Now We're Rollin'

Our chubby little baby turned 2 months last week. He had a checkup where he was weighed and measured. The doctor confirmed what we already suspected: he's big. And fat.

Just how fat? He is the 90th percentile for weight, and the 75th for height. And his head is ginormous. It ranks in the 95th percentile for that category. We could have another John Madden on our hands. But cuter. And a little younger. And without the unhealthy fascination with offensive linemen's butt sweat.

Today Ethan rolled over for the first time. I wasn't home at the time, but Lacey snapped the picture below mid-roll. She tells me he was lying on the sun when he started. Sadly, the monkey was caught completely off guard and was hurt badly. We're trying to teach Ethan to "look, then roll," but he's just not getting it, no matter how loudly I scream.

Taxes!

I just filed my taxes! Hooray! I guess you can call me an early bird. Now I can kick back and relax as all you procrastinators scramble to get things together. I can't believe you waited this long.

Of course, we owed again, but not as much as last year. This year I had to pay a little over $100, but last year it was nearly $500. What a rip off. TANSTAAFL? Can't we pass a law to ban that?

Because I don't have anything interesting to show you besides my kids, here is a picture of how we found Rian last night at 3 am. Poor guy. He falls out of bed quite regularly. When Ethan outgrows his crib, I plan to get them a bunk bed and put Rian on the top bunk. Then I figure the problem will just take care of itself.

Romo, Cars, and Fatty McJude

Cameron visited recently and surprised us all with a gift from his friend: a TONY ROMO jersey! Romo of course is the Cowboys quarterback and a weekly guest in our homes each Sunday between September and January. Here is Rian modeling his new threads in our barren back yard.

Earlier on Sunday he quietly stacked all of his cars onto his Thomas the Train (am I the only one that hates calling him "Thomas the Tank Engine"?) track.


I was amazed.


Ethan is gaining a ton of weight. Lacey must now take great care to wash between each roll, lifting each flab and getting in there. Check out those thighs.


Here she is demonstrating what she calls Ethan's "armpit rolls."

Ben Is Jammin

During my freshman year at George Fox University, I lived across the hall from a guy named Benjamin Hawkins. We weren't really good friends, but we talked a bit and saw each other almost every day. He was the kind of guy that was always happy. He had a great sense of humor, and always had some little thing to say that would make you smile.

We both graduated in 2004 and I remember talking to him several times over our 4 years together. Talking to Ben wasn't like talking to most people, though. Whenever I talked to him I was always surprised because he always listened. I'm not sure how he did it, but whenever someone was talking to him, you could tell that he was really listening. He was a genuinely caring guy.

This was a guy who I never, ever saw do anything selfish. He was very interesting to talk to, an outstanding musician, and one of the greatest guys I've ever met - cheerful, honest, and trustworthy. On Sunday, he was struck by a car and killed in what is being called a freak accident. He was 25.

This simply couldn't have happened to a better guy. Keep on jammin', Ben.

Surgery

I wrote the following about 3 weeks ago, but for some reason I never got around to posting it until now.

In a previous post I talked about Rian's eyes needing to be operated on to correct Strabismus.
Last Tuesday we drove up to Kirkland (near Seattle, about a 3 1/2 hour drive) for Rian's eye surgery. He had an appointment with the surgeon on Wednesday to measure the degree that Rian's eyes needed to be corrected. Their measurements matched those from our local doctor, which was important to me just to rule out the possibility that our local doctor was nuts and that Rian's eyes were fine.

As part of the pre-op appointment, they had to give Rian some eye drops to dilate his pupils. They got big. Huge, in fact. They got so big that his pupil nearly covered his entire iris, so we gave him Lacey's sunglasses to wear afterward because otherwise it would have been too bright.

Thursday was a difficult day. Rian had been very good about accepting the idea of a doctor fixing his eyes in the weeks leading up to the surgery, but it all caught up to him at the surgery center when it was time for the nurse to measure his vitals. Suddenly the surgery got very real and he didn't want any part of it.

They got most of the vitals that they needed and it was time for Rian to go back into the sterile room, alone. They brought him a little red wagon, which he thought was very cool, and the nurse asked him if he wanted to go slow or fast. "Fast!" We gave him some kisses, the nurse counted to three, and off they went, running down the hall. Rian looked like he was having fun, but he turned and looked back at us as if questioning whether this wagon ride was worth leaving the safety of Mommy and Daddy. He would tell us later that they had him lie down and breathe like an astronaut, and that he screamed, "I miss my daddy and my mommy!"

We waited in the waiting room for about an hour. A nurse finally came out and led us back to the room where Rian was recovering. I had looked online at some pictures of kids that had already had this surgery beforehand to help prepare myself. I knew it was going to look bad, but nothing prepared me for this.

His back was toward me as I entered the room. Lacey took him, sat him down on her lap, and held him. He turned and looked toward me, staring at me with these huge, bloody eyes. They didn't move at all, just staring . . . lifelessly. At first I wasn't sure if he could even see out of them, but then I figured out that he could, in fact, see. It just looked so . . . creepy. It was hard not to wonder if we had done the right thing.

The next day we took him back to the doctor's office where they ran the same tests on him that they had before the surgery. This time things were much different. For one test, the nurse would ask Rian to focus on something far away as she would cover one eye, then the other. Before, his eyes would jump back and forth as she would switch eyes. But now, both eyes stayed straight, as they were both able to focus on the same point without compensating. For another test, Rian wore 3-D glasses and was asked to indicate which in series of images was popping out off the page. Before the surgery, he could get about half of them right, but this time, he got them all right!

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Nearly 4 weeks have past since his surgery. One eye is looking much better, but the other is still very bloody. The doctor told us that it will clear up in a few more weeks, but that it's nothing to worry about since none of it is new blood.