Mizblog

There’s a new girl in the world. Her stats and contact info are as follows:

• Name: Saranya Milan Rai-Burke
• Born: Friday May 19th, 8:08am
• Weight: 7 pounds 2 ounces
• Length: 19.5 inches
• Favorite food: mom
• Likes: swaddling, bouncing, fine dining
• Dislikes: having diapers changed, nudity

Her head shots and glamour photos are on the web at

http://www.mizerai.com/Saranya

By 6am we had been sent home. Sangeeta’s contractions slacked off to one every 7-8 minutes so they told us to go back home and wait until she had contractions 5 minutes apart for 2 hours in a row and can’t walk or talk during the contractions!

As of 3:30pm they’re still coming every 6-7 minutes. At one point she had them at 4 minute intervals, but when I pointed this out to her she turned to me and said “It doesn’t matter because I can still talk!”

It’s tough because she can’t sleep. The contractions wake her up just when she dozes off. And there’s not a whole lot I can do to help, aside from a little massage, a little timekeeping, and fetching the occasional object of desire.

Got a short nap, only to wake up and find that Sangeeta’s contractions were 5-6 minutes apart. Grabbed a quick shower, collected the stuff we’d packed earlier, and helped Sangeeta get herself together. This is it! We’re off to the hospital…

Well, today’s the day we marked on the calendar. We’ve spent the last few weeks cleaning our apartment, rearranging furniture, moving baby furniture in, building baby furniture, rearranging things again to make the baby furniture fit, cleaning up after we moved stuff around, yelling at each other about how Sangeeta’s not supposed to be doing stuff and I am supposed to be doing stuff, and sneezing. Mostly I’ve been doing the sneezing. Allergies. They’re worst when I lie down in my bed, since I sleep by the window which overlooks the neighboring building’s laundry room.

Sangeeta had some contractions last night, but they stopped by this morning. She’s very eager to squirt the kid out.

It’s coming down to the wire.

I’ve received several queries about Sangeeta’s due date. I had mentioned May 5th for a while because that’s what the ultrasound guy said, but the OB said that ultrasound estimates are often off by a couple of weeks. So it’s back to the calendar determination of a May 17th due date. The OB is confident that Sangeeta will deliver by then.

In preparation for this, we drove up to Monterey last week. Some people were horrified that we were travelling in Sangeeta’s final month of pregnancy, but it wasn’t as bad as that. The worst emergency I could imagine would be if her water broke. I mean, those are cloth seats! Anyway, nothing bad happened and we had a nice trip.

Yesterday we moved baby furniture from my parents’ house to our apartment. U-Haul charges $19.95 for renting their trucks. Of course what they don’t put in the advertisement is the $0.79/mile and the $14 of protection money. We spent almost $75 just for driving their truck over the hill and back, delivering a disassembled crib and a changing table. They’re now resting in the middle of our living room, with just enough gap so there’s a clear viewing lane from the futon to the TV. We didn’t have the energy to figure out what else to do with them yesterday, and the same might be true today.

Our baby shower was awesome. If you went, you know this. Thank you. If you didn’t go, I’m sorry you missed it. First and foremost, I got to visit with a lot of old and dear friends (don’t tell them I said “old” okay?) who I missed more than I realized. Second, I got to see Sangeeta be the center of attention and love for the whole day. Third, I was the only non-female there. Some guys might think of that as scary but I was not intimidated by their estrogen fest. I got to help take some of the work load off my mom, who planned most of the party and who has been pretty overworked lately what with my dad’s roller coaster “recovery” and her fall while transporting our baby furniture to her house. And finally, we got a lot of baby loot! It took a huge strain off of us to have everybody chipping in on baby essentials, and I’m really grateful to everyone. I’ll be sending out thankyou cards ASAP.

So much to catch up on! I can’t write it all. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep up on blogging a little better in the future, to avoid these awful gaps. Maybe I’ll even have some opinions or observations to share. Let’s see…

A couple people have contacted me via myspace when they, much to their surprise, noticed I had a page there. I don’t use it much. Most of the friend requests I get are spam or random so I delete them.

We had a baby shower yesterday. It was fun but now I’m tired and sore. I can imagine how my mom feels. She set the whole thing up. Not only that, but while moving some baby furniture she tripped and fell. Smacked her head on the floor, injured her back, and had the furniture land on her too. Then she got back up and kept working, saying that it hurt to sit down so she had to keep standing. I do hope she’s okay.

Lots of my old friends showed up, and I was ecstatic to see them. I was the only male at the shower but it didn’t really bother me as you might expect it would have.

I’m also not too frightened about becoming a father, even though I’ve got almost zero experience with children. I can’t do worse than some people I’ve seen on Springer, can I? Nah, I think I’ll learn to be good at it. I’m not a violent asshole most of the time, and I’m pretty good at suppressing those tendencies when they try to surface.

Lots of things have been going on lately, but for the most part I haven’t felt like talking about them. I’m still a little reluctant but here goes anyway.

My dad’s still in the hospital. He wavers between getting worse and getting better. His latest setback happened last week when his kidneys stopped working. The doctors seem confident that they can get them functioning properly again but if they fail then it’s dialysis for the old man.

I was scheduled for laser eye surgery today but I’ve postponed it until Friday. Too much else is going on right now for that. And besides, I forgot to take the recimmended antibiotics for 2 days prior to surgery.

Sangeeta has a toothache and needs bone grafting treatment. She’s also getting heavy with child, and that wears her out.

The baby moves a lot! She sometimes pushes really hard on Sangeeta’s tummy, like she’s trying to stand up in there. Other times she jumps and you can see Sangeeta’s whole body sway slightly. I can’t wait to meet her in person. We’re thinking of naming her Saranya.

My dad has been in the hospital for a week now. He went in for an operation to remove his cancerous colon, but 3 days after that he developed intense pain and it turned out that the intestine didn’t heal and instead it started leaking. They rushed him back to surgery, and when he got out he was insane from the pain meds. He kept insulting everyone, threatening everyone, trying to get out and tearing the tubes and monitors from his body. It was crazy.

In the middle of Friday he seemed to calm down a bit, and he was making jokes. He kept forgetting he was in the hospital, and he’d repeatedly try to get out of bed to get something. Sometimes he’d get angry when he was restrained, and he’d put up a pretty good fight for a guy with a belly wound. He also saw magic ants walking around the hospital room, as well as mysterious brown hair floating in midair.

Sometime on Friday evening he began to vomit up black bile and choke on it. He had removed the suction tube and the nurses never bothered to put it back, so when they did it sucked out over 2 quarts of the stuff!

By Sunday he was unintelligible. You could barely make out some of the words he was trying to say. His tongue looked like a scabby red slug. He was constantly fidgeting, fussing with his tubes and his clothes and covers. His fingers were rubbed raw. It was an awful sight, and we didn’t know if he’d survive or not.

PS. Today (Monday) I hear that he’s lucid and calm again, and getting better. I’m so relieved!

My first week of work in 2006 has gone very well. I’ve accomplished everything I wanted to accomplish, and with less effort than expected.

My mornings and evenings are crammed full of World of Warcraft, though I must admit I’m becoming fatigued. It’s going pretty well, but I’m already looking into ways to include programming in my WoW experience.

The big news is that Sangeeta is about 6 months into her pregnancy. The baby keeps kicking her, and if you put your hand on her tummy, she’ll kick you too!

Sangeeta’s dad arrived back in Kathmandu today, tired because he couldn’t sleep on the plane. I’m glad he made it safe and sound.

Last night was a nice quiet night at home. Happy New Year!