Saturday, May 31, 2008

Prentice is awesome

Little Jude was born at Prentice Women's Hospital, part of Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago. One of the first things to know is that more babies are born at Prentice than at any other hospital in Illinois. Hearing that you might think (like I did at first) that it is an impersonal baby factory. Absolutely the opposite...

Prentice is a full service hospital specializing in health concerns specific to women, but they decided to make the Labor and Delivery department into their public relations marquee. Here are some the things they've put into place there:

+ Valet parking in a drop-off lane right at the triage entrance
+ Labor and delivery suites (something like 400sf in size)
+ 42" flat-panel TVs in all suites and patient rooms
+ Free Wifi access... for things like blogging and sending out announcement e-mails!
+ Wood laminate flooring and paneled walls
+ Fairly tasty food that you can order at any time of day (from a comparatively extensive menu)**
+ A really friendly (and skillful) nursing staff
+ And gorgeous Lake Michigan views like this one:
Really, it felt more like a hotel--at times--than a hospital. So, if you are ever having a baby in the Chicago area, go to Prentice.

** OK, there is a nifty trick we learned for ordering food from their room service place. As you might expect, meals are free only for the patient herself; husbands are on their own. You can pay for meals for guests. BUT, the patient not only gets three meals: they also get three "snacks". A snack is actually a 1/2 sandwich and two "sides", or three sides and a drink. So, just order the patient's snack about 5 minutes after you order their meal, and you have enough food for two people... for free. We would like to thank a random friendly stranger at Ikea for teaching this trick to a very-pregnant Kara a few weeks ago.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Jude... day 2

Day 2 was a good day of Jude getting used to being alive on his own, and us figuring out how to make sure he stayed that way! It's a bit of a misnomer to call it Day 2, though... his 24-hours-old celebration was not until 5:04pm today. Fortunately he was not aware of the faux pas.

Anyway, we are feeling a little more rested now (we thank God that babies often sleep nearly non-stop during their first 24 hours), and wanted to share more photos:

Jude in the bassinet

A close-up of the little guy

Mother and son (I still think the mom is cuter, but he's giving her a run for her money!)

Father and son sharing a nap

What's in a name?

We've been asked several times about the name of the little guy: Jude Scott Kline Miller. There are two things we are asked most about, so I figured I'd just answer them both here. (By the way, we're still in the hospital and Kara and Jude are both napping but I just recently downed a Sobe Essential Energy drink so I'm not sleeping for a little while!).

Question 1... four names? Yes, we decided to go with two middle names. The main reason for this was the desire to incorporate Kara's maiden name, Kline, into our son's name. Kara comes from a long line of Klines, a very proud family, but in her particular branch of the family there are no more Kline men left who are likely to pass on the family name. Sure, I guess we could have simply decided to choose the singular middle name "Kline", but we had other goals for a middle name. We it up and found that there are no legal limitations on the number of names you can assign to a child, but we decided that four were plenty and picked up two middle names.

Question 2... where did "Jude" come from? Yes, I guess Jude is a fairly unusual name, but we chose it for several reasons. First, I have to tell you how we decided.

We started off going through one of those crazy-long baby names books (in our case 50,000 names!) and each picking a long list of names we liked. We had 43 total names on the first lists! Then, we made a game out of it... Kara deleted 5 names off my list, I deleted 5 off hers; Kara "protected" 5 names from elimination, I protected 5; Kara had to delete 5 off her own list, I deleted 5; etc. etc. etc. We ended the game portion of the naming with a list of 13 names. We slowly whittled down the list with mutual "yes, I could live without xyz" agreements, and finally narrowed it down to 2 names which we carried to the hospital. Each of the final two names had associated middle names.

We ultimately picked Jude Scott after taking a look at him in the hospital. We had "Jude" as one of our favorites because it is a name with a long history and meaning. It is the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew name "Judah", which means "praise". We certainly had a lot to praise God for after bringing us through the long desert of infertility treatments, and wanted to remind ourselves (and teach our son) about that fact. There is a short but poignant book of Bible written by a guy named Jude, too. Not a bad history. While there are some more recent cultural references, we hope there's not any insurmountable baggage from Paul McCartney songs or Jude Law (Benjamin Nelson gets the award for first person to quote from "Hey Jude"... we were wondering who the first would be!) .

We liked the sound of Jude Scott, and we also wanted to include "Scott" to go along with the Kline name. There are a long line of Scott and Simon Klines, including Kara' s father, and we wanted to include some of that family history in our son's name.

So that's what goes into a name! By the way, we are not telling what the other choice on the "going to the hospital with two names" list was. And Kara is the one who spotted Jude on her first reading through the baby names book and decided she liked it... needle in a haystack, that one.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Announcing Jude!

Jude Scott Kline Miller was born on May 27th at 5:04pm, weighing in at 9lb. 4oz. and measuring 21in. long. He was born after being induced at 12:30am in the morning of the 27th, and after a brave (but surprisingly uneventful) active labor by his mother, Kara. You didn't come here for details, though, you probably came here for pictures! Here they are:





Today's the day

Well, we checked into the hospital at 11:30pm last night for our labor induction appointment, and Kara's been in labor for the last 9 hours or so. She is sleeping now, so I thought I'd toss out the update. At this point there do not appear to be any significant complications, and it seems that the kid's birthday will be May 27th!

Here's a photo of us checking in to the hospital last night (much less dramatic looking than the "racing to the hospital in pain" you see in movies).

Monday, May 26, 2008

Keeping in touch

There are plenty of ways to keep in touch with us. If you've received the link to this blog that means you probably know us well enough to have an e-mail address. Well, we'll do you one better. We have free live video calling.

If you have ever used Skype for video calls, you know how cool it is. All you need is a webcam connected to your computer and free software downloaded from the Skype site and you can make free video calls to anyone else who also has the Skype software installed.

Kara and I used it to keep in touch when I was on a business trip to Europe for a week last year, and it really helped us feel like we were staying in better contact from half-way around the world. I have used it to connect with my office when I'm out on long trips as well, to the point that we can even hold up sketches or photos to work together on some of our creative tasks. As long as your internet connection is fast and stable enough, it's a really good setup.

If you want to try giving us a call, our home address through Skype is "millerblonde". If he's awake, we can show you the baby live.

Mom grew, too

This post really should be written by Kara, as I can barely scratch the surface of what it meant to have a second living creature inhabit your body (and pretty much take over) for a while. I'll just stick to the photographic evidence.

I can't recall hen the "baby bump" first started becoming obvious, but by month 5 we were in full maternity-clothes-only time. We decided to take a vacation to Jamaica as the last travel by ourselves before major travel became too uncomfortable. This was a photo from our trip on January 20th:


And here is Kara along with the lovely hosts of her first baby shower (Lynsey, Tori, Kara, and Leah from left to right). This was on March 29th:

Then we get to the Wow! photo from a trip Kara took to Wisconsin with some girlfriends at 38 weeks pregnant:
You can get the 41 weeks shot from the future posts about the trip to the hospital... which hasn't happened as of this writing.

Some early photos of the little guy

This post is mostly for the people who have been super-engaged and want to see ultrasound photos from along the way.

The 5-minutes-after-implant ultrasound:
A 3-week ultrasond to check for a heartbeat:

The 20-week ultrasound that makes sure everything is progressing as hoped:

A 28-week ultrasound... can't remember why we had this one!
Next photo of the little guy will be after he shows up!

Friday, May 23, 2008

Eight Cells and a Prayer

For those of you who don't know the IVF process, I'll spare you the gritty details. Here's the briefest of summaries:
+ The wife gets pumped full of drugs (lots of syringes used in at-home injections, woo hoo!) so there are lots of eggs to harvest;
+ The doctors extract the eggs surgically, and mix them with some of the husband's contribution in a "petri dish party";
+ A few days later, they surgically implant an 8-cell embryo back into the wife
+ Then you wait--for what seems like forever, but is really just about a week or so, I recall--you pray a lot and ask for lots of prayer from others, and you find out if it "took" (then, if it does and you're pregnant, everything else for the remainder of the pregnancy works just as if it had happened with no interventions).

It's a mercilessly "medical" process.

The most amusing part of the process (and there was really only one amusing part) was at the very end when we received a "good luck" card from the Northwestern IVF team. In the card were wishes for good luck and a photo of the 8-cell embryo that they'd implanted. Talk about overachieving, we ended up with the earliest baby photo we'd every seen!

Well, that's how the little guy first arrived on the scene in late August 2007. And now some photos:


The Northwestern IVF Team card, and the photo of the little guy when he was only 8 cells:



And the ultrasound taken within about 30 seconds of implantation. Earliest pregnancy ultrasound possible, cool!



Thursday, May 22, 2008

It's a Long Story

So... this blog is around to help keep family and friends updated about the goings-on and fun with Greg & Kara's new baby. We'd love to tell you all about his name, birthdate, etc... but he's not here with us quite yet. Little baby Miller was due on May the 18th, but here we are on the 22nd and he is still cookin' away!

Therefore, let's start with a little of the backstory.

Greg and Kara decided that it would be great to start trying to have a child sometime back in 2003 or so. Much to our surprise, things didn't quite work out as planned, and there was no child for some time. We sought the advice of a number of experts, and ultimately found ourselves in infertility treatments. Our doctor, Ralph Kazer of Northwestern Memorial Hospital, was great (even though he suffered from a bit of a gruff bedside manner at times!). He would often joke that we were his "pediatric" patients, because at age 32 we were far below the median age in his practice.

Perhaps due to our relative youth, we went through almost every treatment in the infertility arsenal (without skipping a step) to no avail. Finally, Dr. Kazer suggested we pull out "the heavy artillery" and start in on In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF).

We were fortunate in this area, at least, in that IVF worked on the first try. It's a gruelling process--perhaps Kara will write more about it on here someday--but found out in early September 2007 that we were finally expecting, due in May of 2008.

And here we are! Nine fairly uneventful months later, little baby Miller (a boy) is due any day now. Keep looking here for updates.