New stuff on the blog

Declan is almost a week old. I might be a bit more than a week older! I can honestly say I don't remember Cameron and Una making me jump to attention in the middle of the night quite as often. If you have looked at the video clip "The Squeal", imagine that at 3am. All I can say is that it is a damn good thing the boy is as cute as he is! Despite the night stuff, we are having a great time with the kids. Cameron has once again assumed the role of the best older brother in the world. He was disappointed to find out that the front pack doesn't fit him- he really wanted to take his brother around the school to show him off to the world. Una has discovered the joys of reading "all by myself!" and has tackled a book about digging for dinosaur bones. Declan took his first stroll in the neighborhood (thank god the dirty old guy next door who thinks he can always kiss me because he is European wasn't out at the time. Declan is too young to see his mother assaulted like that). It is amazing how people on the street will melt in odd, baby related noises when they see such a small baby in a front pack- all you can see are feet. After having lost 11% of his total body weight, Declan is finally clearing his jaundice and putting some weight back on. The doctor is happy about it, if for no other reason than she won't have to call everday for a weight check. Every morning we have to weigh him on the kitchen scale, just like a turnip. Off to bed for me for a whole hour of sleep.

Excited Ineffective

That's the term the baby book uses for the way Declan was nursing a couple of days ago. Excited to approach the boob, but not quite getting the job done...... why does that sound familiar? Otherwise the boy is doing fine. He's nursing fine now once we've figured out his rhythm of things, and he's much more pleasant when he's awake.

The Family Grows

At 16:00, February 22, 2005, Declan joins our clan. Declan Patrick weighted 7 pounds, 5 ounces at birth. And not wanting to be excluded from the "cord around the neck at birth" club to which both his siblings belonged, he managed to have his cord wrapped around his neck just once.

The boy and mom are both doing fine. Labor went quickly this time around, and Adrienne received her epidural at the right time. Any later would have made it pointless. As it was, it had barely kicked in when she went into active labor. Delivery went smoothly without a hitch, and was rather orderly even though there were about 10 people in the room (2 doctors, 2 students, 4 nurses, Bethany, myself, and of course Adrienne). Part of the reason for the crowd was due to the delivery during a shift change, part of it was due to the students.

Adrienne thinks Declan looks like my father. See for yourself on the picture blog. Images are being posted by Flickr, so if they don't show up, try again later. The images uploaded are 640 by 480, any thing you get from Flickr that's larger would have been scaled up and won't make good prints. Let me know if you want print quality ones and I'll send the originals.

I'll also put up a couple of video clips soon. The movies are from Adrienne's new Motorola V551 - 176x144 3GP @ < 3FPS. Let me know if you can't see them when I have them up, I'll mucked with them manually.

More later this week.

P.S. I got a couple of questions about the pronunciation of his name. Declan is a traditional Irish name pronounced DECK-lan.