our LITTLE guy

Well, It's official.  Zain is now, according to our pediatrician, a "failure to thrive" baby.  He has never kept up with his own curve (particularly in weight), and even though we've been feeding him special weight-gain formula for a month now, he is still not where he should be.  He is in the 5 to 10th percentile in weight, the 25th in head size, and 10 to 25th in length.  Every time I look at his little booklet and read the words "failure to thrive", I freak out a little bit.  We knew he was small and that he wasn't gaining much (any) weight, but we didn't realize how serious it had gotten.  We are recording everything he eats this week, then we see a nutritionist Oct 3rd to try to discern if the problem is diet or something else.  As we've tried extra hard the last few days to get this boy to eat, it has become really clear that we have not been feeding him enough and we haven't been patient enough with him.  The average meal is taking him an hour.  Oh my word.  Seriously?  He has to carefully chew and swish around every single little bite of smashed beans?  He is a very picky eater, and has major major texture issues.  He has gagged and thrown up over a single pea.  A bite of rice is enough to make him gag until he throws up too.  He is a milk junkie and loves to nurse.  Still.  He still wakes up in the middle of the night to nurse (I know).  From the very beginning, he has been less than enthusiastic about food.  Maya was an eating machine.  Any time you got a spoon near her mouth, she knew what to do with it, and boy, you'd better shovel fast.  Zain could not be more different.  At lunch today I started with some yummy homemade refried beans (protein?  yes!  fat?  a teaspoon of olive oil!  flavor?  salt and cumin-super yummy!)  From the first bite he locked his lips closed.  Then spit out the skin.  Okay.  Second attempt, some turkey veggie baby food from a jar (he usually prefers the baby food from a jar over my homemade baby food).  But it was a wee bit chunky, so no way.  Okay, third attempt.  Baby rice cereal and half a banana mashed.  Only a few bites, then he was no longer interested.  Okay boy, I'll bribe you with sweets!  Added some peaches (baby food kind from a jar) to every bite, and he finally ate something!  I am so frustrated at every meal, and sitting there for an hour, waiting for him to finish chewing a bite, is awful!  But what else can I do?  Have any of you ever had REALLY picky eaters?  What worked?  What would they eat?  What can I do about his texture issues?  What will help him gain weight the fastest? 

He doesn't look too skinny here, though, does he?

Nice To Meet You

Zain David Jacobsen was born on October 4th at 3:38 p.m. in Beirut, Lebanon, weighing in at 3.435 kg (7.57 lbs ) and 50.5 cm long (19.88 in).  Nice to meet you!!!

The plans of men, the itching, and the new due date

Well, after weeks (months really) of thinking, conversing, worrying, speculating, weighing and praying about whether to do a repeat C-section or to go for a VBAC (vaginal birth after Cesarean), the decision has been completely removed from my hands-YIPEE! My due date was October 13th, but we need to travel Nov 4th, which means we would have had to accomplish the following between his delivery and our travel date:

 

1. Get hospital birth certificate
2. Take hospital bc to our neighborhood official to get it made “official”
3. Take bc back to hospital to have Doctor sign and stamp new official version
4. Take new stamped and signed version to neighborhood official
5. Neighborhood official issues government official version
6. Government official version gets officially translated into English
7. Get a passport picture taken (not easy—they have to have their eyes OPEN!), get the correct size printed
8. Fill out 5 forms for the U.S. government
9. Take official English translated government version to U.S. Embassy (we made the appointment a month before Zain’s due date to make sure we could get in)
10. Embassy issues U.S. passport and report of birth abroad certificate
11. Take new passport to a place called General Security to get a visa stamped in it, so that Zain can legally leave the country

Because of that, there was no way that I could go overdue with Zain and still make our travel plans, but the thing we are traveling to happens about once every five years and is a super encouraging time to get to meet up with people like us who work around this area that we never get to see or learn from . . . so we really wanted to go! So I was hoping that Zain would just come on time, on his own (because you can’t induce a VBAC), we would miraculously get his papers done, and I would even be feeling good (no C-Section to recover from) in time to travel. But then we decided that if he hadn’t arrived on his own by the 11th, we would schedule a C-Section for the 12th or 13th. And then the itching started. . .

 

My hands started itching like crazy. Random, right? Like I couldn’t stop thinking about how bad they were itching, couldn’t stop scratching them. And then my feet started to itch too. Fast forward two days. Zain had been pretty quiet and hadn’t been moving much, which was not normal for him. I had the sense that I needed to get online and look up pregnancy and itchy hands and feet after we got back from the beach that evening. I discovered a thing called Cholestasis of pregnancy. I was freaking out. The words stillbirth and intracranial hemorrhaging kept running through my mind. I told Matt about it, but it was already 11 p.m., so there wasn’t much we could do other than wait till morning so we could call the Doctor. I laid there in bed and prayed that if Zain was okay, would God please make him move. He did. Not a big movement, but enough for me to know he was alive (I was imagining the worst at this point). All night I dreamed that I couldn’t get my fingers to work to send the text to the Dr. (that’s how you communicate with your Dr. here—you send a text message and they text back). I kept trying to make the message shorter, or get my fingers to work, or my phone. By the time I hauled my exhausted self out of bed, my wonderful husband had already texted the Dr. and she had actually CALLED him back and told him we should come in right away for some testing. So we threw ourselves together and walked to the hospital (it’s faster than driving b/c of the bad traffic). My precious precious Doctor called the Labor and Delivery Suite 6 times between when she heard from matt and when I got there and got hooked up to the fetal monitor. She was so concerned about our baby! She is the same Dr. who delivered Maya and she is just a gift from the Lord. Anyway, as soon as we got there, we realized that Maya was not allowed into the Labor and Delivery area, so matt and Maya waited in the waiting area while I got hooked up to the fetal monitor.

Just as soon as those monitors came on, Zain started to perform a tap dance! He was moving and kicking so hard you could see it from the outside. I was very relieved, and so was our Dr.! They did a blood test that didn’t show anything abnormal, but went ahead and put me on medicine. Fast forward one week. When the Dr. saw me again she asked how the itching was—gone. Completely gone. She said this indicated that I was responding to the drugs and that I for sure have cholestasis. Then she said, we need to schedule you for a C-section! So, long story long, Zain’s birthday looks like it’s going to be Tuesday, October 4th, just one day before my birthday! Matt was so funny (and charming), while the Dr. was looking to schedule the C-section on Oct 6th, Matt was saying, are you sure you want to be preparing for Zain’s birthday on your own birthday every year?  It ended up that she scheduled him to be born the day before my birthday so it all worked out!

 

We are so thankful for amazing medical care right here in our city, a Doctor who truly cares about us and our baby, and the fact that we were able to catch this so quickly after it developed. I went in for a Non-stress test for Zain yesterday and he’s doing great, so we are thanking and praising the Lord for His hand of protection being upon us and upon our little boy!