I think I spent the dog food money

Update – 12:10 p.m.

December 23, 2008 in event, family | Tags: baby, birth, family | Leave a comment

After breaking Katie’s water, she got some pain relief from the doctor on call. Things are going very well. Contractions are about a minute and a half apart. Janet is keeping us company in the delivery room. So is Stephen Malkmus, who is singing about the “Cadillac of winter” vis a vis “Old Jerry.”

Katie has insisted on wearing her Saucony running shoes during all this for some reason, so she looks like she ran right in this morning full with child. Of course, I think she looks cute.

Go Jackie go. The nurse gave us a noncommittal ballpark delivery time of about 5:00 p.m. We’ll see.

Update – 11:15 a.m. on baby day

December 23, 2008 in event, family | Tags: baby, birth, family | Leave a comment

Katie’s water has broken and she’s about to get a little pain relief. Things are progressing nicely. Panda Bear’s “Comfy in Nautica” is playing on the stereo, so Katie can think of her happy place.

Brief update from the Birth Center

December 23, 2008 in event, family | Tags: baby, birth, family | 1 comment

We slept a little last night, Katie in her hospital bed and me in the roll-away cot they were able to find (apparently they are a hot commodity around here). I am very grateful for the cot, because the alternative, a “recliner” that couldn’t have been designed with human users in mind, would have been difficult.

Katie is having minor contractions this morning. The doctors will apply the first dose of the inducing agent, called pitocin, in about fifteen minutes after they reattach the monitors and IV. It’s an IV drip that they adjust until the desired frequency and intensity of contractions are achieved. Then we should get this baby party started!

It’s almost time to meet her

December 22, 2008 in event, family | Tags: baby, family | 1 comment

If you ask me, Katie and I have coped with the anticipation of our daughter’s birth pretty well. We’ve been in hurry-up-and-wait mode for two weeks, and much of our downtime has been spent double-checking preparations for Jackie. I even had a trial diaper-changing run with one of our future daughter’s stuffed bunnies. I also put together a baby playlist of the Jones family’s favorite tunes…kind of a birthing soundtrack to play in the hospital room. It consists of more than 300 songs, and features plenty of our mutual favorites:

Belle & Sebastian Pavement Guided by Voices Rufus Wainwright

George Gerschwin Loretta Lynn Ryan Adams Japancakes

Thelonious Monk Velvet Underground Wes Montgomery Erykah Badu

Karen Carpenter My Morning Jacket Panda Bear The Smiths

…you know, it’s simply the first music any father would want to grace the ears of his newborn daughter. Most of you know that I prefer to wait until Christmas to listen to Christmas music (unless it’s Karen Carpenter).

Katie’s mom Janet is here from Georgia, and has graciously volunteered to take care of our dogs tonight. I’m sure they’ll be on their best behavior. We’re very grateful that most of our family will be in around Raleigh until Jackie is born.

Here’s the plan for tonight:
REX Hospital will call us this evening when they are ready for us to be admitted. They will ripen Katie’s cervix (she gave me permission to blog about her cervix) and monitor her body’s reaction over the next 6 to 12 hours. When Katie has a favorable Bishop’s score, and if Katie isn’t entering labor, the doctor will induce labor. So, Katie will probably be in labor by tomorrow morning. That being said, I know very little about the variables of ripening and induction, so I’ll be updating this site on a regular basis over the next two days (when I’m not doing my fatherly duties with comfort measures for Katie).

Also, I’m just getting into Twitter, and I figure the next two days would be ideal to post tweets about Katie’s and Jackie’s status. You can find brief updates on my twitter page. These updates can be viewed on a computer, or on a mobile phone (if you have an account or set up an account).

It’s almost baby time!

Still waiting to meet her

December 18, 2008 in family | Tags: baby | 2 comments

Jackie must be quite comfortable in there. We’re now eight days past the due date and Katie has yet to feel even the smallest little contraction.

Not to worry though (easy for me to say since Katie is the one suffering). We went to see one of our obstetricians on Tuesday, and the baby is perfectly healthy. According to the ultrasound, there is plenty of amniotic fluid in all the right places. They also did a non-stress test, which measured both the baby’s heart rate, which was normal, and Katie’s contractions, which barely registered on the print-out.

REX Hospital has Katie scheduled to be induced on Tuesday, December 23. If she doesn’t come before then, we might just have a little Christmas miracle on our hands. It would also be fine with me (and certainly Katie) if she entered the world tonight, as Tyler looks to break Phil Ford’s record.

Waiting to meet her

December 11, 2008 in family | Tags: baby | Leave a comment

Katie got a surprise from her obstetrician earlier this week — the due date was actually yesterday, December 10, and not tomorrow, December 12, like they have been telling her the past eight months. Of course, this calendar mix-up isn’t a big deal to little Jackie, but it has made Katie and me a little more anxious over the last couple of days.

We’ve now heard every possible theory about predicting and inducing labor. Apparently, a sudden burst of energy (often manifested in some kind of nesting activity) is a twenty-four-hour precursor to labor. Another friend suggested that a baby’s birth, much like a person-to-werewolf transformation, can be triggered by a full moon. Tomorrow marks the full lunar phase for the month of December. Of course, if Katie really wants to speed things along, she can go for a long walk, climb stairs, eat spicy foods, or drink a tablespoon of castor oil.

She’ll come when she’s ready, so we’ll just have to wait a little longer to meet her.

Scooter smile & the best music of 2008

December 9, 2008 in music | Tags: list, music, scooter | 4 comments

We recently got our scooter back from the shop, where two recalled parts (a fuel pump seal and the connecting rod) were replaced at Yamaha’s expense. For both Katie (before she was pregnant) and me, scooting with the wind in your face causes a perma-grin, or “scooter smile” as we call it. Not a full smile, mind you…that would put you at risk of swallowing a bug. The scooter smile is more subdued, but impossible to prevent.

Nice whip eh?

There are several good reasons not to take yourself too seriously when you’re scooting about. For one thing, I think most people look a tad dorky (in the best possible way). I am no exception; my helmet is so big that I imagine myself looking like Lord Dark Helmet (of Spaceballs) as I drive around town.

Lord Dark Helmet, scooter aficionado?

Another reason that scooter riders need a sense of humor is our slow speed relative to the rest of traffic. It’s hard to exude coolness when a Hybrid Kia can smoke you without up-shifting from third gear. Finally, people in North Carolina sometimes assume that you’re riding a scooter because you lost your driver’s license (that’s when a “Not a Liquorcycle” bumper sticker really comes in handy…thanks Steve). So, scootin’ and grinnin’ go hand-in-hand.

Best Albums of 2008

The scootin’ conditions have been pretty cold here recently, but I have managed to scoot around Five Points on the warmer days during the past two weeks. Aside from running different errands, time on the scooter has given me a chance to think back on the year in music. 2008 has really been a good one for tunes, so just like everyone else, I have my own personal “best of” list. Here’s how I rank some of the best of what I’ve heard since this time last year. Also, I reserve the right to make changes to these lists as songs/albums/artists pop into my head. I initially planned to add links to these artists or even mp3s, but I probably won’t have time before my daughter is born.

Tier One

Dr. Dog – Fate
TV On The Radio – Dear Science
Deerhunter – Microcastles
Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes
Cut Copy – In Ghost Colours

Tier Two

Flying Lotus – Los Angeles
Nomo – Ghost Rock
Sun Kil Moon – April
Santogold – Santogold
Hot Chip – Made in the Dark

Tier Three

The Walkmen – You & Me
Ratatat – LP3
Department of Eagles – In Ear Park
The Magnetic Fields – Distortion
Hercules and Love Affair – Hercules and Love Affair

2008 Mixtape (or my favorite 2008 singles)

MGMT – Electric Feel
Empire of the Sun – Walking on a Dream
The Field – A Paw in my Face
The Walkmen – In the New Year
Bon Iver – Creature Fear
Black Kids – I’m Not Gonna Teach You
Lykke Li – Little Bit
Big Boi, featuring Three Stacks & Raekwon – Royal Flush
Passion Pit – Sleepyhead
Department of Eagles – No One Does It Like You
Hot Chip – Ready for the Floor
No Age – Teen Creeps
Lil Wayne – A Milli
Islands – In the Rushes
Atlas Sound – River Card
White Denim – Sitting

Most Disappointing Albums

My Morning Jacket – Evil Urges
Portishead – Third
Kings of Leon – Only By The Night
Booka Shade – The Sun & The Neon Light

I’m always interested to hear some different takes on the music year in review. Leave a comment and let me know if you noticed any mischaracterizations or glaring omissions in the lists above.

Thanks for Thanksgiving

November 30, 2008 in family, home | Tags: family, holiday, Raleigh | Leave a comment

Many thanks to the Burns family who traveled from Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Florida to be with us in Raleigh for the Thanksgiving holiday. Our time together was fantastic. The effects of post-visit depression are already obvious in Robah and Baxter as they mope around the house looking for attention.

Dinner on Thursday was traditional and resplendent. On Friday, some of us witnessed a Lady Tar Heel soccer team beat Texas A&M in the NCAA tournament regional finals in Chapel Hill. On Saturday, a different group of us witnessed the Carolina football squad eke out a victory over Dook [sic] in Durham. We truly enjoyed laughing, eating, and hanging out with everyone.

Reflecting on childbirth class

November 30, 2008 in family, Uncategorized | Tags: baby, education | Leave a comment

A couple of weeks ago Katie and I wrapped up our Preparing for Childbirth class, a six-session weekly meeting at REX Hospital in Raleigh. It’s hard to say exactly how valuable the class was, primarily because we missed half of the sessions. One of our absences was legit because we had to leave town on short notice. The other two absences were not legitimate, but we rationalized skipping class by working on other little baby-related projects around the house.

I like to think that Katie and I learned a lot of the material covered in class from the baby books that we’ve read over the past six months, so we really didn’t miss that much when we were absent. Of course, some of the parents-in-training went a little overboard with their questions and participation. I would even go so far as to say that the people in the class (Katie and me included) were a bit weird.

For example, on the second night of class, a guy who sat near us wore a t-shirt that grabbed my attention. A nebulous, abstract image on the center of the shirt was bordered by illegible text (in a gothic, thrash-metal-band-logo kind of font). I was fixated on the mysterious t-shirt for the first hour of class. Then we had a break, and I was able to get a closer look while the guy proudly described the shirt to another father-to-be. It turns out that the abstract image was a silk-screened representation of his unborn child. He had taken a still image from the 3-D ultrasound and printed a t-shirt. Upon closer examination, the cryptic text read, “DADDY’S LITTLE GUY.”

Depending on your personal taste and perspective, this guy is either the front runner for 2009 Father of the Year or he’s a bubble off plumb (as my father might say).

Overall, I would give the class a five out of ten on the valuable-knowledge-gained scale. It earned a much higher score on the new-parents-act-strangely index.

Nursery tour

November 19, 2008 in family, home | Tags: baby, family, home, video | 4 comments

Katie has been doing great — still working hard and dealing well with ninth-month aches and pains. Jackie is due December 12th, so it’s truly the final countdown. I feel confident that we’re ready (probably because we’re so excited).

Here’s a brief tour of Jackie’s nursery (minus Jackie), recorded with a new camcorder (Canon Vixia HF10) we recently bought. We only have two small lamps in there, but I think the picture quality is fairly decent considering the low-light environment.