Little bunnies have to stick together

And so it begins!

She's here!! Baby Meha took her first breath at 11.10pm, Saturday, April 16th. The labor went amazingly smoothly (so says the dad). At about 9.30 at night, which was about 3 hours after arriving at the hospital, we hunkered it for what we thought would be a long labor. The lights were dimmed, as we were told to get some rest. (For the record, iPad won over the Kindle in this situation as the backlight came in very handy for me to read to Joanne.) Before we fully knew what was going on, we were told to start pushing and Meha entered the world about an hour later.
Here's Meha at age 30 minutes:

And here she is at 30 hours:

She had a huge face-scratching issue when she first came out (she still does to some extent). My guess is that she had her hands close to her face in the womb, and that's her comfortable pose. So, we placed mittens on her little hands. Within half an hour, she had figured out that if she bit down on the glove and pulled down on with her hand, she could break free of the mitten trap. Just as we were admiring the precociousness of our newborn, she proceeded to stick her finger in her eye. Lots to learn.

Twiddling thumbs ...

All the bags are packed, we're ready to go ...
In the meantime, Joanne's dad and I have been busy putting some finishing touches on the baby's room. Here's a picture of the room, upgraded to include curtains and a poster.

Now for some last-minute cramming on occiputs and transitions ...

Amma's embroidery and Vasantha Aunty's quilt!

One of the nice things that came with Jo's parents this week was the baby quilt from Amma and Vasantha Aunty, here spread out in our crib! Amma picked out the cross-stitch design in Kuala Lumpur and we have been following her work on the pattern over the last few months, so we were very excited to see the finished piece :)  As you can see it is a very sweet baby girl fast asleep (cross our fingers the baby chooses to follow this excellent example...) Vasantha Aunty did the quilting, which is super-soft. We love it, and we know the baby will too. We'll be seeing Appa and Amma in May, so the baby can thank them in person!

Pictures!

Today was a hectic day. Left for New York at 5am to renew my passport (boo!) and catch up with Nacho and Ceci (yay!). Passport renewal was successful ... in some future blog, I will have to rant about this process a bit more.

But for now, we have pictures! The baby room is just about complete (about time!). Here's the view when you come in:

Here's a beautifully-sized loveseat that we bought so that I can hang out in the baby's room as well:

And, here's the crib and the baby's bookcase (I added a couple of books to her library from my trip to New York including Neil Gaiman's "Blueberry Girl"):

And, finally, here's the remaining corner where we've placed the changing table, laundry hamper and a diaper-disposal device:

We're still undecided as to the ultimate layout of all the furniture. Suggestions welcome!

We got a yellow loveseat for the nursery and the little toddler bookcase today, but then got a little bit stuck trying to figure out how to get them up our stairs. So this is a picture of our invisible hero, Fabian, whose right hand you can just about see at the bottom of the sofa box on the stairs on the right side of this photo.  You can much more clearly see the box giving PK a bit of a hard time....Thank you Fabian!

Jo's parents are arriving Friday! And we are both so far from being done with work and immigration stuff not to mention pre-baby stuff, yikes. Still racing against the baby!  Anyway, PK (the instigator of this entire scheme) feels very remiss about his lack of posting but promises his public a full-on, photo-heavy, baby-full post tomorrow after a last-minute dash up to NYC to get his passport renewed (!).

Another weekend down the hatch....

An action packed weekend! Firstly India beats Sri Lanka in cricket and then Manchester United beats West Ham. Getting those key updates out of the way, what else ??


We both spent a half day at work, did taxes, built the last of the ikea furniture, laundered the car seat and bassinet and moved more furniture out of the study, which completes the transition from very bare study to overcrowded study/nursery to very bare nursery :) We had two guests and went to a lovely housewarming dinner. And....in between..we had FALSE LABOR.Ow! Now you'd think it would be easy to figure out whether one is in labor, but this turns out to be untrue because so many weird pains and aches happen all the time. In this case, suppose you have a quite nasty Saturday night followed by a grumpy morning and it suddenly belatedly occurs to you that these new pains really are quite particularly regular and hey wait a minute this is a contraction! So here you are already feeling sheepish...."hm yes, i suppose this has been going on a while" but it is more embarrassing to get your nice husband all nerved up and pulling out the contraction timer and talking about going to the hospital after which things sort of slow down and stop, and then you end up feeling even more sheepish. Ugh.
Thank goodness for understanding husbands..

The end of March madness...

Well, we have ordered new curtains so that's one thing down, only a few more to go!  With two weeks left to D-Day, we need to pack our hospital bag and get ourselves in order. We're still waiting on the nursery chair, a tiny sofa and a ton of odds and ends (although as of today, I am happy to report, we do have diaper cream)  Hm. I probably should do my taxes  this weekend before it gets too late! It's also a bit of a race against baby to close shop at work, which is not easy to do when you're not really sleeping much at night, leading to very slow workdays, ugh.  Thankfully, PK is a rock of stability and heroically puts up with all the craziness :)  I have no idea how people who are not married to him can possibly  manage this process...

Hang in there, baby! You can be a bit late! Your mum usually is! Your dad on the other hand, among  his many stellar qualities (such as making a very good dinner tonight and then washing up), tends to be punctual, but you can learn that type of good behavior later in life.... 

Sometimes a hole adds more than it subtracts

Home improvement projects are always stressful. A bathroom-remodeling project, for example, is never quite as smooth-sailing as some reality shows make it out to be. Yes, it's fun; yes, it's nice after the fact; but, when you're standing in front of two long aisles of faucets and don't see a single one that you like, it's hard to escape asking yourself the question, "Now, why did we decide to do this again?"

No, I'm not drawing an analogy between having a baby and a home improvement project (though, there may be something to that--planning, execution, maintenance ...), but the pending arrival of a baby does engender a medically-documented "nesting" instinct. In women, this typically manifests itself in furious online shopping for baby clothes, and, in general doing useful things around the house to prepare it for the baby's arrival. For men, this is usually taken as an opportunity to execute many home improvement projects that otherwise would not get approval from management.

All this serves as background for the events of last night. The latest addition to our on-going project of putting together the baby room involved Jo buying some curtains for our new windows. Now, we have a rather unique window frame due to its proximity to the slanting roof, such that it requires an inside mount. After unpacking the curtains and assembling the rod, Jo held up the curtain for me to see.

"So, do you like it?", she asked.

I paused. As any man knows, that already spoke volumes. But, to that, I added, "Hmm ... it's not doing it for me."

Now, home improvement projects always involves choices. There are times when we sit down and make choices together, but often we go down the (hopefully benevolent) dictator route. The problem with this is that the expression of choice reflects taste, and in some sense, our choice of furniture, faucets, paint color, etc. bares our inner sense of style open for public scrutiny ("I can't believe they painted their house that color! How uneducated!).

So, my pause and subsequent castigation of Jo's purchase was not just an insult to the piece of fabric, but to something deeper. Needless to say, the rest of the night did not progress well. I stuck to my guns--"Am I not allowed to dislike the curtain?"--while Jo decently kept quiet, glumly twiddling at her Blackberry.

The next morning still had a dark cloud over the Yoong-Kannan household. Jo muttered something about new curtains, I said "no, no, let's just keep the ones we have", both with not much conviction.

We spent the morning working from home as an electrician was coming to install an exterior lamp which would illuminate our new house numbers (guess whose projects these are?). A pleasant, twenty-something year old, was busy measuring and tapping the walls while Jo and I were working in the living room. Suddenly, the electrician pops his head into the living room.

"Excuse me, sir."

"Yes?", I replied.

"Is okay I make hole in wall?"

Jo and I were immediately off the couch and in the study. We found ourselves staring at a rectangular hole that was 4 inches wide and about a foot long. Plaster, wood and paint chips were scattered all over the floor.

A funny thing happened then. Suddenly, the events of the night before seemed trite. I realized that I had been a bit of an ass about the curtain, and (I'd like to think) Jo knew I felt that way. The hole had united us, and reminded us that it's not me against her, or vice-versa, but us against the challenges that would plague us the rest of our lives together--in this case, manifested in a large hole in the wall. Curtains, and home improvements more generally, are just something that couples have to do together to turn a house in not just any home, but their home; and soon, a home for their family.

"So, how long will it take you to patch up the hole?"

"No sir, me no patch. Me electrician."

Spring and PK take a day off!

PK is allowing me to guestblog today, so this is a big responsibility:

Today is COLD! What happened, spring??? We have cherry blossoms all over DC and then out of the blue, snow this morning? As a result of this winter-spring combo, PK has a chill  *and* I have allergies, worst of both worlds! What's nice and unexpected are the daffodils that came up in the back yard, which we didn't even plant ourselves, but keep coming up. Our hibiscus is hanging on by a thread, which means that they look pretty dead but I snapped a twig and there is a green thread inside. Cross your fingers! And in the afternoon we planted California poppies, let's see if they take.  It had better not stay cold because then we're going to need little baby flannel/fleece versions of everything that we have in cotton/muslin. Oy spring! Wake up!

Last week we interviewed the pediatrician nearest our house who takes BCBS insurance, and she seems very nice, so I guess we are going with Dr Sweeney! Our big fat baby manual also just came in the mail also. Poor PK is just getting through the Birth Partner, and now he has a whole new set of homework to do, on top of all the furniture he is building,  boxes he is carrying, dishes he is washing etc. This baby better be good because she has a gem of a daddy.

Weekends go by very quick here what with all this stuff... yesterday we made a birth plan (which essentially is a set of instructions for your nurses and doctor in the hospital), and we stocked the changing table with diapers and wipes and washed all the carseat/bassinet upholstery so now it looks good as new. Today we cleaned a bit more, put down the new rug, which looks great in the nursery and tried to figure out if we need more seating in there and then what to get ... We still need to wash everything else in baby detergent before we start putting in the sheets and putting the clothes away.  And lots of furniture still left to move around, but they say babies don't see very clearly for a little while, so hopefully she won't mind if not everything is in its final final place ;).

Also, here's our baby bump picture from last week:

T-3 weeks

Crib: check! Bassinet: check! Car seat: check! Diaper rash ointment: ... wait ... (pause while Jo gets on Amazon) ... check!

The countdown has begun at the Yoong-Kannan household for the arrival of the new addition to our family. In the spirit of the post-print medium, flat-world, surely-everyone-is-interested-in-what-i-have-to-say age, I've decided to blog about our journey down the road of parenthood.


We've still got three weeks to go. Just in time for me to read-up on being the ideal birth partner, armed with a birthing plan and tennis balls in a sock (subject of a future blog). In the meantime, there's furniture to assemble, and things to buy. Oops, turns out our new rug has been lying rolled up in front of our door the whole day! To the cloud!