{"id":102,"date":"2010-05-16T02:21:20","date_gmt":"2010-05-16T09:21:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/roy.gbiv.com\/untangled\/?p=102"},"modified":"2010-05-16T02:21:20","modified_gmt":"2010-05-16T09:21:20","slug":"some-people-call-him-liam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/roy.gbiv.com\/untangled\/2010\/some-people-call-him-liam","title":{"rendered":"Some people call him Liam"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Roy<\/a>After years of planning and hoping and preparing and learning and worrying and just getting on with life, I became a Daddy in March. It came as a bit of a shock, in spite of the eight months of watching the ultrasounds and taking classes and helping Cheryl as the little pod grew. We had just moved to a bigger place, still had dozens of boxes left to unpack before the weekend’s baby shower, and I had only been asleep for a few hours when Cheryl woke me up with the news: Hospital, now!<\/p>\n

Three weeks early. Twenty-two days early, to be exact. All the books say that the range of 38-42 weeks is “normal”, so he was only eight days ahead of the curve and (thank goodness) beyond the stage of preemie health concerns. 2600 grams (5.732 lbs.) of joy, and a healthy Mommy as well. Woohoo! Of course, that also meant we were tossed out of the hospital about 40 hours after birth, thanks to our wonderful US healthcare system.<\/p>\n

\"Liam<\/a>The staff and facilities at Hoag Hospital <\/a>were excellent, but the whole experience was marred by the rush out of the hospital and then a corresponding rush back to the hospital three days later after a test for jaundice<\/a> turned up in the critical range. We really weren’t prepared for that one; I am still peeved that the test wasn’t automatically scheduled for day 4 (instead of waiting for our pediatrician to see him on day 5). However, a night in the ICU tanning bed, with extra feeding to help evacuate the bilirubin, was enough to get him back to a safe zone and he was good to go home again.<\/p>\n

Twenty-two days early doesn’t sound like much, but it is huge. Most of our friends went long for their first baby, so I had this schedule in the back of my mind of all the things that I was going to finish by April so that I could take a long, relaxing break into parenthood. Bzzt! The Anaheim IETF meeting was being held the following week, just twelve miles from my house, and my fellow HTTP standard editors had planned a whole week of editing httpbis at or near my place. Bzzt! We had delayed buying a bunch of baby things until after the shower. Bzzt! We had all these classes on what to expect in terms of sensing the arrival and onset of labor. Bzzt!<\/p>\n

\"Liam<\/a>None of those plans truly mattered, in the grand scheme of things, but it taught me a quick lesson about my limitations as a working Daddy. At least some of my planning worked out, such as saving my vacation time so that I could spend the better part of six weeks at home. He is almost at two months now and still has to eat every three hours. I usually take the night shift and catch up with email while he sleeps on my shoulder. This weekend I discovered that I can actually type this way, with Liam sliding down a bit to warm his legs on my laptop, though I have to watch out when his little feet brush over the multitouch trackpad.<\/p>\n

I’ll be catching up on the backblog soon. Now, if I can just get him to sleep long enough to edit a specification …<\/p>\n

BTW, Liam is his nickname.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After years of planning and hoping and preparing and learning and worrying and just getting on with life, I became a Daddy in March. It came as a bit of a shock, in spite of the eight months of watching the ultrasounds and taking classes and helping Cheryl as the little pod grew. We had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[50],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roy.gbiv.com\/untangled\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/roy.gbiv.com\/untangled\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/roy.gbiv.com\/untangled\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roy.gbiv.com\/untangled\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roy.gbiv.com\/untangled\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/roy.gbiv.com\/untangled\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":130,"href":"https:\/\/roy.gbiv.com\/untangled\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions\/130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roy.gbiv.com\/untangled\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roy.gbiv.com\/untangled\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roy.gbiv.com\/untangled\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}