A man, a woman, a boy, a blog: golbayobanamowanama!

Simon medical, Mama’s take

September 6, 2009 in Progeny by J | 3 comments

Todd and I have been meaning to post something like this for a while now, explaining Simon’s current and historical health situation to any and all who may be interested. The question was who should write it, and in what spare time. I guess I win? Todd promises to give his take at some point.

Let me start by saying that apart from having some medical concerns, Simon is a Truly Exemplary Child, in Practically Every Way. He is an excellent sleeper (quote from the pediatrician), he loves sitting still on my lap and watching things. He loves books and will sit through several Dr. Seuss tomes without even wiggling. He is happy to be held by anyone, family or stranger, and gives out full-face smiles with flirtatious regularity. The only reasons he cries (if you can call it that) are hunger and fatigue, which are fairly easy to recognize and ameliorate. Basically, tempermentally, I have the Best Baby Ever. Sorry if that makes you jealous. Actually, not really.

After Simon’s newborn exam in the hospital, the attending pediatrician let us know that he had been born with a cleft palate and Pierre Robin Sequence, which began a cascade of medical interventions and treatments, as well as
substantial parental education. At the time, I wasn’t sure exactly what a cleft palate was, so I will attempt to share what I’ve learned with you as well, Dear Reader.

At some point in the first trimester, the left and right sides of the hard and soft palate fuse along the midline. When this doesn’t happen, a hole is left, extending from some point behind the teeth toward the back. Simon’s cleft is bilateral (on both sides of the midline), and rather wide. We’re told it lies more to one side than the other, but not being a professional, I can’t really see it.

When we look in his mouth, instead of seeing the roof of his mouth, we see up into his sinus cavity. Now, in thirty years of life, it never occurred to me to stop and ponder: I wonder what’s inside my face and how it all fits together. Now I sort of know, but it’s really hard to describe, and you don’t really want me to. Part of the inside of your face is kind of lumpy and foldy and weird. When he was a little bitty guy, he had these strange lumps of flesh behind his upper gums in the back: his uvula (which was split in two). As he’s grown and his mouth has changed shape, these have been pressed toward each other more, so that the cleft appears a bit narrower. Ultimately, Simon will need a surgery (palatoplasty) to repair the cleft.

One challenge for me early on was that Simon’s cleft makes it impossible for him to suck since his mouth and nose are connected through an extra hole. It would be like our trying to suck through a straw that has a hole in it. Before Simon was born, I had been planning to breastfeed him, and it was kind of a shock to be told by a lactation consultant that he would never be able to nurse for nutrition. Looking back, it was the best thing someone could have told me, since it took away the pressure of trying to get my child to do something he wasn’t physically capable of doing. At the time, however, it was really difficult. I pumped milk for him for about two months, and fed it to him with the special “Haberman Adaptive Feeder.” He still uses the Haberman, but we’ve switched to formula for a variety of reasons. It hurt my feelings a little that he didn’t seem to notice the difference between milk and formula, but, well, whatever.

There can be lots of different reasons that a baby is born with a cleft palate, but missing from this list is “being a bad and negligent mother,” which took me some time to appreciate. After all, I had spent 40 weeks (and five extra days!) growing this child in my body, so it seemed natural that any deficiency in his physiology could be wholly attributed to what I had put into my body, what position I had slept in, how much stress I may have been under, had I worried too much about something, not had the right vitamin, not listened to enough Beethoven, exercised enough, or was it the two ounces of wine I had in February? No. No, no, no. Sometimes, it just happens. It took me about three months to believe that.

In Simon’s case, the cleft appears to be due to the Pierre Robin Sequence (PRS), where for some reason (genetic or as some consequence of intrauterine environment), the growth of the lower jaw is restricted, which causes the tongue to be thrust upward and backward in the mouth, which
prevents the palate from closing.

One big question that had to be addressed was whether Simon’s PRS was caused by some underlying genetic syndrome, or whether it was just a fluke. So, we saw a geneticist, who recommended this and that screening, which all came back negative (with the caveat of a frustratingly high false negative rate). As far as we can tell, he is a “normal XY male.” The screenings did not mention his status as a Truly Exemplary Child.

Simon’s small jaw caused him to have a lot of breathing difficulties early on. The same reason that he had the cleft in the first place (the tongue pushing up and back into his mouth) caused some breathing obstruction when he was lying on his back, the recommended sleeping position for babies. He often struggled to get air in, which made Todd and me freak out pretty much all the
time. He sleeps on his tummy now to allow his tongue to be pulled forward by gravity, but as he’s grown, he’s gotten better at positioning himself in a way that allows him to breathe freely. We also think (but can’t verify it quantitatively) that his jaw is growing, which is our dearest hope, since it would pull his tongue forward to where it’s supposed to be.

One concern with the breathing difficulties that we hadn’t anticipated involved weight gain. Simon was spending a lot more calories breathing than a typical baby would. Plus, genetically, he was predisposed to being really tall and skinny. So his doctors were concerned that he wasn’t getting enough calories to maintain a healthy weight (he was until very recently off the bottom of the chart in “weight for length” despite being off the top of the chart in length). On top of this, he developed acid reflux, making eating a crying, screaming challenge. Thankfully, this is all under control now thanks to infant-dose Zantac and high-calorie-density food. He’s plumping up quite nicely, something neither Todd nor I did until we were in college, if we can even say that.

Right now, we’re looking at one, maybe two, maybe three surgeries for Simon. The most obvious one is the palate repair, which is normally done around twelve months of age, but may be pushed out to fifteen to eighteen months because the surgeon wants to be sure his jaw has grown enough to allow a nice clear airway before doing the surgery.

Most children with a cleft palate also have ear tubes placed to allow fluid to drain out of the middle ear. The muscle that allows us to open and close our Eustachian tubes is connected across the palate (so Simon’s doesn’t connect to anything). As a result, fluid is collecting in his middle ear, which is harmless at the moment (but increases the chances of developing ear infections) except that it seems to be impairing his hearing a bit. The surgeons usually do that at the time of palate repair, but Simon’s ear tubes might be placed in a separate surgery if indeed his palate repair is done later. Overall, no biggie except for the general anesthesia.

The surgery that Simon’s surgeons are trying to decide if he needs, and the one that is causing his mama the most anxiety, is the one that would lengthen his lower jaw, pulling the jaw and tongue forward, fixing the breathing obstructions. We (and I really do mean “we”) have completed two sleep studies to gather data to evaluate whether this surgery is necessary at this time. The first one was inconclusive, the second one better, and we’re waiting for the follow-up appointment with the sleep doctor to give us the interpretation of the results. My guess is that they’ll tell us Simon is doing “okay” but that we need to keep an eye on him.

All this to say: Simon has some special medical needs, but mostly I don’t even think about it because he is doing so well in every other way. He’s charming and smiley and likes to read books and be thrust directly upward into the air to play Flying Boy. Since he’s our first child, I don’t have any real point of comparison, nor do I have reason to stop to think that not all babies need the special Haberman bottle, nor do they daily spit up some food through their noses, or have monthly meetings with the cleft palate team or sleep studies out the wazoo.

He just seems normal. And wonderful and snuggly and Very Bright at Math. And I’m really thankful for that.

Simon Sleep Study, Take II

September 2, 2009 in Progeny by J | No comments

Last night, Simon did his second sleep study. The first one (two and a half months ago) was inconclusive, which is to say that the data were really dismal (showing “moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea”), but he’d had a terrible and atypical night, so no one knew whether he always had bad nights or if it was just that one time. So his doctors wanted to try again, which caused me no small amount of apprehension. As Todd pointed out at some point, “If Dr. Sleep wants Simon to have another sleep study so badly, maybe he wants to take care of Simon that night!”

I should mention that the whole point of these sleep studies is to see if Simon is getting enough oxygen while he sleeps. Since he was born with such a small jaw (due to what is known as the Pierre Robin Sequence), his tongue lies farther back in his mouth and can (does?) obstruct his airway when he sleeps. As a result, he has gotten special dispensation from his doctors to sleep on his tummy, which may be one reason we usually get eleven uninterrupted hours from him at night. But are they eleven oxygenated hours?

Last night’s study (which we’ll call Number 2) was much, much better than the first one (Number 1). Let me compare:

No 1: Checked in at 8pm, and wire hook-up completed around 9:30 or 10pm — many, many hours past his bedtime, and frankly, kind of close to my own bedtime. Did not set the stage for “typical night.”
No 2: I had the foresight to ask for early check-in, which the hospital kindly accommodated. We arrived at 6:30, I fed and changed Simon, and he was hooked up by 8:00. He actually fell asleep mid-hook-up, only an hour or so after his normal bedtime.

No 1: Technician hooked up wires Very Slowly. This was likely because I asked a million questions about what everything was for and he politely answered, but this slowed him down.
No 2: Technician (different guy) paid attention when I mentioned Simon’s 6:30 bedtime, and did the speediest hook-up I could have asked for. When he had to leave the room to check the control booth, he ran — literally. He also kept apologizing to Simon for taking so long. I kept my mouth shut, although I did have questions I wanted to ask. Nothing affecting Simon, just general science-teacher curiosity that really didn’t need to be entertained.

No 1: Simon kept having problems with the toe oximeter (which measures oxygen levels by shining a bright red light on the big toe), which the technician had to keep coming in to fix.
No 2: Still had oximeter issues due to Simon’s sweaty feet, but the technician, a father of five, was an expert at baby-sock-removal and -replacement. Rather than trying to stick the sock on the foot, you have to sort of invert the sock and make it swallow the foot, as it were.

No 1: Simon woke up every thirty minutes screaming and Mama got very little sleep.
No 2: Simon had two freak-outs. One at 9pm, before I went to sleep, and one at 12:45am, which was embarrassingly soon after I had turned out the light for the night. What can I say, I was just farting around on the hotel’s free WiFi and reading Little Women (which is extremely moralizing but someone was about to die but didn’t). It took twenty minutes to calm him down, but then he was out until 5:30am.

No 1: Lots and lots of hair goop. Exceedingly much hair goop. Disgusting amounts of hair goop piled in mounds on his scalp.
No 2: Hair goop used sparingly, with Simon’s goopy hair plastered over the electrical leads to cement everything together. Much easier to wash out, and touching Simon’s head was way less disgusting.

No 1: Wore short sleeves. Simon fed twice during the night. Got hair goop in my elbow-crotch twice. Did not come off easily.
No 2: Wore sweatshirt. Simon fed once. Hair goop went on sleeve. Sweatshirt went in wash. Did not touch skin.

No 1: Mouth-nose breathing sensor frustrated baby, who kept moving his lip around trying to get it off. Maybe this was why he woke up every thirty minutes? It reminded me of when you give peanut butter to dogs.
No 2: Different kind of sensor, caused less discomfort.

No 1: Simon peed through diaper, through diaper cover, through pajamas, through swaddling blanket. Was stinky antibiotic pee.
No 2: Simon peed through diaper, through diaper cover, through pajamas (no swaddling this time). Was still stinky, but not like antibiotics.

No 1: Simon woke up hungry, but we had to take off all the leads before I could feed him. This required a lot of screaming, just so Simon could be sure I knew he was still hungry and hadn’t changed his mind. He is a good communicator.
No 2: Simon woke up hungry, but I got to feed him before detachment. This placated him so much that even the sticky face-tape removal didn’t get much of a rise out of him.

No 1: Used warm washcloth to scrub out hair goo. Baby was too small to put in big bathtub confidently, and a little too floppy for head scrubbing to proceed without my being afraid of hurting him. Lots of screaming.
No 2: Full bath. Lots of smiles. Kicking and splashing. Used his own baby wash on his head. Plus, nice plush towel at the end (he seemed to really like the towel, and tried repeatedly to eat it … Poo, I just realized I left his nice unscented baby wash at hotel).

No 1: Simon looked like a cyborg.
No 2: Simon looked like a cyborg but I was expecting it.

So now we wait a few weeks for Dr. Sleep to evaluate the data and make a recommendation. If Simon is still desaturating a lot (i.e. not getting enough oxygen) during the night, it’s possible he will need a surgery (osteogenic mandibular distraction, for you experts out there) to extend his jaw and bring his tongue forward. If he did okay, then that’s less likely.

My biggest source of anxiety with this last sleep study was that the data they collected wouldn’t be representative of Simon’s normal sleep (either better than average, which might mean the doctors were missing low oxygen levels, or worse than average, which might mean they would recommend a surgery that wasn’t really necessary). Although I wouldn’t say that Simon had the most normal night of sleep ever, I feel like it was typical enough that whatever the data show is probably reliable. And that’s comforting. So now I just get to try not to be anxious for two weeks.

Grabbing: A Perpetually Charming Skill

August 31, 2009 in Progeny by J | No comments

[Editor's note: J actually wrote this a couple of weeks ago, but there have been any number of good reasons why it hasn't been posted until now, including J's not having become familiar with WordPress yet and thus relying on your anonymous Editor to post things, the existence of the Scramble and/or Wordscraper games on Facebook, and possibly the raising of the child described herein. My apologies in getting this to you so late; please do not see this as reflecting poorly on Simon's development.]

A few weeks ago [which would now be about a month ago --Ed.], Simon discovered that his hands are useful tools. Previously, he had been keeping his thumbs tucked tightly into his fists, thinking, I guess, that they were useless vestigial appendages. Then one day, all of a sudden, grabbing started.

It started with grabbing my hands. As I was rocking Simon before his nap, he got really interested in what my hands were doing (which was ”just sitting there”) and grabbed my fingers and flailed them around. This, of course, had the added benefit of derailing the nap-prep, much to his delight.

Then he started face-grabbing, also while rocking. On days that I wear my glasses, this is especially entertaining for him.

At his last physical therapy appointment, his therapist held him all scrunched up in her lap and showed him how to touch his toes, and it was like a lightbulb went off. Prior to that, he had shown no interest at all in flexing his stomach muscles, and would just lie around with his legs straight out. But, literally, the next day after she showed him this new skill, he was all about the toe-grabbing. All day long, all the time.

At the grocery store, I’ve taken to letting him pet the produce we’re buying, just to show him what food is and get him interested in it. Last week, I was absent-mindedly holding a peach up for him to touch while I looked over the vegetable display, looking for something Todd would eat. I looked down, and the peach had little gouge marks cut out of it. I figured I had just picked up a bad one and was ready to put it back when I realized there were bits of peach under Simon’s nails.

And now, he’s into grabbing toys. He’ll pick up cups from the stacking-cup display and wave them around. The other day I saw him grab one with one hand, then hold it with both hands, and eventually transfer it to the opposite hand. Clearly this boy is very advanced.

The most popular game by far is bopping the stacking cups. We have two sets of seven, one of which sits higher than eye-level when Simon is sitting in front of me on the floor. He is perfectly content to spent twenty or so minutes bopping the cups with hands and feet, trying to get to them before I have a chance to stack all seven back up for him. He also likes to grab them and shove them in his mouth.

In other news, he has started up the most mellow bedtime routine I could imagine. After his bottle and a few minutes of rocking, Todd and I kiss him and put him in his bed and leave the room. I’ve spied on him to see what he does, and it consists mainly of looking around for a few minutes, sometimes with singing, settling his arms straight back by his bottom, crossing his legs at the ankles, and gazing dreamily off at nothing until he falls asleep. Sure beats the days when we had to stand over him breathing on him and holding the pacifier in his mouth indefinitely.

The Barium Ingestion Club

August 7, 2009 in Adults, Progeny by J | 1 comment

Several weeks ago, I got to do an upper-gastrointestinal-and-small-bowel X-ray. While I can’t say that it was “enjoyable,” it was interesting from a scientific point of view — my being, you know, a chemistry teacher and all. Seeing pictures of your insides is both macabre and fascinating, and it was nice to be told by the technicians (two of them, separately) that the curlicue pattern of my small bowel is “unique to me.”

The worst part of the whole process, aside from the slimy and gelatinous barium sulfate emulsion I had to drink, was the waiting. The technician would take a picture every thirty minutes, and my job was to help speed the barium through by walking up and down the twenty feet of hallway in the middle of the building. I had taken my crossword puzzle along, but I’m not very good at those, so it didn’t relieve the boredom very much.

Now, since infants aren’t allowed in the exam room with their moms (and really, I can understand why), Todd stayed at home with Simon that morning. And while Todd is an excellent father and I knew Simon was probably enjoying the change of pace, it was frustrating not to get any cell phone reception as I was pacing the halls. I wanted to call every ten minutes to report things like “barium sulfate: disgusting!” “I just got 39-across!” and so on. I lamented about this to the technician between pictures, and she sent me out onto the balcony in my hospital gown. It felt weird, but I was desperate for news from home and a friendly voice, so I did it. She asked me lots of kind questions about my baby and was generally very nice about it.

After about two and a half hours, they did the upper-GI exam, which involved drinking Pop Rocks (or a very close equivalent) and more barium. I must have looked like I was going to kill someone about the barium because the technician tried to calm me down. “It’s not as bad as the other stuff! It’s thinner!” I must have looked dubious. “You know who really likes this stuff?” she continued. “Babies! It’s because we don’t let them eat for several hours before they have to drink it, so they just suck it right down.”

All I could think of right then was what a terrible thing that was to mention, not because this is true, which I discovered later, but because the idea of withholding food from your baby only to feed him something completely non-nutritive seemed, well, repulsive. And I had just gotten done telling her how much I missed my baby. Fortunately, the whole experience was over shortly thereafter, and I got to go home and everything turned out fine.

Then a few weeks later, Simon decided he didn’t want to finish bottles anymore. His intake dropped precipitously, and he lost a little weight, which concerned us and the good folks who see him at Doernbecher. There was no obvious reason for him to not want to eat. We went in for a feeding evaluation, and he totally lost it in front of the feeding specialist, screaming and squirming. It was the opposite of taking your car in to the shop. So, the specialist suggested we do a barium swallow study to make sure no food was getting in his airway.

Of course, this involved waiting several hours for Simon to get hungry again, which we spent in the Starbucks at the base of the elevators (for reasons I won’t go into, don’t buy items from the pastry case at the Doernbecher Starbucks). When it was time for our appointment, he was very very ready to eat, and we set him up in the X-ray video machine. I was handed a bottle of the familiar-looking goo and told to go for it. So, feeling kind of deceptive and mean the whole time, I fed my baby an inorganic salt emulsion while the radiologist videotaped his head. And amazingly, Simon didn’t mind. In fact, he
kind of liked it, which makes me question his judgment about food, and which I will remember when he is a toddler or teenager refusing something delicious at our dinner table: “You can’t talk about not liking that. You don’t know anything, you like barium sulfate!”

The X-ray video itself was pretty amazing. They played it back for me later, and I could even see the food dripping down his chin. Next up: Todd? Want to join the Barium Ingestion Club?

Just to tie up narrative loose ends, although this is not the point of the story, we’ve made some adjustments to his feeding routine, the most notable of which is an increase in his antacid medication, which has done wonders for his intake and attitude about eating.

Likes and dislikes

August 3, 2009 in Progeny by J | No comments

Things Simon likes:

Looking at the mirror on the floor at the correct angle to see Mama or Papa sitting behind him.
Putting his elbow down Mama’s shirt.
Mirror Baby — he grins really big, then turns away and shyly buries his face in my shoulder.
Songs about the disproportionate sizes of his belly and rear end, while on the changing table.
Rainbow-colored toys (caterpillar, stacking cups …) and bonking rainbow colored toys.
Falling asleep on Mama’s chest.
Playing with Papa when he gets home from work. By that time of day, Mama is old news.
Sleeping for 8 hours at a time at night.
Songs involving fake sneezes. Thanks to Kirsten for discovering that one.
Staying up late past his bedtime to play.

Things Simon hates:

Doctors looking in his ears.
Falling asleep in his crib (but staying asleep, now that’s okay!)
Not facing the action.
Swallowing his Zantac.
Waiting more than 20 seconds for his food.

Disgusting but fascinating

July 13, 2009 in Progeny by J | No comments

Or, How to remove cradle cap, as a side effect of an unrelated medical procedure

A few weeks ago, Simon completed a sleep study through OHSU. Now, while it didn’t actually occur at OHSU (but at the Marriott Residence Inn) or really involve that much sleep (for either Simon or me), it did get rid of most of his cradle cap, which makes bathtime much less gross now.

Simon was hooked up to about twenty different data collection wires, ten of which were on his head. On each spot on his scalp where a lead would go, the technician put a layer of salty conducting gel, then pasted the lead on with a white waxy putty, about an inch in diameter. I realize this sounds like an exaggeration, but it looked like his whole head was covered*.

First of all, it’s not quite as sweet to cuddle your child when his head is all full of goop, especially when your child especially enjoys rubbing his head back and forth repeatedly on your chest. It’s harder still to get up in the middle of the night to feed your screaming alien-looking baby with his goopy head nestled, unmoving, in the crook of your arm for fifteen or so minutes. Twice. Just saying.

In the morning, the technician came in to unhook Simon from all his wires. He saved the head wires for last, gripping them about twelve inches from Simon’s head and giving a slow firm tug. All the leads glopped off, leaving ten blobs of wax putty, all entwined with his hair. I was told the best way to get them off was with a warm wet washcloth and scrubbing. Fifteen minutes and one very cranky red-scalped baby later, Simon’s cradle cap was nearly all gone, and has stayed gone. So yay — thank you, sleep technician!

*A brief derivation: Simon’s last known head circumference was 42.5 cm. Assuming his head is a perfect sphere, his head radius would be about 6.76 cm, and his craniofacial surface area about 575 square cm. Let’s assume that about 40% of that surface area is covered by hair (excluding the face and the part under the skull where the neck attaches) – that leaves 230 square cm of hair, which is about equal to 35.6 square inches. (Estimation check: is Simon’s hairy scalp about 6 inches by 6 inches? Sure…) Now, ten of these square inches are covered with goop: that’s about 28%. So not the entire scalp, but a good-sized portion to be sure.

Simon’s schedule

July 12, 2009 in Progeny by T | No comments

It is a well-known fact that over half of all blog entries are apologies for not having blogged lately. And we’re not ones to buck trends here at Stadler Headquarters.

It’s not that we don’t have stuff to blog about, of course. We’re raising a child here, people, of course there are stories. But nearly all of them have to do with poop, which unfortunately triggers the bad-words filter on our blogging software*.

But a while back, Julia decided to enumerate Simon’s feeding times, complete with names, as they were rather stable at that time. Of course, in the intervening weeks, Simon has decided to throw off the shackles of his oppressive feeding regime, but for posterity’s sake, here’s the official list:

Midnight snack (3am)
Pre-breakfast (6:30am)
Breakfast (8:30am)
Brunch (11:00am)
Lunch (1pm)
Second lunch (3:30pm)
Dinner (6:30pm)
European dinner (10:00pm)

I might have chosen to call the 3:30pm feeding “tea time”, but then I am an admitted anglophile**.

Anyhow, for those of you who, until this post, were beginning to wonder why you even bother reading this blog, we here at The Stadlers (“dot org”™) would like to remind you that we also put out content elsewhere — even more frequently than we blog, guaranteed***!

Short random snippets can be found at Todd’s Twitter account****. Photos, nearly all of Simon, can be had at Todd’s Flickr account. And, yes, the Stadlers have a tube you can watch. Here’s a recent video from the latter that you may enjoy, if you haven’t already seen it:

*This is a lie. Our blogging software doesn’t have a “bad-words filter”, and if it did, we’d be too lazy/busy to install it, which perhaps gives you a hint as to why we also haven’t been blogging as much lately, as if you hadn’t already worked that out yourself.

**Not true. I did very much enjoy our trip to Scotland, with its many B&B tea times, but I have never hinted to anyone about, much less admitted to, my anglophilia.

***Not guaranteed.

****Not to be confused with this guy’s Twitter account, as Todd does not tweet in German. Repeat, Todd does nicht tweet auf Deutsch! Achtung! He does, however, occasionally sprinkle it into footnotes of dubious quality.

The many names of Simon

June 14, 2009 in Progeny by T | No comments

When Julia’s mother was in town in the weeks after Simon was born, she expressed not-entirely-serious concern that he was going to grow up confused about what his name was. Apparently, in those heady days, we were coining new monikers with alarming frequency. Some of them have already been abandoned, either due to increasing inaccuracy, or perhaps poor memory caused by lack of sleep. Still, what’s a blog for if not to catalog the minutia of life? So here are some of the nicknames we remember.

Of course, there was his original in utero nickname, Grendel, now largely abandoned (at least after the first few days, when we occasionally forgot Simon’s real name), in part because when we called him Grendel, we thought he was a girl. Yes, in spite of Grendel’s being a male in Beowulf, we know, we know.

I don’t know if it’s due to his cleft palate or if all babies do this to some degree, but early on, Simon made lots of, well, snorting noises. It was actually fairly comforting to us back then, because it made it easy to know if he was breathing in the middle of the night. Still, several names came from this attribute, among them Snuffleupagus and Snorky Doo.

Snorky Doo was likely derived from the similar Simon Doo, no doubt itself derived from the name of popular mystery solving canine, Scooby Doo. (I guess. Julia never actually explained this to me. And since she only ever spoke these nicknames aloud, it’s possible I got the spelling wrong, and these nicknames are actually references to influential punk band Hüsker Dü. Except that Julia is almost certainly more familiar with Scooby Doo than Hüsker Dü. Anyhow.)

Also owing to a particular bleating-like noise Simon was prone to making before turning to a full-blown cry, Simon was also not infrequently referred to as Lambikins or, more simply, Lamb.

Fans of the former TV show Arrested Development may appreciate that, owing to his surname, Simon was sometimes called Mr. S, with the attendant three-note jingle that went along with the name “Mr. F” in that series.

Julia and I share a love of robots (defined as anything from the pre-robotic age, back when robots were cute and didn’t have boring jobs like assembling cars), and it’s difficult not to envision Simon as some sort of mechanical automaton (in a good way). Thus he’s been called Wigglebot, Lovebot, or Rollbot, depending on whatever best characterizes him at the time. Note that Simon isn’t actually able to roll when lying on his back yet, but he does a fine job of dislodging himself from the burping or feeding position, largely by tossing his head to the side and having the rest of his body follow.

But by far the most popular — and enduring — name so far has been Beets, or Mr. Beets (when we’re feeling respectful, I guess). The etymology on this one is tricky, but it seems largely based on how he acts when he’s hungry, turning (beet) red, and exhibiting the rooting reflex (beets being roots, you know). Factoring somewhere in there is an auto repair shop in Southeast Portland called Beets Auto Body, whose sign features the outline of a beet with a man’s face on it. The name Beets often leads to ad-hoc songs, such as the Go-Go’s influenced “I got the Beets”. There is no end to the cleverness in this household.

Anyhow, I’m sure there’ve been, and will be, more, but those are the ones that spring to mind right now. Oh, and I guess we still do occasionally call him Simon.

Simon the eco-zealot

June 6, 2009 in Progeny by T | No comments

Kids these days! They’re so into environmentalism — radically so!

Of course, Simon comes by this naturally — there was the time his dad, after learning about Earth Day and recycling, insisted that his parents save up all cardboard scraps (which were then not recyclable at the curb), which he then drove many dozens of miles away to be recycled. Because he cared about the environment. Or that was the idea, no matter how much gasoline it actually took.

And then there was the time Simon’s papa earned the nickname “The Recycling Nazi” in college for going through the trash cans outside of people’s dorm rooms, looking for soda cans that had been thrown away (and leaving a note on the offender’s whiteboard — every college door has a whiteboard — about recycling).

But Simon, part of the next generation, has exceeded his father’s environmentalism. You see, he hand-mulches. That’s right. He’s taken mulching to the next level.

Fig. A: Harvesting more organic material

I guess Simon has noticed that his parents consider hair and lint to be detritus, worthy of throwing in the trash, and he’s concerned about the inevitable effect this will have on our landfills. In response, he seems to have come up with a plan that involves tightly clenching said hair and/or lint in his fists for hours — possibly days — on end, apparently so that, with the attendant moisture, heat, and pressure provided by his fists, he could … um, I don’t know. Make a tiny amount of rich compost for his miniature garden? He hasn’t explained that part to us yet.

But there is definitely lint and hair — sometimes his, sometimes the hair he’s happened to find around the house, hopefully Julia’s or mine — in his fists, and, owing to his frequent desire to keep his fists clenched, it sometimes gets a bit gross. But who am I to question the next generation’s environmental fervor?

Mother’s Day

May 10, 2009 in Adults by T | No comments

Like many of you, I have a mother. In fact, I’ve recently gotten to spend a lot of time with her and my father, both of whom have been in town for a few weeks to help out after Simon was born. (Julia’s parents were in town before that to also help out. It’s been sort of a parental torch-passing, really.)

I love my mom, and she’s a wonderful parent (same goes for you too, Dad, but I’m not supposed to say anything for a month — you know, legally). Loving, giving, patient … all that and the proverbial bag of chips, to this day, even now that I’m old enough that I don’t feel like anyone’s baby.

But this year, on Mother’s Day, I find myself with more than one mother figure to contemplate. Because, you see, my wife has somehow managed to — while still remaining fully my wife — also become a mother. Now, at some level, this was fully anticipated — I’ve read up on all the biological underpinnings of this transformation and all. But it’s still something of a shock that this beautiful, fun woman I’d known for many years had all this mothering inside her. Who knew?

In times past, I had always considered myself the tough one. When hiking up a mountain (or its Scottish equivalent), I was usually the one in the lead. I was the one, say, who went on a bonus hike to the relatively creepy garden of carved wooden objects while Julia rested up from the morning hike to the waterfall. And so forth.

And then Julia told me that she wanted to have a drug-free childbirth for Simon. Now, I will admit that I initially took this in the same way that I might say that I want to have a chocolate milkshake appear in my hand: it would be nice, if not terribly likely. But Julia kept saying it. More importantly, she said it to the nurses when we checked into the hospital the night Simon was born.

And after seeing her go through that labor without any drugs, I relinquished the title of Toughest Stadler. Which title, you know, technically, I had never actually won. But Julia certainly did, that night.

But it wasn’t just some extraordinary burst of strength on the occasion of Simon’s birth. No, her amazing abilities have continued the whole month-and-change that is Simon’s life. It hasn’t always been easy — there have been challenges for both Simon and Julia — but through it all, she’s just kept going. And doing amazingly well, no less.

It’s like finding out that you’re married to Wonder Woman after years of thinking you’d been living with a very nice Diana Prince … only without the invisible plane and so forth. (And yes, I did have to look up Wonder Woman’s non-secret identity on Wikipedia. What the heck, Wonder Woman can fly? I mean, without the invisible plane? What?)

Point being, my wife — and, more to the point on this day, my son’s mother — is amazing. She’s tough, she’s loving, she’s beautiful. And I love her.