Where Are My Teeth?

Repetition compulsion

Taking care of Charlie seems like an endless process of acquiring useless knowledge: just at the point where you get good at something, you don't have to do it any more. No sooner did we master Fold The Baby to tuck him up into fetal position and calm him than he grew old enough to tuck his own hands up to his chest or face to calm himself. That knack for pulling the feeding syringe off the stomach tube and capping it one-handed? He doesn't have a stomach tube any more. All of our familiarity with NICU routine, hand-washing techniques in the sink with the knee-operating valve, best hospital parking spots will be useless and mostly forgotten in a few more weeks.

I know that's a good thing.

There will be plenty more things to learn and forget, like just the right angle to hold Charlie with his bottle or how high on the shoulder to hold him for a good burp, or where to hide the car keys. But looking back and forward at it all gives me understanding of yet another reason people might want to have more than one kid: you think you're getting good at something, you don't want to throw those skills away.

Sadly, most of the things we've gotten good at thus far I wouldn't wish on anyone even once. I'm not going to say anything stupid about what I would have given to avoid learning how to live for a month with a kid in the NICU, because that's never a choice you get to make. But I hope (and very gingerly expect) we learn some things that might be more fun to repeat.

All bundled up

Like his parents, Charlie is lazy. He'll drink about half of his bottle, beginning with eyes wide and looking all over the place, then slowly closing them, sucking more and more intermittently until finally he's asleep with the nipple in his mouth and not even a good burping will get him back to work again. I guess all that growing and breathing must tire him out.

arithmetical reflection

Charlie is currently taking 40 milliliters of milk per feeding. That sounds like not a whole lot until you remember that he weighs just a touch over four and a half pounds. That would be the equivalent for an adult of knocking back somewhere between three and four pints of milk at a sitting. Every three hours, that would come to between three and four gallons of milk a day.

No wonder he's gaining weight.

The kid gets big

Charlie is now at 4 pounds 8 ounces. He has added a chin and a half in the past two days.

His doctors think that at least some of this is retained water, but not in a particularly bad way. They're going to give him a little diuretic to encourage him to lose it, but he's still putting down plenty of milk (almost 3/4 ounce every 3 hours), so his systems are running well.

A little while before this picture was taken (while I was holding him) Charlie kept ringing his alarms by twiddling his feet funny (that's where the oxygen monitor is taped on); but every time the nurse came over to see what was going on the numbers would go right back to normal. Then when Julie held him we was perfectly quiet. He may look innocent here, but we know better....

243 Gallons

Or, why our local Agway franchise is heading for a comeuppance.

Your standard home oil tank has a rated capacity of 275 gallons, but 35 (think a space about eight inches high by a foot and a half wide by five long at the top of the tank) of that is typically airspace so that you don't blow oil back up the vent pipe when you're filling it. So seeing 243 on the pump after a refill means the furnace was pretty much running on fumes.

Seeing that number when you'd been calling all day to ask when the truck was getting there, and the company really wasn't planning on sending anyone until the next day or maybe the beginning of the next week, and when you were supposed to be on the automatic resupply system that typically sends a truck around 175-gallon time, is a sign that things in Mudville are not as they should be.

Since we were also dealing with unexpected plumbing problems, we got a chance to hear from our plumber, the roto-rooter guy and the tank-cleanout guy of two or three acquaintances each who had been left completely dry by the local franchise. One of them, our plumber said, was being socked for a $75 extra charge for venting the air from her furnace's feed line after the burner had sucked every last drop of fuel from the tank.

All of them, of course, are now looking for a reliable oil supplier.

From the oil company's point of view, I can see how cutting back delivery margins makes sense. If you refill at 235 instead of 175, you can serve almost a third more customer with the same number of trucks, keep less oil driving around in useless inventory, and so forth. But when the low-profit company pushes the envelope a little and refills at 190, none of their customers wake up cold or in need of an emergency furnace rebuild or with a houseful of burst pipes.

Risk aversion being what it is -- and small-town gossip networks being what they are -- it doesn't take long to run a business into the ground.

Keeping the home fires burning

When in doubt, blame things on the helpful neighbor. We came home for a quick visit, to see that the cats were OK and pick up some more clothes and mail out christmas presents. About an hour, one dishwasher run and half a load of laundry after we got in, Julie noticed that there was a new ringing sound coming from the basement. It was the alarm on the sewage holding tank, which goes off when the twin pumps that deliver waste to the line up under the street aren't doing their job. Called our plumber, who confirmed that we shouldn't shower, wash dishes or flush the toilet until further notice. It might just be a stuck float, he said, or the pumps might both have died. Or maybe something else.

Turned out it was something else: a blockage somewhere between the house and the street. Maybe it was a freak freeze in this mild weather, more likely it was the helpful neighbor who came and to look after the cats during the week when we were still down in connecticut and hadn't amde any other arrangements. Cat litter, our plumber explained, is what he uses to contain all the water that comes out when you disasssemble an old furnace. Swells right up and holds everything. Still no showering, washing dishes or flushing toilets.

Roto-rooter guy came, said 250 feet of waste pipe was too much for him, time to call the folks with a bigger hose. Guy with the bigger hose came. pointed out that there was no cleanout plug for him to get into the waster pipe to snake it out, started banging on various bits of plumbing to see if he could get in through one of them. He figured it was a freeze rather than clumping litter, albeit for no good reason. He heated up a union jount with his torch, butthe bits of pipe attached to it started moving instead (it didn't make me too confident that he couldn't remember which way to turn it). The finally got in through the (torched) check valve.

After we cracked the main valve, some portion of the roughly 30 gallons of crap in the line between us as the street came back and got sucked up by the Big Hose. Then the kid started hosing down and sucking out the inside of the holding tank (who knew you were supposed to do that every year or two? certainly not the people who sold us the house) and ran the pump through a few cycles to make sure it was pumping up to the street -- albeit apparently our toilets and faucets fill the tank too slowly for his convenience. And now the union fitting leaks a little whenever the pump runs.

Then it was just a matter of waiting and waiting and waiting for the oil folks to arrive to refill the near-empty tank...

Baby Jail

Our boy is just incorrigible. He pulled his CPAP snorkel off at least once, and hinked his IV so many times that yesterday one of the nurses safety-pinned his arm-board to the bottom of his onesie. This morning they were retaping the board to secure it after he spent part of the night wriggling his arm out of it. And we thought we were just joking about him kicking his feet through one of the open ports on the isolette being an escape attempt....

Some days are better than others

Today I sat and watched Charlie breathe, slowly and regularly, for about 40 minutes. Occasionally he twitched a little or shifted position -- he seems to like curling his left leg up around his right elbow, and you can see his thigh rise and fall with each breath. (He also likes to bend his left arm to put a kink in his IV and ring an alarm, but that's not so cute.)

Then we went out to the diner with the good thick french fries and had a couple of cheeseburgers, and to a bookstore where I got one book on PHP and another on mysticism by an old colleague. And the skies are blue.

What to do when you're becalmed in Norwalk

One of these days we'll visit the historic seaport. Truly we will.

Thus far, our outings have included the fabulous Wilton thrift shop a couple of box stores, two supermarkets, Stew Leonard's (you might begin to notice the common thread) and the superthin-crust pizza place recommended by the NICU nurse with an actor son in the city.

Thus far we've been impressed but not amazed. The pizza was pretty darn good (Julie's spinach and mushroom better than my asparagus and roasted pepper, thanks largely to the olive oil in which the spinach was sauted). Stew Leonard's had a huge parking lot and some fine soups and a delivious rotisserie chicken and meats and fish to swoon over, but when you've spent years in Manhattan going to visit food museums like Dean&DeLuca the very idea of a food theme park doesn't quite bowl you over, I guess.

The thrift shop, courtesy of my aunt, yielded a couple of items of clothing, some christmas presents, three or four trash novels and -- joy of joys -- a sharp paring and chef's knife for the hotel room at 25 cents each.

Perhaps tomorrow or the next day, in the snow and the rain that's predicted, we'll go down to tour the squidport. But I can't get over the idea that the South Norwalk whose train station was so dilapidated when I was a weekend commuter to New Haven 20 years ago, where all the shabby people got on the train, is now "Historic SoNo."

A little tired

Back on CPAP today. This delays everything for two or three days, which is probably just as well considering the weather...

We have a nose!

Until yesterday, Charlie was on a CPAP machine with itsy-bitsy prongs up his nostrils to provide pressure to help keep his lungs open, and a tiny adhesive-tape bridge across his nose to keep the prongs from irritating his skin. But now that he's breathing on his own, the tape is off and he's a bit more aestheticaly pleasing.

He's been taking a little bit of his food by mouth (more by stomach tube, plus the sugar, vitamins and fat by central line). So he gets to practice his sucking on a convenient little finger.

A few minutes for a quotidian rant

Our hotel network sucks. Not only isn't it worth the $3.99 per-stay charge, it feels like we should be billing them for diagnostic services. For four of the first five days, we were on the phone to tech support pretty much constantly ("press 1 if you have ever connected to the internet using the hotel network...") only to hear every time that we couldn't find a network connection because the network was down. The system administrators had been informed of the problem, they said, but offered no information about when or whether anything might be done about it. "They don't generally send technicians out on the weekend," said one support person before hanging up.

Monday, when the network started coming back up, things got even more interesting. The wireless network bridge provided by the hotel didn't work at all, even though the wireless cards in our laptops appeared content; sometimes one machine would lose signal while the other one a few feet away was merrily exchanging packets. The network security system (such as it is) had an uncertain timeout, so that sometimes everything would just stop working and you would have to load the router's home page login an again to keep a telnet session going. Same with DHCP -- every few minutes, it seemed, the powerbook's airport card would drop signal, reaquire it but have trouble talking to the DHCP server and configure its own address. Sometimes moving just a fraction of an inch would make the difference between live signal and none. (Typical pings on a good minute yield maybe 20 percent dropped packet and at least one duplicate packet for every two or three proper ones returned.). Number of times the access point was visible but the rest of the internet was gone: too many to count.

Today when the network fell down again, telling us that the access point was unable to reach its password server, I tried reloading the login page only to be delivered to the administrator login instead. Don't think I wasn't tempted -- I clearly couldn't have screwed things up any worse than they were already, and it's pretty much a dead cert no one changed that password from its default... (now, pretty much whenever I try to get to the login page, the admin login comes up instead. whee!)

There are a few places in the hallway where the network signal strength appears better, but I have no idea whether we could changes rooms. And of course with the rest of the networkin such a mess, who cares about reception?

Five hours

That's how long Charlie was off the CPAP today. No wonder he's been sleeping soundly.

Kinda teeny

But mostly in working order. And consider, as they say, the alternative.

I realize all of this is going to be far more fascinating to me me than most anyone reading this, but that's the way new parents are.