A Nice Welcome Home

You all want to hear about the air conditioner, right?  I know.  It's too exciting to ignore.  Allow me to share.

A. turned it on the night before I got home, just to test it out.  And he found that it was pretty loud on the energy saver setting, because the condenser (or whatever--I'm fuzzy on the details) kept kicking on and off.  So he ascertained it was probably more practical to run it on the lowest "cool" setting instead.

He also decided to put it in the upstairs hall window, in the hopes it would cool all of our bedrooms enough for comfort.  It didn't seem fair that we should be cool and Cubby and the MiL should be sweating in their rooms across the hall.  As it turns out, our bedroom cools the least with this arrangement (whee!), despite being right next to the unit, and Cubby's room cools the most, despite being the farthest away from it.  Must be something to do with the draft from the stairs right in front of his door or something.

But even so, it was cool enough in our bedroom last night that I didn't have to have the fan blowing directly on me to sleep.  And considering it was still ninety degrees outside at 9 p.m. last night, that is saying something indeed.  I would have liked to have had the fan on, but I was afraid the baby would be too cool that way.  And a too-cool baby doesn't sleep very well.  Or rather, sleeps less than he would otherwise, which isn't saying much.  So no fan.  And the fact that I didn't actually need it was a welcome relief.

In other exciting homecoming news . . . The First Tomato has been consumed.  Oh yes.  AND, it's a tie for the very earliest First Tomato ever.  On this very date two years ago, I ate The First Tomato of 2010.  This year's first was, as always, a Stupice.  And I, as always, did not share.  I ate it secretly behind the cover of the enormous tomato plants while Cubby was busy pitchforking manure near the onions.  That's right--I don't even share The First Tomato with my firstborn son.  Or with my second-born son, but of course, he doesn't know what he's missing yet.

Anyway.  That's the news.  Over and out.

Heeeere's Charlie . . .

Let's Blow This Popstand

A. is on his way to the hospital right now with Cubby to get Charlie and me the hell out of here.  Soon we will be Blackrock-bound.

And then the real fun begins.  Hang on for the ride, duckies.

One Day More . . .

If your next thought after reading that title was "Another day, another destiny, this neverending road to Calvary," then pull up a chair, my fellow Les Mis nerd, and let us sing of the red and the black.

And for everyone else in the world who doesn't know every word of every song in a Broadway musical about the French Revolution, that title just refers to the fact that I am still in the hospital.

DAMMIT.

I was SO looking forward to getting the hell out of here this morning, but no.  The pediatrician wants to keep Charlie under the lights for the rest of the day and then check to make sure all is well in the morning before releasing him.  So here I am, hanging out for another wild day of nursing, changing diapers, and staring at the revolting sign on the wall that says, "A baby is stardust blown from a hand above."

No, really.  That's what it says. There are so many jokes to be made there, I can't even start.

The big news today, though, is that A. called around 10:30 this morning to let me know that he had purchased a window air conditioner for our bedroom.

WOAH.  HOLD THE PHONE.

He figures if we run it only at night and on the energy saver setting, we should have just enough electrical current to get our bedroom to a reasonable temperature.  Say, eighty degrees instead of ninety.  Apparently, even A. was unsettled by the thought of bringing home a brand-new baby to an un-cooled house on a day that's supposed to be anywhere between 95 and 100 degrees.

Though in reality, since said baby is currently luxuriating quite comfortably in an isolette set at 89 degrees, I suspect A. might have been worried about that baby's mother and her reaction to those temperatures.  That is, me.  As well he should be.

It doesn't matter why he bought it, though; the point is that we have it.  Now let's all just cross our fingers that we don't black out the entire village or something when we turn it on . . .

Little Rebels

Did I say we were leaving the hospital today?  Scratch that.  Thanks to yet ANOTHER son who has the audacity to be born with a blood type incompatible to mine, I am once again hanging out in a hospital room, sleeping (or mostly not) by the obnoxious blue light of the infant incubator and feeding on demand around the clock.

Is it too much to ask to have a child born who actually shares my blood type and doesn't try to rebel against me from birth in this way?  Apparently so.

Yeah.  Charlie had some mild jaundice.  Thanks to our family history, the pediatrician decided to just keep him here and put him right under the lights to get rid of it right away.  The hope is that just the one night should do it and we can go home in the morning.

Much as I will be sad to leave this lovely air conditioning, I really need to get home.  Cubby, though he has been a trooper about spending so much Mommy-less time with Grandma and Daddy, is nonetheless still wondering what the hell is going on.  Last thing he knew, Mommy was going to the doctor on Friday morning and would be home to put him down for his nap.  Now here we are, three days later, and Mommy is still not home.  And Daddy does not know the words to Brahms' "Lullaby" (and can't carry a tune even if he did).  How is a boy supposed to go to sleep without Brahms' "Lullaby?  With difficulty, apparently.

Anyway.  Fingers crossed we get sprung tomorrow.  Being subjected to an extended period of this hospital food is again a traumatic experience for me.

Know What We Haven't Talked Enough About?

The weather.  I really feel there hasn't been enough bitching here about summer heat, don't you?  And NOW, we can add a new and interesting dimension to the bitching with the arrival of the new baby.  YAY!

I don't know what it is, but apparently I only give birth to extreme sons.  Cubby was born in the winter.  But not just in the winter;  he was born during one of the worst stretches of winter weather we've had since living here.  It literally snowed every day his first week of life, accompanied by wind and very low temperatures.  Super for a newborn, let me tell you, especially in our house.

Charlie, in what is obviously his first assertion of differentiation from his older brother, decided to come during a particularly brutal heat wave.  Not that this matters when I'm sitting in the climate-controlled hospital, but that little idyll ends in about three hours.  And then it's home to our 85 degree bedroom, to cuddle close to a hungry little inferno all night long.  I made the mistake of looking at the forecast.  It's supposed to be 96 degrees on Tuesday.

I'm not going to look at the forecast again. It doesn't help my mental state.

But at least I'm not pregnant anymore!  There's always a bright side.

Let's Hear It for Technology

For it allows me to sit in a hospital bed and spew my usual drivel without missing a day!  WHEE!

Hello, poppets.  Guess what I did yesterday?  Without going into unnecessarily gory details, I Brought Forth New Life.  Once again without any pharmaceutical help whatsoever, leading me to once again have a very strong reaction of, "THANK GOD THAT'S OVER."

So there's this baby asleep in the bassinet beside me.  He's been sleeping most of the time since his great entrance.  And when he's not sleeping, he's nursing.  Kid took to the milk like a natural.

His name, at least the one on his birth certificate, must, of course, remain top secret.  But his blog name will be Charlie.  That kind of goes with Cubby, right?

Right.  And speaking of Cubby, that gigantic child (in comparison to the new one anyway) was just here for his introduction to Baby Brother.  He took a good look, made some comments about babies drinking milk and crying, and then proceeded to bounce on the bed; play with the toys sent to him by his grandpa; attempt an escape to run wild through the halls of the maternity ward; eat the cupcakes the MiL made for us just this morning; and eventually sit on the bed with me to watch a few minutes of "The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh," courtesy of the very same wireless Internet that is bringing you this important update.

In other words, he ping-ponged off the walls for an hour and then whirled out of here like the dervish he is, leaving me contemplating with some trepidation my new reality of Cubby+baby.

But let's not think about that yet!  At the moment, I am alone in an air conditioned room with only one sleeping child.  I have cupcakes to eat, real coffee to drink (again courtesy of the MiL and the thermos she thoughtfully delivered when she came to visit), and Internet access.  Not too shabby.

Plus, there's this baby here who seems to be practically perfect in every way.  So yeah.  You could say life is pretty good right now.