Home with Isaiah

We have settled in at home for a few days now. I still have another week off of work while Elizabeth recovers. We have been getting meals from family and church friends, and that has been much appreciated. I can cook a little, but I have enough other things to do that it is nice not to have to.

Today I bought blank CD's to start mailing the video of baby out. I am posting some new pics we just got developed today as well.

Everything is going very well. Baby slept almost the whole night last night already. We have been lucky with that on all three boys. He never cries for more than a minute and that is rare. He is a hungry little guy, though. He nurses a lot.

Isaiah is Born !!!

Isaiah was born at 8:07am this morning. He is 8lbs6oz and 21" long. He has dad and Gabriel's olive skin, and his face is a mixture of both families. He has been mostly alert and calm. He is very healthy.

Elizabeth took more time to get closed up than expected and had some trouble with getting too cold. Her scar tissue was a bit of a problem and the early word from the doctor is that we should consider this one to be our last. She is fine now, but that delayed the first nursing and kept us in the recovery room longer. We are now in our room and mom and baby are both asleep.

We have plenty of pictures and video to share. I'll have some pics posted in a couple of days. I'll have a Video CD ready to send out shorty after that for inerested friends and family.

In Defense of Internment

This book by Michelle Malkin was written primarily to promote what most people call "racial profiling" in the war on terror. Most conservatives have no problem with authorities paying more attention to 20 year old Mohammeds at the airport than Ethel the elderly white woman. Whenever this issue has been discussed over the last several years, though, it seems that liberals always manage to bring up Japanese internment in WWII. It is the infallible trump card, like McCarthyism, which Ann Coulter spends an entire book on for the same reason. It is supposed to be universally accepted by all modern people that internment was based purely on racial prejudice and had no possible justification. So, in order to have a discussion on this topic, Michelle wrote a well-researched book on internment in WWII, and shows that everything we learned about it is wrong. The Japanese had a major network of spies on the west coast and Hawaii. They planned for significant help from the Japanese on Hawaii. They put together the effective Pearl Harbor attack using intelligence gathered from Japanese on Hawaii. The internment was a simple relocation of the people away from the west coast. We did not torture them in concentration camps or force hard labor on them. We simply needed to move them to the middle of the continental U.S. for national security reasons. I'm just getting into the main course of this book, so I'll have to fill in more details later. I got this book from the public library. It is controversial, highly recommended, and will make you think and question many of the things you've learned.

D-Day

Well, here we are at the hospital preparing for Elizabeth to have the C-section. Mercy hospital is by far the "other" hospital after St. Luke's in everyone's perception, but we find it to be nice and quiet. There are three of twenty rooms occupied in the recently remodeled birthplace. The nurses read your history and bother to get to know you pretty well. It's very nice.

We left the boys at Elizabeth's parents' house last night. That was not fun. We were trying to get home to get some sleep, but we also wanted to stay until they fell asleep. They were whining and crying and getting out of bed. Finally, Elizabeth's dad went down to keep them company in the basement bedroom and that seemed to be going well when we left.

I'm about to search for some coffee and get into scrubs. I've got the video camera battery charging and my borrowed Tablet PC is obviously online and working. Elizabeth has been flipping channels since her IV was put in. I have been reading Michelle Malkin's In Defense of Internment.

The Night Before Zayza

Lord willing, Isaiah will be born at 7:30am tomorrow. His brothers are staying tonight at Elizabeth's parents since we will have to be at Mercy hospital at 5am. Asher has successfully nicknamed him Zayza already using the talent for nicknaming passed down from his father. We will be posting pictures several days afterwards since we scan photos taken on film still. We will edit a short video to burn to Video CD as well if any friends or family are interested.

Third Carseat

We just bought a new carseat since our old one was in rough shape. We expected to put Gabriel in the rear bench seat in his booster since he can operate the seat belt latch on his own now. Then Asher and Isaiah would go in the middle row buckets, right? Then each one can be easily accessed from outside the van using the sliding doors on each side. Well, it looks like that doesn't work so well anymore. The new carseat has a handle that protrudes farther than the old one, and it is illegal to leave it up and not fold it back while driving. In order to fit it into that middle bench, the front passenger seat has to be so far forward that it would be uncomfortable for most adults. This carseat stuff is getting ridiculous. We have one of the largest minivans on the road and we still have space problems? The only reasonable solution looks to me like removing one of the middle row benches. This allows easier access to the rear bench where Gabriel and Isaiah will go. Then Asher will be in the lone middle row bucket.

This is typical liberalism at work. They want gas to be $4 per gallon so that we will be forced economically to conserve it and use alternatives. They want everyone to ride a moped or drive a Prius. At the same time, however, they legislate Big Brother laws that require monstrous carseats for babies and cumbersome boosters for kids until they are old enough to drive themselves. You'd think that in this technological age there would be superior performing carseats that would be smaller than the old ones. You'd also think rear seat access in cars would have improved. So here we are with Big Brother trying to figure out why we won't drive our families around in 1/2 scale cars with carseats that barely fit through doorways. Maybe the real problem is that liberals rarely have more than one kid, and they drive their Lincoln Navigators to their tree-hugger rallies anyway.

America Alone

I was the first person in Cedar Rapids to check out America Alone by Mark Steyn from the public library. I made them dig it out of their back room where it was waiting to be shelved for the first time. It is a very popular book amongst conservatives right now. His understanding of the overall social and political movements at work in the world is very good. The book is a bit depressing, yet witty and funny too. He discusses the dying welfare states, dying liberalism, and the conservatives who will be left to fight Islamofascism on their own. America's friends of the past are dead societies already infiltrated by the enemy. We must stand alone and fight or be conquered siliently through a multicultural acceptance of an intolerant and violent religion. My grandchildren may wake up every morning to a call to prayer towards Mecca. They may be safe on the streets only in Muslim attire. They may be killed for their profession of Christianity. Looking at Europe today we see it isn't so far off here unless our course changes significantly. Mark Steyn's analysis of this worldwide battle for future existence is excellent. Check it out.

King David

Gabriel and Asher have taken well to their Bible stories. We read to them every night before bed from a Children's Bible that gives the main stories at a level just slightly above Gabriel's comprehension. Asher just picks out phrases and enjoys the sound to fall asleep to. They also have a movie they watch about David. They are obsessed with it. All day long the only thing they like to talk about is David killing the lion, David killing Goliath, and Saul throwing spears at David. They swing their homemade slings and swords around and fight all the time. It is amazing how quickly they learn the stories. Of course, the most interesting ones right now are the ones with weapons or animals.

New position for Paul!

I received the offer and accepted it. My boss is agreeing to a Feb 5th transition date, which will likely be right when I get back from my week and a half of vacation watching Gabe and Asher while mom nurses baby and regains strength.

I am reading up on t6he Ada programming language right away to prepare for the move. I'll be going from a nasty steel production warehouse from the sixties into a new single-story office building with huge windows. That will be nice. I'll be around a lot of other engineers my age and will just have a much nicer environment. Exciting!

New position for Paul?

I interviewed for another position within Rockwell Collins today and am very excited about it. It is a software engineering position. If hired, I will be writing test software for Rockwell Collins government systems products such as cockpit displays. The job requires hardware knowledge, which is most of my background, and is a low-level software position with some application writing. I will get to use some C, but most of the software will be written in Ada. I have never used Ada, so I am reading up on it now. It is only used by flight critical applications for the most part. It is very readable and structured. I am really looking forward to this opportunity, and based on how the interview went today, I think I'm going to get it.

Two weeks until baby time

Boy number three is scheduled to be born by C-section on the 24th. We are pretty sure he will named Isaiah. Asher has already nicknamed him Zayza. Gabe is looking forward to having a baby brother around. It will be a major adjustment for Asher, but he will be good just by imitating Gabe.

Elizabeth is ready to get this boy out. She has had contractions every evening lately and she is not very comfortable.