A Dash of Dash a Day: June 3

On one side is Dashiell Clark, our little bundle of joy. On the other, Dashiell Hammett, author and the guy who's name we stole for our son. We have placed them both in hats because hats are cool and to make it harder to tell them apart.

There is a definite divide that comes along with people learning Dash's name. Chances are, you're basically in one of three camps:

1) You're under 40 and have grown up with or have friend who have given their children unique or strange names.
2) You're over 40 and think any name that isn't typical is akin to naming your child Apple.
3) You're over 40 and have either read a Dashiell Hammett book or are familiar with the name via that reference.

We mostly kept the names a secret throughout the pregnancy, in part because our friend did that and was happy with not getting a lot of reactions, and in part because we had more "settled" on a boy's name (our first choice for a boy name ended up not being so good for a lot of reasons), and in part because we still hadn't 100% committed to a girl's name by the time the due date rolled around. This is not to say we're using "settled" negatively in this case, because we did genuinely like the name. It's just that no others came around to really debate in our heads.

Now, we really don't care at the end of the day if people don't like the name. My mother, famously, wouldn't even say the name until the last week or so (we think she might have thought we were calling Dashiell (Dash-uhll) an "asshole"), but others have noted somewhat interestingly that they feel the name will have to grow on them a bit. I'm more than fine with that, for the record - it's not a modern name. It's just an interesting reaction.

What's fun are the people who do get the reference, because it's exciting for them given how rare the name is. I've had more than my share of shared moments with librarians and such who know the name. What's more interesting, though, is that his nickname, Dash, has more or less taken over. I didn't expect to call him Dash much at all, but it just...fits. He's a goofy little derpface, so of course we're going to call him Dash. Or Dashypants. Or Dashydoodle. Or whatever else Ann comes up with.

A Dash of Dash a Day: June 2

So some of you may have heard the story from us, but I figure I can get it down for good so I can stop, as Ann puts it, "sounding like a crazy person" whenever I tell the story.

Because this story was pretty scary, and I deserve to sound like a crazy person over it.

You'll recall my post on the day Dash was born where I had noted that it was "Ann's story to tell." I took that position because I was 95% spectator through the whole affair and figured she might not want to talk too much about it. Since then, we've been a little more open, a little more angry, and so on. I'll explain.

When I came back from Ann getting her epidural, it was like a whole new woman in front of me. When I left she was on a yoga ball in a severe amount of pain from her contractions, and when I came back she was actually really happy. She even ended up taking a short nap, which was nice given how long we'd been there at that point. About an hour or so after the epidural, they came to check Ann again, and decided we were ready for the next step. Considering how quickly things had been moving, I ran out to the lobby where Ann's mom and stepdad were and let them know where we were at. How exciting, after all - it was about 2:30 and we're going to have a baby soon!

So we get back, and we're getting going to push. The nurse, contrary to pretty much everything I had thought up to this stage, has me help Ann position her legs to make things easier (my eyes were locked on that back wall, let me tell you), and we got going.

And then 30 minutes pass. Basically no progress. Ann also said later that she felt pretty much done after 15 minutes. So the nurse comes over, pumps up the pitocin (which helps with contractions), and Ann keeps going.

And then an hour passes. Still limited progress. Ann is already exhausted at this point, the midwife has a look on her face, and the nurse comes over, pumps up the pitocin yet again. It's worth noting at this stage that the midwife can't really figure out when Ann's contractions are, which means Ann is missing prime pushing time. But hey, pitocin will help, right?

90 minutes pass. We're supposedly getting somewhere, but Ann literally cannot move anymore. They slap oxygen on her (full mask, none of that tube nonsense for my girl), and try to get her to push again, and she's...basically nonresponsive. Not so much that she's been knocked out, or lost consciousness, or anything like that. It's that she was literally worn out and couldn't do anything. Single scariest moment of my time with Ann, because this was pretty much every nightmare scenario I had envisioned in my head. But we rouse Ann after a short break, pump up the pitocin again, and go with it.

It took about 2 hours give or take, but we finally get Dash. At one point, Ann was given something similar to a pull-up bar to lean on to try and get gravity to help out a bit. It did more good than anything we had done to that point, and once Ann was able to get the baby out, things were better. Ann was shaking from the epidural and the basic shock of everything for a good 45 minutes afterward, so she didn't even get a chance to hold Dash.

At the point where the baby was born, though, I look down, and my shoe is soaked. There's a clear puddle at my feet, and I say something to the midwife and nurse. They say "oh, it's just the afterbirth," which made no sense because I was above Ann's waist the entire time. That's when I follow the line a bit and realize that one of Ann's IVs was out.

Yup, the pitocin leaked out of the detached IV and onto my foot. Who knows how long it had been loose, but it's probable that the pitocin increases Ann got over the course of the labor ended up on my right foot. My suspicions are further confirmed by the fact that Ann had a tremendously difficult time passing the placenta, which somehow easily worked itself out once the pitocin was hooked back up.

So, with all that said, I should say that everyone was genuinely healthy and no ill effects came of that situation other than me being scarred for life and being pretty sure I don't ever want to see this again. We made a joke with the midwife saying we weren't going to call a lawyer, and she didn't really find it funny, so it was probably ultimately more serious for them than it ended up being for us, but in terms of traumatic experiences, that one was up there. On what is supposed to be a joyous day introducing a new life into the world, you end up seeing your wife limp in a hospital bed with an oxygen mask on? Really?

So yeah. That's the story of Dash's birth.

A Dash of Dash a Day: June 1

I've neglected this blog for a lot of reasons, and I need to get out of that and start really documenting some stuff here. So for the month of June, I'm going to offer up a post about Dash every day to kind of catch up on the backlog of things I've been thinking about, or pictures I haven't put on Facebook (or have and haven't discussed), or just random musings. Then, hopefully, I can look at a more regular schedule.

Anyway, for today, one of Dash's weird habits:


So Dash was off the binky relatively quickly. They kind of scared us off regarding pacifiers at the hospital, citing "nipple confusion" (which, for the record, Dash has no problems with). It turns out that, at least for the first few weeks, it was an easy soother for him, he'd spit it out when he didn't need it anymore, and that was that. We got excited, bought a few of the Soothies he liked almost immediately, and within a week or so, he didn't care for them anymore. Go figure.

One habit that he did enjoy in the hospital, and still does, however, is the gnawing of the finger. I don't know, it's really strange and all but he really enjoys it. He'll grab my finger and immediately bring it to his mouth, and once he gets it in there, he goes to town. He does it for a while, then he's done, no problem. He's not crazy when he doesn't get to eat my hand, he's not upset when I take it away. It's just a weird habit.

I'm sure a lot of you who've been through this are thinking "well, yeah, of course." This is just one of those things that no one tells you, I guess, and that leaves me constantly amused. And my poor finger sometimes hurts by the time he's done, but Dash is worth it.

Life With a Kid Who Has an Old Name and a Mother Who Has Alzheimer's

Talking the baby tonight while making dinner:

Mom: "So what's the baby's name?"
Jeff: "It's Dashiell. Dashiell Clark."
Mom: "Dashiell? Really? Are you joking?"
Jeff: "No, that's his name!"
Mom: *laughing* "That's just crazy! What kind of name is that?"
Jeff: "It's a nice name! We'll call him Dash!"
Mom: (nearly in tears from laughing already) "At least you didn't call him Larry!"

I love my mom.

A random hodgepodge on the day of our child's birth

So Ann didn't want to be posting about stuff too much on the day of the birth, because social media is weird and we'd just end up replying to a ton of texts anyway, so just some random stuff. I wrote half of this on my phone as we waited for our little guy to come, you'll see the place it changes...

* We've been the talk of the local dodgeball league since the due date fell right at the end of the season and right near the playoffs. The running joke has been how the baby needs to come between the key times, so the baby coming the day after the season ends, six days before playoffs? So far so good, lil' spawn.

* Ann's water broke around 2am, I woke up about a half hour later. It was kind of cute how Ann was trying to be quiet so I could sleep.

* The baby heart rate monitor kind of sounds like Pac-Man, Ann's blood pressure thing looks like a Cylon.

* I dozed off for a few minutes and apparently missed the paramedics bringing a woman in who then had her baby within, like, five minutes. I hope she's okay, but my first thoughts were "if Ann screams like that..."

* Ann consistently asked for my input in this like drugs and such, as if I have any clue whatsoever. I realized at this point in the program that I was woefully unprepared for the entire process.

* Interestingly, they wouldn't let me be in for the epidural. Apparently, it made sense, as Ann admitted I would have been helpless, but still...

At this point, I stopped writing anything down for a few reasons. One, we got into the birth thing, and two, I think the whole labor story isn't really mine to tell. If Ann decides she wants to share, I'll keep it here for posterity's sake. If not, I'll share here in as much detail as I'm/we're comfortable with.

Regardless, 17 hours after our adventure started, we introduced Dashiell Clark into our little team:


We spent two days at the hospital and came home mid-afternoon on Sunday. My next post will be about some of being at home this week with a newborn, and all the stuff that goes along with that.

A handful of links

I've been neglecting this place as we kind of get everything together and while I deal with my own issues going on, but some stuff I've had sitting on my desktop for a bit:

* Parenting Beyond Belief and Raising Freethinkers, both by Dale McGowan, are great atheist parenting tomes and on sale for the Kindle for the next few weeks. The physical editions have a prominent space on our shelves, and they've been indispensable in a lot of my approaches to how I want to handle religion and such with the future spawn. It's not the bomb-throwing type of atheist writing, either, so if you're not an atheist but curious, Parenting Beyond Belief in particular may still be of value to you.

* Three Huge Mistakes We Make Leading Kids, and How to Correct Them was an interesting read. I fully agree with everything he wrote, and the idea of self-esteem over hard work and dedication is a key one for me that it's going to be interesting to break. While we plan to homeschool and thus will miss a lot of that, it's more the mentality of society at large and the "we must never be offended" style of thinking that's becoming pervasive and may be reaching critical mass when our kid needs it the most. The ability to be risky while also being smart is quite possibly the most important thing I can pass along.

* I liked this longish piece by Paul Lockhart, "Lockhart's Lament," which makes an interesting contrast at the start between why we like learning music, but hate learning math. I think it says a lot about how we approach learning, and it's something I keep going back to even though I read this a week ago.

We have a month to go! Eeeeeeeeep.

Literacy, Books, and the Coming Kiddo

Ann & I were talking over the weekend about how it's going to be a little weird when it comes to consuming media and stuff with the kid around. We're both pretty much on the same page - we're not into censorship, but there's definitely no need to, say, be watching Mad Men with the rugrat around, either. Why this is a bit of a weird situation for us, however, is because we're absolutely surrounded with books. Many of them are for kids, yes, but many more are for adults, some significantly so.

While two articles came out in the last few days that made me think about this more, the one book that is probably on my shelves right now that I a) love and b) is hardly appropriate for many adult audiences, never mind a teenager, is Alan Moore's Neonomicon. It's a comic book of Lovecraftian creepyness with the added benefit of borderline-gratuitious orgies, rapes, and murders, all in their illustrated glory. It's a great book in spite of its content, but it's not one I go around recommending to people, and it's certainly not one I'd necessarily want my kid reading anytime in the next few decades. There's a reason it's part of a pretty big banned book controversy currently, after all.

Now, we didn't have graphic novels around the house when I grew up, but my mother was a fairly voracious reader as well. She read a ton of Stephen King, I admit to maybe getting into The Thorn Birds or some of the really silly romance stuff on the shelves when I was much too young to even have a clue, but I learned to read at a very early age and I would pretty much read anything I could. My mother had no real rule about books - if I wanted to read it, I could. If I had questions, I could ask her - this resulted in a particularly awkward situation in second grade following my reading of Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret, but that's a story for another time. And, frankly, I rarely read the adult stuff she had around the house. I still haven't actually read any Stephen King, and most of the books from her collection that I've saved are more for posterity/memory's sake than their literary value - I figured out that science fiction and fantasy were my books of choice around the time I hit fourth grade, and that was the end of the curiosity regarding my mother's books.

My experience with my mother and books (a post all its own someday) came right back to me when I read this piece by Jo Walton over at Tor. The gist:

I’ve talked before about starting to read something and realising it’s too old for me and leaving it for later...and how I’m still doing this with E.R. Eddison at the age of forty-eight. It’s a good habit, because it blames myself and not the book when I can’t get into something. It’s quite distinct from thinking “this is awful,” which I think often enough, it’s “this is beyond me right now.”

But is there a right age to read a book?

Walton refers to a blog entry at The Captive Reader, which expands on the idea even more:

The age at which we read a book is of vital importance to the way we experience it but that does not mean that each book comes with a correct age at which to read it. You are not only going to appreciate Vanity Fair if you wait to read it until you are forty-five but you will perhaps appreciate it differently than you did at fifteen and twenty-five and thirty-five. You will understand more and miss fewer allusions but that does not mean you will enjoy it more.

In both cases, the discussion is more about understanding what is being read, not so much content-appropriateness. I can get behind that plenty - while I'm in Walton's boots where rereading a book is difficult for me, I can think of countless books I've read that I think back and say "ohhhhh..." and then move on. But isn't that necessarily the case when it comes to more (for lack of a better term) objectionable content as well? Yeah, I read Disclosure much, much earlier in life than I probably should have, but it's not as if I didn't understand what the two adults were up to on a superficial level, even if the point of where the book was going was probably lost on me for another few years. It's just part of what it is, and I'm certainly not scarred by it today in adulthood. If anything, my mother's lenient policy on books and reading has made me into a better reader today, as I've had probably ten more years than your average reader to figure out what I like and don't like, and experiment with both great and not-so-great works in the meantime.

Yeah, I might move Neonomicon up to a more secluded shelf once our little spawn gets older. He or she might still reach for Game of Thrones, or Judy Blume, or whatever when they're too young as well. I think there's a difference between reading abstractions on a page that you have to visualize as opposed to having the image splayed across your screen in a moving picture. As Ann put it, it's active reading versus passive watching. I wish my mother was in a more coherent place where I could thank her for giving me that leeway to find my own path in the worlds that books open up, and it's a gift I definitely want to give to my own kid moving forward. In the end, I suppose I just have to trust that we are, in fact, made of hardier stuff, and there's a way to be responsible as well as keep a respectful, trustful distance.

If books are that path, I don't think I'll complain.