week 2

Week two of life on the outside for Malakai has been an interesting one for mama and daddy- one we'll probably tell him about when he's older because it was so eventful in the most random ways.

The heat has been the hardest part. We only have a/c in the living room and even though our house is very small it doesn't reach into the bedrooms in the back of the house and sleeping has been difficult even when our little guys is letting us. Mostly I feel bad for him. It's so difficult to figure out if he's uncomfortable in the heat. He's been sportin' the diaper only look pretty much all week. We did escape on Monday to my family's place to enjoy their a/c and swimming pool. (Well, Ben enjoyed the pool anyway). Last night we brought the mattress of our bed and Malakai's bassinet into the living room and parked in front of the a/c. We all slept so much better. My little 12 day old baby slept for almost 6 hours straight!

Sunday afternoon Ben opened the curtains to one of our living room windows. With the summer heat we've been keeping them closed to shut out the sunshine and heat. When he opened the curtains we discovered a blackberry bush that decided it wanted to be a house plant (in Ben's words). It had grown between the panes of the window where the a/c vents and there was a 3 foot vine in our home!

On top of that, when Ben went out to our garage to get the clippers and take care of it I heard him yell really loud. My first thought was that he had hurt himself with the clippers or something. He came back in to tell me he had stepped on a DEAD MOUSE! I wanted to die... gross, gross, gross! Our garage is basically and outdoor shed so we are fairly confident that there aren't mice in our house, but we'll be investing in some mouse traps soon.

Then later that day...we had a spider infestation. Seriously, I swear our house is not dirty like it probably sounds like it is. With being so busy we haven't had a chance to trim the bushes outside the windows and we've been opening windows at night to cool off the house and apparently we invited spiders to have their babies in our house. Hundreds of tiny white spiders on the ceilings and walls. I just about had a melt down, I am SO not a spider person. To give you a picture of how much I hate them, I make Ben check our shower every morning before I get in to make sure there aren't any spiders because that seems to be where they like to hang out when they make their way into our home. So Ben made three or four rounds through our house within two days and finally killed them all. ::shudders::

In terms of Malakai's health, we had still not heard from our doctor about his ultrasound. Ben called on Monday and left two messages for the on-call doc since ours was still out. Apparently she went on vacation without telling us...which is fairly annoying since we figure if we weren't going to be hearing from her about something so important for a whole week that she would tell us. Grr. On top of that, the on-call doc never called back. Usually I love our doctor's office, but oh man...we were getting so frustrated!

Yesterday we had his two week follow up and circumcision. We had scheduled the appointment with another doctor in our pediatrician's group because she doesn't perform circumcisions. The follow up went well- Malakai is up to 8 lbs 12 oz! (he was 7lbs 3oz at birth). Everyone was amazed by his speedy growth and weight gain...in a good way! Part of me is sad that he's growing so quickly...it's already going by too fast!

The circumcision was performed in a procedure room so daddy went with and I waited in the exam room. I cried when he had the PKU done, so there was no way mama was going to be able to handle this procedure. By the time they go to the circumcision though poor sweet Malakai was really hungry so he was crying pretty hard. Without asking the nurse gave him some sugar water through the lid of a bottle. When I found this out I was so irritated! They didn't even ask Ben if it was okay- they just did it! You think that doctors that promote breast feeding would be aware of things that could hinder it, and we did have a hard time the rest of the day getting him to eat. It could have been due to him being irritated by the procedure, but I was still frustrated that they didn't get permission.

His circumcision went well and daddy brought him back to me so I could feed him. He ate a bit and calmed down for a moment, but then stopped eating and cried harder than I'd ever heard. So hard he was trying to catch his breath and I had tears streaming down my face, I felt so bad for our little boy.

Then the weirdest thing happened. We were waiting in the exam room for the nurse to come back and do his second PKU test...we were waiting for about 20 minutes assuming they were with another patient in between. We opened the door to let them know we were ready, but there was literally no sound or movement in the hallways. Ben walked up and down the hall to find the nurse and all the exam rooms were open and empty. He finally found the clinic manager who went to figure out what happened. A different nurse came in and apologized profusely...apparently everyone had gone to lunch and forgotten about us! The clinic manager was pretty upset and I'm assuming that nurse is in a bit of trouble.

We did get news back about our ultrasound from the doc that we saw. She read the notes in his file that said the testicle could not be located. She let us know that normal procedure from here is to wait for his two month check up, consult with the pediatric surgeon and monitor him for a year. If by 12 months old it hadn't descended, then we'd talk surgery. I was so relieved that they weren't planning on doing surgery on my infant son!

Later that afternoon when we got home our pediatrician called and told us that she wanted to consult with the surgeon now and get back to us on what he'd like to do. While I appreciate her being proactive, we then had to worry about surgery all over again. Thankfully she called back today and let us know that the surgeon wants to wait til 6 months to see him and go from there. Thank God!

Thank you all for praying and thinking about us as we worried for our new little boy. We are hoping that things will work themselves out and surgery will not be necessary.

Here's our chunky son's most recent photo taken today.