Category: Oh, baby!

The baby and Nam are fine.
He is 2,500 grams of red-faced crying glory. I put my hand on his head and he immediately stopped and went to sleep.
Life is good.
Thanks for all your prayers!

Just a quick notice: Nam’s water has broken.
I am sitting in a VIP post-op room by myself, as I am not allowed in the maternity ward. This hospital has a strange policy of not allowing husbands into the delivery rooms. It’s a policy we came asking about just yesterday in anticipation of the baby’s target date of May 11. It’s this policy that started us planning on checking out hospitals in the big city of Khon Kaen, an hour away.
We were going to go this weekend, when a doctor we saw before is on duty. Hell, we were talking about going today after lunch. Then her water broke. I threw the go-bags in the trunk, helped her in the car, and we were off. On the way to the hospital I told her we had plenty of time to get to Khon Kaen if she wanted to do it there, but that’s not what she wanted so we are here at Mahasarakham Hospital.
My son is positioned buttocks-first, so there really is no choice for a first-time mother, he will have to be delivered by Caesarean (linguistic note: they call it a “Caesar” here). When we got here, Nam was dilated 1cm. That was around 90 minutes ago. It is maddening to not be in the loop here. However, there is an upside for us. Nam has many friends here, bith nurses and doctors. One of them has promised to get me in to see her in about ten minutes (14:30). So I’ m sitting here cooly describing what has happened to this point, but actually feeling quite anxious about my wife and her upcoming procedure, scheduled for 6:00PM. The reason they are waiting so long, apparently, is that they have to wait for lunch to digest.
There, now you know everything that I do. I will update as things happen, but will post this when I go home to pick up some things later this afternoon. It will reside on my desktop as an rtf file until then.
Oh, by the way, I am so glad we decided to eat at home today instead of going out as planned.
UPDATE: I’m picking up a very weak wifi signal around here. I’m going to go look for it.

I forgot to mention that when the nice lady doctor at the clinic was viewing with ultrasound a couple weeks ago, the baby let loose with a spontaneous boner. He didn’t seem overly concerned to have observers, either. For some strange reason, I felt very proud about this magnificent display.
Heh.

Clive Thompson (the Giant Squid Overlord) has just put up a very interesting post: Why C-section births might cause eczema in babies
Now, in the midst of making some very important choices about how our boya is going to be born, this type of information is key in confirming our choice in a natural birth, if at all possible. We know that the C-section is a valuable tool, indeed a life-saving one as proven time and time again, but the reasons we have heard for having one out of want instead of need recently really cause some concern.
Some women who have had them (numerous times in some cases) claim that it’s the only way to go, because it’s relatively painless and easy. Holy crap, does that reasoning worry me. Some women have advised Nam to have one because of vaginally expansive reasons, which I will not get into in detail, but suffice to say that said women are afraid I will leave my wife if she has a natural childbirth… And some have just been brainwashed by a booming medical business that states that Caesarians are safer and less stressful on the infant and mother – never mind that that stress might be the entire point of natural childbirth.
///////////////////////////
On a flip note, if you read the article linked from Clive’s post you probably came across the reference to Lund University in Sweden. I’ve been there, and it’s the only place in the world where my eczema acted up besides Japan, for the exact same reason it acted up in Japan – the extremely dry winter conditions.

I first felt the baby moving a few weeks ago. Nam first felt it a month or two ago; it’s apparently hard for a first-time mother to tell movements of the fetus apart from digestive and other normal movements. Now, though, there is no mistaking it; he wakes his mom sometimes by moving around so much.

• Sometimes if you tap or pat lightly, he taps back from the inside.
• He grooves to a good beat and seems pretty chill when something soft is on.
• Sometimes when I sing him a song, he pounds the walls for an encore. (So far one little, two little, three little Indians is his favorite even though I tell him the PC version should be counting Native Americans. He replied “I likes me a good curry.” What the hell does that mean? How the hell does he know a good curry from a bad one?)
• His favorite TV show so far is The Shield, he likes to watch Vick Mackie kick ass.
• He pretty much hates that Baby Einstein stuff – dancing dolls and teddy bears are for girls, he says.

Taken on a third-class ultrasound machine in a first-rate clinic out in the countryside of a third-world country
The Yoshida name lives on!