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Aaaaand we’re back, and we are also very PIMP, let me tell you. (PIMP = Pleasant Indeed, My Pallies.) Team Hearn took a short vacation to Fenwick Island, where we participated in beach activities such as Tanning, Swimming, Napping, Drinking, and Eating, in no particular order.

Charles behaved admirably, even though he’s still not sleeping through the night, and his food intake fluctuates rather wildly. One day he’ll suck Sarah dry, and then the next he’ll suck Sarah dry AND have to have a few bottles of formula. (This boy knows eating, let me tell you. He is most definitely a Hearn.) Pictures of him at the beach have been posted at his website.

My brother-in-law somehow has inherited a boat, so he brought that down for a day on Tuesday. I was expecting some kind of flat-bottom boat with an outboard motor you had to steer by hand, but instead, he pulls up with a 19-foot fishing boat with an actual steering wheel and stowage and bilge pumps and the like. We went out for a short trip into the bay, but we had no charts, so when we brushed a sandbar, we got a little spooked and decided to head back in so we didn’t drown or get eaten by sharks or something. You never know.

Wednesday we drove up to Rehoboth and spent the day tooling around, including getting Thrasher’s fries and Nicobolis and Cold Stone Ice Cream, all of which was outstanding, and doing some light shopping. I went into Carter’s and managed to talk myself out of buying a $400 sport coat (an easier decision than you might think), and got a tshirt and some cool Slang Flashcards that have to be seen to be believed.

We were able to park behind a friend’s house, which was very secluded, so we decided to just sit in the car and enjoy the air conditioning and avoid the rain and feed Charles, so Sarah whipped at a hooter and stuffed it in his gaping maw.

Then he pooped.

Then he pooped some more.

Then he let loose with what Sarah described as something “long and moist,” and suddenly she felt very warm, and very damp. She broke the suction and hoisted him up to discover that he had demolished

1. His diaper
2. His onesie
3. Her skirt

but luckily, not the car leather. It was truly outstanding. I couldn’t keep from laughing, so thusly I had to change him, which was an extraordinary experience. I do most of his diaper maintenance (it’s only fair; it’s a dirty job, but it’s quick, and Sarah is stuck with the feeding, which is clean but means she’s stuck sitting somewhere 12 times a day for up to an hour per feeding, including 2 or 3 during the course of a night), so I was prepared for it, but it was still quite a blowout. 9 baby wipes, a diaper, and a fresh onesie later, I finished wiping poop out of his hair and handed him back.

Sarah finished feeding, and we got on the road, and that was that. Woooooo.

This rain has been insane in the membrane. You’ve probably seen the pictures of what’s going on downstate, but you may not have known that New Castle County is getting pretty moist as well. This is right by my house, probably not 2 miles away. Luckily, I’m situated on relatively high ground (in contrast to the last house; the basement at that dump flooded if I peed outside), so there’s no moisture in my basement, although my Big Dig is completely enpuddled at this point.

Last night Sarah and I were coming back from Wilmington with C-beef. We like to take 141 most of the time because of the construction on 95, so we turned off of 202 and BAM suddenly we’re redirected onto Rockland Road. Which you can’t use to get back to 202 and take 95. Plus we were following two other cars that were equally as confused, but lack my stellar grasp of Delaware roadways. We had to take Rockland Road all the way out to Montchanin Road and take 141 from there. Then we tried to take Old Airport Road, as is our wont, drove through one 6″ puddle (I could see the bottom of it, so I weren’t scurred), only to find a very deep one that was actual moving water. “Hecks no,” said we, and turned around to come home on Commons Boulevard. That’s right, the same one that’s in the picture above, with water up to the roofs of compact cars. Luckily, that had apparently drained off into the marsh, so we managed to make it home without too much difficulty.

Rain, rain, go away, come back when my grass is dying.

I tried to get by on four hours sleep a night for as long as I could, but I appear to have hit the wall, and hard. Charles has been a bit colicky, which means basically he alternates between brief moments of calmness and brief moments of outright screaming. The bits of calmness aren’t as restful as you might think.

We’ve usually been able to get him to bed around midnight, but he’s usually up at 4 or so. Sometimes he also awakes at 2, and Sarah feeds him and puts him back to sleep, but when he’s up at 4, he is UP. Completely awake, looking around, wondering why we keep trying to put him back in the bassinet. This means that I have to spend roughly an hour downstairs bouncing up and down on my toes while watching TV. This does not a restful daddy make.

Over the weekend, when he would do this, I would just stay up. No big deal, I thought, I’ll just nap in the afternoon. Unfortunately, I’m not a good napper, and I feel compelled to get things done around the house as much as I can. So from about Thursday to Sunday, I totalled 16 hours of sleep in a 96 hour period. Not good. Not good at all. I was having horrible headaches all day long.

Finally, it caught up with me Sunday night. Around 11pm, Charles was still awake. He was reasonably happy at this point, having worked out some of the colic by pooping all over himself in a particularly stinky manner, so I handed him to Sarah and said “Hey, if you can get him to sleep, awesome. If not, put him in the crib in his room and let him scream, because if I don’t sleep right now I’m going to start weeping.” She took him, fed him, and put him down, and I stayed zonked until about 5 am when he needed bounced around for a while. We did that, which had little effect, and I handed him to Sarah, who tried to feed him for a while and eventually just laid him down between us in our bed. He was out like a light until roughly 9am. And so were we. It was outstanding.

Apparently I hadn’t fully refilled the sleep tank, so last night was pretty much the same. He was down around midnight, up at 4, bounced until 5, back in bed next to me until 8 or so, when Sarah changed him and fed him and asked me if I had any intention of getting up and going to work. I thanked her profusely for reminding me, and told her that if she spoke to me again before 9am I would divorce her.

Ha ha! Just kidding! She’s usually the one that makes the divorce threats. I don’t take them very seriously, though; if she wanted to be single she’d just have me killed.

I’m still tired. Vacation can’t come soon enough.

My patio reconstruction project continues. I’ve started digging around the existing patio, with two possible plans in mind: expanding the size of the patio so that there’s more room for nice patio furniture, and also possibly digging underneath the existing semi-removed concrete and putting dynamite under there.

I’ll let you know how that goes.

Of course, having just bought plane tickets for a trip to Texas to show off my progeny (more on him in a moment), I can’t actually afford to buy the bricks to put the patio in place. Not that this is a problem, because my original plan, “Weekend #1: remove concrete pad and dig out new patio to average depth of 8 inches,” has been changed to “Entire freaking summer: remove as much of the concrete as you can (probably not much) and dig out the patio to a depth of ‘wherever I stop when I get tired and frustrated.'” So I’m sure I’ll have the $800-1000 I’m gonna need to buy brick pavers in April 2007, no problem.

As to my son: he is now just over three weeks old, and has been making attempts to smile at us. He also is eating so much that I’m afraid Sarah is going to waste away. He’s extremely parasitic. Luckily, he’s not scaly or clawy or anything, so we’re willing to put up with it. He can also roll over about halfway if you put him on a soft surface like a bed.

As of Tuesday, he weighed 11 pounds 11 ounces. That, according to the CDC’s official growth statistics, qualifies him as “Holy Crap That Kid Is Massive,” or HCTKIM (often pronounced hicket-kim). Us? We just call him Teh H@nds0m3.

Wanna see something really gross? This is REALLY GROSS.

It’s amazing that I managed to survive to my current advanced age with all of my limbs intact. In fact, the number of injuries I’ve suffered over the years has been relatively minimal, although when I’ve hurt myself, it’s been via doing something really stupid. This trend continued this weekend, when Brian came over to help me demolish my back patio so that it might be replaced with pretty bricks.

I got up Saturday morning and drove to Home Depot so that I might rent a jackhammer (note: we later realized this was a stupid thing to do). It weighed something close to 100 pounds, I think, so getting it into the car was a challenge, but I managed it. Brian wasn’t going to arrive until noonish, so I went around back and got started, breaking the ugly concrete up into small chunks. (Note: we quickly realized that this, also, was a stupid thing to do).

Brian arrived around noon, and pointed out that it might be best to break the concrete up into large chunks that could just be lifted out, instead of several thousand small chunks that needed to be shoveled. The wisdom of this was confirmed when we attempted to shovel the small chunks and discovered they were all held together by some kind of wire mesh within the concrete that prevented it from cracking and spreading. We discovered this after I had chopped up something like 2/3 of the patio into very small pieces. (We also realized later that if I had bought a 14″ concrete saw, we could have cut the whole patio, including the wire mesh, into neat squares and hoisted it out in probably 2 hours. The lesson learned: I am an idiot.)

Then I dropped the jackhammer on my foot. I’m not gonna say it hurt worse than childbirth, but I didn’t have the benefit of half my body being numb when it happened. As of Monday morning, the toe is black and blue and still oozing a small amount of blood. I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose the toenail. It might be broken, but if it is, it’s the outermost bone, and there’s not much doctors can do for that. Ow.

After taping my foot and chewing half a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol^TM, Brian and I got back to work. We broke up the remaining third of the patio into big chunks and removed them one by one, which resulted in 1) bending the hell out of my wheelbarrow by putting too much weight in it, and 2) stabbing me in the left forearm with a small piece of rusty wire. That wasn’t too painful, but it sure bled a lot. And now it’s making me apprehensive because the surrounding skin is just a LITTLE too red, so I’m fearing tetanus and god knows what.

In the end, we got the entire patio broken, but only 1/3 of it removed, because of the stupid mesh. I’m hoping to start cutting the wire up with small bolt-cutters and prying the concrete out, but it may take a while. Basically I turned what would have been a 4-hour job for two guys with a concrete saw and a prybar into 9 hours of frustration and injuries, followed by weeks of back-breaking labor.

This is why normal people hire professionals.

Every couple of years, I feel the need to assert my manliness. Not via bullfighting or boxing or modern dance or impregnating my wife, but by going against my non-hirsute nature, disobeying all laws of science, and growing facial hair in some form. In the past, it has always ended in horrible tragedy, but this time, man, THIS time it’s gonna come up aces for me.

After Charles arrived, I took two weeks off from work so that we could try and figure out how to keep him alive (apparently you can’t give them hunks of pork! Who knew?). The second week, after he came home, we were so busy that I barely had time to shower, let alone shave. So, after 5 or 6 days I found that my chin and cheeks and ever-quivering upper lip were coated with a fine downy fluff that my wife refused to kiss, but which was completely invisible to anyone more than 5 paces away. So I went upstairs and shaved off anything that wasn’t part of a goatee and sideburns. Then I realized that my sideburns STILL don’t connect to my hair, so I shaved them off as well. I was left with a festive little beard, which makes me look:

Dashing
Villainous
Quite The Cad
All Of The Above

Sarah, of course, hates it, because when she kisses me I abrade her lips. You judge for yourself.

It is flat-out retardulous that there isn’t a Target near my house. The nearest one is in what is basically the least accessible part of New Castle County for me. Getting to that North Wilmington location involves only 10 or so minutes on an interstate, but then upwards of 15 on stoplight-ridden thoroughfares to get to the Target contained in the Brandywine Town Center. It’d be faster to get to one in Middletown, which is a slightly further distance but is a straight shot down Route 1.

Well, unless you want to get to the other side of Middletown, which is where they’d probably build it, and which is a 15 minute drive on a 2 lane main drag through down. So nevermind. Just build one right by my house, please.

I was hoping they might, because one has long been rumored to go into the shopping center (I forget the name, and what does it really matter?) across from University Plaza, which is right at the junction of 273 and 95 in Newark, but that doesn’t seem to really be happening. Which is a pity, because that shopping center already has an Old Navy, DFW, Staples, JoAnn’s Fabrics, and Linens and Things, all stores that make me happy in my pants. It also has the worst Boscov’s in history, and if you’re familiar with Boscov’s, that’s saying something. A Target in that location would probably cause me to set up a tent on the grounds. (Probably one I bought at Target.)

Now I see they’re ripping up a huge chunk of the parking lot in University Plaza itself, which makes me almost quiver in anticipation, but a quick check of Target’s New Stores list makes no mention of a new Delaware location. Also, the site they’ve torn up doesn’t seem quite large enough for a Target, and I’m not sure there’s enough parking left to support one anyway. ARGH. Target, why do you tease me so?

I’m sure they’ll build one down here roughly 2 weeks before we move to North Wilmington (better schools up there), which is tentatively scheduled for 2009, assuming I get a massive payraise so I can afford the mortgage payments. Or I sell a kidney or two.

I don’t know how Sarah did it. Childbirth, I mean. For that matter, I don’t know how I did it, what with my propensity to pass out, but then I didn’t have to DO anything. Sarah did all the work, and I just stood there and held her hand, and it was still the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

I’m glad women are designed for this sort of thing, because men would all demand lethal doses of morphine early on in the labor process.

I did end up using my handy dandy recording device for a lot of the labor. Listening to the early tidbits is amusing, for my boundless enthusiasm and desire to record every pointless detail. (BTW: this gets a little gross later. No pictures, but if you’re squeamish about reading gross stuff, it might be time to move on.)

• 5/30, 4:50am: “We have been awakened at 4:15 in the morning for an induction at the hospital . . . it is GO TIME, people!”
• 5:27am: “Arrived at 4:30, admitted to ‘Labor and Delivery Room #1.'”
• 5:54am: “Pitocin started at 5:55.”
• 5:57am: “Looking over the lab forms, we have discovered that Sarah does NOT have chlamydia. We are overjoyed.”
• 6:09am: “The heartrate monitor also shows the fact that Sarah is currently having contractions.”

I’m pretty sure I recorded that because Sarah wasn’t feeling a thing. In fact, later on she had to be told “You are having a contraction right now,” to which she responded, “Oh, THAT’S what that is.”

• 6:11am: “Fairly mild contractions, 3 1/2 minutes apart, lasting . . . well, it’s hard to say, it’s sort of a bell curve. About a minute.”
• 6:18am: “I’m mildly concerned about the accuracy of this graphy thing, ’cause it seems to be indicating Sarah’s having contractions . . . like every 2 minutes . . . which I don’t think would really be the case at this point.”

Later, the doctors apparently thought the same thing, and installed an internal contraction monitor. Ew. The word “internal” has a whole new meaning for me after 5/30.

• 6:39am: “It’s 6:40am, contractions are, oddly enough, 2 minutes apart, but barely strong enough that Sarah feels them. It feels like butterflies, it’s totally bizarre. [Inaudible comment from Sarah] Butterflies and pee.”

The next entry makes no sense at first:

• 7:09am: “Eeyore blood pressure sensor.”

The device that they used to check Sarah’s blood pressure every few minutes would indicate it had completed its task with a couple beeps in a low register that sounded exactly like Eeyore saying “Oh, well.” This amused us greatly.

• 7:21am: “Dr. DeMeo arrived around 7, broke Sarah’s water at about 7:20, not surprisingly there’s meconium in the water which means WE’VE GOT A POOPER. This is, uh, pretty much par for the course with the Hearn gene. That it would poop a lot. Pooping is fun.”

No, I wasn’t drunk, although I sure wished I was a little later. Meconium, by the way, is the baby’s first few poops. If they do one in the womb, it just means they have to clean out his or her breathing apparatus so they don’t have to breathe in their own poop.

• 7:31am: “Uh 7:30, Sarah’s starting a little bit stronger contractions, they’re pretty much consistently 2 minutes apart, and . . . we have requested that she get her epidural, so they’re loadin’ her up with hardcore saline solution. AWESOME. And the Titanic Soundtrack has come on to the iPod, good times.”

For Mother’s Day, I had purchased for Sarah an iPod mini, which I thought might come in handy, and I picked up a small set of speakers at Target so we could all listen to Michael Bolton songs while labor was progressing. It was a lifesaver, according to HW.

• 7:34am: “Guster has come on to the iPod. Jamming has commenced.”
• 7:45am: “Sarah is having what she describes as a Charley Horse in her Urrea.”

Urrea is a word we use that we pretend is the Hisbonic equivalent of “Area,” which indicates the groin.

• 7:46am: “7:49am. I have farted. Sarah has almost peed her pants.”
• 7:47am: “Love cuts deep y’all, Michael Bolton says love cuts deep. If Sarah hadn’t already had her water broken, I’m sure she’d be bursting it at this point. Oh, she’s crying a lil bit, there’s a little bit of pink on the face, I dunno, I think I need to take a picture of her. [Inaudible from Sarah, probably laughter] Oh, GOD! I’ll delete it [the picture], I swear, you just have to look at it once. Oh poor Saree. Oh yeah, you’re uh . . . [laughter, sound of Sarah breathing deeply, attempting to stop laughing. Sarah:] I’ve got to calm down. [Me:] All right, I’m not gonna show you this picture, then. [Sarah: ] No. [Me:] I’ll save that for later. [Sarah starts laughing uncontrollably again. Me:] You poor thing. [Sarah continues laughing, finally calms down. Sarah:] Okay. [Me:] Well, your contraction monitor is totally freaked out. [Sarah starts laughing again.] The nurse is gonna come back in and be like ‘What the hell happened?’ ‘Michael Bolton said love cut deep, y’all.’ [Sarah laughs uncontrollably, someone claps.] I just realized this thing’s been recording for like two straight minutes. [Uncontrollable giggling from all parties.]”

Poor Sarah. That was basically the funniest 2 minutes of my entire life, and I decided to have it while she’s trying to fight off contractions. The lesson: I am a floating turd.

• 8:43am: “Epidural at 8:15. Or thereabouts. Took a while to get it in. Took a long while to get kicked in, it’s about 8:45 now and it seems to be working better.”

Installing the epidural (it’s not just one shot, it’s actually a continuous drip of pain medication delivered into a spot on the spinal cord) was very difficult and painful for Sarah because they had a hard time finding a space between her spine bones. Watching it felt somehow worse, but then I’m just the jerk standing there, not the poor lady getting stabbed in the lower back repeatedly.

• 8:46am: “Sarah’s attempting to operate a bedpan for the first time in her existence.”

And she’ll be thrilled to see it described here on a website.

• 9:41am: “It’s about 9:45, Sarah’s feeling much better and gonna take a lil nap. Bye.”
• 10:44am: “10:45, oxytocin drip up to 12 . . . whatever unit that is.”

It was either milliliters per hour, or milliliters per minute. I don’t remember exactly, but the bag was confusing because it also dealt in “milliunits” per hour, where a unit was equal to some amount of liters of fluid. Also I have a bad memory and am kinda dumb.

• 11:55am: “Noon, getting lunch, ignoring low carb restriction.”

I went in thinking that I’d probably be able to get through the day on meat hunks and peanuts. Ha ha ha ha ha! Wrong. I think I ate french fries with every meal for an entire week.

Sarah’s mom came at some point in the morning and stayed for a few hours, until the contractions got a bit outrageous and Sarah asked her to go so we could concentrate on breathing together.

• 1:34pm: “Round noon, went got lunch, hamburger, fries, totally delicious, two bottles of coke, came back and they had upped her pitocin intake to 16 milliunits per hour, or 16 milliliters per hour; they just now did that to 17, and we are at 6 centimeters dilated, and station at -2, 100% effaced and Sarah’s having a really gross contraction . . . about every two minutes.

The cervix needs to be 100% effaced (thinned out) and 10cm dilated (opened) before they’ll let the mom start pushing. Station indicates where the baby’s head is in relation to, I believe, the pubic bone. Here, baby was 2cm above it. And at this point, recordings pretty much stopped while Sarah did the most difficult thing I’ve ever witnessed.

Starting around 2pm, the contractions became very intense. The pain wasn’t bad, but the pressure was getting enormous, and the urge to push was VERY strong and hard to resist. And it just got worse; the dilation of the cervix was progressing very, very slowly, such that we were at about 9.5cm at 4pm and stayed there for basically 45 minutes. BTW, checking how far the cervix has dilated requires an Internal Examination, which is unpleasant to watch. Sarah and I breathed together, but I don’t know how much good that really did. She was in agony that I can’t even comprehend.

By 5pm, she was as close as she was going to get, so the doctors told her to start pushing. So every 2 minutes, as a contraction hit, the nurse and I helped pull her legs back while Sarah pushed as hard as she humanly could. For 75 minutes. With doctors poking and prodding and doing gross things and even trying to pull the baby out with what amounts to a medical plunger.

In the end, nothing worked, and the doctors informed us that we were going to have to get the baby out via C-section. I busied myself trying to keep Sarah calm, because she was terrified, although I’m sure I did more harm than good because I was so scared I thought I was going to wet my pants. I had to put on big surgical scrubs over my clothes, including a fun hat and mask and mesh things on my shoes.

They wheeled her down the hall and sat me in a chair near the operating room while they prepped her, which gave me plenty of time to think about all the things that could go wrong, and try to pray a while. Then they led me in, where I saw pretty much the thing I least ever wanted to see in my lifetime: my wife, strapped to a gurney, surrounded by people in blue scrubs, getting pumped full of drugs so they could gut her like a trout. For better or worse, she was conscious (but pain-free) the entire time, so I was able to distract her while the doctors did whatever it is they did (they put a sheet up between me and the carnage, which is a very, very good thing).

As we chatted, I half-listened to what the doctors were saying. Mostly instructions to one another, such as “suction” or “clamp this” or “get away from that, you don’t know where it’s been.” Finally, at 7:15pm: “It’s a boy!”

Sarah and I looked at each other. “It’s a BOY?” we said together. We had no preference about gender (I’d been telling everyone it didn’t matter to me, boy or girl, as long as it was left-handed), but in the months leading up we had both just gotten a very strong feeling that it was a girl.

“Wow, it’s a BIG one!” Well, that was hardly surprising. And then I saw him. They didn’t hand him to us right away because they had to suck out the meconium, so I watched as they carried this MASSIVE purple boy (he reminded me of Bugs Bunny for some reason), with all his limbs splayed out in all directions, over to a table where they sucked out and wiped off the goop. And there he was.

I have to admit, my first interest was rather clinical. “Wow, look at that! He’s a big boy, all right. Wonder what he weighs.” They put him on the scale, and he measured an astounding 10 pounds, 5 ounces. Not the heaviest child in history, but above the 97th percentile. Then they measured his length, which was 23 1/2 inches long. To put this into perspective, the average boy born in America is about 19 3/4 inches, and the 97th percentile is about 21 1/2 inches. And the tape measure only went to 24″. All I’m saying is when this kid gets to be 14, and he’s 6’7″, I’m not going to be surprised.

While I was snapping pictures, the nurses took his Apgar score a couple of times (I think his score at 5 minutes was 8 out of 10, which makes him a C student, I guess) (just kidding), and Sarah fell asleep, absolutely wiped out. I went over to make sure she was doing okay, and noticed that her entire face was covered with red dots where she had burst blood vessels while trying to push. Not knowing what else to do, I kissed her on the head.

After everybody was stitched back together and cleaned up, we went to post-op, where Sarah and Charles were tended to by some nurses and I sat and tried not to be TOO aghast at what had just happened. I was finally able to call my mom and let the various family members know that everything went fine, and was allowed to go down and bring them up for a brief visit before we were moved up to the recovery room, where Sarah and Charles finally passed out, and I went home to print a shirt that says “Ask me about my SON! – Charles Matthew – May 30th, 2006 – 10 pounds 5 ounces?!?”, make cigar labels with a similar sentiment, and pass out face first into some french fries.

• 11:05pm: “After a significant delay in proceedings, uh, Charles Matthew Hearn was born at 7:15 pm, 10 pounds 5 ounces, 23 and one half inches long. [Charles, sitting on my lap at the time, cries out.] He had comment to make. [Charles cries some more.] He’s kind of a faker, I’m not gonna lie, but he is a BRUISER. Sarah worked on trying to push him out the natural way for just over 12 hours, and eventually we had to give up and take him out Cesarean Section. And, Sarah was a trouper.”
• 11:27pm: From Charles: “Waa sniff aaaah! Uhhhhhh sniff uhhhh. Sniff sniff.”

Okay, I don’t have enough time for a major league update (I’m still working on my little play-by-play of Tuesday’s action), but I did have enough time to upload a bunch more pictures of Charles: click here, y’all.

Uploading is painful from the hospital because I’m on 56K dialup; getting 4MB of photos online took like half an hour. It hurts my soul. The lappy detects a wireless network, but I lack the passcode. ARGH.

More later.