Leonhardt Tobias
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I’m pleased to announce the birth of Leonhardt Tobias, on August fourth, this year. Leon—we’ve decided to call him that, even though I like the idea of calling him TobyTwo—was born weighing 8.75 pounds, and was 20.86 inches long. If you’re the kind of person who thinks in metric, that’s 3.97 kilograms and 53 centimeters.
I can’t tell you how much I love the little guy—I even think it’s great when he cries—but I can tell you that I’ve changed my first diaper. (I wasn’t wearing the diaper, Leon was.) And I even impressed the midwife with my diaper changing skills. The midwife is the woman who helped out during the delivery—the ‘normal’ word for the birth—and afterward.
It was both an unusually long and a very fast delivery. My poor wife had an induced labor. Or, in other words, the doctors gave her drugs to make her body want to have the baby right away. But she was in labor—that’s the word for the work of having a baby—for over a day and had a lot of pain behind her when the doctors said that Leon had too much stress and they’d have to get him out by C-Section.
A C-Section is the name of the operation in which a doctor actually cuts open a woman—in this case, my poor wife—to remove the baby. My wife’s C-Section went really well and I got to hold Leon when he was only minutes old. But, because a C-Section is serious surgery, my wife will be in the hospital longer, so she can recover from her operation. ‘Recover’ is a word that means the same as ‘get better,’ or ‘get back to normal.’
I think it’s great that my wife can recover in the hospital. She has experts there to talk to her about all the different things we’re learning about Leon. And she has other women around her, and they compare experiences and babies. (“Her little girl was crying all night, so it’s no problem if my little boy cried, too.”)
For me, though, well. . . I’m a little bit lonely here at home when I know that my whole family is somewhere else! The apartment sure seems empty without them!
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August 27th, 2009 at 10:34
Congratulations to you and your wife on your delightful baby, and my warmest wishes for a speedy recovery!
August 28th, 2009 at 05:50
Thanks! We’re (mostly) loving new-parent status!