weekend naptime

Jayde and I look forward to trying to catch up on sleep on weekends - this is the first one where I actually felt like I did. And there's still one day to go!

Owen doesn't really need the naps to catch up, but he seems to enjoy them anyway...

2 nekkid guys. (mostly, anyway)

on the couch
on the couch with Poppy
in the Moby wrap with mom

as always, more photos are at http://www.flickr.com/photos/45091219@N07/

One month old

Okay, long time no post. I'm finding that Blogger is not the best way to get photos out to the world - or, at least, it's not as convenient as Flickr, to which I can directly upload an many photos as I want from iPhoto on the mac.

So today's post will consist mainly of a link to my flickr page...

But first, a one-month party story...

Chinese tradition is to celebrate the end of the first month of a baby's life (well...I guess the real tradition is to do this for boys only, but that's different these days). This is the end of the time when the baby and the mom are supposed to stay home, doing nothing but eat and sleep. Its also the end of the live-in mother or mother-in-law (who helps with cooking, cleaning, and baby care for the first month.) Given the difficulty of giving birth and getting a baby through the perils of the start of outside life (also a historic truth, but not far from true today) getting to one month is definitely cause for celebration.

The baby dresses in a good outfit, and wears gold jewelry. Owen had 2 gold bracelets and a gold medallion sewn onto his hat. These were both hand-me-downs that were used for the one-month party for Jayde's brother, Peter.

We celebrated with 2 special dishes - sticky rice (油飯）and a hard-boiled egg with the shell dyed red. We also had Thai food, Burmese tea leaf salad, Taiwanese cookies (or, at least, cookies made by a Taiwanese person) and some good ol' American cake.

This picture is Jayde's mom, with Owen in his special outfit.


For more pictures (of this party and lots else) go to:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/45091219@N07/sets/

Owen Geng-Ming Roberts

So here's the story behind his name:

We decided that he would have an "American" first name, and a Chinese middle name. (When he travels in China or Taiwan, he'll use Jayde's maiden name, Lin.)

The first name was the hardest to decide - we wanted to use a family name, but didn't find any that we both really liked. So we moved on to look at names from some of the multitude of baby name sites on the web, and we came across a site of Welsh names. My family is, at least partly, from Wales, so that seemed like a good list to consider. After rejecting Caddock, Gwalchmai, Rhydderch, and Ynyr, we found Owen, which has at least 2 origins. Owen is the British spelling of the Welsh variant (or is it the other way around?) of Eugene (meaning: "well-born"), my paternal grandfather's name. It also means "born of yew," which didn't mean much to us until we looked at what the yew tree represents - it's an evergreen, and can put down new shoots from branches and thus live a very long time (2000 years). It was a symbol of longevity and rebirth.

Ok...now on to the Chinese middle name. Most of this stuff I don't really understand, so this is my best guess so far.

Geng is a very old character that's one of the fundamental parts of Chinese cosmology, the seventh of ten heavenly branches. In Classical Chinese it is part of the name for Venus when it is in the west (the Evening Star). It's used as a counting word for the seventh part of something – like time. For instance, this lunar year is a Geng Yin year (the 27th year of the 60-year cycle) That's about all I know. We chose it because it creates a good balance with the rest of Owen's Chinese name, and is a character that Jayde and her parents all like. It's written 庚.

The Ming part is a generational name (that Jayde and I kind of made up) that's the second character of Jayde's brother's children, too. It's an old Chinese tradition to have a character that is shared for all the children of a particular generation within a family - Jayde's family doesn't really do this, but we wanted to. That character, 明 (which is made from the characters for sun and moon put together) means, most simply, 'bright'. Owen shares this character with his cousins, Tao and Ora (Jayde's brother Peter's children.)

Jayde's family name in Chinese is Lin 林, which is made up of two trees. It means forest. So altogether, Owen's Chinese name is 林庚明, Lin Geng-Ming.

Oh, and we did give him a name

I am saving a longer explanation of his name for a real post, but I realized I didn't mention that, in the end, we did not formally name our son 'Baby Tiger Roberts,' despite the big leg up that would have given him with the ladies and with job interviews. His name is Owen Geng-Ming Roberts. We're still calling him 小虎 (Xiao Hu, pronounced kind of like "shao who") which means 'Little Tiger'. This is a common format for nicknames in Chinese, to add 'Little' or 'Big' to some character in the name, or some personality trait.

More on each part of his name soon.

Baby Tiger Cometh

Happy news - our family is now 3! Baby Tiger decided May 8 was too long to wait - he was born April 21 at 10:00pm. It started pretty easily - Jayde started feeling a backache and general discomfort on Tuesday night, but we went to bed and slept (mostly) normally until Jayde woke up at 5 with some bleeding. We went in to the hospital for a (supposedly) brief check, but she was already 4 cm dilated, and they decided to admit her then, since she was contracting well and just to keep an eye on the bleeding.

15 hours later, Baby Tiger's heart rate dropped (for the second time), and Jayde went in for an emergency C-section. This was very frightening for both of us - everything happened fast, I couldn't go into the OR with her (since it was an emergency, Jayde got a general anesthetic, so they don't allow spouses in the room) and there was a clear risk to our baby's health. But 20 minutes later (a pretty long period of time, really) a nurse gave us the news that both Jayde and the baby were okay, and a few minutes later I got to hold my son! It was a special and intense mixture of surprise, joy, and relief at seeing his perfect little form. About 20 minutes later, Jayde was brought back out, still pretty groggy and attached to a wide variety of drips and machines, but that made my relief and joy complete.

All in all, despite not following our plan at all (which I suppose I should get used to), the day ended about as perfectly as we could have hoped - a healthy baby and a safe and recovering Jayde. It would have been really difficult without our great support team. My entire family was at the hospital at one time or another, which was a great support throughout the long day. Jayde's parents and brother dropped everything and drove up, 2 weeks before they'd planned, and arrived in the afternoon on Friday. It was great to have them here, and we're thankful to Linda for being here and cooking great meals during this first month. Our friends Belva and Julie also drove two and a half hours to be with us during labor and the birth. We really want to thank the wonderful staff at the UW Medical Center, who were as expert and as diligent as we'd heard. They got us out of a dangerous and scary situation, and launched us on the next phase of our lives.

So now we're a week into parenthood, working through the various difficulties of feeding, pooping, and sleeping, but loving (just about) every minute of it. I can't think of a better reason to get up at 3 am than to see our son. He's in his co-sleeper, having squirmed an arm or two out of my still-not-professional swaddling job, telling us that it's already past time to eat. And it is real bliss to rock-walk him around the house at 4 am, his body warm and limp from his meal, and to pat his back and kiss his head. Being a dad is great so far.

Belly & Daisies

It is hard to capture the belly by myself so this is what I've managed along with the picture below.

This was taken on my walk around Greenlake.

Both are happy accidents really. Would have been useful to have one of those cameras where you can turn the viewing panel.

Oh Pointy Belly - Oh Pointy Pointy

We are officially full term. Which means Baby Tiger can come at any time! But, I'm asking him to be patient and to arrive on or after May 8.

So, now, he is a pointy belly. My Chinese doctor says he needs to descend more which means he should get pointier. That should be interesting. No?