Ollie Update

A tale of two babies

/ Shane / 9 Comments

Having two kids is definitely interesting, to say the least. One of the things I was really looking forward to with a second kid is to see how the kids are the same, and how they are different. Even though Oliver is still pretty young, I can already see how different the two of them are. Note that I’m comparing Oliver at the age he is now, to Evie when she was his age. Obviously there would be a lot more differences between an infant and an almost-3-year-old!

How they are the same:

  • They both liked baths – Oliver is generally a grump in the evening, and spends a lot of time crying. Not during bath time! Nothing is more sure to make him smile than letting him kick his legs like a maniac in the little bathtub. Evie was the same way.
  • They both loved looking at the light and ceiling fan – This is probably the same for all babies, but they both could stare for hours at pretty much nothing at all.
  • They both liked hearing Old Macdonald – I remember we used to sing this in the car to Evie for like hours at a time, saying every animal we could think of. We would even have variations of animals, like a bird is different than a crow, or a dog sounds different than a big dog. The same is starting to work for Oliver as well. It’s like a switch: turn off singing, turn on crying.
  • They both had a blocked tear duct – This just means that you are constantly wiping away those little “eye boogers” from the corner of their eyes. Sometimes wiping it away will cause him to cry, and I just think, “Oh man, it’s just going to come back now!” Obviously Evie’s cleared up after a time, so we’re just waiting it out at this point.
  • They both loved pooping with their diaper off -There must be some biological reason for this, but the second the diaper comes off, watch out! Of course this isn’t a big deal now that we are used to it. You just need to move fast and get something in position as soon as possible. Sometimes I don’t even have a chance to take the old diaper off, I just need to lay him down and start to unfasten it!

How they are different:

  • Oliver sleeps a lot – The first thing people generally remarked about Evie when she was an infant was that she was so alert. Oliver spends a lot more time sleeping, at least for the first month or so. He has more and more (happy) awake time during the day, but after Evie he still seems like a sleepy head.
  • Oliver shrieks like a banshee – Oliver can (and will) give out this bloodcurdling screech that sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard before. He has quite the vocal range. They always say in books and movies that you can learn what a baby wants by his cry. In my experience that is not true. Evie had pretty much the same cry for everything. Oliver has many different cries, but I don’t think you can really interpret anything by them. He usually gives his horrible-bloody-murder-pain-shriek for pretty much anything.
  • Poop velocity – Evie could hit a bee’s eye at 40 paces, and routinely coated the wall, or anything else not quick enough to get out of the way. Oliver more or less keeps it in the diaper. I can only think of one truly disastrous poopy diaper of the kind that Evie had like once a day.
  • Oliver doesn’t like to be held – Okay, this is the weird one. I thought ALL babies liked to be held? If Oliver is crying, one of the first things to try is setting him down somewhere. Most of the time he’s happier on his own. Even when you’re holding him, he likes to sit up in your lap and face outward, not be cuddled or anything like that. He does sleep better if you’re holding him, but he still spends decent chunks of the day in the bouncy seat or lying on a blanket. It certainly can be convenient, but I’ve never heard of a baby who’s happier not to be held.

Don’t smooch the baby!

/ Shane / Leave a comment

I’ve never had two kids before. That is to say that I really didn’t know how they would act around each other (although I do have siblings of my own, but I don’t really remember that far back). Most, if not all, books and movies tell me that the older sibling would occasionally feel a little jealous or angry at the new baby. This sort of makes sense, at least to an adult, so it seemed reasonable. However, most people I know with a couple of kids said that the older one pretty much ignores the infant.

I don’t know if our situation is unique or what, but Evie had a totally different reaction altogether: an unceasing love so strong, that it threatens to smother Oliver!

Evie is constantly kissing and whispering sweet nothings to him. Every night she hugs him and says, “I love you Oliver!” in the most reverent tones. She gets so upset when he cries and always tries to make him feel better. She just can’t help it; if she sees him, she just *has* to smooch him. We are often telling her, “Okay, back up!”, “Give him some air!”, or “Okay honey, but he’s sleeping right now!” If I had a dime for every time she’s woken up or upset him when he was doing perfectly well on his own, I’d be able to hire a nanny to keep her at bay 24/7.

The thing is, you feel bad telling her to stop loving her brother so much. You feel a little silly when you realize you’ve been angrily yelling, “Evie, stop smooching him! He’s sleeping! I’ll tell you when you can kiss him!” On the other hand, she does occasionally attempt to literally smother him with love.

One time we were reading a “now you’re a big sister” book and there was a section about how sometimes you might get mad or jealous of the baby. I asked her if she ever felt that way. She looked at me as if I were speaking another language. I asked her again and told her it was okay if she felt that way. She looked like maybe she would cry that I would even ask her that. I quickly changed the subject. No need to put thoughts in her head that clearly weren’t there!

So anyway, if we have any problem in this family, it’s too much love. I don’t know how long it will last, but, since we’re approaching the 2 month mark, it looks like it is here for a little while at least. There are worse problems to have.

Where’s Oliver?

/ Shane / 5 Comments

Some of you are probably wondering, where’s Oliver? I haven’t been talking about him too much on here. Well, that’s because, quite frankly, he doesn’t really do very much!

I am very sensitive about slighting him, time-wise, but it keeps happening despite my best efforts. I feel like I talked about Evie a lot more, though I haven’t looked back on the blog to confirm. I know for sure that we haven’t been taking as many pictures of him, compared to Evie at this age. In fact, even now, I think we tend to take more pictures of Evie!

I can’t really help it though. Oliver sleeps pretty much all the time. This is quite a bit different than Evie, who was awake all day. I never thought I would have complained about a baby sleeping all the time, but sometimes I wonder like, “Shouldn’t you be awake? Looking around? Learning something?”

I think that this is all extremely not fair to Oliver. I don’t think he’s doing anything less than any baby this age. With Evie, everything was new and amazing. Now that some of the shiny has worn off, being as it is the second child, everything isn’t so awe inspiring anymore.

Not to mention the fact that Evie has been a little more (intentionally) mischievous lately. Pretty much to be expected, however, it makes it a little bit harder to just sort of enjoy Oliver. You can’t stay in bed all day cuddling him when your toddler is out breaking things in the kitchen.

So if you’re wondering where Oliver is, he’s mostly sleeping in someone’s lap, forcing them to spend all day on facebook. It’s not like you have a choice, you can’t wake up a sleeping baby!

Oliver, Born at Last!

/ Shane / Leave a comment

So Oliver was big, obviously, though that didn’t register right away. Mostly I’ve noticed that in retrospect, like in situations where I remember noting how small Evie was. The car seat is a good example. I remember when we took Evie home that she looked so tiny in that seat! I sure didn’t think that about Oliver!

The first thing I really noticed were his huge feet and long fingers. Huge feet in particular are sort of a family trait, on my dad’s side. The rumor is that when I was born, the doctor, having delivered many babies in my family, recognized my feet immediately. So at least there is one thing about Oliver that I can really say come from me (I gave Evie my dimple).

Sara had no pitocin for her labor, which was apparently quite remarkable. Everybody who came in mentioned it, especially the residents. Sara asked the nurse what percentage of people get pitocin, and the nurse said, “100%.” Well, she had to amend her statistic to 99.95% later, because Sara went au natural, as it were.

And, despite the lack of pitocin, everything went really fast. Well, I should amend that maybe. Every time I exclaim, “It went really fast!” someone says, “Wait a minute. She had contractions for like 29 hours!” Well, first off, 29 hours seems pretty quick when the first one was 62 hours. And second off, every time they checked her, there was major progress. Compare that with the first one, where every time they checked they would say, “Nothing yet!” So, not only was the first one a lot longer time-wise, it also felt a lot longer because of the lack of progress.

As for me, the birth story is really all about allergies. Holy smokes, there was something with that hospital. From the minute we got there, until we left, I was pretty miserable, even with medication. I don’t really know why it was so bad, but I was a little frustrated that this wonderful, important moment, was being ruined by the stupid poisonous air! Plus, you could tell in all of the pictures that I was miserable, with my red scratchy eyes and stuffy nose. It’s hard to see that kind of thing in a picture, so you can imagine how bad it was (although people usually just say I look tired, which was also true).

I wasn’t the only one who didn’t look good in my pictures. Poor Oliver (You thought I was going to say Sara didn’t you? Well you were wrong, she was pretty much radiant the whole time, with perfect hair) had a case of Erythema Toxicum, which is a bad looking rash all over, common in babies.  It’s not as bad as it sounds; it’s not painful or itchy (or toxic) or anything. Unfortunately though, it doesn’t make for very nice pictures.

So, lets see, where was I? They tried to get us a bigger room, but in reality, the room we ended up with was much nicer. It wasn’t huge, but it was on the corner, so we had two walls of windows looking out onto a boulevard with flowering trees (everyone would say, “Look at that beautiful view!” and I would just sniff and claw at my eyes). Plus, it was at the very end of the hall, so we were more or less alone. It was downright luxurious.

Evie’s reaction was about what I would have guessed. She has just been so excited for baby Oliver to get here, so I knew she would be really exited to meet him. She is very reverent around him, with a lot of soft, “Hello Oliver”‘s and “Good morning Oliver!”‘s. At the hospital she sang Happy Birthday to him. Overall though, she was probably more interested in all the other stuff at the hospital, than in Oliver. There were a lot of interesting tubes and buttons and other things she wasn’t allowed to touch. She likes to hold him and give him smooches and pet his head, so much so that sometimes we have to tell her to give him a little room.

We bought some presents to give her from Oliver, and she gave him some presents as well, including the book Ollie the Stomper.

We told her she could pick something out at the toy store for him, and she picked out a piggie bank. It’s really cute, and she was really excited. Even to the point that when she found change on the ground, she put it in his piggie bank instead of her own. Oliver got her a book about being a big sister, a baby dalmatian (so that the one growing inside of her could be born at the same time), and a little heart full of M&Ms. Evie said, “Oliver gave me a heart because he loves me, so maybe I can give him back the heart, because I love him!”

So far she hasn’t seemed too jealous, but there are a few things here and there. For example, the first time Sara put Oliver in the sling, Evie started quietly sobbing. I said, “Why are you crying honey?” and she said, “I don’t know!”

So that’s about it. Overall, everything went better the second time around; no ridiculously long induction, no weight problems for the baby so far, no premature discharging of mommy from the hospital, etc. He seems to sleep waaay more than Evie, and I’m not complaining about that. Of course, now that I’m mentioning it, I’m sure I’m doomed.

And now we have 2 kids. We’re officially an old couple. You can probably get away with being kind of cool still when you just have one kid, but 2? The first thing I noticed about having 2 kids is that you can’t accomplish anything! With one kid, one of you can watch the baby while the other one takes a shower, does the dishes, does some laundry, etc. With two kids, there’s no one left over to accomplish anything! So we’re already going down a rough path in terms of the cleanliness of our house.

(and the timeliness of our blog posts…)

Oliver’s Birth Story

/ Shane / 1 Comment

On Sunday, Sara started feeling contractions at about 5:30 in the morning. However, they didn’t hurt, so she wasn’t sure if they were the real deal or not. By about 3 in the afternoon, they started to hurt. However, ever since they began, the contractions were about 3 minutes apart. So even after they started to hurt, we still weren’t sure they were the real thing. I mean, everything you see or read or people tell you agrees: contractions start far apart, maybe 10 minutes or so, gradually getting closer and closer together, and when they get between 3 to 5 minutes apart, you go to the hospital. So it didn’t make much sense that they were 3 minutes apart to begin with.

So we didn’t really want to mention it to anybody, since we really didn’t think it could be the real thing. Plus, we were just really sure that Oliver would be late, not early. In fact, I was talking on the phone to my mom during this time, and I didn’t mention it. We just didn’t want to get anybody worked up. Finally, around 8 p.m. or so we called Sara’s parents and told them what was going on. We didn’t want anybody to miss any work or anything, especially if it was just a false alarm. On the other hand, Evie was sleeping and her parents were 3 1/2 hours away, so if we waited too long to call them, we might have some trouble. After some deliberation, they decided to make the trip.

In retrospect, it was a good thing we called them when we did, because the contractions continued to get worse. Sara was breathing through the contractions and spending some time in the tub. The warm water seemed to help. She was lying under a towel and periodically I would dump warm water on her.
Me: “This reminds me of when they transport whales.”
Sara: “You’re going to make me pee!”
Me: “You wanted the water to be warmer!”
(Sara would also like to point out that I may or may not have referred to her look as “humpty dumpty” one time while she was pregnant)
So, by the time her parents got to our place around 11:30 p.m., we decided we should go right to the hospital.

It turns out, that was a pretty good time to go. After watching the World Series of Poker for an hour in the waiting room, I was finally allowed to come back to where Sara was, and found out she was farther along than we were hoping she would be. Sara asked for an epidural around 1 and they finally got around to administering it at about 3:30. It was kind of ironic, because Sara mentioned how it took 2 hours to get one last time and everybody was aghast. Well it took even longer this time! Sara made a joke about how badly I took the last epidural, but the doctor didn’t find it all that funny, and I was relegated back to the waiting room for another 30 minutes or so.

The epidural wasn’t as strong as it had been with Evie, so the contractions were still painful, but they were better than they had been with no epidural. I slept for about an hour, but Sara wasn’t able to get any consistent rest. At about 5 a.m. Sara was still making good progress, and they broke her water. They checked her again at about 7 and we knew it would be soon. We were sort of led to believe it would be like any minute, but really it wasn’t until 8:30 or so when Sara started pushing. Finally, at 9:13 a.m., Oliver was born!

Stay tuned for our next installment: Oliver, Born at Last!