­tine was to wake up at 10pm and be up from 2-5am every night. This has con­tin­ued for the most part ex utero. We’ve been try­ing to change that using var­i­ous meth­ods. The first is bath time. Every night at 8, and try to keep him awake until we feed him right before 10. By doing this we hope to get a good start to our sleep. This only sort of worked, we neglected to real­ize that by sleep­ing all day, of course he’s going to party all night. Yes­ter­day we kept him up with fre­quent small feed­ings and he decided to stay awake for a few hours on end on his own. Last night he only fed twice, at 1:30am and at 5. I barely woke up in my mem­ory, but Deb­bie says I was fuss­ing nearly as much as the baby when he cried.

Nam­ing Convention

We chose Abra­ham, after a mod­er­ate amount of delib­er­a­tion, because we wanted a strong, bib­li­cal name that isn’t used all of the time. The name Abra­ham cer­tainly fits that bill, and I hope my son grows into it; and becomes as strong and hon­or­able as his namesake[s]. The bib­li­cal Abra­ham is huge fig­ure in Islam, Judaism and Chris­tian­ity, and Kierkegaard [and other philoso­phers, so I’ve been told] have used the story about him and Isaac as a frame to ana­lyze eth­i­cal and moral behavior.

There’s also Abra­ham Lin­coln; a pil­lar of human­ity if ever there was one.

In terms of nick­names, I’m not a fan of Abe, but I like Bram. And Abra­ham rolls off the tongue so well that there isn’t much need to shorten it. Every­one liked the name except for the cross­ing guard.

Depend­ing on who you ask, you’ll get a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent answers for his mid­dle name. Orig­i­nally, I didn’t want to give him one, Abra­ham Har­vey being impos­ing as it is. But in Feb­ru­ary, my grandma died. Her name was Frances Sue. I con­sid­ered hav­ing a boy named Sue for a brief time, but set­tled on Fran­cis, which works out well since Debbie’s father is named Frank.

Mis­cel­la­neous

Abra­ham wig­gles alot.

Chronol­ogy

Deb­bie started hav­ing fre­quent con­trac­tions on Sat­ur­day morn­ing at 5am. We went to the hos­pi­tal later that after­noon to see what was up, the con­trac­tions were about 5 min­utes apart. We get to the hos­pi­tal and, of course, they slow down. After exam­i­na­tion, Deb­bie was still only about 2cm, so they sent us home. She was still hav­ing con­trac­tions, and we’d told the con­trac­tor work­ing on our house that we wouldn’t be back for a few days, so we stayed at her par­ents house. We didn’t get much sleep though, as con­trac­tions con­tin­ued through­out the night, increas­ing grad­u­ally in pain. Sun­day morn­ing we went back to the hos­pi­tal and found out that Deb­bie was at 4cm. Go time. 13 hours later: Abraham.

Cal­cu­lat­ing labor time is not exact. Tech­ni­cally we could count it from when she started hav­ing her con­trac­tions early Sat­ur­day morn­ing, a 44 hour labor, but I was told that hos­pi­tals usu­ally count labor from 4cm, which would make the labor the afore­said 13 hours. I’m inclined to go with labor last­ing from the first signs of preg­nancy through the birth, because it appears to be work the entire time. Deb­bie was cer­tainly doing quite a bit of work start­ing Sat­ur­day morn­ing. Labor, in gen­eral, burns about 1000 calo­ries an hour. Debbie’s labor plan was to keep her options open. The inten­tion was a nat­ural child­birth if at all pos­si­ble. Since she likes being in the tub, we aimed for a water­birth at first. The only prob­lem was that Abraham’s head had entered the pelvis a bit crooked. This stuck things for a few long [exhaust­ing] hours. The pain was increas­ing and her energy level was wan­ing, so she took a lit­tle Nubain to take the edge off. Being in the tub was help­ing, but after awhile it slows labor down. Even­tu­ally we got out of the tub alto­gether, because Deb­bie had no energy left and asked for an epidural.

After the epidural, we both took a brief nap before things got going again. She was already at 10cm so it was push­ing time, for almost three hours. Deb­bie got the head very close, but it seemed to get stuck again, so Colleen, the most excel­lent mid­wife sug­gested using a bit of suc­tion to get him crowned. She left, and Deb­bie decided she wanted to do it on her own, and with the roar­ing encour­age­ment of the nurs­ing staff, man­aged to get the baby crown­ing by the time Colleen came back with the doctor.

I stopped hold­ing Debbie’s legs, stopped keep­ing her focused, stopped feed­ing her pop­si­cles, and put on my catcher’s mitt. It was time to catch the baby. What looked like a ten­nis ball was already crowned, I thought, “Oh, he’s almost here”, and then after another push, a HUGE, blue-purple, softball-sized head popped out. My thoughts were now noth­ing more than inar­tic­u­late gib­ber­ings of shock and joy. The cord wasn’t wrapped com­pletely around his neck, but it was against it, and there was quite a bit of meco­nium, so Colleen cleaned his nose and mouth before I pulled him the rest of the way out.

My son was then taken from me. Taken. From me. But they gave him to Deb­bie, which is okay, I guess. I cut the cord with one snip. It is tough like a fleshy elec­tri­cal cord. They whisked him away to the warmer while I heard him start to scream lustily. I don’t really remem­ber what I told Deb­bie, but I went over to “check out” the baby. What I was really doing was guard­ing him. Guard­ing my son. He was bright red and squalling. A beau­ti­ful, healthy boy. I looked over just in time to see the pla­centa plop out of Deb­bie. I wasn’t much inter­ested in the pla­centa, so I hung out with my son for a bit before going back to Deb­bie and get­ting a few pic­tures. I wanted a good shot of me deliv­er­ing the baby, but with all of the excite­ment, it didn’t turn out that way.

Debbie’s par­ents came over that night to meet lit­tle Abra­ham. We ended up going to sleep around 3, only to be woken for pok­ing and prod­ding around 7. The first day in the hos­pi­tal went quite well. The staff, includ­ing the stu­dents, were help­ful and com­pas­sion­ate. The sec­ond day, though, was hell. Deb­bie had been up until 5 try­ing to feed the baby and was com­pletely out of energy. Our morn­ing started with a bar­rage of loud knocks on our door, and a male stu­dent who was any­thing but quiet for 7 in the morn­ing. Peo­ple were pok­ing and prod­ding Deb­bie for most of the morn­ing and after­noon. She was exhausted and all she needed was peo­ple to lis­ten to her when she expressed her needs. Instead, when she said she was dizzy, they started ask­ing too many ques­tions and just made things worse. All she needed was food. Which took about 2 hours to arrive. We’d been men­tion­ing to peo­ple all day that she wasn’t get­ting any rest because of all the check­ups. At one point she was lec­tured by a nurse that she should be sleep­ing when the baby sleeps; which she can’t very well do with peo­ple wak­ing her up every half hour. Even­tu­ally she was so tired that she started cry­ing when a nurse asked, for about the mil­lionth time that day, how her bot­tom felt on a scale of 1 to 10. The nurse imme­di­ately asked Deb­bie if she had a his­tory of depres­sion in her fam­ily. That set Deb­bie off. “I’m just TIRED!” she yelled. Evi­dently after the nurse left, she finally spread the word [appar­ently the Do Not Dis­turb sign on our door wasn’t a clue to them] and we stopped get­ting inces­sant vis­i­tors. It only took about 12 hours. Pretty much the only upside to the day was a visit from my mom. She came up for a cou­ple of hours to meet her grand­son and it was great to see her.

We let the baby go to the nurs­ery for most of the night so that we could catch some shut eye. He got bottle-fed once through the night so the upshot was that we got to sleep for about 6 hours, straight. I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of the hos­pi­tal by this point, they had a hide-a-bed that was lumpier than a toad’s back and was too short and angled to sleep on com­fort­ably. My neck and back are killing, but it was nice to be allowed to stay in the room with Deb­bie and Abra­ham. I’d been out mak­ing errand end runs to home and the gro­cery, since Deb­bie is now hun­grier than when she was preg­nant. We made it out of the hos­pi­tal a bit after noon, and the day was much more relaxed after that.

Mis­cel­la­neous

We didn’t get Abra­ham cir­cum­cised. Appar­ently only 50% of boys get cir­cum­cised any­more, it is more tra­di­tional than med­ical. No one has vehe­mently dis­agreed with our deci­sion apart from a few of my coworkers.

Let­ting Abra­ham sleep on and next to me makes me real­ize just how much I am an ani­mal. To him I must seem this great, furry breath­ing source of com­fort and pro­tec­tion, when I nuz­zle him I remind myself of all of those nature doc­u­men­taries where crit­ters care for their young. I’ve got one for myself now, and the chal­lenge of father­hood suits me well. I’d been want­ing a new dif­fi­cult and mean­ing­ful chal­lenge in my life. I love him.

Sleep­dep is already in full effect. Abra­ham only needs fed about twice dur­ing the night, but it isn’t that easy. If he does eat right away, that takes about half an hour, fol­lowed by burp­ing, pos­si­ble dia­per chang­ing and get­ting the lit­tle feller asleep. Then we have a chance to use the restroom and grab a bite to eat our­selves. By the time all that is taken care of, it is pretty much time to feed him again. And that’s only if things run smoothly. Some­times he won’t latch, will fuss because he’s too hun­gry to sleep and too tired to eat, or just because 10pm and 3am were his favorite times to party in the womb. I’m get­ting the idea that I’ll never catch up on sack time.

I’ve lived in this house for almost a year and I’m still not moved in. The work on fix­ing the place up con­tin­ues, and tomor­row the embiggen­ing of the bath­room and closet [to the dearth of the tini­est bed­room] begins. Since we’re in the process of paint­ing the entry room, this means that 4 of the rooms can’t have any­thing in them right now. It will be 5 if we don’t man­age to com­plete the paint­ing and quarter-rounding of the entry room by the time the big room by the kitchen is ready to have the floor­ing put down.

We’re pretty stressed and cramped, liv­ing in two rooms with the floors cov­ered in crap from the other rooms, and the kitchen. We’ll have to go upstairs for most of the bath­room needs. Plus, an immi­nent emi­nent like a thief in the night baby on the way. Com­pared to the hec­tac­u­lar hec­tic­ness of our cur­rent lives, being set­tled in with a fin­ished house and a fin­ished baby seems pos­i­tively cromulent.

Yes­ter­day was a bit of a wash in terms of accom­plish­ment. I had some appli­ances deliv­ered ass-early in the morn­ing, which turned out to be excel­lent, because by 9am I was at the hos­pi­tal with Deb­bie. She’d been hav­ing erratic con­trac­tions all night and since she’s 32 weeks along Colleen our mid­wife had us come in for a checkup. Turns out Debbie’s cervix was 75% effaced, in prepa­ra­tion for labor. I was an early bird and it looks like the kid will be too. But not quite yet. They gave Deb­bie a drug that was orig­i­nally used for asth­mat­ics to stop the con­trac­tions, 2L of saline and a steroid shot for the kid to help develop his lungs in case he does come early. Appar­ently male lungs develop slower than females. Deb­bie had to go back to the hos­pi­tal for another steroid shot today and she’s on 3 weeks of bed rest. Gotta keep him in there as long as possible

We were at the hos­pi­tal for 6 hours, so I didn’t get to accom­plish all the things I wanted in the morn­ing, includ­ing hav­ing my friend Chris come and install a faucet, Punk Rock Soft­ball, and hang­ing out with Rafeeq. Instead, it was time to clean and orga­nize. I was emo­tion­ally and phys­i­cally exhausted so I crashed at 9:30 and didn’t wake up until 8:15.

Today I just went ahead and installed the faucet myself. It took a cou­ple of hours, but I did it well, and now the upstairs is ready for renters.

Appar­ently, if I behave myself, I’ll be allowed to catch the kid as Deb­bie pushes him out. I’ve been prac­tic­ing. A few weeks ago I bought a catcher’s mitt; I’m soft­en­ing it up with mink oil and keep­ing it wrapped around a soft­ball to get a nice pocket cre­ated for the kid’s head.

Catch­ing my son will be the best thing to ever hap­pen to me.

• $110 will get you approx­i­mately 250 items of sec­ond­hand baby clothes. No one needs to buy us any­thing resem­bling a baby cloth for at least the next 9 months.
• The Bobby web­site acces­si­bil­ity val­ida­tor is no longer avail­able online. It is now bun­dled into a piece of IBM soft­ware for pur­chase only. This makes it harder, not eas­ier, for web design­ers to build acces­si­ble websites.
• It is faster to ride RTA down­town than drive, since the E 9th and Euclid inter­sec­tion snarls every­thing up. It is actu­ally faster to exit on E 22nd Street and backtrack.
• No one is used to the bus lanes yet, they’re being used as right turn lanes, which fur­ther snarls traffic.
• After 3 years of pay­ing my con­sol­i­dated col­lege loans on time, I just received at 1% reduc­tion in the inter­est rate. Now it is at 2.375%, which is awe­some. I can pay it off faster now.

Onesy Ideas:

• An arrow on the front point­ing to the mouth with Food writ­ten under it; on the back­side, an arrow point­ing to the butt with Poop writ­ten over it.
• A snake mouth on the bot­tom half of the onesy; so it looks as if the baby is being eaten.
• Basic ani­mal one­sies, all fero­cious and rav­en­ous look­ing; not cute and cuddly.
• Gender-benders: Girl-onesies with sparkly, vicious, toothy T-Rexes; pink and pur­ple fire trucks; etc. Boy-onesies with camo-print pranc­ing ponies.
• His and Her: Mommy Loves Me; Daddy Doesn’t and Daddy Loves Me; Mommy Doesn’t.

Preg­nant Woman T-shirt Ideas [all of these prints go on the lower part of the shirt, so the belly fills them out]:

• Disco Ball [thanks to Noah Pfarr]
• Death Star
• Globe
• A mon­ster mouth with sharp teeth [to dis­cour­age peo­ple from touch­ing the preg­nant belly].

13 weeks after
tears and trepidation,

it hap­pens quickly. You
wrought to sound;

she the seashell
woman you hide inside.

The day you first spoke to
me; I put my ear

to our blood ontology.

like first steps,
like the sea.