Negotiating with the ACLD

So on Saturday at around 1:30 A.M., having endured my daughter’s relentless screaming for the past 6 hours I began, for the first time, to really come to grips with how powerless we are as parents right now. And this is pretty new to me. No matter how powerless I have been in the past I have at least felt like I had some negotiating power. Some wiggle room. Some possible way to lessen the pain. But not now. We are confronted with a force that is utterly decisive and completely uncompromising. And it was in this spirit that I began to liken my daughter to a labor union. Only instead of layoffs, we attempt to negotiate laydowns. Here now a transcript of what the negotiations would look like if both parties could speak.

Us: Thank you for meeting with us today Anabelle. As your parents we feel like there have been some miscommunications recently and we want to clear these up so that hopefully we can all live together more peacefully.

ACLD: No problem. I came here straight from my nap.

Us: OK. First of all, the screaming. What’s the deal with that? Are we upsetting you? Is there something we’re not doing right?

ACLD: No; you’re doing just fine. I just choose to scream. It’s my right.

Us: But when you scream is it because you’re unhappy? Do you need to be changed? Are you hungry? Are you too hot? Too cold? Do you want your back rubbed? Do you want us to stop rubbing your back?

ACLD: I’d rather not say. My advice to you is to assume that it’s all of the above and try each solution 4-5 times because I also reserve the right to change my mind about what’s bothering me at any given time.

Us: OK, well let’s move on. As you may be able to tell from our disheveled and slightly crazy appearance sleeping has been something of an issue. Especially for your mother.

ACLD: Oh, really? I’m sleeping fine.

Us: Yes, we know. But we’d like a little more consistency. We’re going to need a minimum of 5 laydowns per day, for a minimum duration of 2 hours each, with the longest one occurring between the hours of midnight and 5 AM.

ACLD: Hmm; how about this? I’ll give you 4 laydowns per day, at random times, and of indeterminate length.

Us: OK, but can you try to make the one in the middle of the night the longest one?

ACLD: Well, I can’t promise I’ll try. But I’ll try to try.

Us: Fair enough. So what guarantees do we have that you’ll stick to this agreement?

ACLD: None whatsoever. In fact, I’ve already changed most of the rules we’ve already agreed to. Don’t worry though, I’ll change them back again. Maybe. Now if you don’t mind, I’m getting hungry, or sleepy, or cold. In any case, I’m about to start screaming so I’d advise you to start trying to figure out what’s wrong with me.

Back at Home

So Miss Anabelle had her homecoming yesterday, and now her and I are relaxing and watching the Bears game. Christy and my mom left about an hour ago to do some grocery shopping, which doesn't sound like much but is actually two landmarks. It's the first time I've been alone with Anabelle and the first time Christy has left her (not counting the times when the nurses took her to the nursery at the hospital). Not that she requires a whole lot of effort at the moment. It appears that at the moment she's got day-night confusion, so she pretty much does non-stop sleeping during the day and then the last 2 nights she has been wide awake from about 10 P.M. to 5 A.M. Last night Christy and I took 1.5-2 hour shifts keeping her occupied during that time so that the other one could get some sleep. Hopefully this is something that we can remedy pretty quickly; I'm back in the office tomorrow so it's gonna fall more on Christy to keep her quiet at night and I'll have a pretty exhausted wife on my hands if she decides that's the schedule she wants to keep long-term. And you'd think that it would be an easy problem to correct. Just wake her up more during the day. Well, let me tell you, as hard as it is to get her to fall asleep in the middle of the night, that's how hard it is to get her to wake up during the day. We've tried moving her arms and legs, changing her diaper, and even undressing her and blowing on her to give her a little bit of a chill (which sounds mean but is what they recommend) but she can pretty much sleep through anything when she's determined.

So it's back to the office and an attempt at some level of normalcy tomorrow. Hopefully I can get a decent night's sleep tonight and get some work done tomorrow. Although I expect people at work to be very understanding over the next couple of weeks, I really don't want to fall too far behind in my work. As time goes by I'm likely to just get more and more sleep deprived (at least for the next 6 months) so I've got to do my best to stay on top of things while I'm still functioning at something close to 100%.

As I type this now the Bears just fell behind 14-7 in the 3rd quarter. Anabelle is still sleeping straight through it but now daddy's crying. And like her at 3 in the morning, he's inconsolable.

Parenthood: Day 2

So, unsurprisingly, the last 28 hours have flown by in a blur. After the birth, we had to play the waiting game for a while. Apparently there are a lot of other babies in Evanston that share Anabelle's birthday (or the preceding couple days) because there were no recovery rooms available to us right away. Probably the biggest issue with this was that in the labor and delivery rooms there are no sleeping apparatuses for people other than the mother, and at that point I had been up for about 30 hours straight. So when Christy took a nap at 1:30 while Anabelle was up in the nursery getting her first bath I left Christy's mom to watch over her and headed home to get a few hours sleep (another big benefit to living 2 blocks away from the hospital). Never have 2 hours of sleep passed so quickly or felt so good.


By the time I got back to the hospital Christy had been moved to our recovery room and Anabelle had joined us again. That's pretty much where we've bee since, doing our best to please Miss Anabelle and keep her happy when she's awake and comfortable when she's asleep. We all tried to go to sleep at around 9:30 with varying degrees of success. At about 11:00 Anabelle started fussing so mommy fed her and she went back to sleep. Then at 12:30 the nursery came and took her away to get her Hepatitis immunization shot. At 4:30 she woke up again and after mom fed her it was dad's turn to get her to go back to sleep. Then at around 8:30 we all woke up for the day.

Since then it's been a bit of a circus here. Our pediatrician, Dr. Bernstein (who goes by Dr. Andy) came by and took a look at her at 9:30 and said that everything looks good and she is definitely on track to go home tomorrow. At about 9:30 she started to get cranky and we were joking that it was because she had just turned 1 day old and was depressed about how old she's getting. Between 10 and 11 we had visits from the food service people with our breakfast, the on-duty nurse to check on Christy and the baby, one housekeeper to attend to the trash and a different housekeeper to change the linens, and Christy's doctor. Finally, a lactation consultant came by to help Christy with breastfeeding and just left a few minutes ago. In between all that I also got to change my first of many, many diapers. Now we are just awaiting a circus of a different sort as various friends and family stop by to visit.

Tomorrow my mom is flying in from Texas so it will be nice to have an extra set of hands around the house to help out during the first week and I'm so glad she was able to make it up to visit her new granddaughter!

Think that's all for now. Here's a few more pictures from Anabelle's first day of life!

Baby Time!

Update #2: And she's here! After 51 minutes of pushing she arrived screaming her little head off at 9:06 A.M. She's quite a horse at 8 pounds, 11 oz. Mama and baby are currently getting to know one another. Here's the first of many, many pictures:

Update #1: As of 5:30 she is 7 cm dilated on her way up to 10 at ~1 cm per hour. Once she gets there, they tell us that we can expect between 1 and 3 hours of pushing till we're done. Do the math and it means a baby by noon and maybe as early as 10.

It's currently 4:41 A.M. and we're in the labor and delivery room at Evanston Hospital awaiting Anabelle's arrival. I was finishing up playing some online poker (where, shockingly enough, I actually won some money) and heading off to bed at a little before 12:30 when Christy came out of the bathroom and said "I'm not sure, but I think my water might have just broken." Unsure of what to do with this uncertain information, I just said "well, lay back down and try to sleep. If it's something, then we'll know soon enough and if it's nothing well then I guess we'll know that soon too." Not more than 4 minutes later she sat up and said "yep; that was definitely my water." Before I could even get her a towel from the linen closet she'd already had her first *real* contraction and immediately knew that they were different from the preparation ones she'd been feeling over the last couple weeks. So we got up and immediately started making all the last minute preparations. The contractions started coming every 4-5 minutes and after about a half hour we called the doctor to see if we should head over to the hospital. He said that we should so at about 1:30 we did just that.

After getting relatively settled and a few more contractions any lingering doubts Christy had about getting an epidural went out the window. They administered it to her at around 3:00 and since then she has been resting comfortably. She can still feel her legs and move them around but all the pain from the contractions are gone. It's funny because she can watch the little monitor and see the point where the contraction is at its peak and used to cause her absolutely excruciating pain but now she might as well be watching a video game.

She has been advised to try to get some sleep if she can and given that I got to lay down for a whopping 4 minutes so far tonight (I know, poor me) I am going to try and do the same. My completely non-medical opinion predicts that we'll have a daughter at 10:04 this morning. So far everything is going smoothly and everyone at the hospital, especially our nurse Amy, has been wonderful. I'll update more when I have a chance.

This is the monitor Christy is hooked up to. The upper left number is Anabelle's heart rate. It fluctuates between about 130 and 155. The upper right number measures the contractions. When it hits about 30, the contraction is starting (so you can see that she was in the middle of one when we took this). The highest number we've seen so far has been 118. Not sure how high they go.

This is the actual machine that does the monitoring. The monitor from the picture before is really just the screen on the left blown up. The paper on the right tracks the heartbeat and contractions so the doctors can see what is happening over time.

Have no idea what this is. Possibly the machine that goes "Bing!"

Relatively Quick Hits

First of all, still no baby. We've got an appointment set up for Friday to induce if she doesn't come before then, so at least there's an end in sight. We're still hoping that she comes on her own in the next 48 hours though. Since we've started telling people about the Friday plan, it seems as though everyone has an opinion on inducement. Let me put this as delicately as I can. Your opinion is valid, but we don't wish to hear it.

Today Max Baucus unveiled a summary of his health care bill. It's the most moderate of the current bills and carries with it an estimated price tag of $856 billion over the next ten years. It has no "public option" but would create insurance exchanges and bar insurers from dropping policyholders in the event of illness or from excluding people on the basis of pre-existing conditions. It specifically addresses that it will not provide coverage to illegal immigrants and no federal dollars will be used for abortions (though there are a couple caveats to this that will surely be more than enough ammo for the extremists to continue to rage). I'll reserve final judgment until the complete bill is released and analysed but my initial impression is that it addresses most of what Obama wanted and represents a step in the right direction. I'm firmly convinced that if a bill is to be passed this year that this will be the one. The more progressive bills from the House just don't have a chance in the Senate.

Tangentially related, former President Carter has made some comments indicating that he believes racism played a part in Rep Wilson's outburst-heard-round-the-world last week. While I don't necessarily disagree with him, I think it's counterproductive to talk about it right now. Playing the race card in any form just causes people to dig in their heels. It's not conducive to reconciliation. That comment, like the original outburst itself, just serves as a distraction which quickly dominates the debate. Suddenly we're talking about race relations in America. That's a worthy topic but not one that has any place in a health care debate, and it's going to take immense focus to get something done in the next couple months.

Finally, I've been following the debacle that has been the Afghanistan elections and I'm beginning to think along the same lines as George Will. It might be time to start packing it in. I understand that if we leave the Taliban will just set up shop again and it will once again become a training ground for terrorists. I'm starting to think that's the "better" of our options though. Mainly, I just don't think anyone has the stomach to do what really needs to be done: a probable decade-long commitment from an international force totalling half a million or more troops. After our surge, we'll have a total of 65,000 troops there. That may sound like a lot (and it is) but think about it this way: the football stadium in Champaign holds 70,000 people. Do you really think a football-stadium worth of troops can control a country the size of Texas? And these "elections" have proven to basically be the final straw with me. It's obvious that those in power have no desire to establish a flourishing democracy; they (like all bad leaders) just want to cling to power. So now we are spilling our blood and spending our money to support an illegitimate government while achieving little more than forcing the Taliban and the terrorists to move their camps across the border into Pakistan. I just don't know what we're actually accomplishing anymore.

Bears Hangover

If you have absolutely no interest in Bears football, you'll probably just want to skip this post.

So in the matter of about 4 hours Jay Cutler went from Bears savior to pariah. It will be interesting to see what kind of a reception he gets next week during his first home game. My prediction is that he'll get cheered but god help him if he doesn't get off to a good start or throws an early pick. As bad as his performance was (and it was pretty bad), I'd urge my fellow Bears fans not to overreact. It's still just one game. Not that I'm comparing the two, but Favre once threw 6 INTs in a playoff game, and also threw 5 in a regular season game. The point being that even the great QBs can look absolutely terrible on occasion. It's actually a good thing that the 4 INTs were a career high; it would be much worse if he'd already done that 3-4 times. Still, the wrap on Cutler was that he can't win a big game and folds in pressure situations and this certainly didn't do him any favors in that regard.

If you break down the 4 picks, one was an absolutely atrocious throw (the first one), one was actually a sensational defensive play (the 2nd one), and the other two (while still absolutely Cutler's fault) had as much to do with the receiver and the QB not being on the same page as the throw itself. For the 3rd pick, Cutler is scrambling and he sees Knox cutting across the middle but then almost simultaneously as Cutler releases the ball Knox abruptly cuts back. As a receiver, that's what you're supposed to do. When you see your QB out of the pocket, you run to that side of the field so that he doesn't have to throw across the field away from his momentum. But Knox worked mainly with the 2nd and 3rd team during preseason, so Cutler and him likely don't have a good rapport yet but that should change (and hopefully soon). Finally, on the last pick (although again an ill-advised throw) Knox really needs to help his QB out and doesn't. It's a quick out route towards the sidelines and Cutler throws it to where both his receiver and the corner are (which is why it was ill-advised; there was no separation). Both the receiver and defender turn and see the ball coming, but rather than come to the ball Knox inexplicably decides to move backwards and gives Al Harris an easy pick. If he makes a move towards the ball, 8 times out of ten they both fight for it and it drops incomplete.

As for positives from the game, the defense (apart from one Nathan Vasher slip) actually played spectacularly. Although you rarely say that about a game where the D gives up 21 points, considering the 4 turnovers (which doesn't even include the idiotic "fake" punt) it really was. Of course, as I sit here and write this it looks like Urlacher is now done for the season and 2 other defenders went down with injuries, so it could be that this is the best effort we'll get from the Bears D the whole year. If so, it's a shame to waste it.

In the end, this doesn't change my season win prediction. In reviewing the schedule, I already had this game marked down as an L when I came up with the 11-5 mark. That still doesn't stop me from being disappointed about yesterday (and force me to repeat my mantra: it's not THAT they lose, it's HOW they lose). I also have them losing this week at home to the Steelers, before winning 7 of their next 8. This is how I see the rest of the season:

Pitt L
@ Seattle W
Detroit W
@ Atlanta L
@ Cinncy W
Cleveland W
Arizona W
@ San Fran W
Philadelphia W
@ Minnesota L
St. Louis W
Green Bay W
@ Baltimore L
Minnesota W
@ Detroit W

That's 7-1 at home this year, and 4-4 on the road. I still think that's doable. Assuming, of course, that we are spared any more Rex Grossman impersonations from Mr. Cutler.

Still the Proud Parents of a Fetus

So, as of about 13 hours ago Miss Anabelle is officially late and her parents (and especially her mother) are not too pleased about it. Actually, it turned out to be a blessing that she didn't come yesterday. For some unknown reason (possibly Jimmy John's poisoning) I suddenly got extremely sick yesterday afternoon around 1:00. I spent the next 3 hours in bed with the shakes and then started feeling extremely hot and got a splitting headache. All I could think about was "please don't let Christy go into labor right now." Luckily she didn't and, happily, though I am still not 100% I am feeling much better today. So now Anabelle is once again welcome to come at any time now (though I wouldn't be terribly upset if she waited till after the Bears game tonight).

Christy and I walked into downtown Evanston on Friday night, had dinner a really good BBQ joint, and then went and saw a movie (Extract). As you can probably see by my review to the right, I didn't think too much of it. Definitely my least favorite of Mike Judges' movies (the best of course being Office Space, then Idiocracy, and even Beavis and Butthead Do America was better). It's not that the film was terrible; it's more that there weren't any truly hysterical parts and none of the characters were all that likeable. Still, at this point we have to treat every night out as potentially our last for a while so it was still a good time.

Today I am just trying to rest up and get ready to watch the Bears tonight (pending fetal escape plans)! Call it Cutler fever, but I am actually quite optimistic about the Bears this year. Their early schedule is pretty tough, but I'm predicting 11-5 and a 1st round bye in the playoffs.

Slacking Again

So I didn't really intend to not post anything for 2 and a half weeks. Ironically, it's not for lack of anything to say. I actually have a whole bunch that I want to write about but haven't found the time. Well, that's not quite true. I haven't found the time to do it while I've been at work, and I'm not accustomed to blogging on my own time. For once I find myself working pretty much from the time I get to work all the way till I leave (a truly novel approach, I know). And not because I have tons and tons of work to do; it's just that from now on every day when I leave I have to think that I might not be coming in for the next 4-5 days so I am trying to get as much done as possible so I don't fall too far behind when Anabelle finally comes.

Speaking of Anabelle, she continues to make us wait. The first week of September came and went, thus proving me wrong (not for the first and surely not for the last time). Christy had a doctor's appointment today and she told us (for the second week in a row) that she could go into labor at any point now. She also told us that Christy is 4cms dillated and almost 100% effaced. For those uninitiated with that terminology . . .um, google it. But just to give a frame of reference, if you are in the hospital and in labor they won't allow you to get an epidural until you are at 4cm, so it's usually an indicator that you're pretty far along in the process.

As you can imagine this past weekend was rather uneventful, as we pretty much just sat around waiting for a baby that decided she's not ready to come out yet. It was nice to have one last relaxing 3-day weekend but the trouble was we couldn't ever fully relax knowing that at any moment we might have to spring into action. So instead I geeked out and played about 20 hours of Final Fantasy III and watched a lot of mediocre movies as well as the entire first season of 30 Rock.

OK, I'm just getting set to watch Obama's speech to Congress. I'm hoping to have a blog on that as well as a couple of other random topics in the next couple days.