The Goldfish Chronicles

Knowing there was an increased chance of it happening didn’t make much of a difference to the shock, but having been through this before has helped us feel less lost.

In the late evening of Sunday 23rd August, our baby (Jack Owen Yandell) left the womb at the tiny age of 17.5 weeks since conception. Far too young for anything to be done about it - he was still months from being able to survive without his mother and the sudden and unexpected departure from the womb was far more than his body could handle even if he could.

For the second time I cut one my son’s umbilical cord - a world of difference in the context. The placenta came out fine, as did the-damn-IUD (you say it all in one word, deep south style). No emergency room was needed and we spent the subsequent day between doctor and hospital taking care of Carrie. Nathan and Levi both held up superbly and had a short trip to the zoo while Carrie was in surgery.

Today we took them both to the funeral home. Nathan wanted to see baby-Jack, seemed to be clear enough on the subject and did superbly. Very proud. It’s so much better to see your baby than have the absence we had with Abigail, and I’m happy that Nathan was able to have the better experience. Watching a four-year old boy carry his dead baby brother back to the undertaker has to be the most heart-wrenching thing I’ve ever experienced though. On a par with explaining to a four-year old boy that the baby he’s talked about so much over the last 2 months is gone.

The vagaries of chance swung far too much each way for this little one, and he’ll always be remembered.

Last Monday Carrie made a doctors appt because she’d been feeling run down and ill for a while. It was beginning to seem familiar, so she went straight to the specific doctor in question. No… no way, but let’s be sure… oh look, there it is. About 7 weeks. And there’s the device that was meant to stop this happening over there in the corner.

An appt for a better look then occurred. Bigger than 7, let’s say 10 weeks. And look there’s the device. Let’s take it out.

Appt to remove device=. Nope, can’t get it out.

Additional appt setup to remove device with some fantastic voyage camera work. Nope, can’t get it out.

So here we are. 11 weeks in and a high risk pregnancy for both mother and child. Who knows how this will go - we’ve seen enough of this that we’re avoiding getting too excited but also looking forward to another bundle of joy.

Your smile dazzles, your eyes sparkle,
I’ve never seen your face.
Your laughter trickles, your voice beckons,
from an absent place.
Your person spins, and spins and spins,
never keeping with one form.
Your name brings forth a grief in me,
that is still sunshine warm.

Probably the most uneventful new year’s eve of my life. Put the kids to bed as usual after a long and rather unhappy (crap oven) cookie baking session. Eldest went to bed a little late due to watching Shrek 2, but was asleep as soon as I’d finished reading the first couple of tiny chapters of The Twits. Squeezed in a bit of coding. Played Civ 4. Oh look it’s 2009.

One of the things I’ve noticed about having basic cable (ie: 15 channels or so) is that you miss a lot of the big hyped media holidays. The few channels we have that do hype things are the ones I tend to surf past the least. So the same applies to christmas - I’m finding these events less of a culturally or socially attached concept and more of a minor (or somewhat noticeable in the case of christmas) event for the family.

I picked up a refurbished Dell Hybrid last week; so far I’m liking it. Looking forward to installing Ubuntu 8.10 on it when it comes out in 3 days. This is the result of having realized that I don’t know crap about machines nowadays, and no desire to learn. I love our Mac Mini and want a quiet Linux server to develop on. Plus a Windows machine that can actually play the Civ 4 game I got a year ago. Will let people know how Ubuntu goes.

Incidentally - I’ve been sucking at writing blog entries. I’ve also sucked at doing any kind of open source coding. The last few months have all been about new house, new job and two growing kids. Today I did some gardening, in between bits of work. Fun, but I’m not sure my newbie foray into daffodils and mint is really worth blogging about

In case anybody has noticed my utter absence from blogs, open source etc; my latest excuse is that we’ve bought a house. Yes - in defiance of the Seattle housing market tanking, we’ve embraced debt after two debt-free years and are slowly moving into our new house. Major perks are a) a park within toddler walking distance, b) a tree-house, c) more room than the current apartment can offer and d) a garden.

Evenings are filled with packing and driving delicates up to the house. I’m looking forward to it all being over and falling into a deep sleep at the new place.

So far our house search has seen us like 4 houses.

House 1 - on second look we decided it needed too much (new electrics and new windows).

House 2 - we liked it, but Levi was too soon around the corner for us to be doing with such a thing.

House 3 - we liked it, we put an offer down, they refused to budge more than 1% from their asking price.

House 4 - we saw it on Sunday. Really liked it. Same price as House 3 but with no negatives. We decided tonight to put an offer down first thing in the morning. 5 seconds later it was “Subject to Inspection”.

I guess a good house still goes quick, it was only on the market for 6 days.

A week since my last update. Life continues to be busy.

The new job role has turned up the heat - I’m going from looking for things to juggle to juggling lots of things - especially with the old job role still intended to fill my time.  Each day at 4pm I tend to be exhausted - not due to lack of sleep (tonight’s late night not withstanding) as I get lots of sleep, but due to having nearly all my time outside of work and sleep being filled with Nathan.

I’ve managed to do a little coding. Commons Collections is getting closer to the next bugfix release - real close, and Codec too. I’ve started moving towards Lang 3.0 - including such wonderful things as removing deprecations! Maybe… depending what the opinions are etc.  It continues to be what I call dim sum coding - coding that works well with a high amount of context switching. Tonight’s late night comes from committing an extra hour or two to breaking the back of a painful serialization issue [mostly just in terms of figuring out why it didn’t like the test framework, and then once I had real tests why it wasn’t working in the first place].

Levi’s growing happily along. A fair bit of work as any new baby is, but still being remarkably chilled. Nathan’s also a delight and we’re starting to get a weekend routine, him and I. Must repeat this weekend despite relatives being here.