The Miles Rausch Family Website

The question, for weeks now, had been the same. “Now, when is your wife due?”

“May third,” I’d answer.

Their eyes would light up with the math of it. “That’s coming up! Are you excited to be a new father?”

Then, I’d pause. For a while now, I’ve had a standing policy to answer mundane questions with an appropriate amount of honesty. Case-in-point, if I run across a co-worker in the break room, and they say, “Good morning, Miles. How are you?”, I feel I owe them an honest, insightful answer. This breaks the monotony of an otherwise forgetful conversation. It shows that I’ve taken a little time to respect their question with an accurate answer, instead of some boilerplate placeholder emotionless response. It also often leads to a deeper, more interesting conversation. It leads them to offer me an equally courteous answer in response.

Sometimes the answer is “I have a headache, but it’s not too bad.” Sometimes the answer is “I am FANTASTIC.” Sometimes the answer is just “Good”. And sometimes there is a pause.

The pause, that infinite sigh of self-reference, can throw people off when their question is just “How are you?” When the question deals with the vast expanse of newly adopted fatherhood, I think they understand a need to pause. Typically, I’d offer back an obstacle course of my emotions: nervous, excited, anxious, scared, really scared.

The truth was that I couldn’t boil down my thoughts into a concise, conversation-appropriate statement. I knew a baby was coming, a baby who would need me (in some capacity) for the rest of his life. I knew there would be long nights, frustrating days, and a cavalcade of questions and worries. Oh, and I couldn’t stop it, no matter what I did. This would be the rest of my life. “Excited” was far from the first emotion that came to mind. “Oh God Help Me” was closer.

Months ago, I’d discussed with L&S a paternity plan, using my vacation days. My plan was to initially take 10 business days off to spend with Holli and the baby. Tentatively, that time was scheduled to start May 3rd, his due date. Of course, they tell you that no baby comes on their due date, but you can’t help but hang a lot on that date. Then I got the call that Holli was being induced. The call was Wednesday; the induction was scheduled for Thursday.

Suddenly my emotion went from “Oh God Help Me” to the simpler “Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh God…” In talking with others, the only eloquence I could muster was, “It feels really real.”

We made peace with our former lives that night. We knew this day would come; we’d known for months and months. Still, it now felt like we had a single day to wrap up all our loose ends. We enjoyed an elaborate meal at Dairy Queen. We tidied the house. We got little sleep.

The next day, April 29th, at 7:45am, we began Labor. There were some frightening moments, but none that we couldn’t make our way through with each other, intermittent SMS messages to family, and quick updates to Facebook and Twitter. The entire process, which I won’t recount here, finally ended on April 30th at 1:29pm with the appearance of a small, purplish little man.

Ian was here.

Holli’s first words, upon seeing him, were “Oh, he’s so beautiful!” in the plaintive, emotional tone of a loving mother. My first words were almost unprintable, but I mustered a child-friendly “Wow…” instead. Then began pictures, measurements, tests, crying, wrapping, and holding.

I’ve held other babies, but it’s nothing like holding your own. I was a little nervous. Friends or family would ask if I wanted to hold their infant, and I’d usually decline, saying, “Oh, I’m not so good with babies.” I’m not sure why, exactly. I guess I didn’t want to discover that I’d be bad at it. Here, however, in the hospital, I had to hold him. Holli was still being worked on by the doctors, and I didn’t want poor Ian left alone under the lights. The nurse offered him to me effortlessly, and we just fit. His 6-pound, 11-ounce body with its 20 and a half inches of length tucked easily into my arms. Nothing has felt as natural. This was my first moment, my first pause, with my son.

I can’t yet express all of what it feels like to be a Dad. I feel that will be a later missive. I can, however, express one thing; I feel a strange kinship with God. During the Saturday evening of our hospital stay, we attended Mass at the chapel in the hospital. During the service, I fixated on an oft repeated phrase, “God gave his only son.” Mere days earlier, I’d been given a startling context to that statement. I had a son, whom I’d fallen in love with instantly, and I thought for a second what it’d feel like to have to send him to suffering, ridicule, and death. I could now stand shoulder-to-shoulder with God and say, “I don’t know how you did that. You’re a stronger man than I.”

Every day has been a chance to learn more about Ian: how he makes faces when he sleeps, how he takes long pauses while feeding to look around with shifty eyes, how he hates being cold, how he screams during his bath until the shampoo, how he seems to know when we desperately need him to be a good boy and then quiets down and falls asleep, how he seems to have always been with us unrevealed.

I feel fortunate that I was able to take ten days off from work. When I made arrangements, I thought it was important for Holli that I be around for that amount of time. I now think it is equally important for me. Tiny dark balls of dread weigh my stomach when I think of having to go back to work, not because of what I’ll go back to but because of what I’ll leave to do so. Unlike a pot of boiling water, Ian grows up even as you watch him; I hate to think of how quickly he grows when I’m not there to watch him. After all, he doesn’t pause for anything.

The past week has been incredible. Holli’s mother, Carol, has been a huge help in preparing meals, doing laundry, doing dishes, and a thousand other tiny things that we’ve asked of her. Yet, she won’t be here forever. This coming week will be a departure from the safety net version of parenthood that we’ve been living up until now. I’m hoping we’ve truly learned something from our safety nets: the nurses, the doctors, the family members. To all of our safety nets, Thank You. Our baby wouldn’t be as healthy and happy as he is without your help. Also, keep your phones nearby.

I’m looking forward to establishing our “new normal” with Ian. I’ve already started paring down podcasts and RSS feeds to be more efficient in my listening, watching, and reading. Every show in our Hulu queue will get scrutinized. Our other pleasures will get evaluated and measured, and some will get eliminated. Thankfully, Holli and I have the benefit of having lived a fairly boring life hitherto, which shan’t require much change, overall.

Ian has hit the Internet hard. I suppose it just makes sense, given his parentage. His picture went up on the Sanford Health Cradle Roll, though they got our message wrong. There were supposed to be quotation marks around “God is gracious”, because that makes it a pun. I’ll leave it to you to figure it out.

Right now, the greatest concentration of Ian Greggory will be Flickr. Flickr allows us to upload photos and videos at the same time with the same speed and ease that we need. Plus, I’ve already paid for a Pro account, so I might as well use it.

• Introducing Ian Greggory – a collection of images from the hospital recounting his first several days of life
• Ian’s First Bath – a small snapshot of what it’s like to bathe him
• Ian’s First Week – a collection of images from the rest of his first week of life

He’s also had his first professional photo shoot. We had a session with Scott Meyer of Scott Meyer Photography, who did our wedding, and he got some great shots of Ian. Read his blog post, and expect us to share more of those images later. He wasn’t perfect, but he was good enough, and a couple feedings at the studio helped keep him collected. Honestly, our biggest concern was the downtown parking meter.

If you want to keep up with this little guy, keep watching this site. I (Miles) will be blogging here a little more often, when it applies to sentimental Dad stuff. We’ve got a new category for Ian Greggory, and we’ll try to keep it updated appropriately, if we can keep up with him.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go pause with my son.

I honestly thought this baby would be born with snow on the ground. We had so much of it, I just figured it would take forever to get warm enough for it all to melt. Never did I imagine we’d have flowers blooming in our yard!

As we’re quickly approaching the (supposedly) last week of pregnancy, I’m finding it difficult to not be anxious about those things of which I have little-to-no control over. When will labor start? What will it feel like? What kind of delivery will I have? Will he be healthy? How quickly will I recover? What kind of baby will he be like? Will nursing be difficult for us? And so much more…

I anticipate that once I’m admitted to the hospital, a lot of my anxiety will be relieved since right now the biggest question for me is: When? After that, most of the questions will be answered within hours. And I’ll find new things to be anxious about. So far, we’re just taking it day-by-day. Every afternoon I send an end-of-day email with every project I’m in the middle of, where to find the documents, and where I’m at with the project. I’m working on school assignments early, to hopefully get some things done before the baby arrives, rather than needing to ask for extensions later. I’ve had several days of feeling “crampy” and thought each time that maybe it was pre-labor so that has kind of motivated me to be on top of things as much as possible, even though these aches have not amounted to anything.

Many people have asked about visiting us in the hospital, etc. We’d like to keep hospital visitors to a minimum for several different reasons and so we ask that only our parents and siblings visit during that time. However, anyone is welcome to come meet the baby once we return home. I’d ask that you call or email us first, so we don’t have a lot of people showing up on the same day, unannounced. This way, we also can let you know if it’s “not a good day” without turning you away on our doorstep. But seriously, come meet the baby. We might have an informal “meet the baby gathering” this summer in Sioux Falls, but I’m not ready to commit to anything at this point.

We’ll post updates, pictures and video of him online (nothing gorey, no worries) so in addition to this blog, I would suggest checking out my Facebook profile, Miles’s profile or the Dear Future Kids page–as well as my Flickr stream and Miles’s Flickr stream or Miles’s Twitter feed. We aren’t making any guarantees on who we’re texting immediately after he’s born, so many of you will probably hear it first through one of those avenues. Unless some interesting new information reveals itself in the next couple weeks, this will probably be the last post before the baby arrives!

For your listening pleasure, there’s a new Dear Future Kids podcast available, DFK 105: Math is Hard.

I kept thinking we’d get around to recording a short DFK podcast, but we haven’t yet. So here’s an update…

Good news! The ultrasound at 32 weeks showed that he’s right on track. In fact, he’s in the 52nd percentile in all of his measurements (weight, head, abdomen, length, etc.). This basically means out of 100 healthy babies at random, he’s bigger than 51 of them and smaller than 48 of them. It doesn’t explain why I’m measuring so much bigger, but we’ll take it. Of course, I’ve heard they can be off by as much as a pound on ultrasound measurements, (which would make him much much larger) but I’m choosing not to linger on that. Bonus: more baby pictures!

My appointment this week at 36 weeks went smoothly. I’m measuring at 38 weeks, but two weeks ago I was measuring at 37 weeks so I might be starting to level off. Looking at my pregnancy journal, I can see that it’s actually taken 12 weeks for my uterus to grow the equivalent of 10 weeks. At 24 weeks, I was measuring at 28 and at 36 weeks I’m measuring at 38. This makes me less concerned about measuring big.

I’ve gained a lot of weight. Like scary close to the weight I was before I lost all that weight. And if you remember how many pounds I lost, then you can guess within 10 pounds as to how much I’ve gained during pregnancy. They give you a weight range to try to stick to in gaining (based on your pre-pregnancy weight) and I flew by the high end on that range weeks ago. And I mean flew. And I mean weeks ago. I know in an instant I’ll lose like 10+ pounds with the baby and everything else that, umm, comes out. It’s just a mental thing. It confuses me because people tell me I look small. But I’m measuring big and weighing in big. So maybe people are just nice. But at my last appointment my doctor said “your blood pressure, your urine and your weight all still look good” so…we can add that to the list of things I love about her. I now will be going to appointments on a weekly basis until the baby comes.

Looking at my class schedule, it reminds me just how close we are to his arrival. I give a group presentation less than two weeks before our due date. It’s just weird to think about. Being two weeks before our due date pretty soon. Then, after my due date there are 3 classes left. Not really certain how that will all work out as I don’t know what my recovery will be like, but the professor said we’ll just play it by ear and work it out however we can. My hope is to only miss one class and then sit in class for the remainder of the weeks and just take notes – and then have Miles bring the baby half-way through the class (it lasts 3.5 hrs) so he can nurse before bed. In theory, it makes sense to me, but we have no idea what to expect. I do know that we have a final exam, so I am planning to at least be there for that.

Miles’s cousin Amber and aunt Karin threw a shower for the baby last weekend. We had a really good time and it was great to see everyone who came – many of whom I hadn’t seen in months! The baby scored a lot of loot and is loved already. We’re so excited to hold him and wrap him in all his new blankets and clean up his spit-up with all the new burp rags and dress him in dino outfits and change his diapers on his little butt. I’m obsessed with thinking about his little tiny hiney. Is that weird?

We’ve got a new podcast recorded and up at Dear Future Kids, so you can listen to it here. You’ve probably seen a plug for it on my Twitter account and DFK’s, as well as my Facebook profile and the DFK fan page. We’re flooding our outlets since it’s probable that no one checks for the podcast anymore. It’s about 50 minutes long, but it has been a few months and we’re long-talkers. We hope to get at least one more out before baby’s arrival. The next one shouldn’t be as long.

Here are some photos to prove the baby is growing.

6 weeks, 26 weeks, 28 weeks, 30 weeks, 32 weeks

Sorry it’s been so long since my last post…we’ll have more to post after an ultrasound this Friday. (My uterus is measuring big, so they want to see if it’s because the baby is big. Let’s hope he’s normal size.)

Looking for the perfect way to tell that special someone something special? Well, you can find a variety of Valentine’s Day cards for any LOST fan whose claimed your heart. (Some cards may contain spoilers if you haven’t watched past season 3.)

You can view the illustrator’s website here. Thanks for sharing, fellow Twitterer and LOST fan, abbybischoff!