May poll closed. Send your checks today!

Thanks to everyone for voting. And a special thanks to the 17 of you that will be sending checks for $500. I know who you are. Don't make me send someone significantly bigger and scarier than I am to come after you. Someone like Kitty.
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In other Ninja news, the boy attended his first baseball game last weekend. The surprisingly efficient Mariners stopped the Tigers (for one out of the three) and the boy made it through the whole game and the subsequent dinner and sunset.

That's my boy - not letting something like fatigue or hunger get in the way of cocktails.

A true Parker.

Also, the first known sighting of a Ninja at Safeco Field. Note his concerned expression. He's not sure about being held at arm's length over the nasty concourse floor just for the photo op.

I'm sure he'll get used to it.

Plot thickens, resolve thins

It's been a busy week in the Fussy dojo.

It all started out with some great news. As anyone that has spoken to/emailed/been within 25-yards of Kitty in the last 6-months may recall, she was supposed to return to work last week after a short 8-week maternity leave. Her company was not granting her credit for her previous 3 years of employment, and was only considering her current 9-month run in declaring her ineligible for FMLA protection. A recent court case, in which a plaintiff in a similar situation had sued and won, resulted in a surprise change of heart. Sweet, right? As a result, she now does not need to return to work until July 7. She could have stayed out until August, but then the reduced income would have forced us to cut down on the number of organic vegetable boxes we receive each hour, and that just wouldn't do.

Kitty's mom, MeMa, had come into town to help Kitty with her anticipated transition to working mom (read: follow her around with Kleenex) and since we didn't want her to feel like her trip had been wasted, we made sure to make the most of her time here. Let's put it this way, fatherhood is far less forgiving of a hangover than I had anticipated. A sunny Memorial Day weekend is not a great time to have a free babysitter. A little too much going on. But back to the point, having Dot here was a huge help -- even if she spent the entire time whispering plans to Finn about moving back to CT under cover of darkness.

On Tuesday, the headache was (mostly) gone, and Dot was headed back home. That morning, we had our first meeting with the Occupational Physical Therapist at Children's Hospital. This was the latest battle in our longstanding war with breastfeeding, and at this stage in the game, it's safe to say that discouragement is beginning to set in. I won't recap everything we've tried, since I've already rambled on about that enough, but Kitty counted 15 different visits to different specialists in the last 8-weeks. Forget about the co-pays, that's like $1,000 in gas.

We were hoping (naively) for a silver bullet solution. Something that we could put into action in the parking lot and would have fully resolved all of our issues by the time we pulled into our garage. Of course, the prognosis was not quite so simple. We did get some new exercises to try, since apparently his sucking muscles aren't working properly (insert your own joke here). But that could take weeks to really make a difference. So that bummed us out.

Today, we had another appointment with the tongue clipping doctor. We had finally, and nervously, decided to go ahead with the deeper cut. The first cut hadn't made much of a noticeable difference in his ability to extend his tongue up or out, so to try and address both his feeding issues and any possible future speech/mouth issues, we agreed to do it. This time around wasn't quite as traumatic (for him; for us, still not so good) and he was smiling and on the bottle again immediately afterward. Unfortunately, it will take a little while to determine whether this is going to fix the problems. So we're still trudging along this slow, and increasingly discouraging path.

"Why do it then, you idiot? Why not just go entirely with the bottle?" That's a really good question. I'm not going to go into the benefits of breastmilk, because this isn't a New Age hippie blog. Though those benefits certainly play a part in our decision, the biggest reason that we keep fighting this thing is because we're tired of paying $30 for a little can of powdered pre-vomit. As the saying goes, why buy the formula, when you can get the milk for free? I'm certainly not high enough in the Church of Scientology to free bottles of Suri's formula (I'm only a Level IV), so we're gonna keep at this thing until it works.

Or until there's simply no more funny to be had. At some point, $30 starts looking like a pretty good price to pay.

After all, I think that's only one organic vegetable box, and I can definitely do without that.

To all the English teachers out there, both amateur & pro

Thank you for all of your comments. As the son of an English teacher, I am acutely aware of my own spelling & grammar. My use of the word "irregardless" in my last two posts was intended to accomplish two goals:

1. Annoy Kitty - always my primary goal.
2. Comment on improper use of language online & at work.

I certainly achieved number 1, so it was all a success, even if my second goal got lost in the mix. Thanks to everyone that felt compelled to point out my issue. The only thing I ask of each of you in return is that you never again use the phrase, "I could care less." It's "couldn't care less."

As in, "I couldn't care less about this whole stupid breastfeeding topic."

Shame on you for calling our problems stupid! Have you no soul?

Jerks.

Boobs & baseball

While few things in life are certain, there are reasonable goals that should be relatively easy to accomplish. Chief among these are winning a baseball game with a $205 million payroll and successfully breastfeeding a baby. Unfortunately, as we have learned in 2008, both of these are surprisingly difficult to achieve.

Stop me if you've already considered this, but baseball & breastfeeding are actually quite similar. In baseball, you field a team of nine starters, plus a bench and bullpen. Egad! Breastfeeding is exactly the same! Between the doulas, the midwives, the lactation consultants and the occupational therapists, we have to actively manage our roster to keep it within the 25-man major league limit. This doesn't even count our farm system of friends, relatives and grocery store checkout people. These folks are all actively playing the game, backing up the battery of mom and dad as they throw their best stuff at the baby in the batter's box, while the ump (apparently, anyone that has ever seen a picture of a baby in a magazine) judges your decisions and calls balls and strikes.

And why/how is breastfeeding so difficult? Isn't it the most natural activity in the world? Didn't the survival of our species depend on our ability to get this one little activity right? I'm pretty sure that they didn't have Similac or breast pumps at the Sumerian Babies 'R' Us, so how did they overcome issues like the ones we've had? The experts will tell you that while they may not have had occupational therapists back then, there was more in the way of community nurture. There were wet nurses and there were female relatives to assist.

I'm sure that's true, but is our issue also due at least in part to an overabundance of information? Do we stress out about the problems we're having primarily because we can read blogs/articles/bathroom walls discussing these issues and therefore feel validated that there is a problem? Were the folks in the olden days just blissfully ignorant, breastfeeding away while their boobs felt like they were being mauled by wolves? And what about those kids that just couldn't breastfeed properly due to something like -- oh, I don't know -- a tongue tie? Did those children just not survive? Were they the cost of evolution, eliminating the weak genes from the pool? If the bottle had never been invented, would we now be a race of Gene Simmonses?

(Incidentally, it's no secret that evolution has stalled, or even backpedaled, along the way. You only need to spend some time online or in a corporate office to see how far we've fallen. OMG! LOL! Irregardless, we're not here to boil the ocean, are we?)

I don't have any answers. Just questions. The only thing I do know for sure is, if my baby needs a therapist for his current occupation of breastfeeding, that does not bode well for his future career success. Of course, if he goes the corporate route, he'll have no problems whatsoever. There are many successful business folks that are completely unable to recognize a boob.

And that's the only reason that I've still got a job.

Lazy? Technologically challenged? No problem.

I know that constantly checking blogs for infrequent and elusive updates and/or figuring out how to configure an RSS reader to notify you of new posts is not something that many of you have the time for. Which is surprising, given how little most of you have going for yourselves at the moment.

Irregardless (yes, Kitty, I said it), for those of you that are too "busy" to keep up on your own, I've put a little subscription box in the lower right hand corner of the page. Just above the (depressing, but excellently written) Yankees blog. So sign up, sit back and do whatever it is that you do when you're not thinking about my son.

Which must be very rarely if you're still reading this.

Finns to the left, Phinns to the right

When my father was growing up, back in the 1800's, Brian must have been an exotic name. Like "Poughkeepsie." Or "Gluten." By the time I was in school, however, there was a four Brian per class minimum. Despite what you may have heard, I was saddled with my nickname simply because there were too many Brians on our dorm floor my freshman year.

When we were choosing the boy's name, we wanted something that would stand out. Something distinctive. We thought we had it nailed.

We were wrong.

We have already met two other F/Phinns, both in Seattle, both born in March. We'd better start thinking of a nickname now. It would suck to be stuck with a name like "Woody, Jr." due to lack of planning.

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One of the other Finns is in our PEPS class. PEPS is a support group for new parents. We gather weekly at each others' houses, stare at our own babies for two hours, then leave. There is also a snack. It's very fulfilling.

Kitty's upset because during the PEPS introductions -- when we were asked to tell our birth stories -- I took the time to inform everyone how Finn's arrival was, and I quote, "the worst day ever." For those regular readers of the blog (whatup, Derek Jeter!), you know that we had some "issues" on that first day. I would like to to once again reiterate: "worst day ever."

However, and I say this for the record, if I had it to do all over again, I wouldn't change a thing. Yes, it sucked jumping in the car and chasing my newborn's ambulance to the hospital, the entire time thinking that a decision that I had made had put my baby's health at risk. And yes, it sucked having to watch my wife in constant pain for 37 hours, half-heartedly trying to talk her out of an epidural that I knew would have made us both MUCH happier. But in the end, our baby is healthy and the birth was done in a way that made the process itself as stress-free (for her) and low-impact as possible (right up until the end). It's easy to look at the bad stuff and question your decisions, but it's impossible to measure how much of a positive impact those decisions had on the experience.

And when it all works out OK, why would you ever change it?

Of course, next time...

Finn - 1 Month

As many of you know we have been addressing some issues with breastfeeding, weight gain & yeast. Luckily there are some great resources available for this stuff in Seattle. Last week, there was a concern amongst our doctors & support staff that Finn was not getting enough food. He did not seem to be gaining weight and hadn't pooped in almost 10 days. An initial consultation with a breastfeeding MD brought up the fact that he may actually be "tongue tied." This diagnosis surprised us since we thought tongue-tied was an expression, not an actual condition, but it turns out that it's more common than we would have guessed. These days, with bottle feeding being a readily available backup plan, most mothers frustrated with nursing will head to the bottle and never find out what the real problem was. One of the main problems is tongue-tie -- the kid's inability to stick his tongue out or touch the roof of his mouth impacts his ability to latch properly.

This is not an insurmountable problem. There is a very simple procedure, that used to be quite common, called tongue clipping where the doctor cuts the tether beneath the tongue to allow the boy to extend it fully again. This article explains the issue and its history. Turns out that Finn's version of tongue-tie is the hardest to diagnose & treat, but if left untreated, it could cause problems in the future with speech & sinus development. This would also obviously effect the boy's chance of ever playing lead guitar in a rock band, if he can't even get his tongue out past his teeth.

Before getting any part of him cut, we got a second opinion from a woman who spent 18 years specializing in breastfeeding issues (thanks Dot!). When we showed her pictures of Finn's tongue & mouth she asked if she could use them to teach students what tongue-tie looks like. That was a pretty resounding second opinion. On Tuesday, we brought Finn back in to see the original doctor and to discuss tongue clipping. His weight was down even further, almost back to his birth weight, so after a quick discussion we decided to go ahead with the procedure. It took about 10 minutes. The baby had a local anesthetic, but still screamed bloody murder, which didn't help Kitty's state of mind as she held his head. Immediately after the procedure the baby is back on the breast and is fully healed within 24-hours. He didn't need Tylenol or anything, but Kitty could have used some painkillers.

In order to get his weight & energy back up while his breastfeeding improves, we started supplementing with formula. It's nasty tasting stuff, but he sucks it down and as of today had already gained back some weight. Everything appears to be moving in the right direction. His fussiness is down (for now), his sleeping is improved (he actually let us put him down for a little while) and he appears to be smiling for real (when he's not spitting up on us).

All in all, we're in a very good space and the boy continues to get better looking by the day. Here are some pics to prove it: http://gallery.mac.com/woodykittyninja#100055

We'll keep everyone posted with any new developments, but for now we're focusing on Finn's dancing lessons and Aunt Nicole & Uncle Keith's visit this weekend.