OMG! SRSLY! ROTFL!!!!111

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Turns out he is!

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So here it is, my first Father’s day as a father.

It was grand! Pancakes for breakfast! A long, loud screaming, failed attempt at a nap! A trip to the museum! Chinese food for dinner! Blog writing whilst chocolate cookies bake right now! Could life be finer? Well, reading that agenda you could probably identify exactly what would make the day finer, but that’s the new life I lead. Gratefully, I might add.

And I am grateful. I love that littly guy. The time I spend with my family is the most important time for me these days. Today is Father’s day. It’s the day of all days to appreciate that. So I’ve been thinking about fatherhood, and that’s had me thinking about my father.

My brother and I know my dad like no-one else in this world does. We know him as a father. In fact, I know that Mr. Lathrop in ways that he doesn’t know himself. I’ve been watching how he does things carefully for the last 36 years. Sounds weird, as I write it, but it’s true. I’m his son. I can’t help it. It’s what I am meant to do. In case you’re reading this, Dad, and I know you are, I think you have done and are doing a great job. Happy Father’s day!

Now I’ve got a son. Know what? I am on to him. He is watching my every move. I can already tell, he knows me in ways I don’t know myself. Like I said, though, I am on to him. I get to know him, too, as my son. That’s something new that I now I have in common with my Dad, I know what it’s like to have a kid. It’s a trip. It’s big to think about. It makes me feel like part of a bigger chain of parents and children in time. I’ve got a new place on that chain, and it isn’t at the end anymore – there’s a link on both sides now.

Big stuff to think about, but I need to stop writing now and answer the cookies that are calling me. I am indeed a very lucky man.

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I haven’t been blogging so much lately. I promised a monthly picture. I guess I fell off that wagon pretty quick. It might be the advent of Cooper that’s caused this, but I think it’s more likely Twitter.

Twitter allows me let off steam a bit at a time, rather than all at once in a big blog entry. It’s a shame though, because when I read my tweets, I can’t say I really feel that they are anything to be proud of. Not so with the blog entries – when I look back and read them I see a record of the headspace I was in and the person I was when I wrote it. All I get out of the tweets is a record of what kind of lunch I had on a given day, or something equally as banal.

And, dare I say it, this is a trend in the way human communication has been affected by technology. We go from fewer, more intimate connections to impersonal ones in a greater quantity. It used to be we connected face to face. The telephone let us connect from afar but only from voice to ear. Then email came along, and while easy to write, the inflection of speech is lost in binary text. It’s less personal than a written letter, too, we lose the flourish one can give a written word with their unique penmanship.

It used to be a blog entry seemed a little impersonal to me. Compared to a tweet or a facebook status, however, a blog entry is hardly impersonal. It seems that the more social platforms are invented, the more we are encouraged to communicate in quantity, not quality. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but I just can’t sum up most of the experiences that count in my life in 140 character packages.

All that said, I like Twitter. I like the immediacy of it. If I know what so-and-so had to say 20 minutes ago, doesn’t that imply a connection, regardless of the content of the communication? I like feeling that connection. I also like that I can contribute to my followers in less than 60 seconds by writing a quick tweet. Not much thinking is involved, so it is very convenient. I can still concentrate on the other 10 things I am doing at the same time.

But something gets lost. I have friends I read tweets from regularly that I haven’t spoken to or heard from otherwise in months. I start to assume we’re in touch, and I guess we are in a way, but I don’t really know what’s going on any more than I do the guy I saw in the elevator this morning. (I said, “hey”. So did he. I said “How’s it going?” He said, “Good and you?”, and I said “Good.”).

If that guy read this blog entry, I think he’d know me a little better. I guess that’s why it’s important for me to make time for blogging.

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Or if you do, I recommend having a washcloth ready.

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I ordered a new computer the other day, and I am giddy about its imminent arrival. I’ll miss the current one, though. My old laptop was purchased in the beginning of 2005, and has served me very, very well.

When I bought it I did an experiment. Previously, I’d always focused on specs per dollar. Whichever machine had the most RAM, processing speed, or hard drive space won out. Back when I bought this one though, I tried putting a new criterion ahead of all that.

I walked around the store, trying out the laptops and judged them for their physical attributes. Not for aesthetics, but ergonomics. I wanted keys that didn’t have different functions printed on them. I wanted a number pad. I wanted ports on the side instead of the back. I wanted a well placed touchpad that didn’t get in the way of typing. Once I found a machine that felt like I wanted of too, then I went about finding the particular model that had the specs I needed.

And honestly, I think that’s why I’ve kept this old thing as long as I have. I love working on it and always have. Hopefully the new one serves me as well.

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As promised – the monthly photo.

There were highlights from February too:

• The birth of my new nephew, Will. I am thrilled for Cooper, who had 4 girl-cousins before, now he has 4 girl-cousins and one boy-cousin who is only a couple months younger!
• Going back to work. My first day back was February 2nd. I like my job, but not working for 2 months was pretty great. I can see why people buy lottery tickets.
• Going to the Butterfly Gardens here in town, or just outside anyway. Julie and I went and joined part of a meetup.com group of folks with kids doing kid friendly stuff. It was fantastic – I expected the visit to be interesting, but didn’t forsee it being relaxing. We bought passes.
• Hanging out with visitors from Vancouver, Elizabeth, Gord, and Tamara.
• Watching Cooper with his Nana and Pop when my in-laws came for a visit.
• Slowly but surely, finding parenthood more and more normal, and finding bits of time to do some of the stuff I’ve always done – fiddling on computers and playing music with my buddies.

There are highlights from March already too, but I’m going to save them for later.

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Here are some things I’ve learned in the first two months of parenthood. These are listed in no particular order, except for the #1, because it belongs at the top of the list:

1. Julie is amazing. We decided to have Cooper, and bringing him into the world was no easy feat. It took a lot of hard work and dedication on her part to make that happen. I was there, but she was carrying the baby. Now that Cooper is here, the physical and mental demands on her are even more apparent, and while it’s not easy, she’s mustered the courage to take it all on, and it makes me proud and happy to know Cooper has such a great mom.
2. Having a contiguous thought for more than 10 minutes is a real challenge these days. Hence the bullet points. I took a little more than two months off work for the arrival of Cooper, and I had all of these grandiose ideas of how I would spend my time. I thought for sure I’d be blogging like a maniac. Twitter is much more conducive to the parenthood experience so far. The block of time necessary to write a paragraph is hard, but for a sentence or two, not so bad.
3. The days are long, the months are short. Lack of sleep and constant attention for the Little Man make the days seem long. Watching his behavior and physicality change so quickly, however, makes me very aware that the newborn Cooper I knew a month and a half ago is gone, and never going to return. It was great to know that 2 week old little Little Man, and I miss him, but now I have had the pleasure of knowing several other versions of the Little Man since then, and I’ve loved them all just as much or more.
4. There is no right way to do anything. All one can do is to survey all the right and wrong ways that others have done, and based on one’s intuition, try to pick the least wrong and most right among them.
5. I can function fairly well on not much sleep for an extended period of time. Getting 3 hours straight is good, and I think the all-time high has been around 6 or so between feedings. I always wondered how medical personnel do it, like the residents who work 36 hour shifts and the like. Now I know.
6. I can go from feeling extreme disappointment and dread to knee melting love and adoration in no time flat. When I’ve just gotten him to sleep, and done what I need to do to get the house in order to get my head on the pillow, and he starts to cry, that’s a pretty low moment. Seconds later, when I am holding his little head in my hand with him close to my chest and his sniffles start to stop, I can’t believe how lucky I am (admittedly, sometimes more than others).
7. Mini vans really do rock.
8. We’re really lucky. We had a rocky start with the NICU and everything, but since then, Cooper’s proven to be a pretty easy going and normal healthy baby. I feel blessed, and hope he keeps on that track!
9. There are many kid people out there. This is most apparent at the mall when one is there with a stroller. Some people will sprint far out of their way to get the door, then will greet me with a wide smile and ask about how old, what gender, if he sleeps through the night etc. These people will usually want to smile and stare at the baby for as long as I can stand it before I feel I need to go. Sometimes it’s welcome, sometimes it’s a little weird, but I always appreciate it.
10. There are many non-kid people out there. These people vary in their non-kidness magnitude. Some regard at Cooper and see an obstacle to get in front of before “it” slows them down on their sidewalk journey, or they might be offended by the time it takes to change him when they are behind me in the lineup to use a change table equipped washroom . For others, it’s more pronounced. I can see that when they look at Cooper, there is some part of them feels the same way a soldier might when they first notice an enemy grenade tossed into the bunker. They want to get away fast, before “it” does something unpredictable, and would prefer not to be in the same 20 foot radius as him. Fair ‘nuff, I guess, but I think they forget they were once no bigger than he.
11. Kids, or infants at least, aren’t that expensive to maintain. They don’t even really take up much space. The big commitment is time and sleep.
12. Life would be simpler if Cooper’s grandparents lived in the same city as us. We’re lucky though – they are motivated to visit and have the means. this is the next best thing.
13. Acquiring a deep freeze has turned out to be a very, very good idea.
14. I thought I’d be grossed out by dealing with diapers all the time. I am totally used to it now. Poop shmoop.
15. Everything changes. The things I liked to do and the ways I identified myself in the world pre-Cooper are mostly gone now. I have whole new set of things I like to do now, and a whole new way to identify myself in the world. I miss some of those things from before, but on the whole, it’s a very good change. Thanks Patrick and Cris, who both pointed this out to me before he was born.
16. Everything I thought would be terrible, isn’t as bad as I thought it would be, and everything I thought would be great, is even better than I thought it would be. Thanks Robert, for pointing that out to me before he was born. It’s entirely true.

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We took this photo across the street from the Chinese Public School on Fisgard Street during Chinese New Year’s celebrations here in Victoria.

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Julie had a great idea – take a photo on the first of every month like this one, the kind you take holding your hand out with the camera, aiming without the vewfinder and hoping for the best. This one was taken January 1st, 2009.

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Just a quick post to showcase this YouTube video of just how happy my boy can be. He isn’t like this all the time (by a long shot), but moments like this make all the screaming and crying worthwhile!

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This is just video of my baby sleeping. A little bit of voiceover from his mom. Not very exciting, but I could watch this guy sleep forever.

Okay, not forever. I meant to watch Cooper while Julie was in the shower, but I became a participant observer.

I should also note that there are more photos up of the little man here .

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Fist off, they have these signs plastered up all over the mother and babe ward:

Doesn’t it look like the sign should fully read, “Don’t Leave Your Baby Unattended, We Have A Problem With Giant Birds Taking Off With Them.”

Also I noted this sculpture that sits in the main foyer. It looks to me like this guy is at the hospital to have his groin injury taken care of.

Also, there are more photos up at Picasa: http://picasaweb.google.com/bigmikephotos/081215#

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It’s been a big adjustment this last few days, and while this Cooper guy involves a lot of hard work, its the most rewarding I’ve ever done.

I wish I’d had a chance to write a big entry on the blog every day. I have lots to say, but I am experiencing so much life right now I just haven’t been able to make the time to sit down and write. I expect I will soon.

Here’s the main headlines:

• On Saturday morning, Cooper moved from level 1 of the special care nursery from level 2. He was still in an incubator and on an IV, but they were confident enough in his progress that they figured they didn’t need so many machines that go “BING!” around him.
• On Sunday morning his IV was removed, and he was out of the incubator and in a cot instead. This was great, because handling a newborn is tricky and intimidating enough for a new parent, and delicate tubes and wires didn’t make it any easier!
• On Sunday afernoon, Cooper was released from the special care nursery, and was moved to stay with Julie and I in the hospital room we were in
• Today, Thursday, Cooper, Julie and I came home!

It is great to be back here. We’re up all night still, but it’s way more comfortable here in our own bed and in our familiar surroundings.

I’ve started posting some photos up on Picassa . Here’s the latest album . I’ll be putting more up there as I process it all!

Thanks to everyone for all your comments. Nothing pleases me more!

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This is the absolutely best day of my entire life. I am not kidding.

At 11:32 am, weighing in at 9lbs and 9oz, Cooper Ruben Stephen Lathrop was born.

You can see he has some real instinctual talent with gangsta rapper hand gestures. Check out the video!

Julie is recovering well, and we’ll all be here at the hospital for a few days with her. Cooper is also doing well, but after being born his blood sugar and temperature started to drop. I got to hold him for about 2 hours, and feed him some formula (in an effort to increase the blood sugar levels). Since about 1:30, he’s been in the special care nursery here at the hospital, in an incubator, with an IV glucose drip. It’s a little hard, not having him in my arms, but once again I am really feeling lucky to be receiving such great care. I just went to check on him, and he’s getting what he needs. Both his temperature and his blood sugar is up, and he seems alert and okay.

I heard from many people that the experience I just went through is indescribable, that one can’t comprehend how much love you feel for that little critter, that there is nothing like it. I have no way to describe the experience without sounding as cliche as that. I can add that in the moments leading up to the birth, I honestly felt like every bit of caffiene I’d ever ingested was hitting me all at that same point. I can also say that the period of time I was in the operating room before the child was born felt like about a half hour at least, perhaps more. I was astounded when I heard the time of birth was 11:32. They called me in about 11:25. I still can’t believe that period of time was 7 minutes. This to me is proof of the theory of relativity.

I am anxious to upload and publish this, because I get to feed him in a short while. I cannot wait to get my mitts on that little guy again.

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“Go with the flow” has been my mantra over the last few days, and it has served me well.

Julie’s induction started yesterday at 3pm, but by 11am today, it was not working the way it should, and the treatment was stopped. I chose my shirt carefully this morning, and even sped to the hospital at breakneck speed because Julie was having some pretty big contractions when she called me first thing this morning, but no baby as yet.

Given what we’ve learned, Julie isn’t really a candidate for induction. There are other circumstances at work that negate her as a candidate for waiting longer for things to start on their own, and so tomorrow, we’re up for a scheduled cesarian section. That wasn’t really the way we saw our birth plan going, but our plan always put healthy baby and mom first, so we aren’t really deviating either. We’ve talked with many doctors, nurses, obstetricians and doulas, and we feel our consent is very well informed.

It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster this last week or two, not knowing when, if and how this story would unfold. That said, I can’t say I’ve really found it all that trying. (Mind you, I’m not the one that’s pregnant.) Every step of the way, I’ve understood what has been happening, and why. For the past two days, I’ve been expecting the birth to happen, but I don’t feel dissapointed not to have him yet. Every night I’ve been going to bed feeling wonderstruck, hopeful and eager to greet the coming day. It actually feels great. It’s not every day a guy goes to bed expecting to meet his first born the next day. Many never do. This is my third night like that. I count myself lucky.

And so, it is now fatherhood eve. I took the opportunity to shave (thanks, Candace, John, and Deb). I will pick another great shirt tomorrow, but for the record, the above guitar shirt was also a winner (thanks for the birthday present, btw, Mary!).

As I write this, there are only hours to go and I expect to be holding this kiddo in my arms tomorrow. I just can’t wait to meet him!

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Wednesday came, and while the kiddo is still inside Julie, the induction has begun, and sometime in the next hour or 48, she are expected to deliver our little boy.

I am in a heightened state of awareness. I am supposed to get lots of sleep tonight in order to prepare, but I am not quite sure how that is possible. Everything I am doing now seems auspicious, though, so the pressure is on to sleep well. When I picked my shirt this morning, I thought, this could be the shirt that I am wearing in that first picture of the Little Man, Julie and Myself. Someday he’ll look at that picture and think, “Wow. That shirt is so 2008. I wonder what things were really like back then.”

That’s what I presume anyway, based on the thoughts I think when I see my dad’s shirt and sideburns when I look at the photo that was snapped of me and my parents when I was shiny and new in 1972.

Today it was the ghetto blaster shirt. It’s a good one – one of my favourites. I better pick another good shirt tomorrow.

This last few weeks, we’ve been hearing the sound of the fetal heartbeat on the monitor by Julie’s hospital bed. They hook her up to it several times a day. I am always blown away by the sound of that little heart thumping away. I wonder how many times it will beat. I think about how the first one, no matter how you measure it, happened sometime around 7-9 months ago. It’s pretty damn awe inspiring. Whatever your take on spirituality or epistemology is, to consider all of the various circumstances and coincidences that are leading up to that little guy getting born is amazing. I feel privileged and giddy just thinking about it.

Here’s a link to a brief recording of said little heart, thumping away:

03_12_08-10_39AMfetalheartbeat.mp3

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Julie is back in the hospital, and has been since last Tuesday. She was there a few nights the week before, too.

She’s actually feeling fine, for someone who is nearing full term pregnancy, and nothing seems overtly wrong. Her blood pressure is higher than they’d like, however, and they want to keep her under observation at the hospital in case anything were to develop.

But, so far it hasn’t. So, the plan is currently to induce Wednesdayish, to time the birth for the 38 week mark, which for us is Thursday.

It’s crazy to have something so big sitting there in my calendar with all my other reminders for events that seem so insignificant by comparison. I’d imagine this is how an astronaut feels the week before launch. My whole life is leading up to that liftoff moment, but in the meantime I need to figure out what’s for dinner.

Anyhoo, just wanted to let everyone know where we are at in these crazy scary awesome cool hard fun times!

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All it takes is 30 seconds and a sharpie. I highly recommend it.

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We’re getting near the end of our wait.

Julie is on bed-rest now. I’ve pared my professional life down to 2 projects, and I am hoping to complete them before the baby comes. I give myself a 50/50 chance on that. My clients know my situation, and backups are in place, so that’s winding down.

This is good, because Julie is really only supposed to get up when she needs to do something I can’t do for her. That is pretty much everything, except for showering and going to the bathroom. In the last few months I have learned I am capable of getting a lot done in a day, but It’s been a challenge. Balancing the home life and the career has led to a few dark moments, but it’s also provided counterpoint to a my career focussed life. Making a ritual of cleaning the kitchen first thing in the morning clears my head, and after a day of squinting at the computer screen imagining how abstract little gears of code mesh, cooking in the evening removes the worky thoughts and replaces them with the smells and colours of a well prepared meal that I can take an ounce of pride in.

One of those dark moments, though, was last Monday night. Julie was in the hospital for a few days last week – she was feeling ill, and the doctors have pegged her at a greater risk for several nasty scenarios. My priority was her, so I dropped the work stuff. I stayed at her bedside, fetching water and trying to keep track of what the doctors were saying. Finally we called in help – my mother in law, Mary, offered to come over to give us a hand. After two days in the hospital, I was becoming aware that we needed it.

That night, she flew out from Vancouver, and I was at the airport in the evening, waiting to pick her up. She never came though – Victoria was socked in with fog, and her plane had to turn around and go home. I was a little bummed about that as the airport is about an hour and a half drive, there and back. Knowing she was coming the next day, however, and that it was only 8pm and I now had the time and energy to put a few hours in at the office lightened my mood.

I extinguished email fires and got some damage control done between 8 and 9:30. I was feeling pretty good as I locked up the office door and the elevator. I went through one of the self closing doors at the end of the hall, and heard it shut behind me. It’s a rough part of town at night, so there is an additional barred gate to go out of after that door. I put my key to the gate’s keyhole, and it didn’t seem to fit.

I have exited through that gate many, many times, and I knew my key worked. It was a strange moment, investigating the keyhole, looking at the key, seeing there was no way they were the same shape, trying the door that had just closed behind me, locked, also barring entry to my usual key. Where’s the undo button?

Essentially I was outside, locked behind a gate on a dark, chilly night with no way out. The space I was in is about 4’ by 10’. I had a laptop with a battery, and a cel phone with 2 bars left. Junkies were walking by, eyeing me up and down, if they noticed me there at all. I didn’t think I’d need to use a toilet anytime soon, but I remember feeling some relief noting there was a drain in the middle of the hallway. I also remember feeling a raging sense of despair at that sense of relief. Damn it! my day was too crappy already for a drain in the hallway to be a good thing. My spouse was in the hospital, I was stressed about work, stressed about home, I’d just spent 1.5 hours driving to the airport and back for no reason, it was 9:30 pm and I had just abandoned a bunch of projects I wanted to keep working on because I was too exhausted and sleep deprived from the previous night’s lack thereof!

I made several calls, and then several more, and then a few more after that, trying to track down someone that could help me. Apparently the building manager had the locks changed, and gave one to the guy I sublet my sublet from, but he didn’t realize it was for all the doors. I spoke with my office mate, and my sublessor, and was unable to leave voicemail in the full mailbox of the building manager. Eventually, I was down to one red bar of battery – I called a locksmith, who said they’d come, but at a $180 hourly rate. “Whatever,” I said, “Just get me out of here!”.

He showed up, eventually. One guy on a busy night. It took him literally about 5 seconds to pick the lock. “These are pretty crappy locks” he said. I concurred. They’d been crappy for me. I gave him my credit card and let him do his worst. I can’t tell you the elation of getting out of there – I would have given up my right arm if he wanted it. Heck, 20 minutes prior, I would have chewed it off if I thought it would have helped.

It was about 11:30 when I walked down the street to get into my van and go home. And while I thought “This has to be one of the crappiest days of my life”, I also took a moment to count my blessings. Really, they are many. The top three:

• Julie, while in the hospital, was fine. She received excellent care while she was there. A short decade or two ago, or in any other part of the world, we wouldn’t be so lucky. Socialized medicine is really working for us right now, as is 21st century technology, and the decedant lifestyle we’ve become accustomed to in the Western world.
• My mother in law was coming to help us out. She is an absolute godsend, and knowing she was with Julie I was able to go back to that office and work the next day, entirely guilt-free, a good 5 or 6 hours. It was the first time that happened in many days. I’m a lucky guy to be with Julie, and having Mary for my mother in law is a big perk!
• Last and not least, I had my cel phone, and it was charged up enough to make the calls I needed to get out. It was a pretty dark and lonely night, but it would have been darker and lonelier if my only option was to scream for help from passers-by.

Not, mind you, that I ever want to do that again!

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