Demoted to Dog

(Originally posted on Thursday, July 13, 2006 by Tim)

...and you thought you would get a baby picture.

We had a couple of firsts today.

1. Cathy came downstairs for the first time from the birth.
2. Sam and Modi got to meet Dalton for the first time.
3. I changed my first (and second) diaper.

I'll let you decide which you think is the most exciting event.

Dalton is still slow on picking up breast feeding. We had a meeting with the lactation consultant at the local hospital today. She was great. She spent 2 hours with us and got Dalton to finally feed from Cat's breast. At two hours per session, it's no wonder they don't answer the phone. While we still have some work ahead of us, the improvement is very encouraging.

My parents arrived today and also met Dalton for the first time. Mom took this picture of her grandson. Note how Mr. Long Labor still has his hands up around his head.

Day 2

(Originally posted on Wednesday, July 12, 2006 by Tim)

I can already feel this web space threatening to become a string of baby posts and pictures. Over half our readership is probably grandparents so I expect it will be well received.

Both Cat and Dalton had a checkup from Hannah (our midwife) today. Both are doing well. Cat is healing fast and Dalton is progressing as expected. The only real difficulty at present is Dalton seems to be a little slow on picking up on breastfeeding. We?ve rented a breast pump and he is being fed colostrum from a syringe. Hopefully he will get things down in the next day or two. Regardless of the slope of his learning curve, he is getting fed.

Cat?s mom (Carol) was here for the birth. She actually made it just in time. The original plan was for her to come up here on the 10th after stopping in Tennessee for an appointment. Cat started having contractions early that day, but wasn?t sure if they were real since they were irregular. While talking together on the phone that morning Carol remarked, ?Feel free to get started without me.? Apparently Cat took her seriously. Carol arrived about an hour after Cat began active labor.

The picture above was taken today (Day 2). Dalton is being held by his aunt Jessica and is looking quite lively.

Dalton S. J.

(Originally posted on Tuesday, July 11, 2006 by Tim)

Born early this morning after 24 hours of labor (12 of it active and 5 of that pushing). He had his hand up by his head and that prolonged the experience. Hopefully, he has learned his lesson and will steadfastly avoid causing his parents grief in the future.

9 pounds even
21 inches long
1 day early

Both mother and baby are doing well.

The father is still a bit freaked out by the experience.

4th of July

(Originally posted on Tuesday, July 4, 2006 by Tim)

I hope everyone is having a good 4th of July. Cat and I are going over to a friend?s house for Middle Eastern food. Eating food from that region of the world on the 4th of July seems a bit un-American based on events of the last decade. Still, we like the food, so we?ll be off soon. I?m taking the precaution of eating bratwurst and baked beans before we go to try and keep us off the FBI and NSA watch lists.

The other issue with today?s dinner is that it is in Radford. Normally, this location is neither here nor there, but I was at work today and the entire city or Radford has no water. Our friends called ahead and warned Cat that there was only one flush left in the toilet. Cat got a double take out of me when she said, ?Oh, I?ll be fine.? As you all know, Cat is pregnant and due any day now. With the baby pressing on her bladder, she has to use the rest room every 10 minutes. Just this morning, she kicked me out of the bathroom in the middle of shaving because she couldn?t wait any longer. Now I know what you are thinking. Cathy could stand on her head at dinner and that would take the weight of the baby off her bladder. Unfortunately, it would put the weight on her lungs instead and then she wouldn?t be able to breathe. I suppose I?d better start finding some containers to load the car up with water to flush the toilets this evening.

On the bright side, these friends didn?t give us an option of something to bring and now we have something. I?ve been trying to think of an idea, but I keep coming up short. I was thinking about a bottle of wine, but they are wine people and always bring a really good bottle when we see them. I?ve been drinking very little wine the last few years and I don?t have a prayer of picking out something that wouldn?t be embarrassing. Another idea was to bring a basil plant over. Last time they were at our place, they commented on the basil hedge I had upstairs. Unfortunately, I haven?t prepared for this and I don?t have any basil plants ready to give away. Fortunately, I just thought of what they need. You guessed it, they need drinking water. Their entire town is out of water and has been all day. I bet their grocery stores are out as well. Water, it?s the perfect housewarming gift. We?ll pick some up on our way over.

Blackberries

(Originally posted on Sunday, July 2, 2006 by Tim)

Cat and I have an acre and a quarter of land around the house. Of this, approximately a quarter acre is adjacent and open to the road and the ?back? acre is fenced in for the dogs. We?ve planted a number of things in both parts of the yard since last Fall and we?re in the process of seeing what sorts of fruits and vegetables we can get here.

I?ll describe some of the things we have planted in a separate post. In addition to what we?ve done, there are three ?crops? that were extant in the yard when we arrived: Grapes, raspberries, and blackberries. We had a great crop of grapes the first summer we were here. I harvested a gallon or so of these and used them to make a very nice grape jam. Last year, we didn?t get any grapes. I?d speculate that this was due to a combination of a Japanese beetle infestation and my not pruning the grape vine during late Winter.

I have never raised grapes before and I wasn?t aware that you were supposed to prune grape vines. Apparently, you get your greatest quantity of grapes from new growth. As such, you are supposed to cut all growth back to the first or second bud from the main vine. This involves some pretty extreme pruning. I was worried that I had gone too far when I finished hacking back the vines this last Winter. This level of pruning appears to have been just fine as we have a vigorous and healthy grape vine this year with copious bunches of fruit.

The benefit of heavy pruning was supposedly discovered by a monk shortly before the fall of the Roman Empire. The monk was Saint Martin, who also is the French Saint of winemaking. As legend has it, he would ride a donkey to the vineyards in order to examine the crops. On arrival at the vineyards, Saint Martin would tether the donkey to a post and go about his investigation of the grapes. Now Saint Martin may be a patron Saint, but he was no Boy Scout. As such, he couldn?t tie knots very well. One day the donkey escaped its tether. When Saint Martin returned from his inspection, he was horrified to find that the donkey had been eating the vines and had chewed some back to the trunk.* He considered having the donkey shot, but being the 350?s it was not politically correct and gunpowder hadn?t been invented yet. To his surprise, the chewed grape vines grew back vigorously and produced the biggest crops the next year. Since then, heavy pruning has been an essential component in the process of winemaking.

The easier to maintain crops in our yard are the blackberries and the raspberries. In contrast to the grapes which require pruning, weeding, and spraying for insects, I have to hit the blackberries and raspberries with the lawnmower to keep them from taking over the yard. In our first two summers here, we largely missed the blackberry crop. The fruit begins to become harvestable in mid June and it?s not really worth bothering with by July. This year, we?ve managed to catch the crop and have harvested 5 quarts of blackberries so far.

We?ve been picking once a week. At that rate, we?ve missed a lot of the fruit on the vines. I think we will want to pick twice a week in the future. I would estimate that our yard produces 2 to 2.5 gallons of blackberries a year. Based on how things were looking a few weeks ago, I decided that I should get 1.5 gallons of blackberries out of the yard this year. I'm not sure what we'll use all those berries for, but it's a goal and I'm going to hit it!

Cat used the first half gallon of blackberries to make a very nice jam. I expect the second half gallon will be used for pancakes over the year. As for the last half gallon of blackberries, who knows? Maybe we will use them in smoothies.

* Previous to the 20th century, the rampages of poorly tethered donkeys was responsible for more than a 10% annual decrease in world wine production. Repeated attempts to breed donkeys that abhorred the taste of grape vines failed. Thankfully, this dilemma was largely solved in 1907 with the invention of the Boy Scouts in Great Britain.

Smooties, revisited

(Originally posted on Sunday, July 2, 2006 by Cathy)

Tim and I don't really agree on appropriate formulations for smoothies. His recipe is much too thick, and verges on being desert instead of breakfast.

So, I present you with....

lower guilt smoothies

• One over-ripe banana
• 1/2 to 1 cup of orange juice
• 1 to 1.5 cups frozen fruit (pineapple is my current favorite, strawberries are good too)
• 1 cup plain organic yogurt (not vanilla, too sweet)

Blend until smooth, offer half to Tim, who will refuse. Put half in the fridge. Go look for it in an hour or so and discover it is no longer there. Blame a dog. (Alternately, pour entire blender contents into a 1L drink container and drink.)

Unlike Tim's recipe and typical coffee shop smoothies, this is a thinner, drinkable smoothie, not requiring a spoon. It is also much less sweet than a coffee shop smoothie, since it gets all its sweetness from the fruit used.

My First Rose

(Originally posted on Sunday, June 25, 2006 by Tim)

As I mentioned in Saturday?s post, I managed to contract a fairly nasty case of poison ivy earlier this Summer. This resulted in a truly surreal experience working out a couple of weeks ago. I?ve told this story to a number of people and none of them seem to appreciate it as much as I do. Not one to be discouraged, I?m going to subject you to the gory details in some hope of satisfaction. The story is a little long so you?ll have to bear with me. Moohahahaha!

Roughly a month ago, I managed to get a swath of poison ivy on my face while moving a wood pile. I?ve never been good at recognizing the stuff. It was growing on top of the wood pile and I stuck my head right in it. The result was about four days of agony from Monday until Friday when I started taking steroids to suppress my immune system. Note that all steroids do not help you build big muscles. This steroid tells your immune system to chill out so you can sleep at night. Things quickly got better from the poison ivy point of view after that. The rashes stopped itching and faded to a shadow of their former selves.

The remaining problem was the side effects of the steroids. I?d been experiencing some difficulty sleeping and some nervousness over the week of steroid treatment as well as a little bit of difficulty with my vision. I?d also noticed about four pounds in weight gain (half of which I have now managed to lose). The vision part was concerning me and I decided to finally read the full package insert.

The package insert describes things such as irritability, nervousness, difficulty sleeping, weight gain, muscle loss, negative nitrogen balance, vomiting?wait a second?MUSCLE LOSS!?!?!?! Once I read about the possibility of muscle loss, that settled it. I stopped taking the things immediately.

So I still haven?t gotten to the surreal part. Between the poison ivy and the various things I?ve tried to treat it, I?d been really off my game for about a week and a half. With that, I hadn?t managed to work out. The night after I had stopped taking the steroids, I planned to work out, but I got a migraine right before we left the house. I decided that it had been too long and I wasn?t going to let the migraine stop me. I took my normal 800 mg of ibuprofen and we headed out to the gym.

Now when I work out, I usually start with the bench press. The first set of repetitions are usually agony. I have an old swimming injury in the shoulder of my right arm and it literally screams through the entire first set. Seriously, you can hear dogs barking in a half mile radius around gym when I start lifting. After the first set, I assume some endorphins kick in because the rest of my sets are far less painful.

So the surreal thing about my workout a couple of weeks ago was there was no pain. I sat down to do my first set and felt nothing. My muscles still fatigued at the same point, there just wasn?t any pain. I kept looking at the bar to make sure there were weights on it. No one else seems to fully appreciate the story but it was a really weird experience. My sister in law (Jes) is a physical therapist and she thinks that it was a combination of the anti-inflammatory steroids and the ibuprofen. I?ve been considering taking some ibuprofen before workouts, but I probably need the pain to keep me from pulling something by trying to lift too much.

So that?s my story. I don?t have a cool picture to go with it so I?ve posted a picture of my first rose. I?ve never planted a rose bush before and I decided to try two in the front yard. I get good sun out there and I?m hoping I dug a big enough hole to make up for the orange clay that masquerades as soil in this part of Virginia. I was worried for a while as the rose bushes didn?t seem to be doing that well. Jes even commented, ?Well, at least you got one.? This is the flower in the picture. It?s a little sickly and I really thought it was all I was going to get for a while. I think the bushes were getting beat down by a spat of rainy and overcast days. We?ve recently had a long streak of hot, humid, and clear. They seem to be doing much better and I counted eight buds last time I looked. With a little luck, we?ll have blooming roses for Dalton?s birth.