He's losing on us!

Well, we visited the doctor -- nurse, actually -- today for Jude's two day appointment. We left the hospital with him weighing 6 lbs, 9 oz. At today's appointment, he weighed only 6 lbs, 5 oz. The nurse that saw us was someone we had never met before.

Without an established rapport, she came across as overly concerned and put us into a semi-panicked state. She was very concerned with Jude's weight loss and advised us to supplement formula to Jude's normal diet of breast milk. Amanda and I both took that -- like a bunch of granola-heads -- as a personal challenge. We want so badly to prove that we can make him gain weight without formula! Amanda fed Jude today every 1-2 hours.

He was feeding so often that I thought it might work better for her to not wear a shirt?! (Yeah, I probably should keep that one to myself!) Jude sure was a busy bee though today. It's almost 10 pm, and poor Jude is just worn out. I had to laugh . . .Amanda had just finished feeding him for what seemed like the 100th time today and he started hiccuping. I wasn't sure which end his noises were coming from, and so I asked her.


Amanda propped Jude up to burp him and he just looked like this drunk sailor! After being fed all through the day, there he sat . . .his hat about falling off, hiccuping, not able to sit up straight and just wanting to sleep. Poor Jude!

To our friends of faith, please pray that Jude would gain weight between now and our next appointment this coming Saturday morning. Thank you!

3/1 UPDATE: Jude made his Saturday weigh in with some to spare. He weighed in at 6 lbs., 8.8 ounces, just .2 ounces short of what his weight was when we left the hospital. Praise God!

Hey Jude!

As you can imagine, we've gotten tons of feedback on Jude's name in the three days he's been with us.

For some, his name might conger up images of Paul McCartney singing the Beatles song, "Hey Jude." That's not such a bad thing. How can a band sell 8 million copies of a song and it be bad?! I'd call it (i.e., the song) safe.

The NFL thought he was a safe bet, bringing him in for the Superbowl the year after Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction! As part of getting Amanda's vote, it also didn't hurt that Jude Law is one handsome Brit!

Back to the Beatles . . .a buddy of mine sent me this YouTube video . . .priceless, thanks Truen! If you want to sing along to the song, LyricsFreak has the lyrics.

When you're done singing along, you might be interested to know that in Hebrew, the name Jude means praised, or "he shall be praised." The Greek version of the name is Judas -- we didn't name our child Judas. But Jude is referred to as Judas in this Bible verse (or this), which gives us insight that Jude was probably a half-brother to Jesus.

There's also a very good study aid at BlueLetterBible.org on the book of Jude. I actually haven't read the book for a long time, so writing this post has given me some motivation to dig in and learn what Jude has to say about false teachers of the day and what that means for us today.

I write all of this to try and deepen the meaning of his name, but in the end, we chose it because we thought it was a cool name, it didn't bring up images of horrible former students, and it has a historical biblical connotation. This child was the answer to prayers of ours and many of our friends and family for over 3 years.

Because of having to wait to meet him, we've grown in maturity and have a deepened understanding of what it means to be his parents. For this, we praise Him! More on that in a future post . . .

Living on love

Well, we made it through our first night. Diana asked Amanda, "Are you living on love?" Interesting how that phrase has so much more meaning, even after just one day.

One problem we encountered was how to keep the pacifier in his mouth. At 3:30 in the morning, images of psycho moms or nightmare daycares come to mind. We learned from some friends that a trick is to swaddle him super tight, and to let some of his swaddling ride high so it goes over his face a little bit. Very nice!

While we're on the topic of swaddling, I'll share that the Gerber swaddling blankets we got from Wal-mart are a bit small for him, even at 7 lbs.