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Baby was well behaved inside, and Indira traveled to Europe with me in her 5th month. When we came back to the US, she did the ultra-sound check and we asked for the gender of the baby, and we were told flat and sure that it was a girl. We named her Tea Tane, honoring our grandmothers. We also filled a closet with dresses and little pink suits.
Not that we are terribly disappointed that our girl turned up to be a boy: he’d be a little transvestite, I guess. What is, however, alarming, is that the ultrasound is used widely around the world to predict the gender of the baby, and it appears to be not entirely reliable. In rural India, for example, there is huge societal pressure on women to abort female babies.
That’s a deplorable practice in itself. And if ultrasound is wrong in a half of those cases, it is downward scary. Indira’s doctor, indeed, judging by the baby’s weight, development, and position, had been suspicious of that ultrasound prediction, and in the last couple of weeks, Indira even bought a small pair of jeans, just in case.
Indira has set up a gift registry at the BabyCenter Store, and we thought you might like to know about it, particularly now that we have no clothes. Come find out what Indira has registered for and start shopping!
Giving birth was a torture. They admitted Indira to the hospital at 7 pm on Friday, December 26th. She was placed on the bed and hooked up to machines for the next 30+ hours. Oxygen mask on the face. Glucose infusion in one vein. Oxitocin (hormonal) drip in another. Epidural pain-killer drip in the back. Sensors on her stomach. Catheter. She herself compared that to the Matrix movie. Yet even that elaborate set-up managed to produce verifiable contractions only 26 hours later.
Our kid, the lazy bastard, didn’t move an inch all that time. Indira was blaming Montenegrin/Bosnian (my grandpa is from Livno) blood, and re-telling a Montenegrin joke to the nurse: kid doesn’t want to come out, so his parents beg him, and offer him bribes, telling him: “come out and we’ll make you the university professor”, kid does not respond, “ok”, they say, “we’ll make you a general”, and kid mutters from the inside, “ok, but only if I get to retire immediately”.
It would be nice if he just came out at around 7 or 9 pm, so that we can have a nice dinner afterwards and go to sleep. But no. The transition part of labor started on 2 am on Sunday morning. Indira called me and woke me up at 2 am, and I went to the hospital and stayed there with her until 7 am. Anyone who knows me, knows how hard I am to change my daily routines, and I feel like crap after 2 hours of sleep today. But then, this event happens relatively rarely in our lives and I did not want to miss it.
The real ordeal was around 3-4 am, when the nurse shut off the epidural drip, so Indira could feel the contractions. And she felt them very much. Suddenly she was screaming: “cut me open and take it out.” The pain was unbearable, and the doctor and the nurses urged her to push strong against the pain, something that I saw she wanted to do consciously, but her body was rebelling against it with all its force. At around 4:30 am, the doctor said that it would be dangerous for the baby to continue pushing, and that he should perform a caesarean section. Hence, after nearly 35 hours of torture, she still ended up cut open.
When they took the baby out, they saw that it was entangled in the umbilical cord and turned the wrong way (its face facing the front of mommy’s stomach), which was probably why it didn’t want to come out through its natural pathway. Also, it was quite obvious that it was a fine, healthy, big boy. As Indira was shaking violently, bleeding, being in pain, and in all sense practically dying, if it was not for modern medical technology around to keep her alive, and since this was early Sunday morning with very little hospital staff at hand, they let me have my boy for his first hour and half outside in the dangerous world.
Kid has dark blue eyes, patches of dark hair on his head, surprisingly strong arms, and propensity to use his hands to grab my fingers and put them in his mouth, bite on them, then pushes them out with his tongue, like a little doggy that just ate something foul, determining that’s not the real thing. He also loves to be poked and otherwise played with. He falls asleep immediately if I let him lie on my stomach, but starts crying if I let him lie on the bed. I guess we need a crib that makes a sound of heartbeat to trick him into thinking he is lying on my stomach. When Indira came back from the shock, we let her have the baby. There he discovered that mommy’s tits taste better than daddy’s fingers. And he cried in disapproval when the nurse took him away to be weighed and measured.
He was born at 5:10 am. He was 22 inches (55cm) long and 9 pounds (4kg) heavy at birth. After scaring us with the list of genetic horrors that affect 'old mothers', they told us that just his testicles were too big. Ah, well, that runs in the family, I guess (it is harmless hydrocele that affects a half of male newborns). When he got out, his head was slightly mis-shapen, elongated, just as the doc said, it'd be from sitting stuck in cervix for two and a half hours. It straightened up since, and, apparently, the miniature mechanism still works. I wouldn't dare to try this with my notebook computer, though. We are still so much more robust than our toys.
As we were speculating about his male gender for only the last couple of weeks, we haven’t given much thought to his name. We wanted a short, easy to remember name, which can function both in English and in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages. We also wanted a name that has no known religious ties, as we are a non-practicing couple of different religious backgrounds (Catholic and Muslim). And we wanted something powerful to convey the miracle that he was born as a boy, while the modern technology had predicted him as a girl.
Indira chose the name Tin, after her favorite late Croatian bohemian poet, Tin Ujevic, that used to be friends with my grandpa. And we both settled on the name Aragorn, after the Tolkien’s displaced, courageous, yet gentle hero among humans of Middleearth, taken by the beautifully told story in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which conclusion we just recently saw.