As you can see from the date listings on my last posts here, it is SO NOT EASY to keep up with both a blog and a daughter, however beautiful she may be. So there haven’t been any posts here in forever.

Even more complicated, I’m actually (theoretically) posting in a second blog as well! In reality, what happens is that if I ever have an inkling of an idea for that blog, I end up thinking about this one and how totally neglected it is … and the whole thing dissolves into a mental mess.

So I’m sacrificing the Famblog here. I will certainly have more to say about sweet lil’ Feeburs, but I’m going to do it at the other blog with a “Phoebe” tag. I’m sure all you imaginary readers are just devastated to hear this.

So, see you on the other side!

Just spent the afternoon adding new pics to Phoebe’s Flickr page and captioning like crazy. We’re almost up to date on the pics now … the latest ones are from when she was 5 months old, and today she turned 7 months! So happy Month Day, Phoebe! Yaaaaay!

This morning, the whole crew is making its way to Hammond, LA to get the little Phoebe-girl baptized. Does that seem like a long way to go to get some holy water? Well, yeah, but we wanted to have it done by Father Paul at Grace Memorial Episcopal, the man who married us. He’s a good guy.

There’s a pretty large contingent of family who’ll be going to see this happen. My sister’s family is visiting from Orlando, my Mom’s cousin from Brooklyn, my grandfather, my uncle’s first wife and a couple of close cousins. That’s in addition to the large chunk of family that’s already there. We’re gonna total about 25, which may not seem enormous, but you haven’t seen us all try to eat in the same room.

Pictures will be forthcoming, seriously. Of course, I’ve been pretty bad about posting anything here, so there’s gonna have to be some serious catch-up happening soon. In the meantime, you can always enjoy a Phoebe slideshow at flickr.com. (She’s got her own tag!)

Did I mention my wife is a photographer extraordinaire?

Nope, my mistake. That’s just some silly bird.

Now THAT is a Phoebe!

So maybe it was an unreasonable expectation that I might have any time or inclination to blog while I’m learning the fatherin’ ropes. Or maybe I’m painfully lazy when it comes to such things. I suspect I’m merely out of practice … my bloggin’ muscles need a good stretch.

For the most part, Phoebe is an amazingly healthy, well-behaved child. She was a little jaundiced at birth, and one of the main treatments for that is to just “give ‘er a little sun.” That would have been great except that she was born at the beginning of a ten-day gray patch in Mississippi January.

She rarely gets into crying jags, preferring instead to SHOUT us into doing what she wants. (HEY! HEEEEY!) She still loves to stretch and move her limbs. When she’s calm, a tight swaddle helps keep her that way (we call her the ‘baby burrito’), but if she’s alert when we swad, she twists and turns and pulls like a little Houdini trying to get at least… one… arm… out! When she starts talking, I expect a few battles of will.

I can hear you asking now, “What about sleep?” Well there are good nights (baby goes down hard at 10:30, nurses in 2 1/2 to 3 hour increments!) and bad nights (baby REFUSES to go down until 2, then half wakes up at 3 and makes just enough little noises for the rest of the night to prevent anybody else from getting any sleep!) in roughly equal proportion, but the good are starting to outweigh the bad! Mama breastfeeds and Daddy takes care of the other end, when he can.

I stayed home for a week after Phoebe was born, but I had to go back to work again, which is why I have to wrap up this rambling entry now.

(Photos coming really soon, I promise! I’m uploading to Flickr even now.)

I’ve been a bit busy to post over the past few days, so let me catch you up.

Phoebe Jeanne (aka “PJ” or “Feebs”) was born Friday, January 12, 2007 at 4:03 pm. weighing 8 pounds exactly.

Getting there was insane and terrifying. Tanya was put on a pitocin drip early in the morning and labored for over eight hours to get to 4 cm dilation. There was certainly pain in the process, but it seemed manageable. Then Dr. Hanna broke Tanya’s water, and the pain shot up the scale. Dr. Hanna saw the head in the birth canal, but also a little hand poking out! She waited a few minutes to see if the hand woud go back in, but unfortunately, Phoebe seemed to be trying to swim her way out. Despite all the painful labor, vaginal delivery was no longer an option.

They quickly wheeled Tanya into the operating room and I was told to get into scrubs and wait to be escorted in. So I waited for about ten minutes … and was told that Tanya needed to be knocked unconscious and they couldn’t bring me in. So I got out of the scrubs again and waited in what was suddenly a very quiet and depressing room.

What had happened was that the anesthesiologist was unable to install the spinal drip because Tanya couldn’t roll into a ball to separate vertebrae without breaking the little arm that was trying to emerge. They told her the news and she was devastated. She had so hoped to experience the birth, and now the only people who would get to see it happen were the doctors doing the work. She cried herself to sleep.

Meanwhile, the operation went very quickly, and a nurse came to the room and told me to grab my camera and head to the nursery! I got there just in time to see a perfect little screaming bundle, bright red and beautiful. Once she was laid in a heated tray, she stopped screaming and started looking and stretching and sticking out her tongue. It was like some kind of baby Tai-Chi. Just awesome.

My family and guests had been quickly rushed out of the room when Tanya’s water broke and just as quickly ran to the window when they saw me with a camera in my hand. (This simply never happens.) Everyone was captivated by the little star, and if the Native American legends are true, my child is now a thoroughly soulless zombie. That seems highly unlikely to me. This kid’s got serious soul.

I’m about to return to the hospital and bring my wife and daughter home. Everybody’s happy and healthy now, and I’m sure we’ll have numerous pictures posted here very soon.

So I have this really bad case of performance anxiety. There is this up-coming gig tomorrow morning and I don’t know the songlist. I haven’t rehearsed in 15 years. I’m freaking out.

I’m sure this anxiety is what every mother-to-be feels as birth draws near. I remember great fear 15 years ago…fear of the unknown. Now it is fear of the known. I know how long this could take. And yes, I remember very well how badly it hurts… especially with induction drugs which intensify the contractions. I know what I face tomorrow. I’ve watched enough Discovery Health Channel and read enough “complications” sections of pregnancy websites to know just exactly how many things can go wrong. I’m freaking out.

But I am also old and wise enough to know that tomorrow will come and pass. The great apex of this nine-month-mountain will be reached and life will, more-than-likely-in-spite-of-all-the-freaky-shit-I’ve-seen-and-read, GO ON. It will go on with a new element. Routines will fall in to place, rolls will be assumed, and we will find it hard to think back to life before Miss Phoebe Jeanne Voorhees came into it.

And, in spite of all I face tomorrow…I can’t wait to meet her.

on tenterhooks
In a state of painful suspense, as in “We were on tenterhooks all through the game, hoping against hope that our team would win.” This expression alludes to hooks that formerly were used to hold newly woven cloth that was being stretched on a frame. Their name has long survived this method of manufacture. [Mid-1700s]
The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer.
Copyright © 1997 by The Christine Ammer 1992 Trust. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.

So I’m having a kid.

Technically, I already have one, but 1) she’s not my own flesh & blood, and 2) I came in late on the rearing process. When I married my lovely wife Tanya, Chloe (or “The Chloe”, as she liked to be called then) was 12. Now she’s 15 and a social force to be reckoned with. She manages to straddle the line between interesting and popular in a way I never dreamed was possible in a public High School.

But I get to be in on this new story from day one. Excellent.

We do know with a high degree of certainty that the unborn baby currently occupying Tanya’s womb is a girl, thanks to ultrasound. That information was hard-won because she really, really doesn’t seem to like the kinds of noises or feelings that the ultrasound process makes! She’s been very shy, enough so that even though we had half a room full of lovely pinkish clothes from loving family and friends, we also had a backup plan a month ago involving copious hours on eBay.

But a few weeks ago (Dec. 14, to be exact) we got a good, solid view at girl-dom. So we are almost certainly about to be the parents of Phoebe Jeanne Voorhees.

Phoebe’s official due date is January 21, but we are not going to last that long. She has maneuvered herself into a good position, and Tan’s mucus plug has fallen out. What’s more, we’ve scheduled labor to be induced tomorrow, Friday, January 12. So her birthday is either going to be 1/11 or 1/12, and either one will be easy to remember.