Mizblog

Having a baby is hard. I don’t just mean giving birth to the baby, I mean keeping the baby alive and comfortable and quiet and happy. It’s not easy work. First off, babies need lots of attention. They sleep a lot, but not necessarily for long periods of time. They have no patience whatsoever, and no empathy or sympathy. But what they lack in maturity they make up for in volume. To all you prospective parents out there, I have this advice: get used to the sound of a baby crying – it’s going to be with you every day of your life for quite a while.

I guess I should get over the generalities and get down to the particulars, huh? Saranya (my daughter) is going to be 3 months old this Friday, and she’s already as big as an average 5 month old baby. She’s a giant! But she sure is cute. Here’s a picture of her at 6 weeks of age:

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…

It’s midnight. Sangeeta’s been having contractions all evening, about every 7-8 minutes. We’ve packed all our stuff and are ready for a trip to the hospital once her contractions become 5 minutes apart for an hour, and so strong that she can neither walk nor talk until they subside. Don’t know how much sleep we’ll get before that though. Hope we can get some!

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.

After a long and tedious absence, I have returned to the blogosphere. So, yesterday I worked on my programming all day. Today I realized that all the work I did all week was still not enough to address the stability problem we’ve been having. So it’s back to the drawing board for me.

I guess I can tell you all about my eye surgery. It went great! Took two weeks to recover, and that meant keeping my eyes covered when I slept or showered, sleeping only on my back, and using medications that kept my eyes crusty and gross. Oh yeah, and I couldn’t touch my face anywhere around my eyes. But now things are back to normal, except that I don’t need glasses at all. It’s pretty cool. :)

My dad is home again from the hospital. He’s got a pump that pushes his IV liquids into him to try to get his kidneys working right. My mom says he seems to be getting better. :)

Got dentist appointments today. Sangeeta had hers this morning and mine’s this afternoon.

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.