strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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May 4 03: aed
Sure sure, there are other things to discuss. But! Here’s the best bit of news: on Wednesday I became an uncle. Please join me in welcoming Avery Elizabeth Drew to the world. Avery was born on April 30, six-and-a-half weeks early, which meant that there were a few potential health issues, but she avoided many of them altogether and is overcoming the rest of them like a champ. I got to see her yesterday, all 4 pounds of her, and she’s beautiful. Her mom and dad are also doing swimmingly, although Jason now has to advance the timetable on his Baby Room Storage Redesign Project considerably. He has somewhere between a week and three weeks before she gets home from University Hospital in Stony Brook.
The photo at right is what she looked liked yesterday. You can see traces of an intense blue light coming out from beneath her blanket: she is not some kind of junior X-girl (although yes, that would have been cool). She’s actually lying on a light-up pad-thingy. It’s to help her get over some mild jaundice—more of a tan, really—which is one of the health issues I mentioned. As a result, she spends lots of time with a little sleep mask over her eyes. You can see the adhesive velcro pads used for this purpose on her temples. The nose tube is for feeding: that’s the other thing she’s still learning how to do. Her lungs work just fine, though, which was a big worry.
I regret that the photo doesn’t give you an indication of scale. Her head is about the size of a fist. That’s also the Joy of Cooking guideline for a ‘medium-sized onion,’ now that I think of it. Medium-sized onions, however, don’t have such exquisite little pointy chins.
Finally, for those of you into such arcana, here is Avery’s natal chart. Anybody who wants to tell us what it means is invited to do so.