Isaac is certainly growing.

He had a decided growth spurt this past weekend. On Thursday the tabs on his newborn diapers could be made to meet in the middle. On Sunday morning the could be stretched to no less than a half to 3/4 of an inch apart. Sometime in the early hours of Sunday morning I looked down at him and noticed that his head seemed to have gotten much bigger, and he was heavier in my arms. So we took him to the pediatrician's office yesterday to have him weighed. He weighed in at 9 lbs. 11 oz.

Parker seemed to have grown a lot just while I was in the hospital with Isaac. He seems to be much heavier than he was when I was still pregnant. It was suggested that perhaps I had not been lifting him as much near the end of my pregnancy, but I know that's not true. How else could I get him into his car seat, or change his diaper, or make him come inside when he was resisting? We'll have to give him a weigh next time we visit my parent's house.

Yesterday morning Isaac fell asleep in his little portable swing. An hour or so later he started making noses as he started to wake up. Parker ran into the dining room, where the swing was situated at the time, and I heard him say, "Just a minute Isaac; I'll pick you up." I told Parker that it was nice, his wanting to take care of Isaac, but that he shouldn't ever try to pick him up. I asked him if he wanted to hold the baby, and he said yes. He went over and sat on the couch when I asked him to, but when the time came, he didn't really want to hold the baby.

I'm glad he starting to take a little more of an interest.

Outside Interests?

A couple of months ago a man at church asked me if I had any interests outside of home and family. At the time I couldn't think of a thing. It was ridiculous, of course. I have plenty of outside interests. It's just that at the time child care and food prep (along with other homemaking issues) were all I could think about. All the same, when my friend Damon asked me to make a list of anything I could imagine myself doing to bring in a little extra income, I couldn't think of very many things to put on that list either.

I am an excellent secretary, so long as I am not expected to make very many phone calls. This was my downfall, and a source of constant stress when I was a legal secretary. I love paperwork; I'm pretty good at record keeping, too. Phone calls petrify me. I'll put off and put off the simplest ones--that is unless I make the call immediately I discover the need. I've had to make lots of phone calls about medical things recently because there was some delay in getting Isaac added to our health insurance policy. I'm getting better--having had to make calls for the attorney all the time helped--but it's still a struggle for me. Email and internet access to accounts has made life that much better for me.

I'm reading *Don Quixote* and *The Rhetoric of Fiction.* Surely that qualifies as an outside interest. I'm still writing, if sporadically. I think about things, various and sundry things, all the time. Just last week Michael and I had a discussion about the effect of advertising on the public, as we drove past a Quizno's bearing this sign: "Now Lower Prices."

My Boys

It isn't quite true that ALL he does is sleep, but almost.

But look at that hair on Parker. He will get a haircut sometime soon, I promise.

Adjusting to the new baby? How can I tell? He's two--which is a whole other matter. Yesterday morning Parker said to me, "Take that baby off," while I was feeding Isaac. Tonight, though I didn't get a picture, he dozed off while playing a crashing cars game on Michael's computer. We said, "Are you tired?" and Parker barely summoned up the strength to shake his head no.

Weight Panic at the Pediatrician's

Yeah, it's hard to get on here to write anything. A couple of weeks ago I took Isaac in to the Pediatricians Office for his two week check up. A few of you already know what happened there.

Before I get to the part where you find me in tears, I'll tell you this. I thought it was significant, but I always tend to think that these things are significant.

In the well-patient waiting room there is a television showing children's programming. The movie that was showing while we waited was the 1975 version of Charlotte's Web, starring Debbie Reynolds.

When I was a little girl I had a vinyl record of the soundtrack to this movie. I knew all the songs, and I used to act out Charlotte's death scene near the end. At the time I had neither read the book nor seen the movie, but I knew that song was sad and dramatic, and I would crawl up on my chest or table (I don't remember which it was) and pretend that I was Charlotte dying, not knowing the Charlotte was a spider.

Later in high school I would do the same thing with the death scene at the end of Antony and Cleopatra. It sounds crazy, I know, but it always made me feel better when I was low. It helped that all of the lines near the end of the play are given to female characters.

Anyway, Charlotte's web was playing, and I remembered the scene from my childhood, and I thought--this is a little treat from God, reminding me of something I enjoyed as a child. And I remembered the words to "Mother Earth and Father Time."

Back to the point of the post.

They called Isaac back, and of course the first thing you do upon arriving the examining room, is you undress your child down to his or her diaper so that a weight can be taken. I did this, taking extra time to change Isaac's diaper because it was very full, all the while telling him how I wanted to be sure to get an accurate weight. The nurse and I proceeded to the scale. The reading came back at 6 lbs. 0 oz. I told the nurse, "That's not good. He weighed more than that when we left the hospital. He weighed more than that a week ago when we weighed him at the Breast Care Center. This is very, very bad." The nurse, who must have been new, said nothing. She gave me nothing back. Just went about the business of administering Isaac's PKU. I wanted to ask her to weigh him again, but if you know me very well you won't be surprised that I didn't. I spent the next however many minutes waiting for Dr. Brown looking down at my baby, wondering how this could have happened and what I was going to do about it. Should I make an appointment with a lactation specialist immediately? Should I call my mother and tell her she was wrong, that he wasn't growing, that he didn't weigh anywhere close to 7 lbs?

Denise came in, and we talked about Isaac's feeding. I told her what had happened with the scale, and that he weighed 6 lbs 8.5 oz less than a week ago. She reassured me that it didn't sound right, and so we took him out to try the scales again. This time a more experienced nurse told us that sometimes the scales got out of whack when the mother's weight was removed from the scale as babies are being placed on the cradle. She jiggled it up and down with her own weight to make sure the calibration held. Isaac's weight came back at 7 lbs 7 oz.

I should have known immediately that feeding every two to three hours with an abundant milk supply and very little spittage could not possibly result in a weight lost of 8.5 oz. I should have known, but I didn't. Looking at Isaac you can see that he is growing. His little cheeks are filling out, and he now had a distinct bottom. He's already grown out of some of my smallest onsies.

That was a pretty scary and tragic twenty minutes for me though.

Photos--Parker/Isaac

These first two photos are of Parker--the first one taken in the hospital, the second shortly after we brought him home for the first time. I don't have digital copies of any of the pictures taken right after he was born, though I do have prints in a photo box at home. Parker was born before we ever thought about putting a SD card in our digital camera, so for the first little bit we had to rely on pictures taken by others.

These other two are all Isaac. I still don't know how to get blogger to post more than four photos at a time.

At first we didn't think that Isaac resembled Parker at all, and still the similarity isn't exactly striking, but as I compare these pictures I can see that there really isn't that huge a difference in looks. Isaac, born only two weeks early, is much smaller than Parker ever was, a difference that will probably minimize all to rapidly. In the meantime, Isaac gets to wear baby clothes that Parker outgrew before I ever had the chance to put them on him.

I'm starting to see mannerisms between the two boys that are similar--the way they raise their chins when they are sleeping and not interested in eating anymore. Maybe these are simply mannerisms that are common to all newborns, but in this respect they remind me of one another.

My mom was right, Parker does seem very big next to Isaac.

I keep trying to get Parker to let me take a picture of him in the hat my mother gave him for Christmas, but he won't do it. He wore it once, but the camara was not in reach and I missed my chance. Someday maybe I'll actually get a photo of the two of them (Parker and Isaac) together, but for now Parker isn't all that interested, and maybe for the next month or so that will be for the best. He does sometimes express concern for Isaac when he cries. "What's wrong, Isaac?" he asks.