Ice Cream For Everyone!

Breastfeeding.

Who knew it was a skill? I always figured you’d take the kid, hold him in front of your breast and he’d know what to do. I mean, he’s hungry right? Go for it, son!

We got it working, but at first it’s not unlike feeding a sleepy kitten whole bananas. Ok I made that up and it doesn’t quite make sense, but the point is it’s hard. We think it’s easy because the women with the confidence to do it in public are clearly trained professionals. They’ve got it all worked out and the rest of us are home trying to keep the kitten awake.

Just like most of our generation we took a childbirth class, where you pay to learn all the stuff your parents could tell you if only you’d listen to them. They gave us some great reasons why we should breastfeed, such as a better immune system and fewer allergies for the keiki, and it sounded great and all but really I stopped listening when they said it’s mom that has to wake up around the clock to feed the little one.

Yes!

We are a couple of devoted breastfeeders, honey! You know, we’ll do it for the kid, just like they said in class. Good for you.

Then I found out I was on diaper duty.

Ok wow. You have no idea. Kids these days are trained killers! The moment they feel fresh air down there they pee on you. Of course like any newbie parent you try the old cover-cover-wait-for-it-waiiiiit-ok-GO! routine, but you have no chance. Their algorithm is too simple. Too perfect.

1. Wait until you can pee on dad.

2. Pee on him.

I don’t have a chance.

Yesterday brought a dab of wine, a little bit of the snip snip and lots of joy. Welcome to the nation, kid!

His name is Reuben.

Wow, it’s been AWHILE since we’ve updated this site. Time to get back on it, yeah? Now that we have some news…

If you’ve called or emailed and we haven’t replied, apologies. We’re a tad overwhelmed right now…

…with our brand new boy!

normalhead.gif

The due date was the 2nd, but the little rugrat didn’t show up. An ultrasound to check him out measured him as “gosh, he’s pretty big” and only getting bigger, so Evgenya was induced early on Saturday morning and gave birth Sunday night at 6:50 PM.

Evidently most of labour is spent waiting in pain until you’re actually allowed to push. Who knew? When that time came, the midwife suggested we could wait another few hours and wait for more progress, to which Evgenya replied “nah, I’ll push him out now.” And then she did. In under an hour. I saw him come out!

All 9.1 lbs of ankle biter. Dude had a serious cone head!

conehead.gif

The little guy had fluid in his lungs, so they moved him to the intermediate care unit where he could be poked, proded and hooked up to machines that go beep. They gave him extra oxygen and he’s doing better, breathing on his own now.

Unfortunately the follow-up x-ray what looks like pneumonia in his lungs, and when that happens they don’t mess around, they pull out the big guns. So now he’s there until Sunday, a little bundle of happiness in starched whites.

porthole.gif

He’s doing fine, but it’s hard not to be home with him. You can’t connect with your baby the same way if he’s hooked up to tubes and monitors. You can’t just hold him without some cord popping out and a machine beeping at you reproachfully until you silence it. We just keep reminding ourselves that it’s temporary, he’s be fine and we’ll be home soon enough. All four grandparents are here, and that makes a world of difference.

Evgenya is such a trooper, I can’t believe it. You see your wife in a whole different light after she goes through something like this. I am positively in AWE of moms now. Oh my goodness, you guys rock! :)

More details as things get more “normal” (yeah. right.)

- Aaron, Evgenya & Keiki (he’ll get a name at the bris, until then he’s Keiki (”kid” in Hawaiian)

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

The jungle is an interesting place to live.

We drive past the usual dogs and cats to get to our place, but when there’s rain there’s also frogs. Evolutionarily (yes, it really should be a word) these little guys are unprepared for the meaning of oncoming headlights, and so they just sit there. Presumably their little noggin’s are hoping the moon (which has just split in two and is approaching low along the ground) will go around them.

At night, black wild pigs meander around but move off into the bush pretty quickly.

We drive over fallen mangos and past bananas, increasingly acclimatized to the potential harvest around us. We vow to get some avocados off the tree, but we’re never sure when to do it.

Inside the house, we’ve fought mini-battles with ants that re-routed a highway through our living room one day and switched it back just as suddenly. Geckos appear on the walls from time to time, a mixed blessing. They eat other bugs, but then they leave their … evidence around the edges of the walls. We catch ‘n release the little ones but the big ones are just too fast.

Birds make all kinds of funky noises, but NONE of them sound like crows or seagulls? Yeah, that’s right baby. It really must be paradise.

Lastly are the cockroaches. Doesn’t the word just inspire the heeby jeebies? We don’t see ‘em often, the big ones at least but we’ve seen a few. My perspective on these guys has really changed though. I still think they’re ‘gross garage!’ as Evgenya would say, but the ones we have around here are different in my mind than any I’d have seen back in Victoria.

These ones are hapless jungle critters that wandered into our house on a routine walkabout. City roaches are parasitic nasties who live on garbage and creep us out. To put things in perspective, roaches have been around for a very long time. For eons, they were hanging out in the forest eating stuff, talking about world domination and smoking up (where do you think the term ‘roach’ came from?!). Then, humans arrived and word went out — PARTY in the new world!!

Anyways, they bug me less when I remember they’re forest critters and not Built To Bug People.

So yeah. Jungle living. Nothing quite like it.

At the end of all the school year for my dad’s fine furniture course,
they had a big wrapup dinner and everyone displayed their final project.

As it turned out, they brought in four independant judges (two of them gallery owners) and gave away a $500 prize to the very best design.

They gave it to my dad.

HUZZAH!!

ottoman.jpg

Work is going really well. It’s fun to revert to Bachelor Workaholic mode for awhile. The drift is towards being up later, which is making it harder to get up at 6AM (to take calls starting officially at 9AM Pacific). Today I crawled out of bed at 7, which is already 1PM for many of our customers on the East Coast. *groan*

Check email… check the phone for messages… cooool. Nobody noticed! ;)

That judo class I went to was fine, but as I left I noticed another class starting in a building next door. I wandered over, tried a class and fell in love with it. AMAZING. After reading Bruce Lee’s book many times over, a chance to train in his art (Jeet Kune Do = “way of the intercepting fist”. For a quick background on him rent Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. Great movie.

Just like a musician, martial artists have influences. His influencs were Wing Chun (first art he learned as a child with an emphasis on fast hitting in straight lines) western boxing (distance, timing, wallop) and also judo and jujitsu (ground fighting).

The school I’m at is somewhat competition-focussed at the higher levels. That’s usually bad because sports have to be safe, so you’re either training yourself to hold back, or your art is actually modified to specifically avoid injurious strikes. If you really have to defend yourself, you don’t want to be sport-fighting, you want to be street-fighting.

At this school the training is focussed on full-contact fighting. We use safety equipment and we don’t hit each other hard. Lots of tag-got-ya drills though, which are always fun. Don’t worry mom! I’m not gonna jump in the ring, it’s just a good sign that the training is realistic. (And far less dangerous than when Byron and I used to wallop each other. ;)

My body is thanking me for taking up a physical activity, and I’m finding concentration at work is coming more easily as well.

Bah. I miss my sweetheart.

Evgenya’s sitting on top of a large rock in Chile right now, hoping the clouds will go away so she can work.

She would never complain, and so I will do it for her. The trip there and back involves 60 hours of total travel time, to a place where the air is so thin you get headaches and nosebleeds and dinner involves stale bread, PB&J and an apple.

She works by night and sleeps during the day, the internet connection is slow and the coffee… well it just isn’t coffee. The country just got rocked by an 8.0 earthquake (she’s fine, didn’t feel it) and it’s probable that the clouds won’t go away and the whole effort will be useless.

Neat ’scope though.

I love you babe, hang in there!!

little_lizard.jpg

This little fellah lives somewhere in our kitchen. We’ve seen him a few times, but he always says something about imminent suction cup failure and runs off before we can have a good chat.

They eat las cucarachas though, so welcome little brother. Welcome.

This is how bananas grow. Neato.

bananas.jpg