From Wit’s End

Jack lost half an ounce compared to yesterday. Rachel is tired, but she is still dutifully getting him up every 2-3 hours to feed him, both the natural way and with a formula supplement, as instructed by the doctor. She has been doing this for over 48 hours now. Consequently, she hasn’t slept for 3 hours in a row for at least this long. I have been sleeping in another room so that I could be well rested enough to drive us up to Virginia this weekend. So I’m doing okay, but Rachel is pretty fried. The next goal for little Jack is to gain 3 ounces by next Monday afternoon. Please pray for us.

Jack was weighed this morning at the doctor’s office: One and half ounces heavier! So we will be continuing this regimen for about four or five more days, with the doctor checking him again tomorrow and then in another week.

Isn’t it funny how babies are expected to do things that would be bad or rude for adults to do? I ‘m thinking of things like burping in public, gaining weight with impugnity, and sleeping through the church service. Keep up the good work, Jack.

According to the doctor, Jack hasn’t gained any weight in the past two weeks. He should be gaining about an ounce a day. So the doctor has prescribed a rigorous feeding regimen involving a mix of breastfeeding and high-calorie formula every 2 hours. We’ll be feeding him all night, too, which should be interesting. If he hasn’t gained at half an ounce by the time he’s weighed at the doctor’s office tomorrow morning, further tests will be necessary. Here’s goes nothing…

…Jack either wore himself out yesterday, or that last “double-feeding” last night filled him up really well, or both, because he slept all the way through the night last night for the second time. Huzzah.

Rachel was feeling tired this evening, so we ordered pizza for dinner tonight. I kept it in the oven for a little while to let Rachel finish pumping some milk to save to feed Jack. She was bummed out this evening, because she convinced herself that Jack isn’t getting enough nourishment, he isn’t growing fast enough and that this makes her a bad mother. We resolved to call the doctor for his opinion the next day, but this didn’t keep her from worrying herself out. We took a walk after dinner, with me holding the dog leashes, Nik pushed Jack’s stroller, and she lagged behind the whole time. When we got back, Rachel went to the back room to feed Jack, and Nick and I each had a bowl of ice cream.

I heard Jack crying back there, but he sometimes does this before he settles down to feed, so I didn’t think anything of it, until I realized that the crying had been going on longer than usual. I went to the back of the house and found Rachel crying too. “What did I do wrong??” she said. I took Jack from her to give her a few minutes to calm down, and I asked her where the bottle of milk she pumped was. It was already in the freezer, apparently. She tried to get the bottle warmer to work but couldn’t. She took Jack back, who was still fussing pretty bad, and tried to get him to feed again. I found the instructions for the bottle warmer on the maker’s website, and got it working. I finished my half-melted ice cream, and then took the bottle out of the warmer. It was too hot! I stuck it in the fridge for a few minutes, got its temperature down a bit, and took it to the back of the house. Jack had slowly calmed down and was feeding tolerably well. Rachel thought the bottle was still a bit too warm, so it was put aside. I suggested that Rachel call a friend, L., who has a few kids, for her perspective and for a friendly ear, and she eventually agreed. Jack took to the bottle pretty well, too, so he was doing better. I called up L., and she asked if she should come over. “She can come over if she wants to,” Rachel answered. “For her, that’s a “yes”,” I said to L., passing on the message. L. said that she would be over in about ten minutes.

By this time, it was almost 9pm, and Rachel suggested I check up on Nik, who I had almost forgotten about while trying to help Jack and Rachel. When I came into the den, I found Nik crying. All the crying had frayed his nerves, I guess, and he was feeling a little homesick, too [Nik is Rachel's 8-year-old brother and is staying with us for the week for VBS at our church]. I hugged him, asked him to forgive me for forgetting about him, and suggested that I read him a book. We sat down to Shel Silverstein’s book “The Giving Tree”, and about halfway through the story, he had stopped sobbing, and by the end of the story, he was smiling again. Rachel’s friend L. got there about that time, and Nik and I left them in the living room to talk, and went into the den to read “Runaway Bunny”, which Nik hadn’t heard of but liked very much. He also enjoyed a couple of silly Homestar Runner toons, too.

After about 40 minutes, L. went home, Rachel was feeling better, and Nik was ready for bed. We battened down the hatches for the night, and Rachel thanked me for being there for everybody.

All I can say is, tomorrow should be better.

Well, Rachel’s 1997 Mitsubishi Mirage is gone. We sold it on Saturday for $800, and the guy picked it up during the day today. So we’re a one-car family for this week, at least, while we wait for our new-to-us car to become available (More about this later). With this and Nik being around, it should be a delightfully different week.

Nik (Rachel’s brother and Jack’s uncle) is staying with us this week. For the second year, he’s staying with one of his sisters here in Columbia so that he can attend VBS at our church. So Jack will have a companion, and Rachel will have a little assistant for the week, at least for the afternoons.

Just click on a picture to view a larger version of it.

Jack gets a pre-baptism bath the night before.	Jack is contemplating the covenant.	The Happy Family.
Dr. Sinclair Ferguson baptizes Daniel Jackson Wisdom.	Jack-in-a-Bag.
The	Food	Line.

He slept through the night for the first time ever last night! From 10:30pm to 5:30am! Thank you, Jack!

Jack does his impression of Al Zarqawi [If you don't believe me, just look at the thumbnail of this picture from a distance.]

…it has somehow settled my mind so that I feel like I can tackle the nightmare that is our office and actually make some progress there. When things are looking a lot better, I’ll post before and after pictures. For now, however, I’m too abashed.

Oh, this week I was turned on to a really good program for graphics file manipulation. A guy at work told me about it just in time for it to be very useful for newsletter archiving. It’s called Irfanview. It’s both simple and functional, and has already become my picture file modifier of choice for web publishing purposes.

…that my son is half human and half vulcan.

Well, I’m not quite as bad as James Lileks is (click here and scroll down about halfway to see what I mean), but I do have a certain neurosis about preserving my own personal history on digital media. This is why I blog. Before I blogged, I had a newsletter. While I was was porting old blog entries over to this space, I decided to see if I couldn’t put my old newsletters here too, even if only as scanned JPG files. So I took an inventory of the old hard copies, and I found good news and what I thought was bad news. The good news was that I had translated three of my old newsletters (1996, 1997, and 1998) into HTML already and backed them up on CD. The bad news was that I couldn’t find a single copy of one of my other newsletters in the office (this is not a big surprise, considering the current state of our office), and I thought that it was totally lost. This seriously bummed me out.

A few nights ago, I couldn’t get to sleep, despite the weariness caused by Jack’s infliction of a new sleep pattern on us. I got back up and looked more carefully through the filing cabinet one more time. Bingo!! I have them all now, so watch for the links at the bottom of the sidebar of this page to go live one at a time over the next few weeks. And if you happen to be a former Kindergarten teacher who just recently found an old student on the internet, you can now catch up on the last ten years of my life one page at a time, if you’d like.

UPDATE 06/07/06: 1999 Newsletter is up. Four down and four to go.

UPDATE 06/08/06: The 2000 newsletters are up, both for Winter and for Summer. Two more down and two to go.

UPDATE 06/09/06: The 2001 Newsletter is up. This one is in HTML format, instead of just JPEG [Ideally, I'd like to put all the newsletters in HTML format, but I'll have to finish that little project up another time]. The 2002 Newsletter is actually up in HTML format also, but since it was the transition to my presence on the web, I have to fix the links in it before I make the link to it live. So only one more little piece of personal history to go, and then I can get back to posting present things…

UPDATE 06/10/06: There, the 2002 newsletter is posted and properly linked into the pertinent blog posts. Now we’re all filled in from 1996 to 2001. From 2002 to the present will happen a little more gradually, I think, since those archive links are already live, and you can go see them whenever you like already. Enjoy.

Sorry about that. I’ve been tweaking the PHP of the two sites inorder to separate the archives of the two sites from each other, and since last night, this personal page had no posts on it. I added another “If…Then” statement, and everything is hunky dory again.

P.S.– Just so you know, I haven’t posted much in the past couple of days because I am concentrating on digitally archiving and backing up certain personally important documents. More on that later.

This page now has its own address:

http://www.fromwitsend.org

This should be a little easier to remember than “…?cat=201″, right? Enjoy.

Wow, what a month! As all of you should know by now, My son was born on May 9th, and his appearance on the world scene definitely made waves on this little corner of the internet. Behold, the Jack-alanche!

For the day…

…for the month…

…and for the year…

As you can see, we had about 850 hits for the month of May. It’s a great tribute to all of you who cared for us and prayed for us through this past month as we came through the real Jack-alanche with colors flying high, a “promotion” for each member of the family (“Hey Mom, have I ever told you how Grand a Mother you are?”), and our numbers increased by one sweet little boy. Thanks again for all your support, and thanks for helping to welcome my son into the Wide World (Web).

These two pictures attempt to show something that we discovered about Jack in the past week or so: the little boy who is the son of an engineer is fascinated by the light and the rotary motion of the fan in the den. Hmmm…