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Two images that compare my two sons. First is Andrew. Second is Benjamin. Both were taken when the boys were two days old.


…or maybe all babies look alike.

Andrew William Dickerson was born on January 16th, 2008 at exactly 8:15 AM. Weighing in at 6 lbs, 10-1/2 ounces, he was 19 1/2 inches of pure fury, shrieking like a banshee for the first several hours of his life.

Thankfully, he has calmed down considerably since then.

It is interesting to have a second child, because it gives you a new opportunity to reflect on what aspects of your previous child are what God gave you, rather than what you “did” to raise him a certain way. Both of our kids are really happy, easy-going infants who smile a lot and readily woo the ladies with giggles. Benjamin was sleeping through the night at 8 weeks of age, while Andrew is usually up until 11:00 PM and still wakes Mom up at 3:00 AM on the dot (Dad sleeps right through this). Andrew is a good eater, and is putting on weight well. He takes a pacifier, something Benjamin never did. At about three months of age his eyes turned brown. He also seems considerably stronger than his older brother was at his age. When I carry him I have to be extremely careful, because he has a habit of lurching suddenly out of your arms with surprising strength. He is also demonstrating good leg strength, even at four months. Andrew also has a prominent widow’s peak, not unlike my twin brother David. It makes me wonder if he will lose his hair early like David did. He is a little more tan than Benjamin is, but beyond that I don’t think there will ever be a question that they are brothers. The only significant difference may wind up being the widow’s peak and eye color.

Andrew likes to be bundled, which is not unusual for babies at all. However, Andrew has a tremendous talent for wriggling out of his bonds, and then getting really upset about it. I think maybe this has something to do with the fact that he likes to suck his fingers, but then can’t control his arms once they are free. Even in utero Andrew carried his hands up near his cheeks, like a boxer protecting his face. That is the posture he still takes when sleeping. I’ve tried to bundle him with his hands up like that, but a few simple shrugs and he’s out of that, no problem. So instead I do the bundling charade with him, knowing that it won’t keep for long.

My mother wrote in my baby book that I used to feed well, but then spat up about a third of what I ate every time. Andrew is living out that Dickerson curse upon Emily every day. She tells me she now plans her day around feeding time, knowing that there is no use putting on nice clothes until he has yacked up on her at least once. It is now my habit to make mental note of where the burp rags are, whenever I see my wife carry him into the room, because I know it is only a matter of time before I will be asked, in a frantic voice, to sop up some mess or other, somewhere in Andrew’s vicinity.

It is for this reason I have decided that Andrew’s wrestler name will be Bile Shock, as he can vomit up large quantities of white, viscous goo with the slightest provocation. Unfortunately, we haven’t worked out what the trigger is, and as far as I can tell, he hasn’t figured out how to control this impulse either. But I have little doubt that with some experience in the ring, he will learn to employ this technique on his enemies for devastating effect, leaving them blinded and at his mercy. This unusual ability comes at a price, however — this utterly adorable, happy little one usually has… a reek. No pleasant baby smell, here; no sir — this baby almost always smells like vomit.

Announcing the birth of our son, Benjamin John Dickerson, born on March 29th, 2006. He’s an adorable morning-person. He inherited his eyebrows and hands from Mommy, eyes and ears from Daddy, and a shock of red hair perhaps from some third donor we know little about.

Benjamin very much loves to be cuddled. He finds it so comforting in fact, that it doesn’t much matter what’s going on as long as he gets that physical contact: You could be at a Metallica concert, or in the Land of Barking Stray Dogs, or worse, and he’d be just fine. Conversely, he could be in infant-heaven: soothing music playing, surrounded by lactating breasts and bathing in warm milk, but he’d be crying uncontrollably if it were not for the cuddling. So we spend much of our waking hours comforting him. I suppose you can tell we’re still trying to figure out if we’re spoiling him in that department.

At this point, Benjamin has very limited skills with respect to speech, mobility and bladder control, but already I can tell he’s going to be a killer wrestler. He will be known as the Claw Hammer, because of his signature move, which will involve digging into his opponent with his razor-sharp fingernails, and following with a powerful head-butt. Trust me: it’ll be deadly.

Benjamin was born at St. Joseph’s hospital in Tucson, Arizona. The care we received there was absolutely wonderful. One particular nurse was really fun: she had a very pragmatic approach to parenting infants in general, and nursing in particular. “People try to treat babies as if they’re stupid, but I’ll tell you what: your son isn’t dumb. They say he’ll have nipple confusion if he gets a bottle. Do you honestly think that this baby is going to confuse a plastic bottle with the warmth of his mother? He isn’t stupid.”

She has a particularly fun take on breastfeeding. “Some try to make breastfeeding this tender, bonding event between Mom and her child: they let the little baby snuggle up and go to sleep with the nipple in his mouth. No; not me. Breastfeeding is all business: if that baby goes to sleep before he’s full, he’ll be up again in 30 minutes, but Mom hasn’t slept a wink! And I guarantee he won’t notice that you’re tired. Give that a week and Mom will literally lose her mind.” She continued, “Your objective should be to wear him out completely — he should feed him until he is unconscious and in bliss, with a dribble of milk going down his cheek”

But, how to keep him nursing and not just fooling around? She taught us the countdown technique. As the baby nurses, let him rest for a few seconds to catch his breath, but if he starts to just lay there going to sleep, start a countdown: “5… 4… 3… 2… 1…” and once you make it to one, then comes the tickle hand of torment. This was my favorite part: tormenting my son. She advised me to “Tickle his back: newborns just hate that.” So, we tried this, and it worked like a charm: after just two or three times doing this, with the baby starting to doze off, I would just start in with a low and ominous, “One… Two…” and the baby would suddenly come back to life, sucking for all he was worth. It was hilarious! Even our infant recognized the countdown. So, Benjamin has always been a really good eater, and I give most of the credit to the outstanding help we received from those nurses at St. Joe’s.

Emily was connected to all kinds of sensors and things, which beeped terribly and made noises when she moved. Then once, Emily got a strange look on her face, and blinked hard, as if swallowing something big. The nurse looked up at the readings and said, “Oh, look! You had a contraction!”. Emily asked, “Does this mean I can go through a normal birth now?” Her demeanor immediately changed, and she said, simply, “No.”

So, we continued to wait.

We waited a long time for the operating room to open up for her c-section. We were bumped twice by other, more urgent cases. I took some comfort in this: our state must not be that serious or we would be the ones bumping others out of the room. They gave me an operating room getup to wear, and I put this on. When it finally came time for us to be seen, after carefully negotiating Emily’s bulky operating bed out of the room into the hallway, our nurses promptly switched into crazy, E-R mode. They ran down the hallway full speed, yelling all the way: “Look out! Clear the way!” Emily had white knuckles all the way in. I did too, and I wasn’t even hanging on to anything. Once they had burst through the swinging doors, normalcy returned again. I was told to wait outside the operating room while they got everything ready.

Eventually they let me in to the operating room. Emily was lying there on the wheeled-in operating table with a gaggle of medical people gathered around her midsection. They had a specific place for me to stand, near Emily’s head, with specific instructions about where I could go and what I could and could not do. I wasn’t sure what to expect: I had seen some bloody things before, but I didn’t know how I would react to seeing my wife cut open before me. I noticed there was a little stool behind me. My instruction sheet said, “If you feel nauseous, take a step backward and sit down.”

Dr. Jenson was there, standing on the other side of Emily’s head. He walked me through the operation, telling me more or less what was going on as it happened. He was a godsend. I watched some of the operation, but it was pretty troubling. Thankfully, Emily was awake but smiling the whole time, completely oblivious to anything going wrong around her. They used some kind of electric cauterizing tool that made the room smell really bad. At one point, someone actually did say the classic ER line, “get me a clamp: I’ve got a pumper here!” (blood squirting from Emily’s body).

Then they brought out an object that I can only describe as the crowbar of life: a gigantic, flat piece of metal in the general shape of a nail-puller. They wedged it down into the cavity they had opened in Emily, and leaned on it with terrible force. They pulled and pushed and moved it around — it was a violent, crazy picture. I could not fathom that a baby could withstand such force. I took a step backward and sat on my stool.

After a moment, I heard Dr. Jensen’s voice. He was pointing for me to look at what was happening. He was smiling. I stood up and peered over the blue tarp to see the macabre sight of my son’s head sticking out of my wife’s body like some kind of growth. It was looking straight at me. How bizarre.

Then with another great pull, the baby was out. They let me cut the umbilical cord, which was flat and pale and thin. The doctor said that it was good we went with the C-section, because of this. I was amazed that there wasn’t any blood to speak of. The baby was pink and apparently covered with mucous, but he was not bloody. He let out a pitiful cry, and they whisked him off to the incubator table.

I said something to Emily; I don’t remember what. We were both pretty relieved and happy. Dr. Jensen was filling in the boxes on a stack of papers that looked like statistical readings. When he saw me watching him he stopped for a second and said, as if nervously, “You don’t suppose anyone is going to read these, do you?” He looked back at the stack and said, distractedly, “Maybe I should check my spelling…” Everything he was writing were numbers.

I was invited to come see my son. The nurse had apparently cleaned the mucous off of him. I had my camera with me, so I took the first picture of my son at two minutes old. He was perfect. The nurse weighed him, verified his vitals and such. She wrapped him in a blanket and let me take him back to his mother. He was beautiful.

As I came back to Emily, she had this large pink organ on her chest, connected to the hole in her midsection. My mind was racing: what could that be? Too big to be the heart. The stomach? Was it… her liver? It was huge. Why was it on her chest? The doctor was rubbing it down with something. I didn’t know what to do. I brought little baby Benjamin over behind the blue tarp, where Emily’s head was, still smiling and happy to see me, and introduced her to her son. It was a wonderful moment. I decided not to trouble her with the big pink thing on her chest.

Later on the doctor told me the mysterious organ was her uterus, and they were putting some chemical on it so that it would contract back into the pre-childbirth shape. They let me carry baby Benjamin out into the receiving area, to show him to the family who were there: my father and mother-in-law. I was a proud daddy.

Benjamin John Dickerson was brought into this world on March 29th, 2006, at 8:34 PM. He weighed in at 7 lbs 8oz and was 18-1/2″ long. His apgar score was all 9’s, which blew his daddy’s scores away. But then, Daddy wasn’t breathing when he was born.

In order to have a c-section done, you apparently have to get a spinal block of some sort called an epidural. This is something that people often opt to have done when they do regular labor, but when it comes to c-sections, it is not optional. We weren’t planning on any anesthesia at all, but we were past caring about this. When our nurse saw our chart, she exclaimed, “Oh, you have Dr. Jensen — He’s a really good anesthesiologist; he’s been doing this a long time. You’ll like him.”

There was a knock at the door, “Pizza delivery!” Dr. Jensen had arrived. I wish I had a picture of him; I remember he was a tall guy, older, with unkempt white air. And he smiled a lot. He had a low voice and as he talked to Emily he always spoke in really slow, measured tones, as if mocking the seriousness of the procedure. “There are several terrible, horrible steps to this procedure: awful things that you will have to endure. The first horrible process is this: I am going to swab your back with iodine. It will feel wet and cold; you won’t enjoy it a bit.” Emly smiled and said “Okay. I’m ready.” As he worked he continued his slow and distracted conversation, in that same grave monotone: “I have to use all four swabs on my plate. I don’t know why there are four swabs… No-one ever explained that to me… I only know… that I have to use all of them.” Then he paused, frozen for a moment, turned to me and said, “Some things you have to accept by faith.” When he was done swabbing he leaned in and asked Emily, “How was that? Are you okay?” Emily said she was, so he replied, “Oh, good. I must have done it properly.”

This was the same odd manner he carried on with for the entire procedure, and every step went off without a hitch. At the end of each step, he would ask for confirmation that all was well. When Emily would invariably reply that it was, he would again repeat. “Oh, good. I thought I got it right…” or, “I must have got it right, then.”

What a fun guy. He clearly loves his job, too. He said he likes doing baby deliveries best. When I was in the operating room during the c-section, he was there, standing right beside me. He took it upon himself to talk me through the procedure. He made jokes about the doctors and talked about the paperwork he had to do. In the middle of filling out some paper or other he paused, looked up at me and said, “You don’t suppose anyone’s going to read this, do you? Maybe I should check my spelling…”

We went in for a regular check-up, two weeks before Benjamin was supposed to be born. Our regular doctor didn’t do sonograms: “I went to the classes and everything, but I can’t make head nor tails of what I’m looking at with those things. I just use the nurses at St Jose’s — they know what they’re doing, and I go with what they tell me.” So we were already at the hospital. This time, there was a problem. There was no amniotic fluid: none.

“Did you feel your water break?” the nurse asked. Emily hadn’t, but there was no amniotic fluid. “The baby doesn’t appear to be in any distress…” but she couldn’t figure out how the fluid had gone away. I asked if they needed to schedule something else because of this, and the lady said, “Well, you’re not going home today — you’re going upstairs.”

As promised, we were whisked upstairs to the delivery floor, and Emily was hooked up to a heart monitor, I-V tubes and sonogram machine. Our doctor was away at a conference, so a backup doctor was paged and we waited for the results. When they finally came in, we learned that the baby was not in any distress at all, but that because there wasn’t any fluid, this could make for a complicated delivery. We had gone through several weeks of LeMas natural birth breathing classes, and Emily didn’t want any anesthesia. Well, now we had a choice to make:

Option 1: they would make a small incision and pump in some saline fluid, which would provide some measure of protection before they induced labor. Then they would carefully monitor the baby during the induced labor and would determine if the child was in trouble. If he was, then they’d give emily a shot of something to counteract the induced labor, knock her unconscious and wheel her in back for an emergency c-section.

Option 2: monitor the baby throughout the day and plan for a c-section later on in the afternoon.

We opted for what was behind door number 2. It seemed infinitely more managable and predictable, with fewer contingencies and counter-plans.

Ever wished you could be away from natural beauty like trees, grass and other greenery, and live in a lifeless, blasted heath? This nightmare is now possible, thanks to the ancient mystery known as caliche (pronounced “call-ee-chay”). Caliche is a very hard, rocklike substance that develops in arid lands like Tucson, Arizona. Wikipedia has a nice article about it. This article, while containing many “useful facts”, about caliche, fails to capture the true essense of this material. Caliche is a purely hateful mineral: a cancer on the planet that is literally impervious to standard means of excavation. I know this because my yard is infected with the stuff. The Wikipedia’s primary solution to the myriad problems caliche causes is to “remove the caliche and… [replace it with some other, non-concrete-based type of soil]“. Riight. Remove it…