The only possible explanation

Who eats breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, luncheon, afternoon tea, dinner and (later in the evening) supper?

Lenny.

Ergo, Lenny must be a Hobbit.

QED.

This means that somehow our baby is not Homo sapiens sapiens, but rather Homo floresiensis, aka, a Hobbit.

Math, yay!

Now that we have to feed Lenny formula for the week (which costs a small fortune), we can track about how much she eats. We fill the bottle with 4 fl oz each time, often she'll finish, sometimes not, sometimes she'll also request a 1 or 2 fl oz snack, so let's assume she's eating 3.5 fl oz each time. She eats about every 3 hours, so that's about 8 times a day, but let's reduce that slightly to 7 for the sake of argument.

1 fl oz = 30 mL
1 mL = 1 g

Each day Lenny then eats 735 g/day.

Last she was at the doctor (about two weeks ago) she weighed 6#14. From what I've read, babies should be expected to put on 1/2 to 1 oz/day early in their lives. Let's split the difference and figure she's gained 3/4 oz/day (although I think she's closer to 1, considering just how much bigger she appears). That would put her at 7#10 (I'm thinking she's closer to 8#, though).

7#10 = 3460 g

735g/3460g = 21%

Lenny is eating then about 1/5 of her body weight every day somehow. That's like me eating 40 lbs of food a day.

Now I know why she sometimes looks like she's struggling so hard when she poops.

I don't care what your opinion is

This is hands-down Michael Jackson's best song.

Do you dare disagree?

Added: Wow, I was just looking at some Jackson stuff, and something that absolutely blows my mind is that since 1979 he only released 6 albums: Off the Wall, Thriller, Bad, Dangerous, HIStory, and Invincible. I remember owning Dangerous (I can't believe that came out 18 years ago Jeebus kill me now I am so old), and that was when people were already starting to say, "Hey, what's the deal with Michael Jackson, so those who were born very close to 1982, the year I was born, are really the last people who could possibly recall a time when Jackson was not "weird" - maybe "eccentric" by that time, or perhaps "odd," but probably not "weird." Thriller must have been huge.

Double Bonus Addition: I now recall how on Thursday nights in high school when our football team would all eat dinner together that every damn week our quarterback, whose sense of humor was horrible other than this particular action, would play "Childhood" on the jukebox and act like it was pumping him up. What a lunatic.

Too Soon? Edit: I heard that Michael Jackson was going to be cremated and have his ashes spread in sandboxes so that children can still play with him.

My favorite Jackson joke and it's sooooooooo wrong edit: What's the difference between Michael Jackson and Neil Armstrong? Well, Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon, but Michael Jackson likes having sex with little boys.

Well, that was more adventure than I had bargained for

All I wanted to do on Father's Day was take a nap from 5:00-7:00 in the evening.

Instead, we made a second trip to Seton, this time to the ER. Ariane's appendix (as vestigial as the letter C) had decided to emancipate itself from the oppressive shackles of her intestine. A few hours in the ER, at CT scan, and a short operation later, it was outta there. Luckily it hadn't ruptured yet.

So now we're bottle feeding Lenny for the next week. This makes her poops unbelievably worse. So smelly.

I suppose "experts" advise against taking Vicodin and antibiotics while breastfeeding. Also advising against doing this? Anyone with half a brain, that's who.

And look who just woke up

Publish the post, out come Mommy and baby. Lenny is busy eating and pooping right now, the two things she does best.

Self-indulgent nerdy post

It's 2:45 am on what is now Father's Day (whoop de doo! a fake holiday!) and I am still up because Lenny has completely destroyed whatever semblance of a sleep schedule I used to have,* so I figure I'd come on here and write about what I've been having fun with for the last week, and since of the eight people who actually ever read this crap five are involved at least tangentially in science this might be familiar.

If you've never really searched the scientific literature, you might be surprised by how narrow the scopes of some journals are. The best way to do this is simply to list some of the titles of the journals, and you might be amazed that there is an entire journal devoted to that topic, like the Journal of Fluorine Chemistry, which exists and is published by Elsevier. I am starting writing up another manuscript right now, and I am searching for journals that I may want to publish in, because that actually helps me determine which experiments I'd like to conduct (usually you go the other way around, of course, but my situation is different at the moment for reasons that I will spare explaining to you). Some of the titles are hilariously dorky. I have already published in or submitted to Thin Solid Films, Electrochemical and Solid-State Letters, Journal of the Electrochemical Society, and Microelectronic Engineering. The following is a list of titles that have any possibility of me submitting to, excluding those four. I haven't linked them, but you can easily thegoogle.com them if you want to read their oh-so-boring scopes. I hope you find the titles as entertaining as I do. (For those of you not in the know, if a title is followed by a single letter, like Materials Science and Engineering B, it usually means that the old journal had to split as the topics became more specialized.)

Acta Materialia
Advanced Engineering Materials
Advanced Functional Materials
Advanced Materials (apparently different)
Applied Organometallic Chemistry
Applied Physics A
Applied Physics Letters
Applied Surface Science
Chemical Vapor Deposition
Chemistry of Materials
Journal of Alloys and Compounds
Journal of the American Chemical Society
Journal of Applied Physics
Journal of Electronic Materials
Journal of Materials Research
Journal of Materials Science
Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics
Journal of Materials Science Letters (they're all different, apparently)
Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids
Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology A
Materials Chemistry and Physics
Materials Letters
Materials Science and Engineering B
Materials Today (seeing a trend here?)
Organometallics
physica status solidi (a)
Scripta Materialia
Surface and Coatings Technology
Vacuum

Also, I hope to get some collaboration with someone in physics on some magnetic properties of my stuff and get my name on a paper in some magnetism-centric journal, because physics is even nerdier than materials science.

Go ahead and list your favorite journals or titles in the comments!


*Note that Ariane's schedule, however, has not been destroyed. Actually, if anything, Lenny has simplified hers. It's somthing like this:
9 am - 5 pm: Be awake; feed, burp, and change baby as needed
5 pm - 9 am: Be awake; feed, burp, and change baby as needed

Re-posting

Just because it is my favorite picture ever, displacing my old favorite:


Looking at that dinolasers picture again, I am convinced I had a toy like that growing up...

Fingers and feet; Head and shoulders, knees and toes

Ariane, Nina, and Anne were all in agreement that Lenny's (I almost wrote Claire - I have called Lenny "Claire" a few times; I am so clearly unprepared for this) fingers are exceptionally long for a baby. So I was going to post this to see if anyone had thoughts.


Then my Mom called a couple nights ago and said the same thing, before I had posted this, but after I decided to write it. Granted, I have slim to none experience with babies, but I am not seeing it. They look like baby fingers to me.

What's strange is that everyone was in agreement that I have long fingers. Maybe the word "thin" was also bandied about, but I don't remember, I was too shocked to hear that anyone considered my fingers long. I always considered them short, stubby, and fat. I can't palm a basketball, and I'm 6' OK, I'm 5'11 (and a half!)" tall. I would figure that I should be able to?

So she's got my fingers, I guess. And my cheeks. And my face (poor, poor baby), although it's becoming apparent that she has Ariane's eyes. I am hoping against hope that she doesn't have my big, wide, flat feet (12EEEE).


Ariane is convinced she's got the huge gap between her big toe and second toe like I do (I can fit a billiard ball in between them and crush soda cans, it's gross, I'll admit). Apparently her toes are also long? And she seems to have crazy control over them. I can cross my right pinky toe over my fourth toe and my left fourth toe over my middle toe, and my big toe over my second toe on both feet (I think everyone can do that, at least). Maybe Lenny will have this simian ability also. I just hope she has arches in her feet.

A post about fingers and toes is all the excuse I need to embed this.




If that's not actually U2 performing, someone really nailed their sound. I probably shouldn't admit this, but one semester my junior year, Scoots, Snots, and I watched Rattle & Hum four nights a week every week. And we'd sing along. Every time. Scoots made his all time best joke, "If you were on a plane with Bono, and it were about to crash land, and there was only one parachute, would you give it to Bono?"

The correct answer was, "Of course not, you use the parachute yourself, and Bono will float to earth on a cloud, because he is an angel."

That is so pathetic... yet so true. He is an angel. And so is The Edge.

Edit: Now that I've had "Head and shoulders, knees and toes" stuck in my head all day, I must say that it is way more fun to sing it as "Head and shoulder, sneezin' toes." You know, just FYI.

Heave ho

Lenny decided to go all-you-can-eat at Mommy's Restaurant this morning. It ended with three projections onto Ariane before I took her and made the mistake of holding her facing me. Then, two more projections, one of which got into my face. Lenny of course put on her "Who, me?" face again and demanded to be fed.

The joys of parenthood smell curiously like stomach acid and curdled breast milk.

My two favorite people in the world

Snores McGee

Your guide to 3:30 AM television

I am now an expert at late night TV viewing, since I have unofficially volunteered to take the 3 am to 7-8 am shift keeping Lenny asleep (she just hates her crib and insists on being held for a while to fall good and asleep). Since the websites I enjoy don't update overnight, I am relegated to TV. Lemme tell you what, the most popular show in this time frame is something called "Paid Programming," which appears to be in syndication on 50% of all channels. Crazy, they must have made several hundred episodes of this series, yet I never have seen it on primetime TV. My favorite character is Ron Popeil, a farcical idiot who finds stupid people (not unlike Sean Hannity, who has the added bonus of not being an actual stupid person, but also completely morally bankrupt) who believe simple tasks are difficult in order to give himself reason to invent a device that makes the simple task actually more difficult OR invent something that you will never need, like a five gallon food dehydrator or a knife set that includes a paring knife because so many people clean and filet their own fish nowadays.

Additionally, Austin has two PBS channels (one of which our totally awesome cable company has confined only to digital cable because a. PBS means Public Broadcasting System, so why the heck not restrict the audience's ability to view high-quality, informative, non-sensationalistic programming? and b. Time Warner Cable sucks big time). The only thing they broadcast overnight is some lame program called "Off Air." Why? Because people like you and me are too cheap to buy a tote bag when they are begging for just $20 so they can continue to bring you quality programming like "Hitman: David Foster and Friends," which was actually awesome, and Nova, which kicks ass 99.9% of the time.

ESPNU always has a replay of some game, but since their programming model is apparently strug-a-ling to make money, they only broadcast maybe five games a week, then replay them incessantly. So last night, the night before, and the night before that, I have watched Florida play Southern Miss in the Super Regionals not once, not twice, but thrice. Then when 6:00-ish swings around, ESPNU re-broadcasts yesterday's College Football Live... six times in a row to fill three hours of dead space. And this despite the fact that there is absolutely no college football news to report. Yesterday, they did a report on the state of football in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine; combined I-A and NFL football teams in those states? Zero. Funny accents in those states? Uncountable. Then this morning they spent half the show talking about what a BFD it is that 'Bama is going to have to vacate wins because (say it with me now) Alabama commited NCAA violations within their football program and also the sun rose in the east.

I could watch the same SportsCenter eight times in a row, but they are focusing on the NBA (which sucks) way too much, and I am permanently boycotting Major League Baseball because when Pujols gets outed as a 'roider, it would break my heart if I were following the sport.

The actual only cool program on during this time is a Science Channel show that is not about science at all. It's called "Mantracker," and it is awesome because it is about a guy with a sweet beard and a cowboy hat who persues the most dangerous game: Canadian people, eh? You know, those northern Snowbillies (yes, Canada, you can have Alaska, you already have one lunatic petro-state, why not take a second, crazier one? you could add a superfluous "u" or two, if you'd like; call it "Aulaskau") who are always dreaming up a lotta ways to ruin our lives. The metric system, for the love of God! Celsius! Neil Young! The fact that it's Canadian improves upon the concept because of funny accents and the ability to film in such scenic locales as the Great Plains of Alberta, or the Great Plains of Saskatchewan. If you're lucky, they may hit the prairie portions of Manitoba, too. He'll never track people through Canada's capital, Toronto, or the bustling metropolis of Whitehorse, though, because Mantracker (eh?) is too tuned-in to bent grass and snapped twigs to bother with your fancy "streeuts" and "boouk leaurnin'."

And finally, let's not forget the oldie but goodie perfect-for-a-laff-in-the-morning idiot-fest, Fox & Friends, which simply has to be a joke that Republicans are playing on the rest of us. Normally I can take about 18 seconds of that show before I have an aneurysm (which is a word I can't spell, so I'd love to watch the brown haired guy who isn't Steve Doocy try it). Then I am almost dead so Lenny gets handed off to Nina and I sleep it off until I "go to work" around 2:00 pm.

Happy birthday all

People who share Lenny's birthday:

King George I
Ian Fleming
Jim Thorpe
Jerry West
Terry Crisp
the odious Rudy Giuliani
Gladys Knight (no Pips mentioned)
John Fogerty
Patch frickin' Adams
Zahi Hawass
Kirk Gibson
Ben Howland
Kylie Minogue
Stupid Elisabeth Hasselbeck
Michael Oher

Famous deaths:
Leopold Mozart (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's father)
Noah Webster
Anne Brontë
King Edward VIII
Phil Hartman, RIP
Marquise Hill

Also see here and here for the top stories.

It is also Republic Day in Azerbaijan and Armenia, so yay.

The sound and the fury

I haven't read it, I don't like Faulkner, but if I had to guess, I think it might be about baby farts, which are so disproportionately loud and long to their small size that I sometimes think it's sound effects being piped in from elsewhere. All I know is that after Lenny sharts herself, she becomes impossibly relaxed.

Same with when she projectile vomits cheese all over the place. She has chunks of stuff all over her, but still manages to put on "Who, me?" face. I guess that's what happens when you treat boobs like all-you-can-eat buffets. Of course, with her stomach now empty, after she gets cleaned off she immediately puts on her hungry face and starts turning her head, mouth open, searching for the nipple that is certain to be there. Lather, rinse, repeat...

For the record, I have been directly puked on once, narrowly avoided a four-projection mega-puke, peed on twice (by a girl, for the love of Pete!), but I have not yet been pooped on. I am crossing my fingers.

Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Updated.

Getting there before you do, Lenny and I are competing against a Chinese phonebook for "Most Chins."

I thought I broke her

I was changing Lenny's diaper yesterday, and when I was taking her pants off I forgot to extend the wasteband to get around her umbilical cord and it came off. I was like, oh shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit, I broke her. But apparently almost nine days old is old enough, and nothing was bloody, so it looks like we have just found a new belly button.

Oh wow

I hope you have the music in your head all day long.

Also, Sesame Street, an oldie, but still a goodie.

Ex post facto blogging Lenny's birth

Sure, maybe some people live blog certain events, but what's the difficulty in that? That's why I like to exercise my memory by ex post facto blogging a week after the event of interest. Also, please note that Lenny is over a week old now.

So here's how it goes, starting Wednesday afternoon. All times are approximations that I have gathered from video files, cell phone call times, and blog posts here.

May 27, 3:00 p.m.: Ariane finishes what will become her last checkup with her doctor. She's already 3 cm, which means that as soon as labor starts and she gets to the hospital she can get an epidural. Her exact phrasing, "Booyah! Epidural!"

Appx. 9:00 p.m.: Ariane starts getting contractions, none that she thinks are actual labor-related. At 11:00 I tell her to get up and pack her hospital bag, which has been on her "to do" list for days. She manages to sleep through the night.

May 28, 7:00 a.m.: I wake up to go to work. Ariane still wasn't feeling very good.

11:30 a.m.: I am setting up XRD analysis, and I get another call from Ariane asking if I can come home. I tell her my XRD is going to be finished at 3:00, so I'll leave then.

12:30 p.m.: Ariane calls, asks me to come home right then because she was feeling so bad (notice at none of these times did she ever really say she thought she was having contractions). I stop all of the work I was doing and on the way out jokingly tell Ryan and Wes that the next time they see me I might be a Daddy.

1:15 p.m.: I get home and realize she's having contractions. She says she's kind of been timing them off and on. That's no help, our doctor told us to call if they were greater than a minute long, five minutes apart or less for over an hour, i.e. you have to time them well. I try to start timing them. I also call the pediatrician to register if I have to (had been on my "to do" list for a looong time), and try to start teaching myself how to use the video camera (also had been on my "to do" list for a looong time). Ariane wants me to do the dishes. I tell her that it's not important, that ten years from now no one will care if I did the dishes, but if we don't get video and she is in labor then everyone hates me until the end of the universe, plus I don't even know if I need to buy a memory card or if our model has built-in memory. I somehow lose that argument and do the dishes.

1:15-2:30 p.m.: I try to do dishes, time Ariane's contractions, call the pediatrician, and read the video camera instruction manual while charging the battery. No matter how many times I ask, Ariane doesn't tell me she's having a contraction until like 20 seconds in when I see her face and ask if she's having one. That makes it kind of difficult to do. Since Nina and Anne are scheduled to fly in at 8:30 that night, I ask Wes if he could pick them up from the airport if we need him to do so, which he agrees to do. We get up to go for a little walk, which we were told can stop false labor, I try to time on my cell phone, and I also, for the first time, think that her tummy has dropped a little lower.

2:30 p.m.: I am convinced that it's time to call the doctor. Ariane makes me do it. They tell us to come in.

2:31 p.m.: I pack my hospital bag.

2:32 p.m.: We're on the road.

2:45 p.m.: At the doctor, they take Ariane back, but I stay in the lobby. I spend the next 15 minutes looking like a total perv because I am playing with the video camera in the lobby of an OB/GYN office. Did I mention our camera has loud sound effects when you press all the buttons?

2:50 p.m.: I discover (quite hilariously) that our model lacks built-in memory. Oh shit, is my rough thinking. I consider who I could dispatch to buy a memory card for me and I ask the desk to take me back to wherever Ariane was.

2:55 p.m.: Ariane is hooked up to a machine measuring her contractions. The nurses are excited, I meekly tell her I don't have memory for the camera, but the nurse tells me, and I quote "You aren't the first one, don't worry." This doesn't really make me feel better. She also tells me that there is a camera shop a block and a half a way. Hallelujah, angels singing, peanut butter jelly time, and all that.

3:00 p.m.: Dr. Kisch (not Ariane's doctor, who is off because it's her children's last day of school) comes in, tells Ariane she's a "roomy" 3 cm, and that we have to go to the hospital (which, thankfully, is literally next door). I commence with a mini freak out, because she wasn't due for a week and we were convinced she'd go past that, although we thought all along that the doctors were underestimating how far along she was (you know, because we are the experts on fetal development).

3:30 p.m.: We're checked in and Ariane is having some fairly painful contractions. Considering her incredible tolerance for pain, I'd be writhing on the ground.

4:00 p.m.: I call Delta in Atlanta to leave a message for Nina and Anne that we won't be picking them up because Ariane is in labor.

4:05 p.m.: I leave to get food and drinks and a damn memory card. Who gets into the checkout line behind me at Central Market? Wes. Weird. I buy a card that sounds good at Precision Camera. Perhaps they gouge me. Is $50 for 5 GB of SD fair? I have no idea. Whatever, I have bigger fish to fry.

5:00 p.m.: Back in the hospital, I find that Ariane isn't allowed to eat or drink. So I eat the food I had bought for her. Because I am nice like that. Dr. Kisch had broken Ariane's water while I was gone, which is great, because I don't "do" medical procedures of any kind. It was very slightly green, which means that there was some meconium (i.e. fetus poop) in the amniotic fluid and a neonatal doctor might be needed at birth to suck anything out of Lenny's mouth and nose before she breathes it in. Imagine how thrilled we were to know that Lenny had already discovered the joy of pooping, which she still frequently practices.

5:15 p.m.: Anesthesiologist arrives to give Ariane her epidural. I don't "do" that, so I leave before I am asked.

6:00 p.m.: I finally have the video ready to go and take the first one. Ariane is so chill with her epidural. Doesn't even feel her contractions any longer. She's about 4 cm, according to Dr. Kisch. We sit back for the wait. Dr. Kisch is done, and Dr. Reue will be taking care of Ariane for the next shift.

6:00-8:00 p.m.: Lauren, our labor nurse, checks in on Ariane from time to time, Ariane watches TV, and I just annoy her by taking videos. I have a small headache that has gotten progressively worse, but the hospital can't give me anything, so I figure it will go away if I drink enough.

6:30 p.m.: Derrick had called earlier and asked if there was anything he could do, and we decide to take him up on his offer and ask him to make the pickup at the airport. I also ask him if he can get me some painkillers. My offer was a million dollars.

8:00 p.m.: Dr. Reue comes in, introduces himself, checks Ariane, says she's fully dilated and just about ready to push. Uh, what? She went from 4 cm to a full 10 cm in two hours? This is madness. I start to freak out, I am so not ready for this. Dr. Reue also hits us with this bit of comedy: A lot of women take two or three hours of pushing to get the firstborn out, but Lenny is sitting so low already that he expects that Ariane will only need to push for about thirty minutes. Can we slow this down a bit, please? I need time to digest this. No? Well then.

8:15 p.m.: Ariane starts pushing with Lauren helping out. Since I don't "do" childbirth, I hide up by the head of Ariane's bed, alternatively squeezing my temples, keeping my eyes closed, trying not to throw up, and maybe rubbing Ariane's hand or scratching her head. I am totally useless at this point. At some point in the next half hour, Lauren asked me if I was OK. I said I was, I just am not very good with medical stuff. I also say they don't even have to bother asking me if I want to cut the cord, because the answer is a million times "No!"

8:45 p.m.: Dr. Reue comes in with a small army for the birth. A neonatal doctor is there to take care of the meconium birth. At some point one of them sees me with my eyes closed, head down, covering my mouth, and asks if I want to sit down. I am such an ass. Ariane is pushing a baby out of her, and I can't even gather myself enough to say, "You're doing great, sweetie!" I would have failed our childbirth education course if this were considered a final exam.

8:59 p.m.: And just that fast, there she is. Lenny Grace. The neonatal doctor rushes her over to the warming table to suck out any amniotic fluid, they wipe her down, weigh her and measure her as the doctor finishes with Ariane. I can't remember much at this point. I remember them asking if I wanted to take pictures, so I walked back to get my camera and accidentally saw the placenta sitting in a bowl or something and nearly puked (again). Soon they wrapped Lenny up in a blanket and gave her to Ariane. That's when I got that first video of her.

9:30 p.m.: Derrick arrives with Nina and Anne, plus his roommate Brent. I am given a quick hug at the door before they bolt to Ariane and Lenny. Derrick hands me a new bottle of Tylenol. Awesome.

*****

The rest of the night is spread out. Ariane fed Lenny, then they brought Lenny in for a bath, which this proud papa got to attend and film. Ariane was brought to our room, and then so was Lenny. Somehow we were up until 5 a.m. before we got a couple hours of sleep. We stayed in the hospital for less than 48 hours, and now we're home working through the growing pains of being new parents. Lenny is great. We're figuring out how to maximize sleep in the night; one of the things parents "conveniently" fail to tell non-parents is that for the first several days of their lives, newborns are nocturnal (awesome). But all is good. Lenny is already back above her birth weight. She had dropped from 6 lb 2 oz at birth to 5 lb 12 oz at her first doctor's visit on Monday. By Wednesday, after Ariane had gotten her milk in, Lenny was 6 lb 4 oz, gaining half a pound in two days. Now she's more than a week old.

We're glad you're here, Lenny. I hope we can give you a great life and help you become a good person, and that you are healthy and that you do what makes you happy. Good luck, little girl.

Stretching out

What's my name?

All right, I am no longer Luke. On Blogger, I am now Lenny's Dad.

So much I want to write

But I am just so friggin' tired, I can barely move my fingers. I don't know how Ariane is doing it. Must be some kind of mommy super power.

Maybe I'll get to it tonight or so, but until then just another video that I (and my impossibly slow upload speed) have already uploaded to Kindertube.

Kindertuben, revisited

Can you watch this? Please answer in the comments if not.



This is Ariane literally 5 minutes after pushing Lenny out. I'd say she's looking pretty good, no?

Update: Melissa informs me that, yes, you can view this. Thank god Youtube is idiot-proof.