I Miss Owen

It's been nice being back at work, but I have to admit that I open my picasa web album at least once a day and check out photos of Owen! He's so darn cute and it's becoming more difficult to be away from him during the day. I thought it would get easier over time, and yet I was fine at first and am just now starting to dread leaving him. That might have something to do with our daily routine...

Bryan and I both wake up around 5:30am (on a normal day; we haven't had many of those lately, though, with all Owen's illnesses) - he gets Owen fed and back to sleep for another hour or two, and I go for a run to try to work off the baby weight. After I'm done showering and getting ready for work, Owen is usually still sleeping and I have to say goodbye to him on the baby monitor. Bryan gets him dressed and takes him to daycare. I get to work fairly early and am able to pick up Owen at daycare before 5pm each day, and then spend the early evenings with him while Bryan finishes up at work.

It's a good routine for us. Except I don't get to see Owen until 5pm! He's way too much fun to only see him for a few hours at night. So sad, but that's the life of a working mom, I guess. I can only hope it truly does get easier (less horrible?) over time.

Medical Challenge #2

I ended my last post with the statement, "What does Owen have up his sleeve for his next trick?" I wrote that on June 25 and it didn't take long to find out. Last Friday night, Bridget packed suitcases for her and Owen to fly up to North Carolina for a couple days to hang out with her family on the outer banks. The flight was early Saturday morning so just like usual we woke up Owen around 6 for him early morning bottle. Everything seemed fine until he made it about halfway through the 7 oz bottle. All of a sudden our son, who had only spit up maybe twice in his entire life, threw up. Thinking it was a one time thing we cleaned him up and continued feeding him. Five minutes later he did it again.

So now we have a three month old throwing up just two hours before he and his mom are supposed to get on a plane. We got him cleaned up again and laid him down in his crib hoping he might be able to get some sleep. A couple minutes later, I looked at the video monitor and something wasn't right. I went into his room only to find that he had thrown up for the third time all over his clothes and this time his mattress (fortunately, Bridget always keeps a waterproof sheet on top of the mattress).

At this point, we begin to worry. What is wrong with Owen? What do we do since it's 8:00 in the morning on a Saturday? What about the flight? We hop in the car and start heading toward the hospital. We call the doctor's office since they open at 8 on Saturday's and talk to a nurse. Since he was not only throwing up but was also extremely lethargic they said we should continue on our way to the hospital. Fortunately, we live very close to the children's hospital in Orlando. That provides two benefits. One, they are used to new parents like us coming in with a sick baby and acting frantic. Two, it means that we don't have to go to a general ER and expose Owen to a bunch of other sick people.

It was in the ER where we quickly found out that it wasn't as bad as we thought. You can always tell those things in the ER when they take you to a room and don't come back for 20-30 minutes. They checked Owen out, gave him some pedialyte, and, in what may have been one of the fastest ER visits ever, I think we were out of there in an hour. While in the ER, Bridget talked to a great agent from Southwest, who was quickly able to change her flight to Wednesday without any problem.

A week later Owen is still having "intestinal issues" and has only been eating about 50-70% of his normal amount of formula but other than that he seems relatively happy and healthy.

I think I'm going to stop thinking about what challenge he may pose to us next and just start enjoying the days that don't involve doctor's visits.

BTW, I posted some new pics of Owen, including some of him hanging out with grandma, on Picasa. Even created a new album since the previous one was getting a bit big. Here's the link to the new album: http://picasaweb.google.com/bryanlabutta/Owen3Months

Query

What is worse? A sick husband or a sick child? Bryan caught Owen's cold (which went away about a week ago, but is now back) and now I've got two sickos to deal with. If they both weren't super cute, I might be more upset about this.

The Cold

I've learned that babies are remarkable beings. It is as though they know when mom and dad have conquered the most recent challenge and dig into their bag of tricks to present a new one. Owen did just that two weeks ago. As soon as he had started sleeping pretty consistently from 8:30 until sometime between 4 and 5:30 he discovered a new weapon to throw everything back into a state of disarray...

A cold.

Of course we knew Owen would get a cold eventually. In fact, we expected it to happen sooner than later since he had just started going to daycare about a week and a half prior. When you walk into a room of screaming kids every morning and each one that looks up at you has what appears to be the Colorado River of snot running out of their nose it's pretty inevitable that your kid will not be safe for long. What we were not prepared for, however, is how a cold progresses and just how long it can stick around.

June 12 it all began. It started as most colds do with a sniffle. Nothing major and so we figured he'd get congested and it would all be over in a couple days. That was a Friday. The next couple days passed and Owen became more congested. However, he was still sleeping relatively well and outside of having to use the dreaded nasal aspirator every once-in-a-while things were OK.

Last Friday, the cold took it to a whole new level. Thursday night Owen developed a cough. We sort of figured this would happen since we've all had colds and they usually start to drain and turn into a cough. That night, Owen didn't sleep well at all. The kid who had been sleeping through the night woke up in the middle of it. To make things worse we checked and he was starting to develop a temperature. Nothing too serious, 101, but enough to worry two new parents enough to call the doctor as soon as the office opened at 8:00. Bridget's previous post described that adventure so I'll move the story along.

From Friday until Wednesday, we learned all about what a nasty cold really is like. It involves things

• A baby who had never spit up in his life vomiting half his bottle on your clothes.
• Waking up at random times of the night with 15 minute coughing fits that won't stop.
• Parents unable to sleep because the baby coughs once every 10 minutes and the monitor makes sure you hear it.
• Having to switch from 6oz of formula at a feeding to 4oz and eating every four hours to every three hours because the baby can't eat more than that at a time.
  

Finally, on Wednesday, the congestion started to go away and by today the cough is much, much better so much so that last night Owen slept til 4AM when I woke him up for his bottle. In a way, we're glad we've gotten through cold #1. It's another obstacle cleared and we'll be that much more prepared for cold #2, which I'm sure will be here sooner than later.

Now the only question remaining is...What does Owen have up his sleeve for his next trick?

Life with Owen

I love Owen. He's a cool kid. Tomorrow he'll be 12 weeks old and he's just started to do some really neat-o things. Life is still hectic; in fact, life is so hectic that I fell asleep in the dentist's chair today. How crazy is it that getting your teeth scraped is the most relaxing part of your day?!

Anyway, back to Owen. He's been sucking his thumb for a few weeks now, but just recently he's been able to do it with some degree of consistency. I can't tell you how frustrating it was for me to watch Owen bring his hands to his mouth over and over again, only to miss his thumb completely and start crying about the whole fiasco. The thumb really soothes him and I'm glad he's able to find it regularly.

Just recently he also started to grab toys and bring them to his mouth, too. Bryan or I have to hold the toy in front of him, but he knows how to use his opposable thumbs to grab on. And it must be instinct for a baby to put everything in his mouth, because the toys went straight in. FYI, it appears Owen is a lefty.

The coolest thing (next to sleeping through the night) is that Owen can now find mom's face in a crowd of people. We found this out the hard way (story below), but it's the most incredible feeling when your son finally recognizes YOU and wants to see your face above all others.

So Owen got his first cold at daycare. He had some congestion and sniffles for a few days, but we finally decided to take him to the dr. when it sounded like he had some chest congestion and he was running a fever. Bryan sent me in alone, thinking it would be a routine exam...how wrong we were. The first thing I hear is "pneumonia" and the second thing I hear is "blood draw". Eek. To put your minds at ease, it turned out to be just a cold, but that diagnosis only came after we did a flu test (giant cotton swab up Owen's nose), a blood draw (yes, a giant needle into my little son's arm) and a urine sample (a plastic bag taped - taped! - to my son's crotch - crotch!). Luckily, all those tests came back normal, so the dr. didn't require us to do the chest x-ray she originally scheduled. The only good thing out of this whole story is that during the blood draw, Owen was able to find my face amonst the other 3 people (nurses) in the room, and he looked to me for comfort and immediately calmed down when I picked him up. Cool.

"School"

It's been a while since I blogged, but rest assured I am alive and well! The first 6 or so weeks of Owen's life were rough for Bryan and I, as I suspect they are for all new parents, but we seem to have hit our stride around the 8th week. I just read the book "Home Game" by Michael Lewis, (hilarious!) in which he wisely noted that we love our children all the more because we do all that dirty work in those first weeks/months. We are truly grateful for Owen; he is the best kid ever and we are having a lot of fun seeing him grow in all the ways that babies do.

Since I'm returning to work on June 15th, and Bryan isn't keen on the whole Mr. Mom idea, Owen has to go to daycare. I like to call it school, because, well, just because. I sort of feel that sending your child to school is perfectly normal and healthy, but I feel guilty about sending my child to daycare. Probably because I was fortunate enough to have a mom who stayed home with me and my brothers when we were growing up. So we just won't call it daycare.

We started to take him for partial days this week, so hopefully we can have some sort of schedule in place when I go to work. The first day was rough. I cried. Okay, sobbed. Owen's teacher, Ms. Ana, had to hold me. I stayed with Owen for about a quarter hour, but left when he started to wimper. I don't think I could've handled seeing him cry and knowing that someone else was going to sooth him. I picked him up from school a few hours later and he was happy and smiling, thank goodness. Owen went back on Thursday and Friday, and it's going well. He doesn't realize what's going on (phew!) so the only real adjustment for Owen is getting used to his school schedule. One great moment today - Owen managed to poo during the 3 minutes it took to get from the house to school and Ms. Ana changed the diaper. Niiice.

Made It. Two Months.

Owen is two months old!

It's June 1, which means that Owen is two months old! That's the good news. The bad news is that since he's two months old he had to go to the doctor's office today and get his first round of immunizations. Wow, that's a lot of shots. Four shots, two in each leg, and one vaccine taken orally. He actually handled it really well. He cried, but Bridget and I are pretty sure that he cried because we put him down and he wanted to be held and not because of the shots themselves. With myself being someone who avoids doctors mainly because of the risk of getting shots, I think he did fantastic.

In other news, Owen has undergone quite a transformation in just the last week and a half. For the first 7 weeks, Owen was unhappy unless he was being held to our chests, being fed, or if he was asleep. About 10 days ago, however, he decided it was OK to just hang out and soak in the world. He still can't take too much stimulation at one time, but he's usually good for anywhere between 30 and 90 minutes after each feeding of the day. Of course, this change had all of our visitors over the last two weeks thinking we were crazy for saying Owen was such a handful (if only they had visited a week earlier!)

Owen sitting in his Bumbo seat for the first time

As far as sleep is concerned, he is getting better and better at sleeping in his crib at night. He's now going for 6-8 hours at a time after being put down at night, which is super since Bridget is heading back to work in 2 weeks and neither of us were looking forward to getting up every night for nighttime feedings. During his daytime naps we haven't pushed him too hard to sleep in his crib so he struggles with that. We'll see what happens when he starts going to daycare part-time this week. Something tells me they'll be better at training him to nap in his crib that we are. (As long as they don't just let him cry it out. Just one of my many fears about sending him off to daycare.)

It's amazing to think back on the first two months and see not only how far he has come but how far we have come as parents. Those first couple weeks were brutal and while things are not exactly sailing right along yet we have a much better handle on the situation. Now it's on to the next set of challenges. Monitoring for complications from vaccines, waiting for him to get sick at daycare, the beginning of toothing, etc. As long as I get a smile from him each day I think I'll be OK.

New pictures are posted in our Picasa Web Album. Check them out!