So Tired

I put Max in his little jumper thing today while I went to clean up the kitchen a little. He was playing and having a good ole time as usual. Then, he kinda went silent. I looked over and this is what I saw:

Never seen him fall asleep in that thing before. He would usually get sleepy and start whining. I guess he was having too much fun and didn't want to get up.

Introducing Maxton Takahiro Chan

It has been a couple of long nights. We finally decided on a name, Maxton Takahiro Chan. We were released from the hospital yesterday around 5pm and suddenly we were on our own. Things have been a little crazy since. No more room service. No more calling the nurse for help with Max. No more sending him to the nursery for some rest. Yeah, the hospital was nice.

Our first night at home was sleepless to say the least. Max just would not sleep on his own. He would only sleep if someone held him. So Robin and I took turns holding him last night while the other slept. I think I actually dozed off a few times holding him... luckily I didn't drop him!

We took Max to the doctor today just for a quick check up and they said he has gotten more jaundiced. He is reading 12.4 on some jaundice scale, up from 7.5 when he left the hospital. We have to bring him back to the pediatritian tomorrow to see if it is still going up. If so, they will place him under some lamp or something.

CC has been a great help these last few days. She's been over here helping us watch Max and even got us food and did some grocery shopping for us. Thanks Sis!

I would also like to thank everyone for their well wishes in emails, text messages, voicemails. I have read and heard them all. I apologize for not responding back but it has been very crazy here, lots to adjust to. Max has been taking up all of our time and energy!

Tekelec released their earnings yesterday. Numbers were good. Yay! Stock goes down? Boo! Bonus is 140% Yay! So that's a wash I guess.

Anyway, here are a few recent pics:

Resting

Mother and baby are now sleeping. We got moved to our postpartum room. This room is even nicer than our last one. Rex just renovated this wing, so everything is brand new. We even got a decent HDTV (looks like a 32" LCD) to watch the Duke/UNC game tomorrow night.

We will be staying here until Thursday evening, I believe. I think that's standard these days to keep the mother/child for 2 days after the birth to make sure there are no complications. They also have to give him his shots and circumcizion.

The rest of the pics can be found here: http://picasaweb.google.com/weiyan8/BabyChan

I'll have to warn you, tho, some of these shots are NWS... there are some penis shots in there. :-)

Baby Chan is here!

Our healthy baby boy was delivered at around 6:30pm today. Everyone is doing fine. The boy ended up being 8lb 13oz, decent sized baby. I will try to post some pictures soon, I've got tons. He's got chubby chubby cheeks. :-)

Fully Dilated

Robin is fully dilated now! Time to start pushing!

Progress

Wow, we've had alot of progress the last few hours. The doctor (Dr. Zimmerman, UNC Grad!) just came and checked the cervix. It's 8cm dilated now! He said it should hit 10cm within the next few hours and then she can start pushing. Getting close!

Epidural

We decided to go ahead and get the epidural, so the doctor just came in and administered it. Robin is feeling much better now. :-) Just resting right now waiting for her to dilate some more. The goal is 10cm. She is still 4cm.

In Labor

The doctors came in this morning around 7am and started the Oxytocin drip to induce the contractions. They also went ahead and broke her water so the baby will have to be delivered within 24hrs of that no matter what. The contractions are varying between 1.5 - 3 min apart so not real consistent yet. The pain is increasing now so we are talking about going ahead and getting the epidural now. She is 4cm dilated.

At the Hospital

We are in the hospital now. The room is pretty nice and spacious with our own bathroom. They prepped Robin for the induction and gave her some ambien to help her get a good nights rest. They will be giving her some petosin(sp?) at around 7am to kick start the labor. The labor/contractions should begin shortly after that. It is unclear how long after the contractions starts before the baby comes but they said it varies anywhere from a few hours to a few days! Hopefully, we will be on the lower end of that spectrum.

I'll try to keep you guys posted on the progress and maybe post some pictures.

Go Baby!

We're off to the hospital tonight! The doctors will try some stuff to try to get me dialated to ~3-4cm so we're heading in tonight. Then tomorrow morning (EARLY!), they will induce and hopefully we will have some good news for everyone very soon!

Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers that we will have a safe and healthy delivery of our little boy! Lots of love to everyone of you who are reading our blog and pulling for us. We appreciate all of your support and prayers for us as we enter this very exciting new time in our lives!

No news yet!

No news yet. We have a scheduled induction for Tuesday Feb 5th - so unless the baby decides to come before then, that is the date. Wei Yan says there is wifi at the hospital, so we'll be able to post some updates here when the baby arrives. I'll have my last check up with the OB on Monday and that is when they'll make the decision to have me go in Monday night or Tuesday morning.

Today is the baby's due date

Yup, today, Jan 28th is our baby's official due date, and yes, there is no baby yet. We'll see the OB tomorrow and see what she says. He's still moving around in there and I don't feel much different. I'm supposed to be sick of being pregnant by now, but I don't think I'd say that I am. I might start getting sick of being asked if we've had the baby yet or folks saying, "so when is he coming?" (as if I know this.) I guess I must be used to being so big & clumsy & tired, cuz I am not really sick of being pregnant yet. I may get sick of wondering when he's going to decide to come out and what I'm going to do with myself as we wait....

Oh, and yes, we must just be wasting time because we went to go see Rambo yesterday evening. Talk about violent...terrible movie, but if you just want to see some gore, and violence for violence's sake then yes, this is the movie to see.

12 days to go

 

I was measuring a little on the big side, so the doctors decided to do an ultrasound to make sure everything was ok. Everything looks fine, and they concluded that I'm measuring big because the baby is big. The ultrasound is not exact (they give estimates plus or minus a pound) - but the machine calculated that the baby is 7 lbs 8 oz and about the 61% percentile. That lines up with the 30 week ultrasound that said he was in the 60th percentile. Course they also said his head is measuring in the 86th percentile - so I told Wei Yan that was his fault. But, yeah, could be any day now. The ultrasound lady was nice enough to switch it over to the 3D ultrasound and print out a few pictures - the quality is not that great, but you can see that he's got some very chubby cheek and we could even see his poutty lips in the profile.

They said next week that they will go ahead and schedule an induction for sometime in the 41th week just to have the appointment booked, but that a lot of women go into labor by then. So at the very least, we'll be having an avergage to larger than average baby - if he comes out at 8 lbs, I guess that means that all the newborn clothes will be packed away right from the start!

names

We're still deciding on names and yup, feeling the pressure. Some of the Japanese names that are in the running for middle name are:
* Tsukasa - My maternal grandfathers name. I was pretty close to him, and everyone called him "Tiger" which is kind of a cool nickname. Course everyone called him Tiger because no one could say his name. It would be kind of cool to keep this in the family, but I'm not sure I want to give our kid such a hard name to say/pronouce/spell. Course I guess on the last name he is getting off pretty easy - but this is NC, so he's gonna have to spell his last name all the time anyway...
* Takahiro (or something with Taka in it like Takashi, Takaharu) - I like Tak and Taka. Wei Yan likes Tak and maybe the Heroes series is having a subconscious effect.
* Yutaka - I think this is my paternal gradfather's brother's name. We always just called him Uncle Taka and he had a shop called Tak's automotive (still exists today). But I think this was actually his formal name. Might be a good option in case T ends up not being a good middle initial depending on what we pick for a first.

Sadly I have no idea what any of those names mean. And if I find a website with meanings - I'm reading whatever characters I recognize in chinese. If any family members are reading this or friends that have some knowledge of japanese to share or family history to share, please do. Course, like I said, we may end up just going with what sounds the best with the 1st name we decide on....whenever that happens! ;-)

latest pic

Me a month ago:


Me today with almost the same outfit on:

 

hehe...i look more tired in today's picture for sure.

Week 37

Today (Monday) the baby is officially full term. So if the baby come before the official January 28 due date, he will be considered full term (not premature) even though it would be early. This also means that the baby's due date is exactly 3 weeks from today! Our furniture is probably going to come after the baby is due, but we've got the pack 'n play set up and plenty of clothes and diapers. A lot of folks ask me if I'm ready to have the baby, but I'm still feeling like we need more time to get ready for the baby, it would be nice to do a few more things to clean up the house and wrap things up at work. It's a big relief to know that the baby is now full term and still elbowing and kneeing me vigorously. My hip was hurting a bit the last 2 days, but nothing too bad or uncomfortable - just tired these days. I'm sure I'll get to that point though, because folks tell me all the time that the last few weeks you get to the point where you are ready to just be done with the whole pregnancy thing.

locked & loaded

just got back from the OB. he was pretty sure the baby was head down, but after I mentioned that the last 2 weeks that the other docs were unsure, he went ahead and did an ultrasound to confirm. dr. henderson is a pretty funny guy - real dry sense of humor. overall everyone that i've met at the practice is pretty cool, they all seem pretty laid back. but, yup, he's turned around. funny though, i don't think that it feels any different - although the last 2 days I've felt slightly more pressure and the baby isn't as active as he was before, but didn't seem significant enough to mention. so no scheduled c-section at least.

Week 35 update

Starting to go to the doctor every week from now until the baby comes. Last time, the OB was thinking the baby may have turned head down, but said we should wait til this time to be for sure. This week, the OB says she thinks the baby is still breech. This past week, there have been many times where my belly looks like a square or a heart - two bumps sticking out on either side of my belly button. I told the doctor this, and after checking the heartbeat, she said the baby is probably transverse, with the head still up - given where the heartbeat was heard the loudest. She said that we'll keep checking weekly and that at some point, they will do an ultrasound to be sure. And if I go to the hospital in labor that we can let them know that the baby's position has been breech & they will check again at the hospital. She did say that she's know babies who have turned in the last week, so a c-section is not for certain just yet.

Head down?

Well, the doctor says she thinks that the baby is turned head down. I think I must be measuring a little big, because she said something to the effect of "he doesn't seem like he's too big" when she was trying to feel my belly & see if he's turned down or not. It was a bit alarming, because I'm pretty careful with my belly these days, and she was just pressing in with her fingers to try to feel the baby in there and it was farther than I've ever pressed on my belly. When you are lying on your back (which I haven't done in ages!), I guess all the muscles relax. When I'm standing, sitting or lying on my side, gravity or something makes it so the belly is a lot more solid and not so squishy.

So by meeting the only female doctor in the practice, I've now met all the doctors who could possibly deliver the baby. This starts my once per week visits. And she said that she thinks he's head down, but by next week it will be more obvious. The heart rate was good and the baby was busy moving around in there even though I couldn't feel it, so I guess he does have a bit of room to move around.

Cord Blood Banking

So one of the decisions that we want to figure out before the big day comes is where to bank the baby's cord blood. Seems like there are 2 big private banks: Cord Blood Registry and Viacord. And there are also many public cord blood banks as well. Neither one of us has a history of diseases that are typically thought of for cord blood treatment, but since dna matters, they say that people of mixed ethnic origin should consider that matches are harder to find. I'm not sure if half japanese and half chinese counts, but either way seems like a finding a match is going to be hard enough as it is.

The cost of a private blood bank is a good chunk of change. The public cord blood banks run the risk of someone else having a match, the cells being used for research or maybe issues with access if it has not been used yet. I think right now we're leaning toward the public bank. If I died tomorrow and someone needed my heart, I don't think I'd want my family to deny that person a chance to live on the off chance that someone in my family might need it in the future. What are the real chances of us needing them? But then would I feel differently if it were my own child?