Week 46 - Bar

Our first day pondering the other baby in the room.

Well, it didn't take too long for us to start setting standards high for our little girl. It's not that we are demanding performance from her, but more that we are giving her the opportunity to explore the world around her rather than bundling her up and watching the television. So as our little girl levels off her weight and hopefully starts to gain (she's just so active, she's not putting weight on!), we have discovered ourself in the mirror. That's right, this week our little Hannah was looking at herself in the mirror as she lay on  her activity mat. There's really not much else for her to do on the mat right now but be put on her stomach for a little "tummy time", so we let her lay on her back for a while and look around. She is so curious, I just know she's going to be a great learner.

My wife and daughter on our first walk.

Meanwhile, we've also gotten out on our first walk together which turned out to be a bit more difficult (and easy) than we expected. First the easy part. Courtesy of great family and friends, we were blessed with many gifts during the course of the baby shower period, and one of these was the Graco Click Connect (Fast Action) stroller/carseat system. Yes, shameless plug, but my wife did her shopping research and this turned out to be a great system. I recommend it to anyone. The seat base was easy to install (despite my wife's best efforts to complicate it with too many iterations of the manual), and the stroller pops right out of the back of the car and opens up into correct standing. When we're done, we remove the carseat and pull the handle and it folds right back up. It is light, sturdy and fits square in the back of the Corolla. The only difficulty is that it doesn't come with shock absorbers and living near a reservoir, our typical walking spot is up on the dike. This isn't quite level enough for the stroller though, so we had to seek out pavement where we could get a more smooth walk in that was as peaceful as little Hannah needed. Bumpy rides freak us out a little bit after the county forced us to watch a shaken baby movie. Nothing quite so inspirational to brand new parents like a forced viewing of destroyed children. 

Us, after our first ride together post-baby.

While I'm bragging on my wife for her shopping acumen, I should also praise her for her seemingly quick recovery. She is a champion and proved it once again by hopping back on a bike this week, less than 3 weeks after her C-section. Props to modern medicine and the staff that worked with us, but the main award goes to my wife for her dedication to the Pelotonia (approaching in just a few weeks) and her willingness to challenge herself. We only did 8 miles, but with an average pace of 13 mph, I would say that it was a pretty good first ride. 

The shelving all washed up before Old English oiling.

Projects around the house continue to progress, including clean-up work on the garden and my final start to the basement bar. I asked my mom to help us pick up some lumber from Lowe's and she mentioned the availability of an old oak shelf built by my great-grandpa Ralph back in the day. It took a little bit of love since it has been sitting up in the dilapidated seed barn for the past few decades, but it is a special piece for my basement since he is who I was named after. The wood is still very pretty and the shelving isn't too wobbly - you hardly notice on the uneven floors we have anyhow. Lumber picked up and 2 engineers and Mexican coke later, my brother has helped me make some almost square and level stands for some rejected cabinetry. Home Depot and their scammy register clerk who signed me up for emails helped me get some decent in-store cuts to build a bar counter and there will likely be a wheel table in the works as well. At least for now I can store all my glassware and finally take it out of the boxes it has resided in since we bought the house.

On the work front we have FINALLY put period 2 of the fermenter trial to bed. Not even kidding, but my Brazilians' lab notebook said "Period 2 Again Again AGAIN". My adviser says that to pull off a fermenter trial you need 2x as many experimental periods as you will actually measure and he has been sadly underestimating for this project. I know our visiting scholars are disappointed, but I have been trying to find them other things to get done instead. Here's to literature reviews and reading instead while we wait. We are also starting to talk about doing some video work to estimate protozoal volume more accurately than the oldschool L x W^2 method which is obviously incorrect based on a non-cylindrical shape of many rumen inhabitants. The real challenge is video quality because the eukaryotes are mostly moving too fast for a firewire on a standard microscope camera to catch them. The image is blurry and separates into red and blue at the same time for both pictures and video so the processing is obviously not fast enough.

Such a small hand grabbing my fingers.

Our little girl sleeping in the cool porch air.

Family get-together for Independence Day was a little different this year without Grandpa, and Grandma definitely had a struggle with the change. I had hoped we'd be sitting there around the table with him holding our baby girl, but things were not to be. At least we know he is at peace now and in a better place. With the cool weather, we've been able to enjoy a little bit of time outside, including fireworks for the 4th and a few different cookouts which once again murdered my diet routine in its sleep. But every day feels like a bit of vacation right now, even though I have to work and I have been better at opening my eyes to the great things going on around us. The world is a beautiful place most days.

This little frog was out front of our house this week.

Week 45 - Weight

Big news this week as we are already holding our head up at just 1 week!

Betsy loves her new sister.

Early on during my master's degree, one of our professors taught us something valuable about practical animal science research. Many of us over-complicate our research and forget about the big picture. We come up with all of these fancy parameters to measure and lose track of the obvious, or the measurements of long-term consequence. But the most valuable and important tool in his opinion was the scale. With the scale we can determine if an animal is gaining, maintaining or losing weight. And weight is linked to an animal's health, metabolic status, energy balance, and genetic worth. This isn't to say that other smaller parameters aren't of value for modes of action with research, but just to say that the scale is instrumental in the base layer of quantification, the big picture measurement to determine what is really happening in the life and health of the animal.

My little Spartan, despite her mother's misgivings.

But as a dad, all bets are off. And hard is it is, I needed for the scale not to be the primary determinant of success in the first weeks of life for our new baby girl. Hannah struggled with her weight for the first week or so, losing and then finally leveling off. By the end of this week, I am feeling like we might be on our way out now that the weight has started into the plateau. When we visited the doctor, they confirmed what I already knew to be true. She was alert, happy, passing plenty of diaper-fodder, but not putting on any weight, just going down. Everything was ok, but we just needed to keep on keeping on. So cheers to that - we will continue to be chilled out parents.

Hannah after her first bath. So cute!

Bathing was our big learning process this week, but just like running any brand new assay, you just need to have everything you will use laid out in front of you and ready to go. Ideally, she is declothed, wet down gently, soaped and rinsed and being toweled off as quickly as possible. But once the water hits her, it doesn't matter what the temperature is - she is going to squirm and doesn't like it. We were also trying to do this on a spongy flower which a family friend gave us, so we did it up on the countertop. Sponge didn't probably work as well as we hoped, so we basically bathed our baby right out on the kitchen countertop with a cozy cushion leaking water everywhere. Top this off with a happy little tinkle, and I'm pretty sure there are people who would never eat at our house again if they knew what went down in there. Good news is, it was just one of "life's bleachable moments". Our first bath didn't go quite smoothly, but I think we'll get the hang of it. At least she didn't cry too much.

With time at home, got the flags hung in time for the 4th!

View from our bedroom with the sunrise. Late night, but she let us sleep in a bit.

I love holding our little baby girl. She is so trusting.

Otherwise, our first full week of parenthood has been going well. We have been getting acceptable amounts of sleep, and I have been working from home for the most part. Period 2 died again, but we are back on the road towards getting it knocked out of the way. Meanwhile, electrical failures are the new frustration at work. Our lab has a collection of great equipment, but it is all worthless when a power surge blows fuses and causes adjustment fluctuations when nobody has changed the switches. Gremlins indeed, no, we have more power fluxes in my fermenter room than a horror movie. It is good to be back to work, and trying to make progress, and it is even better that the team pulled together so well while I've been out. But I long to be home as soon as I get on the road to work, and struggling with this equipment and the unknown ghost of power problems. It's going to be a long road to finish this PhD, now that she is here with us. I love learning and working in this research environment, but I love being home with her in my arms. Our place is so peaceful this year with the sheep grazing the pasture.

Week 44 - Girl

This was finally the week we've been waiting for forever. Of course, since this post is 2 months delinquent, I suppose you probably already guessed I was swamped in the new life of a dad. You would be correct, but I value this blog and hope some others have come to as well so here I am again to catch you back on things. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but let me tell you my story first and then you can judge for yourself.

With all of the research delays, period 2 has been a real thorn in my side and of that of the Brazilians and my summer interns. I think it is fair to say that we truly dread the fermenters and there will be a lot of reworking of the system once this project is done. But this week has been plugging along fine since the 3rd restart of period 2, when we went in for the ultrasound of our little baby. We were a few minutes late for the appointment and the girl behind the counter who couldn't figure out how to check us in did nothing for the cause. Then we waited until we could be let in for the ultrasound and things started moving along again. But I knew something was up when the tech kept trying to measure over and over again. It was obvious that she wasn't happy with the size estimates she was getting for the baby.

Sure enough, when my wife went to the restroom, the nurses looked at me and told me the real news. Not only was the baby measuring big, but it was measuring at 9 lbs, 15 oz. Holy crap! I held it in as well as I could until the OB could see her and talk things over. He walked into the room with the print out and looks at her and says, "Well, go big or go home, huh?". After she heard the weight, we were a bit afraid of waiting until the baby came on its own, especially with a full pound of flex in the estimation. So a C-section it was, after debate at the local coffee shop. We met him back in his office and he told us we were making the right decision and to plan on Friday. It was 30 minutes later that my wife called me bawling on the phone the the appointment was tomorrow!

We made the preparations, sending Betsy off to visit the in-laws and calling off of work. We hadn't been planning for something so sudden, but we were ready, thanks to her insistent urges to get everything ready "just in case". Then came the phone calls in the morning asking if we could reschedule. Mind you, my wife has called off work (a big ordeal), stayed at work until 8 to close everything up for weeks, she hasn't eaten and we haven everything ready to go. This could not be happening. Luckily it worked out that we could go in that day and so we were off to bring home Betsy's little sister.

You can see the joy in our faces in the recovery room (about 45 minutes after).

Four hours later, I was holding a crying baby in the OR while they put my wife back in order. The events of that room are a bit too personal to share with the world, but having a child is a great responsibility and bringing one into the world is a tremendous honor and wonderful moment, regardless of what process it takes to get them there. Suddenly all of the waiting was over, and our daughter(!) came out like the statue of liberty into the whole new world. She laid on the table under incubators and oxygen for a few minutes before I was allowed to hold her and bring her over to see my wife. In 3 hours I had been excited, nervous, impatient, frustrated, confused, lost,  alone, anxious, worried and then I had burst into full joy. What a wonderful gift we were given that day; she is a true blessing to us.

So tiny and helpless. She wrapped her fingers around mine the very first day.

That night while my wife slept, I hastily published 4 blog posts to get all caught up in order to put the big news out, but then I was caught up in the wonder of the girl and never looked back this blog. We had issues with the nurses questioning our intelligence and being pretty bossy and disrespectful/rude to my wife. As a father, it's hard to see your wife treated that way, and I kept looking at her to see if she would let me step in, but she seemed to want to fight through on her own. To the 2 good nurses that we had, you were shining lights in the midst of a bad recovery experience we couldn't escape from. Luckily we had great family to visit us and interrupt the "service", but I wasn't happier than the day we could bring them both home.

Our little daughter, Hannah. She slept with us in the room every night.

When we pulled up the drive, our families had been working on a few surprises per my request and as exhausted as she was, my wife lit up to see them. Her old blue spruce from home had been brought over to the house, our hammock was set in the ground and hung, and a weeping cherry tree was planted out by the old stump in the side yard. I couldn't have possibly gotten all that done and it was so great of them to get my wishes done for Amanda. So grateful.

My wife with Hannah and our new cherry tree.

Amidst all our time at the hospital, my lab team had been quietly working away without me and I want to commend them for performing so well on their own. Period 2 is well on its way to completion this time (after another crash) and then we can put the dread behind us. My wife and I capped the week off by popping open one of the "baby beers", thus named because I made them while she was pregnant so that she could celebrate in the hospital post-parturition. However, it was a few days before she finally felt up to a bottle. This was my first cherry wheat, and while I think next time I will some of the mashing myself for a slightly more unique and richer taste, this turned out beautifully. Great color, carbonation, taste and after-taste. So I'd like to briefly share what I did for anyone interested.

Cheers to the newest member of the family!

• 1) Brewer's Best Wheat Beer Kit. Follow the instructions (I used my "city" water, which is pretty hard with moderate fluorine/chlorine.
• 2) Boil 3 lbs. frozen tart cherries during the brewing in a "sock" to sterilize.
• 3) When adding the final hops, the cherries stopped boiling to cool.
• 4) Rapidly cool wheat beer, then add the cherries and the water they boiled in (would lose a lot of color otherwise) in a primary container with a wide lid.
• 5) Primary fermentation lasted 7-9 days, then I transferred to secondary in a glass container and tossed the cherries (great for attracting unwanted varmits).
• 6) Secondary fermentation lasted beyond when they were done bubbling. I had a lot of sediment which I allowed to settle out, so about 4 weeks.
• 7) Bottled with 1 cup of sugar for priming the bottles.
• All fermentation steps occurred in my basement at about 68*F. I don't like to rush things with the warmer temps.