Oren has been home with us for 25 hours. Few things about his arrival have been like we expected. We were warned that he’d require of us some of our sleep. He did wake up a few times last night, and made a lot of noises between.

Oren was born on a recent Monday (the vagueness is intentional because crazy financial institutions think that knowledge of your birthdate means you must be that person) at 12:28am US/Eastern. However, I discovered that determining the time a person is born isn’t quite as obvious as I had thought. A person starts to be visible without medical instrumentation (such as ultrasound) quite a while before he’s born. In reality, Oren started to be visible on the previous day — a Sunday.

As a kid, I was very interested in exactly what time I was born. Officially, it was 3:01am US/Eastern for me. I imagined that the doctor who delivered me must have had a foot-pedal so they could estimate the exact second I was born.

We’ve heard several times that we’d probably want him sleeping in the same room with us at first. I can’t figure out why. It’s clear he makes lots of noise, but the noises don’t mean much. It seems obvious that if he were to die of SIDS, he wouldn’t make noise. In fact, they say that if somebody is choking and coughing in doing so, that they’re not really coughing. Unless I get up every four minutes to confirm he’s breathing, then it’s unlikely that I’d ever be able to help.

Nevertheless, it probably is useful to be able to hear him. Although, I wouldn’t mind attenuating it a bit. He tends to get louder as he actually wakes up. Maybe soon we’ll try using the monitor as a way of controlling the loudness.

Maybe it’s because I’m the male “parent”, but I just can’t understand the night-time monitoring. Why’d my mom get up and check me all through the night?

Oren spent the first 12 days of life at the Special Care Nursery. He didn’t need any breathing help or feeding tubes, which was great. Hopefully he’ll adjust pretty quickly to being home. They told us he’d let us know when he’s hungry. We wondered how he would; it seems he communicates by making increasing noise and by swiveling his head about while opening his mouth (also called “rooting around”).

He definitely doesn’t like having his diaper changed; nor did he appreciate all that is bathing.

It’s really kinda stressful to have a baby at home, too. I realized as soon as we got home with him that I was all stressed out and nervous. I know I still am kinda stressed out. Parents, including our own, have told us that we’ll tend to be more stressed out about the first one than on any subsequent kids. If we’re lucky, we’re already well on our way to ruining Oren’s life by being too nervous.