On Thursday morning we had our second child, Ethan David Dobrindt. A couple of quick things.
- I am going to work on posting some pictures tomorrow. If you are really curious, just log onto any site with new born pictures and that is him. Swollen, odd shape, angry looking, puffy eyes. Wait, I just described myself. I do have some great pictures I will post soon but he looks like almost every other baby.
- Picking out his name was very very difficult. As you can imagine, I wanted to call him David Jr. My friends Peter, Billy and Joe Didio all had boys as their second child and named them after themselves. I liked David Jr. But my wife, my sisters and my parents all expressed their opinions, God bless them, and David Junior died on the vine. So then we went with the cool names. Spencer, Cooper, Pierce. None of those worked. Then we went with the classics. Thomas, William, James. Nope. So then we tried a combo of our fathers? names. Lawrence (after my father) James (after Patti?s) for Lawrence James Dobrindt, or LJ. But nope. Then one day Patti said she liked Ethan David and I went along. So now he is Ethan David Dobrindt.
- For those who had a tough time with their first child (like we did with Emily, 36 hours of labor, bad stuff happening that required doctors to rush in, Emily not getting the feeding thing), the second go-around is a million times easier. It?s kind of like building something. You cut your teeth the first time, the second time is much easier.
- My parents were able to fly up the morning he was born and Patti?s folks came up to help the first full day we were home. Both provided invaluable help and we could not have done it without them.
- Our friends Chuck and Danielle Slate, who have two little girls, took Emily the night we went into the hospital and our friends Claire and Mark, who have two little boys, watched her the morning we had Ethan until my parents got here. We owe both a ton of gratitude.
- The night Ethan was born, 17 other babies were born too. One of the risks of using a highly regarded city hospital is that a lot of other people do the same. But because so many were born, a bunch of moms had to double up on rooms. So for the first night Patti had to share a room with another mom. It was not a huge deal except that as you know, Patti has been through this before, and the other mom was a first timer. The other mom had a tough time with the newborn and required much more attention. Patti just wanted to be left alone and people were constantly coming in and out of the room to help the other mom. But the second night and last two days we had a great private room with a really nice view. Another strange thing. The other mom and her own mother who was there were both German decent but were from Zimbabwe. The father was American but the other two spoke with German accents and were white folks from Africa, just like me. That is not the strange thing. The strange thing is that the family were all ?Jews for Jesus?, or as I like to call them, Christians. They prayed a lot which was kind of nice because I just assume Patti and Junior got some of the prayer overflow.
- Now we are home and things are going well so far. Of course I have not gone back to work and we have had friends and family helping out. I am taking off this entire week and hopefully Patti will be more rested and physically feeling better by the time I go back to work. We?ll see.
That is about it. I will post some pictures when I get them web-enabled and you can see how handsome our boy is.
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